← Identity/Crisis
Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Shall Apartment Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing Jewish life today. I'm Yehuda Kurtzer. We're recording on Thursday, June 25, 2026. Today's episode is sponsored in honor of Robert Kogod's 95th birthday by his loving family. I'll just say personally, Bob, our longtime board chair, we miss you. Missed you this week at the board meeting. Wishing you well. Sending a lot of love. When you work and live in the Jewish community in North America, at whatever level of organized the Jewish community is in question, you operate amidst a tremendous amount of noise that is rarely vocalized about money. It's in some ways the most important conversation we should be having as we try to construct community, meaning and identity within a market capitalist environment where we're all free agents and where all of these big commitments like community, meaning and identity are often implicitly classified as commodities. But instead, this rarely pops up as an open conversation, mostly shows up when people are talking about one or another specific issue related to money, like philanthropy or affordability. Those tend to be the big ones. I also find that much of the conversation I see about money in Jewish life is accusatory or laced with judgment. This happens at scale and also in minor interactions. On philanthropy, for instance, you hear a lot of noise about the ways that mega philanthropy is transforming the Jewish organizational economy. I think that's true, but it's rarely used as a point of analysis, usually as a point of anger or lament in turn. And as I've seen many times, the philanthropy industry can wind up being weirdly defensive, not quite sure how to manage its discomfort about both wielding a lot of power and the reality that other people notice. This is true on affordability, too. A couple weeks ago, I hosted a podcast here with a Jewish educator who was talking about how he tries to make the case to his students as to why they should consider careers in Jewish education. And on the podcast I heartily agreed. But in turn I wound up fielding accusations that the case that I was making that people should go into Jewish education was from a place of privilege because I am someone who works in this field with a good salary and therefore not a credible witness for the case that I was making. Now, I'm not complaining. I can handle the feedback, but I'm just trying to notice something. Money defines so many features of North American Jewish life, but there's rarely a structural or systematic conversation about it, much as the case is that individual families think and talk about their finances all the time, but rarely discuss such matters openly with their neighbors. I suppose there's a few reasons for this. Maybe Jews get nervous that our real public conversation about money and status in class all gets conflated into a public conversation that's laced with anti Semitism and prejudice about Jews and money. So we're scared to like, contribute data that contributes to these perceptions and conspiracy theories. Maybe the problem is that communal discourse is controlled and shaped by people who tend to be much more moneyed, such that issues of class and affordability are at best problems to be solved, but more commonly just realities that are easier to ignore. In general, we tend to focus as a society on symptoms presented by contemporary problems less than we invest in understanding the unarticulated root causes. But whatever the reason, and I'm sure there are more, this produces this paradox. The force that maybe shapes most of our lives and our choices is the thing we're scared to talk about. And the continued suppression of this conversation contributes both to its magnitude below the surface and but also fosters less and less understanding at the same time. We fail to see and resist talking about money as a global concern with Jewish implications, rather than as a kind of unique matter of moral worth for Jews. By this I mean you often hear about Jewish voters and like the competing considerations of, on one hand, voting for matters of specifically Jewish interest and safety, like Israel and anti Semitism versus the in interest of voting for their pocketbook. This perpetuates a notion that your pocketbook is not a Jewish issue, despite the fact that Jews are human beings like other people and their safety and their vitality are intertwined with their economic situation. I'll give you an example. On an organizational level, the single biggest variable currently shaping our organization and its financial health is not our management skills or even the vicissitudes of our donors, but the collapsing rate of the dollar relative to the shekel and what that's doing to the relationship between the Israeli and American economy. So an organization like us is trying to solve for our institutional health within the limited framework of what we can do for ourselves. We cut budgets, we try to raise more money. That's what any institution could do. But there's no invisible hand, pun intended, that would refocus questions of organizational health on global economic trends and world currency markets in in ways that would both help us put all of our work in context and maybe even lead to the kind of collective solutions that all of US organizations that operate in both places could benefit from. And so could the whole field. Perhaps more poignantly, Jews in poverty or close to the poverty line navigate their own precariousness and their choices largely in isolation, trying to keep up in Jewish communities where money is taken for granted as an essential variable in Jewish life, but rarely discussed or engaged in a way that could create deeper empathy, understanding and communal solutions. It strikes me that, for instance, when it comes to questions of the affordability of Jewish life, the best we get is like a form of managed care. The capitalist system largely prevails and there's like a scattering of ways for those who struggle to keep up, to manage their way through. It doesn't feel like the story in which we should be living anyway. Instead of lamenting a conversation that's not happening, I'm excited to just have it and to welcome the one scholar who I know who is least risk averse about this conversation, the most courageous in speaking out about issues of class and money and poverty in our community. Also a scholar who I find approaches this issue in the least polemically or ideologically driven ways. Ilana Horwitz is an assistant professor in the Fields Rand Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane. She's nationally recognized sociologist of education and religion. Her work examines how gender, social class, religious upbringing and institutional structures shape educational pathways and long term outcomes. She's a great scholar in the academy, but also really adjacent to and interested in informing the Jewish community's approach to these sensitive issues. I got to know Ilana in recent years, especially through her involvement here at Hartman in our North American Scholar circle, also through her books the Book on the Entrepreneurial Scholar. And I've heard a lot about her new book, the broken why 2/3 of Americans Don't Complete College and why It's Not Their Fault. I think that's still forthcoming, but she also wrote a recent piece in our journal Sources called Jewish Education Is out of Sync with the Lives Many Jews Are Living. She's a great scholar, great person, has the single best website of any academic that I know and I'm happy to have her here today. Lan, thanks for coming on the show.
