Jan

Jewish Poverty in Brooklyn

When I think of Jewish New York, I think of media and finance, of bankers, lawyers, philanthropists, doctors, writers, and the mayor. I think of Katz’s deli, the diamond district, and B&H.

In my six years of living here, I have never considered Jewish poverty. But, as I learned while reporting my latest story for the JC, it is a huge issue for New York’s Jewish population.

The Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty estimates that 250,000 Jewish New Yorkers live in poverty. For the neediest few, there is literally nowhere left for them to turn when they are in need of a hot meal than friends, family, synagogues, and now, a small but growing number of kosher soup kitchens run by a relatively new non-profit called Masbia.

Charedi Poverty, New York-style (the JC)

Categories : Englishman in New York

3 Comments

Beau
January 10th, 2010 at 7:48 pm

These are the perils of moleishly staring at your pc all day and not going out. I did warn you. Look what’s gone and happened; you, a seasoned JC hack overlooked quarter of a million poor on your doorstep! Figures sound MASSIVELY inflated, though.

Ciao ciao from Hilton Buenos Aires.

pdberger
January 11th, 2010 at 8:17 am

Well spotted, Beau. If you follow the link in the post, you will see that the Met Council’s poverty stats are different than the Federal Poverty Guideline.

How is poverty defined?
Poverty is both relative and absolute. A family or an individual experiences relative poverty when they have less income and fewer resources than the people around them. In some places, Israel and Western Europe for example, poverty is usually defined in relative terms. Often, a household whose income is less than half the median income of all households is considered to be poor.
In the United States, poverty tends to be defined in absolute terms. Since the days of the War on Poverty, initiated during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, poverty in America has usually been measured in terms of the Federal Poverty Guideline.

Met Council has adopted an Adjusted Poverty Guideline, which calculates poverty at 150% of the Federal Poverty Guideline, as the appropriate measure of Jewish poverty for several reasons:
1. New York City has one of the highest costs of living in the country.
2. Many city, state, and federal assistance programs, recognizing the unrealistically low level of the Federal Poverty Guideline for New York City, have established eligibility levels that are substantially higher than the Basic Guideline.
3. Even the researcher who first proposed the federal poverty standard in the 1960s says it is outdated. “Anyone who thinks we ought to change it is perfectly right,” Mollie Orshansky stated in 2001.
4. The need for a more realistic definition of poverty is evident from a simple examination of the family income levels for those falling under the Adjusted Poverty Guideline. A family of three persons with less than $22,530 in annual income or a family of four with less than $27,150 would fall below the 150% Guideline. Any such family is clearly poor in terms of what it takes to live in New York City today.

Beau
January 11th, 2010 at 2:15 pm

I never follow your links Paul, who knows which dubious avenues of perversion they’d take me down.