Upstate shtetls

There are shtetls in New York State. Who knew? Europe's last/only shtetl is supposedly the Jewish part of Antwerp. Can any grouping in the US really count as a shtetl? Or, for that matter, can any current town, even in Europe, be so named? Like the term "ghetto," shtetl is--fairly or not--used to describe communities all over the voluntary-involuntary spectrum. Is a shtetl no different from a kibbutz or a commune? Or is it more like an American-Indian reservation, with implications that society at large wants to--or at one point wanted to--keep members of a certain group far from everyone else? What does it mean, in terms of the First Amendment, for a village to be officially Hasidic?