- [07:09]
B
Thanks so much for having me. It's really an honor. Yehuda.
- [07:11]
A
Awesome. So let's start with helping our listeners get to know you a little bit, both as a scholar and as a person, because these questions of money and class in the Jewish community are both personal for you in terms of your biography. I've heard you speak about it, but they've also become issues that you're addressing, both as related to the Jewish community, but also as relates to Americans more broadly do you want to situate yourself in the story?
- [07:33]
B
Sure, absolutely. So I have been interested in issues of social class without even understanding what it meant probably since my twenties when I started thinking a lot about my own life growing up in Philadelphia. And so by way of background, I immigrated here from the former Soviet Union. We were refuseniks. We moved here at the end of 1988. And we came here very much with the work of HIAs and the work that the American Jewish community did to advocate for former Soviet Union Jews. I did a year and a half of public school when we moved here in Philadelphia. And then I went to Jewish day school, mostly on philanthropic dollars. And so I spent my adolescence really as like a pretty working class immigrant kid in navigating an upper class world. My parents were really highly educated engineers in Russia. But as most immigrants, when you come here and you don't speak the language right, they had to really take a step back. And they worked several different kinds of jobs, including working as cleaners and. But my family ended up. My parents were really entrepreneurs. They started a business. And I would say my family eventually very much like achieved the American dream at a time when it really did still exist for people. But in my 20s, after I went to day school and I went to college at Emory, and I was part of all these, like, upper class worlds. And I really started thinking a lot about the role of class and how that played out in my life. And that is actually what led me to be a sociologist. Academia is my second career. And when I went back to graduate school at the age of 30, and I was trying to figure out, like, what's the right discipline for me, I was interested in Jewish studies, but the discipline I was interested in was sociology because I wanted to understand how people navigate different social worlds. So that kind of brought me into the academy. My early work is about the intersection of religious upbringing and class broadly in America. As you know, my first book is about conservative Christians. And then about, I would say around the pandemic, I really started thinking about issues of class in the Jewish community. I was, you know, sheltering in place at home in Palo Alto, and I was thinking a lot about the role of sort of how people who were economically vulnerable were navigating the economic setbacks of COVID especially people who had young children. And I decided to do like a small study of Jews. And I'm happy to talk more about that. But basically that small study ended up ballooning into a much larger project and a big part of my research agenda over the past six years has been looking at issues of class and economic vulnerability in the Jewish community.
- [10:08]
A
So I do want to go into the study and I get into greater detail, but I'm first curious whether is the conversation around questions of class and money in the Jewish community fundamentally different than if you took a different subset of Americans? Like, what are the characteristics of that conversation that are unique and different, and what pieces of it are like. No, a comparable subset or a comparable ethnic or minority or religious group would show some similar trends. Data. In other words, how particular is a conversation about Jews besides the fact that Jews are interested in talking about Jews?
- [10:41]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So there is a universal dimension to this conversation, which is about how do people get into economically vulnerable positions in the first place? And the research that I did shows that Jews experience economic vulnerability in very much similar ways as other Americans. We'll probably get into some of this, but. Right. They have unexpected caregiving burdens. They have changes in the family structure. They have medical issues. All of these end up derailing their opportunities in the labor market in some way that leads to some sort of economic challenge. That is not a Jewish issue. What is, I think a Jewish issue is how issues of economic vulnerability actually intersect with Jewish engagement. That's really what we wanted to better understand. And the big study that came out about a year and a half ago at this point, it's called on the Edge. And we were really intentional about that title because it captures this very precarious position of economically vulnerable Jews who live at the intersection of financial instability and social exclusion. So for Jews, being on the edge is not just an experience of being on the margins economically, but also within the Jewish community, where participation in religious and cultural life often requires resources that they struggle to access. So that's where the Jewish and the economics piece intersect in a particular kind of way.
