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Before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the Rubashkin family's Agriprocessors slaughterhouse in May 2008, Postville, Iowa, was home to a thriving multilingual radio station, a multicultural food festival, and a "Diversity Garden."

But as the recently published "Postville U.S.A.: Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America" reveals, the collapse of America's largest kosher meatpacking plant, among other factors, led to the disappearance of Postville's "small miracles" in diversity.

Still, authors Mark Grey, Michele Devlin, and Aaron Goldsmith maintain that hope remains for a town still reeling from an ICE raid that revealed the harboring of illegal aliens, money laundering, and a slew of safety and child labor violations at a plant whose former workforce of 1,000 amounted to nearly half of Postville's population.

"For years, we witnessed hardworking, well-meaning Postville residents trying to make diversity work in their town," the authors write. "But it often seemed as if Postville had to live up to someone else's definition of diversity."

Founded 150 years ago as a German Lutheran community "full of family names like Schroeder, with the occasional Scandinavian Gunderson," the book says, Postville saw an influx of immigrants from Mexico, Ukraine, and Russia in the 1990s after the arrival of Agriprocessors in 1987, followed by another wave from Guatemala, Palau, Somalia, other Latino nations, and even China and Pakistan.

Agriprocessors also brought the Chabad-Lubavitch Rubashkin family from Brooklyn to Postville, among an eventual community of about 400 Hassidic Jews. Despite "built-in" segregators like the Hassidic community's dress, kosher dietary laws, and language (Yiddish or Hebrew), the isolation of Postville's Jews was usually exaggerated by outsiders, the book says, as Jews and non-Jews were neighbors, worked together, and even attended each other's holiday events such as a Hanukkah festival.

In one of what the authors call Postville's "small miracles," Aaron Goldsmith was elected to the Postville City Council in December 2000 despite a petitioning effort against his candidacy and the distributions of hate-filled materials around town by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The annual Taste of Postville festival featured vendors who served falafel, tacos, and Lutheran hot dishes, while the Radio Postville station ran programs in English, Hebrew, Spanish, and Russian. In the Diversity Garden, launched by Iowa State University, immigrants and longtime residents tended plots and grew food.

So what happened to the feel-good story of Postville? Ultimately, it was the "powerful forces of a new world economic order and the age-old temptation to exploit vulnerable populations that ultimately made it impossible for the new Postville to become a true community," the authors write.

While a major part of the problem were the exploitations of former Agriprocessors CEO Sholom Rubashkin, who faces charges for an astonishing 9,300 individual daily child labor violations in a trial scheduled to start on Oct. 13, the authors lay a large chunk of the blame on immigration policies that forced 302 Postville detainees to plead guilty to using false social security numbers (instead of aggravated identity theft charges) and accept five-month prison sentences -- even when their English barriers meant that most of them didn't know they needed a social security number to work in the U.S., or better yet, didn't even know what a social security number was (a Supreme Court ruling one year later stated that in order to be charged with aggravated identity theft, an individual must knowingly use a social security number that belongs to a real person).

The ICE raid claimed 20 percent of Postville's population. At Agriprocessors, external staffing agencies struggling to find legal replacement workers brought in ex-convicts and individuals coming off drug rehabilitation stints, leading to increased crime in Postville, the book explains. Workers who were unable to pay rent left town, but not before leaving the water running to overflow sinks and ruin floors in their apartments.

With no utility payments coming from empty rental units, the town received little revenue from water and sewage hookups, the authors write. Hundreds of immigrants lined up at food banks several times a week, and tensions ran high among cultural groups that worked together for years. Immigration debates, they write, "forced people into artificial camps and into forms of extreme expression that rarely enlightened the situation."

"The stress proved too much for many in town, and the social and economic burden of care for displaced workers grew enormous," they write.

The aftermath of the immigration raid wasn't the only reason Postville's diversity experiment turned sour, the book says. The town's "small miracles" came from a handful of passionate volunteers, but weren't well funded by government and weren't supported by an infrastructure that perpetuated the momentum of diversity when "champions of diversity" left town. When the Taste of Postville organizers left, the festival ended, and the Diversity Garden shriveled away once locals stopped tending to it.

In addition to the needs for higher ethical standards from corporations, immigration reform that would include a legal guest worker program, and multiple champions of diversity to sustain a town's feel-good initiatives, the authors suggest a number of other factors that could have benefited Postville's diversity experiment, including: corporations providing the costs small communities incur for serving newcomers; communities learning how to manage the speed at which diverse populations are absorbed and how to deal with "microplurality" -- small numbers of immigrants from a wide variety of countries; and citizens realizing how their desire for cheap goods and food drives the need for cheap (and illegal) labor.

The authors lament how Postville could never meet the unfair expectations of outside observers who envisioned it as a multicultural paradise, and also criticize the attitudes of skeptics who respond "I told you so" to Postville's decline. They write that diversity in Postville worked for so many years because of an emphasis on accommodation, the ability of groups to coexist in a state of mutual respect and tolerance. It was a culture that never forced anyone to change their traditions as long as the community wasn't harmed.

Expressing optimism about Postville's future, the authors note the formation of the Postville Response Coalition, in which local churches took care of families impacted by the raid; Camp Noah, a leisure program for children who experienced traumatic disasters; and the efforts of Jewish Community Action and the Jewish Council of Urban Affairs to prepare a community benefits agreement with next owners of Agriprocessors.

Many people in Postville also remain upbeat, the authors write, as "these are tough people who get through tough times."

"We remain optimistic that Postville can rebound and ultimately serve as a model to other rural communities facing the promise and challenges of diversity in a new America," they write.