Poor Jews

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. POVERTY AMONG JEWS -- The Culture of Poverty -- The Invisible Jewish Poor -- Jews Without Money, Revisited -- The Hasidic Poor in New York City -- 2. THE JEWISH RESPONSE TO THE JEWISH POOR -- Some Aspects of the Jewish Attitude Toward the Welfare State -- Concept of Tzedakah in Contemporary Jewish Life -- Our Jewish Poor: How Can They Be Served? -- Problems in Serving Chicago's Jewish Poor -- 3. THE JEWISH POOR AND THE WAR AGAINST POVERTY -- Why Jews Get Less: A Study of Jewish Participation in the Poverty Program -- Memorandum of Inspection Division Office of Economic Opportunity -- Re: Jewish Poverty -- 4. ON ENDING JEWISH POVERTY -- The Jewish Hospital and the Jewish Community -- A Systematic Approach to Poverty Policy -- Postscript: Elder's Lib New York Times -- Contributors -- Index

The popular image of the Jewish community is that it consists primarily of members of the middle and upper middle classes. But this image is far from true. Poor Jews: An American Awakening shatters, once and for all, the stereotype of Jewish affluence. Citing national data and descriptions of the life-styles of the Jewish poor, the authors reveal unique social characteristics of the Jewish poor—including the surprising statistic that over two-thirds of the members of this group are past the age of sixty, thus experiencing the compounded disadvantage of being poor, elderly, and deserted by the young, mobile Jewish community. Reasons for the "invisibility" of Jewish poverty are examined, as well as how the Jewish community has responded to poverty within its own ethnic group and Jewish attitudes toward the welfare state and charity. The lack of Jewish participation in antipoverty programs is cited, along with measures which will bring them fully into this and other federal and state programs.

The popular image of the Jewish community is that it consists primarily of members of the middle and upper middle classes. But this image is far from true. Poor Jews: An American Awakening shatters, once and for all, the stereotype of Jewish affluence. Citing national data and descriptions of the life-styles of the Jewish poor, the authors reveal unique social characteristics of the Jewish poor--including the surprising statistic that over two-thirds of the members of this group are past the age of sixty, thus experiencing the compounded disadvantage of being poor, elderly, and deserted by the young, mobile Jewish community. Reasons for the "invisibility" of Jewish poverty are examined, as well as how the Jewish community has responded to poverty within its own ethnic group and Jewish attitudes toward the welfare state and charity. The lack of Jewish participation in antipoverty programs is cited, along with measures which will bring them fully into this and other federal and state programs.

Economic inequity is an issue of worldwide concern in the twenty-first century. Although these issues have not troubled all people at all times, they are nonetheless not new. Thus, it is not surprising that Judaism has developed many perspectives, theoretical and practical, to explain and ameliorate the circumstances that produce serious economic disparity. This volume offers an accessible collection of articles that deal comprehensively with this phenomenon from a variety of approaches and perspectives. Within this framework, the fourteen authors who contributed to Wealth and Poverty in Jewish Tradition bring a formidable array of experience and insight to uncover interconnected threads of conversation and activities that characterize Jewish thought and action. Among the questions raised, for which there are frequently multiple responses: Is the giving of tzedakah (generally, although imprecisely, translated as charity) a command or an impulse? Does the Jewish tradition give priority to the donor or to the recipient? To what degree is charity a communal responsibility? Is there something inherently ennobling or, conversely, debasing about being poor? How have basic concepts about wealth and poverty evolved from biblical through rabbinic and medieval sources until the modern period? What are some specific historical events that demonstrate either marked success or bitter failure? And finally, are there some relevant concepts and practices that are distinctively, if not uniquely, Jewish? It is a singular strength of this collection that appropriate attention is given, in a style that is both accessible and authoritative, to the vast and multiform conversations that are recorded in the Talmud and other foundational documents of rabbinic Judaism. Moreover, perceptive analysis is not limited to the past, but also helps us to comprehend circumstances among todays Jews. It is equally valuable that these authors are attuned to the differences between aspirations and the realities in which actual people have lived.

What was it like to be poor in the Middle Ages? In the past, the answer to this question came only from institutions and individuals who gave relief to the less fortunate. This book, by one of the top scholars in the field, is the first comprehensive book to study poverty in a premodern Jewish community--from the viewpoint of both the poor and those who provided for them. Mark Cohen mines the richest body of documents available on the matter: the papers of the Cairo Geniza. These documents, located in the Geniza, a hidden chamber for discarded papers situated in a medieval synagogue in Old Cairo, were preserved largely unharmed for more than nine centuries due to an ancient custom in Judaism that prohibited the destruction of pages of sacred writing. Based on these papers, the book provides abundant testimony about how one large and important medieval Jewish community dealt with the constant presence of poverty in its midst. Building on S. D. Goitein's Mediterranean Society and inspired also by research on poverty and charity in medieval and early modern Europe, it provides a clear window onto the daily lives of the poor. It also illuminates private charity, a subject that has long been elusive to the medieval historian. In addition, Cohen's work functions as a detailed case study of an important phenomenon in human history. Cohen concludes that the relatively narrow gap between the poor and rich, and the precariousness of wealth in general, combined to make charity "one of the major agglutinates of Jewish associational life" during the medieval period.

The reputed wealth and benevolence of the Portuguese Jews of early modern Amsterdam attracted many impoverished people to the city, both ex-Conversos from the Iberian peninsula and Jews from many other countries. In describing the consequences of that migration in terms of demography, admission policy, charitable institutions—public and private—philanthropy and daily life, and the dynamics of the relationship between the rich and the poor, Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld adds a nuanced new dimension to the understanding of Jewish life in the early modern period.

This book is the first comprehensive study examining the impact of emancipation on the lives of Amsterdam's Jews. The enactment of equality in 1796 failed to provide these Jews with similar rights and opportunities as the non-Jews; two-thirds of Amsterdam's Jewish community remained poor for much of the nineteenth century. Even though the declaration of emancipation should have provided the Jews with legal and social equality, the Dutch authorities continued to retain their perception of the Jews as a separate and different group of predominantly uncultured paupers and never made it their priority to remove all restrictive measures.