- [12:02]
A
And is that causal meaning? Is being on the margins financially or being in a place of precariousness the cause of the risk of social exclusion and marginalization? Or are they happening simultaneously?
- [12:16]
B
Yeah, it's certainly not causal. It's very much correlational, and one drives the other. So people who are already economically vulnerable to have a much harder time engaging in the Jewish community for a variety of reasons. But then if you are then not that involved in the Jewish community, that also might hinder your ability to access resources. So they play interchangeably and sort of circularly.
- [12:39]
A
They're intersectional, in other words.
- [12:41]
B
Yeah.
- [12:42]
A
So why don't you give us a state of that reality and the key findings? I think part of what I'm trying to understand about my own community is both what is the reality on the ground in terms of Jewish economic vulnerability in the United States, and also how do I hold that in line with the public narrative that the organized Jewish community tends to have? So let's start a little bit with the data and what you learned about the story, and then we can unpack its relationship to the story that American Jews tell.
- [13:10]
B
Sure. So in your opening remarks, you talked about one of the reasons that people are nervous to talk about money in the Jewish community. And one of your hypotheses is that we don't want to reify sort of the view that Jews are well off, right, because it plays into anti Semitic tropes. So it is important to start from this, like, macro level story. And so using Pew data, we can tell where Jews sit in the socioeconomic ladder of the broader American population. And that story is one in which Jews are doing really well. So Jews are, in addition to Hindus, the most socioeconomically successful group. Their rates of bachelor's and graduate degree attainment are twice as high as Americans. Their rates of income are much higher, Their rates of unemployment are much lower, and their rates of poverty are much lower. So on the whole, American Jews do really well when we compare them to the average American. And that story really obfuscates the heterogeneity of the Jewish experience. And so what the research that I did, and by the way, I did it in conjunction with Rosoft Consulting, I do want to give a shout out to them. And it was funded by the Weinberg Foundation. So those were amazing partners in this work. One of the things that we knew going in was that about 20 to 25% of American Jews experience a form of economic vulnerability. So by economic vulnerability, I do want to take a minute to explain what I mean by that, because I'm going to use that term a lot. And in my work, it is defined conceptually as being financially insecure or unstable, but it is not the same as being at the poverty line. So the federal government, right, has a definition of poverty, and it uses a set of federal poverty thresholds, which consider income and household size, the presence of children, and in some cases, the age of the householder. But they don't rely on self assessments. And the federal poverty level tends to be really criticized for setting unrealistically low income levels. So in our study, we took a different approach to thinking about economic vulnerability. We looked at the ways respondents categorize themselves on a subjective scale. We asked them A question about to what extent they're able to meet their experience expenses. Right. Do you have not enough? Do you have just enough? Do you have a little bit left over? Do you have a lot left over? We also took into account how many people live in their house. And so our way of thinking about economic vulnerability is a bit more expansive than just people in poverty. I just want to be clear about that. So we estimate that About a quarter, 20 to 25% of American Jews are sort of living on the edge in economic vulnerability. And I think people tend to imagine that poor Jews tend to be ultra Orthodox, maybe Russian immigrants and Holocaust survivors. Those are the buckets. And actually, yes, those groups do tend to struggle. But the group that is most sort of susceptible is actually people in their middle age, the 30 to 50 range. People who have young children at home, who are paying for really expensive childcare, who are paying for college, who. Who have a tremendous amount of expenses, who haven't been able to pay off their homes. Right. Those people actually tend to more often find themselves in economic vulnerability more often than people who are 65 and older. There's also a whole host of people who have challenging family situations, so unexpected divorces, people who are widows, people who have some sort of rupture in the family structure for whom that really derails their economic stability. And those are people who are really unseen. So there is, within this broad group of American Jews who are doing well, there are a significant amount who are really struggling.
- [17:00]
A
Can you just help me with the control group as it relates to Jewish involvement? Because when you start to correlate the economic vulnerability with being disconnected from Jewish institutions, that population is historically also lesser connected to Jewish institutions like indexing of Jewish affiliation and belonging tends to go up as Jews get older. So is it really out of proportion that they're disconnected, that you would make a correlation to the economic story, or is it something else?
- [17:32]
B
Yeah, it's. Let me back up and just explain to listeners how we went about doing this research and what our groups were, because we were really intentional in this. So first of all, it's important to note that we surveyed 2,000Americans who self identify as Jewish, and we went to national survey companies. It's really hard to do a study not only of Jews, but of a group within the Jewish subsample that's also only about 20 to 25%. And we didn't want to go through existing JCC lists and federation lists and people who are already connected. And we also could not financially do a nationally representative Study. So everything I'm telling you is not based on nationally representative survey, but it is also not based on a snowball sample. So what we did is we went to national survey companies. And I don't know if you know this, but there are people who fill out surveys as like a side hustle. And for every survey they fill out, they get a couple of dollars.
