JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Read this article in Yiddish. Jewish crime ain’t what it used to be. In 1908, New York Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham caused a scandal when he asserted in an article in the North American Review that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The Jewish community was outraged and Bingham was forced to retract his statement….
Kosher food pantries have spent months preparing for Passover, a pricey holiday during which many Jewish New Yorkers need some extra help putting food on the table. But with coronavirus taking a toll on family finances, those pantries are seeing a rapid increase in demand for their services. The Forward wrote about the challenges food…
In a normal year, the weeks leading up to Passover are a boom time for a Hasidic handyman who specializes in installing dishwashers and stoves. His services are in high demand right before the holiday, when Orthodox families like to schedule home improvements to coincide with a rigorous cleaning. This year is different. He hasn’t…
This essay is part of an ongoing series about Jewish poverty. Previous entries in the series can be found here and here. It was a bright Thursday morning in late May, and suddenly there was a blueberry crisis. A few staff members of the digital food pantry at the Commonpoint Queens location in Forest Hills…
Passover is around the corner. This year, as I begin to prepare in Jerusalem, where cleaning products went on sale the morning after Purim and municipal posters wishing everyone a happy spring holiday decorate the streets, I think back to preparing for Passover four years ago, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was still winter and…
If the American Jewish community seriously confronted the persistence of Jewish poverty, it could look like this: More than 200 people from 19 states and the District of Columbia gathered on March 19 at a large San Francisco hotel for a convening sponsored by the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation to examine why a surprising…
In 1972, the journalist Paul Cowan spent weeks roaming Manhattan’s Lower East Side on assignment for The Village Voice, searching for the Jewish poor. He didn’t have to look far. “Most people think of the Jewish immigration as the most spectacularly successful one in American history,” Cowan wrote, “but the 50-year journey from the shtetl…
Why are people poor? It is, on the face of it, a simple question. People are poor because, in comparison to other people, they have less money. But the question is often asked in moral terms. What makes people poor? American political discourse, especially in conservative circles, views poverty as a moral failure of the…
