What Would Happen If American Jews Weren’t Rich?
A thought experiment. Imagine that it turns out that Glenn Beck is right, and that President Obama is a closet socialist. Further, imagine that upon reelection in 2012, Obama announces a series of reforms – call it a Four Year Plan – to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and that the keystone of the plan is a marginal tax rate of 99% on income over $100,000. A few machers and their lawyers would figure out how to game the system, but the broader communal affluence that sets us apart from nearly every other American ethnic group would disappear. Given such a scenario, what would it mean to be an American Jew in 2030?
On its face, it’s an absurd question. American Jews, after all, are quite comfortable with the notion of Jewish poverty. When we talk about our past, we love to dwell on the filthy tenements of the Lower East Side, the hardscrabble kibbutzim of the Yishuv, the simple life in the prelapsarian shtetl. We get a big kick out of our humble roots. Contemporary Jewish kitsch is epitomized by the figure of the immigrant bubbe compensating for a traumatically deprived childhood by compulsively overfeeding her family. Meanwhile, suburban Jews speak of the New York kosher deli as the peak of culinary achievement, and even though we can afford a nice tuna steak, we still buy gefilte fish.
Of course, the vast majority of American Jews-95%, according to a 2003 report by the United Jewish Communities-live above the poverty line. According to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 46% of American Jews earn over $100,000 a year, compared to only 18% of all Americans. For all but a few, our nostalgia only underscores how much we have changed. Our jokes about bubbes shield our discomfort as the American Jewish experience melds with the experience of exceptional affluence.
See, for instance, the comments of hedge fund manager William Ackman at a January 15th panel at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan entitled “Madoff: A Jewish Reckoning.” [Flip to the interview on the next page for more on this event.] “The press makes a big deal about the fact that he has a Park Avenue apartment,” Ackman said of epic con man Bernard Madoff. “The reality is he has an apartment on East 64th Street between Park and Lex…[T]his guy’s ostensibly a billionaire, [but] he didn’t live a particularly ostentatious life.”
Ackman was arguing that Madoff cultivated trust by not spending money wildly, which seems reasonable. But the idea that Ackman could say that owning an apartment just off Park Avenue, a mansion in Montauk, a third home in France, a share in a private jet, a $2.2 million vintage yacht, and a 24-foot speedboat isn’t “particularly ostentatious,” and that none of three hundred or so New York Jews in attendance would pelt him with tomatoes, reveals something striking about communal standards of ostentation.
Or perhaps not so striking. After all, for many American Jews, being Jewish means engaging in a series of performances of wealth. In middle school, to be Jewish is to attend expensive Bar Mitzvah parties. In college, to be Jewish is to eat ice cream at an extravagantly funded Hillel. As a young adult, to be Jewish is to pay thousands of dollars for a seat at the synagogue on Yom Kippur, and, a few years down the road, thousands more to send your kid to nursery school at the JCC.
One of the many reasons that Newsweek’s annual ranking of the most influential American rabbis is a joke is that the real influence in the community doesn’t rest with anyone on the list, but rather with their patrons-the hedge fund managers, investment bankers, alcohol and cigarette moguls, and cosmetics heirs whose philanthropic purchasing power allows them to dictate the communal agenda. These captains of industry are often thoroughly decent, well-meaning people. But their influence shapes our perceptions of wealth, cultivating a broader spirit of ostentation that makes throwing a Bar Mitzvah a sacralized pissing match.
So, if Obama is a socialist, what would remain of American Jewish culture? If being Jewish in America is bound up with being wealthy, what happens when American Jews don’t have money?
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It’s a question that takes on particular urgency in this season of economic collapse. Jews of my generation are often agnostic when it comes to contemporary threats to the Jewish people. We can’t disprove our parents’ warnings about anti-Semitism in America and threats to Israel, but we’re not disposed to believe in them. The threat that the financial crisis poses to American Jewry, however, seems real. Obviously, Glen Beck is wrong about Obama. But while we won’t lose our money to a 99% income tax, we may lose it in the market. As investment banks tuck tail, it’s easy to see how an American Jewish experience defined by affluence may not be sustainable.
We at New Voices may be skeptical of the Jewish community, but we’re not nihilists. It’s not important that every aspect of the Jewish community be preserved as it was in 2008. It is important, however, that there be a Jewish community in 2030. As American Jewry reorganizes in the face of new economic realities, how can we ensure that it no longer functions as an extension of Jewish wealth?
At the January 15th YIVO panel, Princeton professor and Dissent editor Michael Walzer half-jokingly suggested that Jews should reinstate the sumptuary laws of the medieval European ghettos, the often self-imposed rules that regulated ostentation within the community. That’s one option.
The alternative is less amusing, but perhaps more levelheaded. We got this way by ceding leadership to the community’s major philanthropists. If we take it back, we can diminish the influence of the most affluent on our values and our priorities. The means to such a coup are unclear. It will require passionate involvement in Jewish communal politics on the part of a generation of young people who, understandably, find the community deeply boring and hopelessly lame. Our challenge is to convince our disillusioned friends that the way to fight the materialism and ostentation that they find so distasteful is to care enough to fearlessly challenge the Jewish status quo.
Businessmen, bankers, and big-shot lawyers will always be an important part of American Jewry, and rightly so. But to allow the wealthiest to define our community is a dangerous mistake. Let’s hope we can muster the willpower to correct it.