- [18:26]
A
And I always wondered about that.
- [18:27]
B
Yes, that's like, there are actually people who do this quite a lot.
- [18:30]
A
It's like how I made a bunch of extra bucks in college doing all the psych experiments.
- [18:34]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so. So survey companies tend to know a bunch of demographic characteristics of people in their survey sample. And so we went to two survey companies and we said, look, we are looking for people who self identify as Jewish in whatever way. We were not super prescriptive about that. And then we were looking for people who fell into one of the following three buckets. And this is important to understand. The first bucket is people who have never experienced economic vulnerability. That is about one third of our sample. The second group are people who experienced economic vulnerability growing up, but are no longer in that position. So it would be someone like me. And then the third group consists of people who are currently economically vulnerable or have been in the past five years. And having these three groups allowed us to understand and look at differences in attitudes and behaviors. Then let me add, in addition to doing these 2000 surveys can only tell us so much. But what it did give us was a pool of people who were willing to be interviewed, because every survey at the end ended with a question. Would you be willing to participate in an interview for this project? And so I ended up interviewing 175 people. And I talked to them for about 60 to 90 minutes. And I asked them all their life stories. And their life stories, you know, started out in many different ways. And then I asked questions about how sort of being Jewish intersected with their life stories. And then that group also had these different kinds of buckets. So I just want to make sure listeners understand the basis of the data from which I'm drawing conclusions. Your question is, like, how does, like, engagement intersects with this? What we found is denomination actually plays a bit less of a role. The most interesting group, I'll tell you, is the people who are non denominational. This is a very interesting group. People who say, like, just Jewish, culturally Jewish, not religiously Jewish, people who fall outside of the denominational mainstream. And the reason they're interesting is because they actually, like, if you imagine for a second the spectrum of religiosity. So this is a sort of course spectrum, but right, you have the non denominational, then you have Reform, then you have conservative, then you have modern Orthodox, and then you have the ultra orthodox. And so it actually ends up there. Income levels are kind of an inverse U where it's people on the non denominational and the ultra Orthodox who are most economically vulnerable. With the Reform conservative, modern Orthodox doing really well. I think we all know, like why the Haredi Jews are struggling economically. I'm not going to delve into that. But the question of why these non denominational Jews are also struggling is really a perplexing question. They also have lower rates of happiness and life satisfaction. So I'm really delving into this. There were 39 people who I interviewed who are non denominational. And what I'm kind of seeing is that people who are non denominational tend to be people who are outside of other typical normative American institutions. So they're outside of the institution of marriage, not because they necessarily want to be outside of that institution, but because being Jewish and there affiliating and family life really go hand in this country. People who are outside of one institution, the institution of marriage and family, also are outside of the denominational institutions. So that is really interesting. So beyond like just denominations, within every denomination, Reform conservative, you have people who experience these moments and times of situational vulnerability, right. Caregiving, medical issues that derail them. And that is where beyond just denomination, where that kind of like falling off the economic path starts to unfold for them.
- [22:16]
A
Okay, so you as a good social scientist, refrain from turning the data that you observe from description into normative claims. But I'm going to not being a social scientist, what you said is super interesting because from a Jewish history standpoint, there is a lot of evidence that Jewish communal belonging was an instrument for preserving not necessarily individual wealth, but managing economic instability. I'll give you an example. Like one of my favorite Jewish texts of all time is about the synagogue in ancient Alexandria, in which it's very clear ancient synagogues were not really about prayer, which is already interesting in of itself, but a different podcast. They were places where Jews gathered together largely in diasporic context, if you need a place for a community to come together. But in the ancient Alexandria text, it says that they sat in the synagogue based on the guilds that they belong to, goldsmiths here, silversmiths here, blacksmiths there, and that way. Why? Because then a pauper would come into the community and be able to head towards their industry and be sustained by belonging to a guild. In other words, it's like a wild text because it's basically saying the synagogue was a part of an infrastructure of social justice in the community to preserve everybody having access to income. Now, whether that was true about ancient Alexandria's rabbinic stories, who knows what they're true or not? It does seem right that communal infrastructure in Jewish life fosters economic interaction. I mean, one thing we know consistently throughout history about what Jews did in shul was talk. And it makes sense to me that, like, belonging to a Reformed synagogue gives you access to colleagues, work connections in the same way that, like, you know, my friend Nissan Pelman has been doing all of this work over the last number of years helping people of lower socioeconomic status build relationships on LinkedIn, because when they have relationships on LinkedIn, it opens their access to otherwise closed networks. Is it plausible to theorize because you're hesitating about connecting the dots you're observing, but it seems like a fair guess that, like, access to institutions, as you indicated, is not just a corollary to economic vulnerability, but actually, like, lack of access, maybe even causal, or at least you're not giving yourself a pathway to economic success.
