Grim study on recession’s impact on Jewish life
It’s not happy reading, but studying it should be a mandatory assignment for every Jewish activist. Steven Windmueller’s paper on The Unfolding Economic Crisis: Its Devastating Implications for American Jewry, lays out a crisis that will continue to impact the Jewish communal world for many years even if the economic downturn ends soon.
He concludes “In the midst of it, core institutions are being fundamentally reshaped and individual lifestyles reconstructed. These economic challenges threaten the existing infrastructure of the American Jewish community, leading to a new order of institutions and leaders.”
For many older Jews, “many of their core institutional patterns of personal engagement have been altered.” And for younger Jews, the economic dislocations “may foster opportunities for further experimentation and disengagement from the traditional patterns.”
The net result “is likely to be a far weaker, less cohesive American Jewish community.”
Tags: Jewish organizations, recession
July 20th, 2009 at 10:22 am
This is the comment I left on that article:
I actually think this is naive. In the US, at least, the financial debacle is not considered a “Jewish” problem. Nor is it in normal Europe (I live in Berlin). Certainly strident antisemites will use it, but they use everything.
However, although we earn a decent living, my family could not afford to join a synagogue or send our children to a Jewish school when we lived in Westchester county NY. That with an offer of 50% off tuition. Who can afford 15,000 (after discount!) per child! With a similar discount, our synagogue dues were over $2,000. No wonder there is disaffiliation. We couldn’t afford to pay over 70% of our after tax, after mortgage earnings to be Jewish. So we went to Germany, and have a higher quality of Jewish life.