Until just a few days ago, William Rapfogel was considered New York Jewry’s poverty czar, and his deep connections to the city’s political class were viewed as one of the prime assets of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, which he long headed. Rapfogel’s abrupt firing amid the disclosure of a criminal investigation into his…
Forty years ago, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty was founded in response to growing concerns that Jewish poverty was largely overlooked, something that was too taboo to discuss. We were all shocked when the 2002 Jewish Community Study first showed that there were 226,000 Jews living in poverty in New York City. Unfortunately the…
Poverty in the New York area’s Jewish community is growing fast with more than 560,000 people living in nearly 200,000 poor and near-poor Jewish households. The survey covers the five boroughs of New York City: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island, as well as the nearby counties of Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester. The…
The invaluable Thomas Edsall reports in his New York Times blog on a paper by an MIT economist, co-written with a Harvard political scientist and a French economist, that claims America can’t adopt more egalitarian social policies because it’s our “cut-throat capitalism” that allows countries like Sweden to have their “cuddly capitalism.” The idea is…
Israel has the highest poverty rate in the developed world. Some 21% of Israelis were poor as of 2010, more than in any of the other 33 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, its new report reveals. Compare this figure with where Israel stood in 2000 and the picture is stark —…
The Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem is driving its Palestinian residents into deeper economic isolation and they face far greater poverty than Jewish neighbours, said a U.N. report on the city at the heart of the Middle East conflict. The U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report, published on Thursday, is the first comprehensive…
Probably no more than the top 10 percent of Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews will ever shop at Pomegranate, the luxury kosher supermarket recently featured by The New York Times columnist David Brooks in a column titled “The Orthodox Surge.” Brooks chose the upscale kosher version of Whole Foods as the fulcrum of an admiring piece on…
As a professional anti-poverty worker, one of the most frequent questions I am asked by friends and acquaintances is whether to give money to panhandlers. People want to be generous and helpful, but they are worried about potentially facilitating self-destructive behavior or aiding con artists. Given that Jewish tradition tends to rake every social issue…
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