- [24:40]
B
Yeah. And on this point, I do feel comfortable saying, like, look, our religious institutions, and this is not just synagogues, it's also churches are really important sources of social capital. That is where we go to not necessarily network, but where people, young people, older people sort of develop relationships through forms of trust and reciprocity that end up paying off. A very interesting experiment that happened to me, kind of like, naturally. So my family, when we moved over from the former Soviet Union, synagogues in the Philadelphia area were doing these, like, hoopa weddings for couples that never got to have a Jewish wedding. And so my parents and, like, a bunch of other couples stood on the stage on the bema of a synagogue to do this kind of, like, Mass Pippa wedding. And it was officiated by Rabbi Gerald Wolpe and the patriarch. Yes, the patriarch of the Wolpe family. And Rabbi Wolpe was the rabbi of Harzaan Synagogue, which at the time in Philadelphia, and maybe it still is this way, was a very, like, affluent synagogue. But everybody who Rabbi Wolpe married got a gift, and that gift was a lifetime membership to that synagogue. So my immigrant family commuted an hour to go to Harzine Synagogue. We were pretty out of place. But later in life, one thing I didn't mention in the early part of our conversation is that my father passed away when I was 14 in a car accident, and Rabbi Wolpe and the Harzein Synagogue and my school were showed up for my family in a way that I will never, ever forget. And that not only, I think, helped us, like, economically recover in some ways, but it also gave us a sense of social belonging, sort of social connection that certainly helped me as a 14 year old, kind of like, not get derailed by this very tragic moment in my family. But there's no doubt that, like, by being at Karzai and developing a relationship with Broadway Wolfe that ended up connecting me to all sorts of grants and fellowships that I got to go to Israel and to go to USY and to basically be a really not only involved Jew, but also then I went to, you know, Emory and a bunch of other super elite institutions. And I am sure that all of that institutional life helped me. So to your question, like, is there a causal relationship between, like, participating in Jewish life? Absolutely. But in my case, there was sort of like an exogenous factor that got us to Harzein, whereas most people in my economic position at that time would have never thought to go to Harzein or any sort of, like, affluent institution. And they weren't mostly hanging out in day schools. So it's like, how do we get people who are economically vulnerable to even feel comfortable walking through the door because of the sort of stigma and shame of being poorer in a community that's known to be pretty affluent?
- [27:20]
A
Right. So that would raise the question of thinking programmatically, which is the easier problem to solve. Creating environments in which people are made to feel less stigmatized, which feels like a very hard lift for affluent congregations. Or creating the kind of courage and networking capability that would signal that for Jews who are on the edge, their best way in is through belonging. Which feels more plausible to you?
- [27:53]
B
Interesting. I mean, because people tend to prefer sort of technical fixes as opposed to, like, adaptive fixes. A technical fix. Right. Would be much easier. Like, here are some programs to give people financial aid and to get them through the door. But really I think there's like this adaptive change of getting people to see, but that. And that requires a culture change, and that is so much harder.
- [28:17]
A
But that's the only interesting thing to
- [28:18]
B
talk about long term. Like, that's the long game, right? Yeah, so that would be the better approach, but it's a tough one to figure out. And I think one of the reasons it's really hard is because there is still still such a very deep story in the minds of American Jews in the minds of Americans writ large, not Jews. That American Jews are a group who came here with very little and ascended the ranks of the American elite over the course of the 20th century and has done really well. And so the idea that there are Jews who are struggling is, you know, not something really people think about and really not something that is normalized. Even something as simple as. Like, my own synagogue was going through, reviewing sort of our budget, and we realized that a quarter of our congregation is probably economically vulnerable. Their experiences aren't visible. And I think we. To make this adaptive change, this culture change, we need to normalize the conversation about the fact that economic vulnerability is real and that most of the people who are struggling, it's not that they made poor choices, but that there are conditions in the 21st century that led them into this position. One of the things that was most surprising for me, Yehuda, in my research, is like, I expected as a sociologist to hear a lot of stories of intergenerational poverty, right? My mom was poor. We were poor. It's really hard to get out of intergenerational poverty. But that's not the story that I heard. The story that I heard is what I call. It's like the book that I'm working on forever on this project for this research is called the man in the Pink Gorilla Suit. And the reason I call it the man in the Pink Gorilla Suit is because I interviewed this one guy, and he's emblematic of so many people I talked to who said something like this. He's like, look, my life growing up was great. We lived in Florida. My dad was a really successful Toyota dealer. I had a pool. I went to private school. Everything was great. And then, yeah, he went to college. He worked in the financial services industry. And in his 20s, he started to feel kind of, like, cognitively fuzzy, and he didn't know what was going on. And then eventually, what ended up happening is he had a massive stroke. And what was going on that he didn't realize was that he was having a series of dozens and dozens of mini strokes that ultimately culminated in this massive stroke. And then on top of all that, when he was recovering, he ended up getting hit by a car and then had three different forms of cancer. I kid you not. And his life was not linked with anyone, meaning he had never partnered. So there was nobody who was able to help him. He didn't actually have any intergenerational wealth because his dad ended up losing his money later in his life. And the reason he brought up this image of the pink gorilla suit is. He said, I found myself as somebody who had grown up really comfortable standing on the side of the street in a hot, furry pink gorilla suit, holding a for sale mattress sign, just trying to make ends meet. And so that story of downward mobility and situational vulnerability was so common. And I think that's what I'm really trying to get people to understand. Like, yes, we have always had four Jews. That is not a new story. But there's something happening in the 21st century that. That is different than the experience that we tell about the 20th century. So for people to understand that, we need to shift our mind about the story of the American Jewish experience is really like, the main intervention, I think, of my research at this point.
- [31:26]
A
Wow. But their bigger challenge, though, is that what you're describing is both a larger American phenomenon. Right. We're encountering the first generation of Americans who are going to have less wealth in the history of America. Right. So it's not really an American Jewish phenomenon. It's an American phenomenon. American Jews have so deeply internalized the story of upward mobility as what you do in America. You told that story about yourself, right? Like, we rose the ladder, we made good. I tell that story about myself, but three generations ago, and maybe it's even a defense mechanism of, like, yes, I know that I'm at this place, but it was. Somebody sweated down the line. And what that does is it creates so much virtue associated with that story that the idea that our community is supposed to be kind of collectively accountable for one another, that's not really the pathway, like, to the extent that it would lead to programmatic solutions that are like, how do you help people get back on the path of the American Dream? As opposed to interrogating whether the American dream should be associated with so much virtue because it ultimately creates so much shame in this. I mean, it feels like the bigger psychological, adaptive problem is how do we get past that story that is so embedded in all of us, which creates this kind of moral dichotomy between, what does it mean to be a good American? What does it mean to be a bad American?
- [32:46]
B
Yeah. The story of the American Dream and the attainment of the American Dream and the role of college in helping people attain the American Dream is really something I write a lot about and think a lot about. You know, one thing that most of your listeners probably don't know is that while American Jews have really high rates of educational attainment, the latest Pew data shows that rates of degree attainment for men are falling pretty substantially. And that mirrors a broader trend where we know that men in America are less likely to get a college degree. But that has all sorts of implications for the American Jewish experience. And it's not just like, oh, American Jewish men aren't going to college. So what? But first of all, college is a place where a lot of Jews get engaged in Jewish life, where they meet their social partners, where they find out about birthright. So if the Jewish men aren't going to college. Right. That might have all sorts of implications that we don't yet know about, about their sort of engagement in the Jewish community. It's also a place where people go to meet their partners. And so this might have implications for, like, the future of economic Jewish life, but changing, sort of moving away from the story of, oh, Jews achieved all this. It's, I think, when people start to see it really play out in their life and see how it actually affects themselves and their own children and seeing their children, there's kind of three things that people could see. These are like the three pathways to downward mobility. There could be like this sudden shock where there's like the widowhood or illness or a crisis, but then there's the slow erosion. Right. The middle class scaffolding one generation built becomes unavailable to the next, not because of poor choices, but because the economy has changed.
- [34:22]
C
Right.
- [34:22]
B
Stagnant wages and banished pensions and credentials that no longer guarantee security.
- [34:26]
A
Yeah.
- [34:27]
B
And then the blocked futures. Right. For younger adults, downward mobility isn't a fall, but it's like a horizon. The future that their parents promised them isn't here. And so milestones like homeownership and family formation and communal participation get delayed or abandoned. But I think for Jews to see that, they're going to have to start seeing that in their own communities to realize, like, they're not immune from it.
- [34:46]
A
Yeah. I mean, there's one case that feels to me like it is weirdly consistent with the downward move, especially of young men going to college or thinking about higher education as necessary. Necessary, but is actually connected to potentially upward mobility, which is in the modern Orthodox community. It's like a weird case because I talked to my son about this, who's a graduate of a modern Orthodox high school. And he is very aware, very, very aware that if he wants to live that lifestyle in the handful of places where it's actually available to him, where he can also have access to kind of some measure of, like, liberal egalitarian community. Right. That in order to do that, he has to live in very particular socioeconomic class to be comfortable. We were sitting around our house a few weeks ago, and my parents were talking about how, like, oh, they bought their first house for whatever ridiculous amount of money it was, and they were having a good laugh about it. And I could see my son's eyes were like, oh, my God, that's not going to be possible for me. And he spoke up and said, this is why it's leading kids in his environment to think that to be a mono Orthodox Jew, you have basically two major financial pathways in front of you, which is to go into real estate or to go into finance, Neither of which really require a college degree, except to the extent that it helps with some amount of networking. What you really want is family connections into those systems. And to some extent, it used to be law and medicine, but it's becoming less and less so. So the same phenomenon of, like, less of an investment in higher education has the potential to also be a driver towards financial upward mobility or at least sustained socioeconomic class for some sector of the population, which I think is kind of interesting and weird.
- [36:27]
B
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting empirical question of, like, well, the men who aren't going to college, what are they doing instead? And are they staying in the labor market and how are they doing that? I have seen recently there's also some changing of norms around pathways to college. Like when I was growing up in Philly and, you know, Ashkenazi community, if you even so much as thought about going to community college, right. There was for sure a social stigma. You don't go to community college. You go to four years of college at the most elite place you could get into. But I was really fascinated by the fact that I just did a bunch of research in the Persian Jewish community in la, that their social expectations about pathways to college are really different. People there. It's very common. Right. You start at smc, which is Santa Monica Community College, you live at home, and then you transfer to UCLA and USC and still maybe live at home. And so we have really, like, certainly social and cultural norms around what is the college pathway that is socially appropriate in a different Jewish community. But. But I think there is a sort of changing view about that. And so. But in order for people to feel comfortable even getting off the college path, the community needs to recognize, like, you can still have social standing in this community even if you don't do this thing that we thought for so many decades that we have to do. But then you have to ask, if people don't go to college, what do they miss out other than the networking opportunities? What are the sort of like formative Jewish experiences that happen in college that are really important. Important when you think about the long term life course for people especially who aren't already engaged in Jewish life. If you don't go to college, I'm not sure how you're going to ever tap into the Jewish community.
- [37:58]
A
I have more to say about that, but I want to just observe that some of the most interesting stuff that I'm watching happening in the New York area is in the city colleges and schools, because it's exactly coding in this direction, like SMC in la, which I know about from Stephanie's family. It's pretty commonplace. It's common in Sparta communities, not just in the Persian communities, but that's happening in a significant way in the public colleges and universities in the city system where again, there's a lot of living at home, a lot fewer, I would say humanities majors. Folks are focused on actually building up towards social and financial capital and as a result also having a totally different Jewish experience around all of the identity politics and politics politics that are taking place on campus. Because. Because it's like, no, I'm not here for that. There's even a little bit of, I would say, condescension of like, yeah, the kids from Scarsdale have the luxury to be out on the encampments at Ivy League schools, but a kid from Brooklyn who's commuting to Hunter, they're not going to college for that. It almost feels like two periods of Jewish history that are at war with each other in America. One is a story of financial attainment that then accesses people and into one part of the American story against what many of us experience as like the old version of the American story. Like my grandparents going to college at night so that they could be part of this financial attainment. So it feels like we're diverging from each other in some ways, not just socioeconomically, but in like, what story of the college experience are we actually trying to have?
- [39:32]
B
Yeah, you're reminding me of when I was going to college. My mom said to me, she's like, you are not going to college to find yourself. You are going to college very much for the purpose of socioeconomic attainment. I mean, I don't think she used those terms and I don't remember how it sounded in Russian, but it was very clear that I was going to college not to major in the humanities and I went to business school. That was the most practical thing I could think of. I knew I wasn't going to be a doctor or lawyer and so I was like, okay, I'll go to the business school. And I did that. And I worked several jobs when I was in college. I don't think I would have participated. I don't know. I don't know what my relationship would have been like to kind of like the same social justice causes and how much time. I was a pretty involved person, so maybe I would have made time for it. But the point is, yes, people's sort of class standing and the goal of college and the purpose of college is very much a class story, right? And it took me like well into my 20s to finally leave the business world. I went and I worked in consulting and I did all that. And then it was much later that I was like, okay, now I'm ready to go do the thing that is much more are satisfying. And that's how I ended up in academia. But I couldn't have done that because there were familial expectations. And a lot of people who are at these city universities that you named in New York who are first gen low income students, people who are not coming from the kind of expectations of what college is. And it's important to also note that their lives are very or likely interdependent. And what I mean by that is like when I went to college and when you went to college, Yehuda, I was financially dependent on my parents, but I was or my mom, I was independent in that. I started college, I went straight through for four years. I didn't have any caregiving obligations. I didn't have to be home to do that for anybody. So I could go away for four years and that was fine. The subject of this book that I have coming out in January is really about how more working class Americans, not Jews, but working class Americans broadly, that is not how their lives are structured when they go to college. Their lives are interdependent, meaning that they have to stop and start and stop and start. Women in particular, who carry a lot of the nation's caregiving burdens because people and their family are counting on them for money, for caregiving, whatever it is. And so like the idea that college is this four year period where we get to live in a college bubble isn't actually available to most Americans. How that plays out in the Jewish experience I think remains to be seen. But certainly in the case of these more like community colleges and state colleges and in New York, we are seeing Jews entering into spaces and having a different college experience than the average Jewish student at Tulane.
- [41:57]
A
Yeah. So let me bring it back full circle and it goes back to the comment you said before. If you don't access the kind of American college experience, your access to Jewish communal life is fundamentally limited. You have a larger critique, and it's a kind of interesting intersectional critique again of both how the Jewish education system is designed around around class and wealth, but also what we're doing wrong as a Jewish community in general, around issues of class and wealth, what's invisible to us. So to the extent that you feel comfortable, what are the recommendations that you would offer to the Jewish community more generally as we relate to Jews in places of economic vulnerability? But I guess particular when it comes to creating better pathways for Jewish education and engagement that are not tied to generational wealth and certain windows of opportunities. Like what would the redesign look like?
- [42:46]
C
So, Yehuda, you know, I tend to prefer to be in the descriptive rather than the prescriptive, but I will lay out a couple of what I think are strategic opportunities, particularly for Jewish philanthropy. And the report that I wrote on the Edge lays out this in much more comprehensive fashion. But here are just a few things that I think are important. I think we need to think about and frame economic vulnerability as a barrier to Jewish engagement and financial stability as an investment in Jewish communal participation. Right. So philanthropists and communal leaders tend to view this issue pretty narrowly as an issue of material need and it overlooks its broader impact on well being and Jewish participation. So I wonder if we can reframe the promotion of financial stability as an investment in Jewish engagement by like demonstrate the return on investment. Maybe there's a way, way to highlight how addressing food and housing and health crises create the foundations for participation in Jewish life. Maybe share stories of individuals who reconnected with Jewish life after receiving supports like scholarships or mentorship programs or accessible childcare to emphasize the connection between stability and engagement. On a different note, I think there really needs to be some effort to reduce stigma and shame and to normalize conversations around economic vulnerability and promote inclusivity. So perhaps that means a public awareness campaign to reduce stigma and encourage help seeking behavior. Perhaps it means some sort of training for rabbis and educators and lay leaders to create more welcoming environments for people from all different economic backgrounds. Maybe we fund some sort of storytelling or public education campaign that normalize economic struggles and incorporated encourage help seeking.
- [44:25]
B
And then coming back to an early
- [44:26]
C
point that you brought up about Jewish institutions as like important social institutions, we have to strengthen social networks. So economically vulnerable Jews are less likely to have strong social networks to provide emotional and material support. So maybe we can foster programs to develop peer support networks and social activities for vulnerable populations to reduce their isolation and create a safety, a sense of community. And maybe we pilot programs that pair vulnerable individuals with like volunteer navigators who can help them access Jewish community resources and services. So those are some of the ways we might be able to intervene in the community.
- [45:05]
A
Totally amazing. And Ilana, I'll just say, you know, our community is in your debt for the research you're doing and the data that you're providing. But we also your prescriptions are pretty good too. Thanks so much for being on the show today.
- [45:16]
C
Thank you. Thanks for having this conversation with me.
- [45:29]
D
Here are some other things that are happening at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Our summer programming in Jerusalem has begun and our campus is buzzing with learning and conversation. We are grateful to our Board of Directors for joining us in Jerusalem to launch our biggest Hartman Summer yet. We are thrilled to be welcoming hundreds of scholars, educators, rabbis and community leaders from across North America and around the globe to wrestle with the ideas and questions that matter most about Zionism, Jewish values, peoplehood and belonging. If you can't be with us in person this summer, subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive alerts about special live streamed programming from Jerusalem over the next few weeks. And as always, stay tuned to our emails for up to date information. Mazaltov to Annie Beyer Chaffetz, Daniel Goodman and Tessa Zitter for being this year's President's Award recipients, Hartman's highest professional honor. They are being recognized for their impactful work on our flagship podcasts For Heaven's Sake and Identity Crisis. Thank you for helping our ideas reach listeners around the world.
- [46:30]
E
Thanks for listening to our show and speaking. Special thanks to our guest, Alana Horwitz. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our Executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Josh Allen, with music provided by so called transcripts of our show are now available on our website. Typically a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about or or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us@identitycrisisalomhartman.org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere. Podcasts are available. See you next time and thanks for listening.