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A mother and child at the battered women's shelter; a retarded citizen in a group home; a street musician on Nicollet Mall; and a recovering alcoholic in the soup line.... what do they all have in common?
They are all Jews -- Jews without money.
For many of these people, life is a double burden. Not only must they struggle with poverty, they are also faced daily with insensitive remarks by non-Jews who believe that"'all Jews are rich" and that poor Jews must be "rare exceptions."
One single mother I know was told by neighbors in her apartment building, "You may be poor now, but you'll get rich, because Jews have a natural talent for making money." Natural talent? Which genes control prosperity? Are they on the same chromosomes that make Jews "smarter"? And just how does the retarded Jewish citizen cope with that stereotype?
There are probably no accurate statistics on the number of poor Jews in the Twin Cities. The welfare department does not ask about religion, and ethnically we are lumped in with "whites." But because I always wear a skullcap and am therefore visibly Jewish, people walk up to me on the sidewalk, at the bus stop, or in the park. Many stop to chat with me as I work in my garden. And while this unofficial street ministry may not be the most scientific way to collect data, it does enable me to hear stories that never reach the ears of sociologists. Perhaps the very informality of a park bench allows for a kind of personal sharing that cannot happen in a caseworker's office.
Many poor Jews are, quite frankly, afraid to admit that they are Jewish, for fear of being harassed or ridiculed. This is especially true in group homes, where acceptance by the other residents can make or break one's participation in the program. Paranoid? Perhaps. But I know the feeling, because I myself have had some unsettling encounters with stereotypes.
For example, there was the bill collector who simply refused to believe that I was unemployed and had no cash on hand. He had apparently been informed that I was a rabbi, which, to him, meant that I must be drawing a fat salary from some suburban synagogue. (My ministry is mostly volunteer, supported over the years by a string of secular jobs.) At one point, this obnoxious man actually threatened to reveal my debts to my "congregation." My wife and I joked about that one for months, as we pictured this guy in a three- piece suit, parading down Franklin Avenue with a sign proclaiming that Rabbi Gershom owed fifty dollars to the phone company!
Eventually I did find employment, which brought with it another set of Jewish stereotypes, beginning with the co-workers who openly wondered why a Jew would want such a low-paying job. (We get hungry, like everyone else.) Almost everyone told me stories about someone they knew who had worked for some rich Jew somewhere, oblivious to the fact that people who can afford to hire servants are, by definition, affluent -- regardless or race, religion, or national origin.
To be a poor Jew is to be invisible; you do not become a statistic until you strike it rich. For ten years I lived in and around the Phillips neighborhood as a tenant, moving every couple years when the landlord raised the rent. As such, I was an anonymous part of the urban population. But when my wife and I finally managed to become home owners, we were miraculously transformed overnight into "Jewish Yuppies." All we had done was buy the same house we were renting, to avoid moving again. As Jews, we were seen as Yuppies; for any other minority, we would be "grassroots people gaining control of our living space." [Update: in 1988 we lost that house, due to long-term illness.]
By now you are probably thinking, "He's oversensitive. Those Jews are always complaining about something. Next thing you know, he'll be screaming about antisemitism."
WRONG. Very little, if any, of this is overtly antisemitic. Mostly it is a matter of insensitivity, ignorance, and a lack of exposure to different kinds of Jews. Sometimes it is a case of tunnel vision, as when visitors to Brooklyn notice the Hasidic diamond dealers who fit the "rich Jew" stereotype, but are oblivious to the Hassidic cab drivers, hot dog vendors, factory workers, panhandlers and street musicians on the same block. Until recently [mid-1980's] the New York City welfare department was also unaware of thousands of poor Jewish senior citizens who could not read English, and were therefore unable to apply for help. Now, thankfully, the pamphlets have been translated into Yiddish.
Sometimes even well-intentioned efforts at education may go astray. When Sesame Street, that beloved inner-city block which prides itself on diversity, decided at long last to introduce a Jewish character, who did it turn out to be? Mr. Hooper, the shopkeeper, who came out of the closet by serving everyone BAGELS! This wasn't antisemitic, just unimaginative. Now if Cookie Monster had been Jewish, he could have agonized over having to give up leavened cookies for Passover. Or perhaps Big Bird could have invited everyone to a Hanukkah party, or maybe Oscar the Grouch could have explained why he doesn't have a mezzuzah (*see below) on his trash can. The possibilities are endless, once you stop seeing Jews as a class of merchants and bankers.
Jews without money. The phrase sounds strange to American ears, like a fish out of water. Yet for every Jewish millionaire, there are countless anonymous Jews who struggle to make ends meet like everyone else. We are ordinary human beings, with all kinds of personalities, occupations and lifestyles. Many of us live right here in the inner city, supported by pay checks, welfare checks, unemployment checks, and social security checks. We are your neighbors.
*Mezuzzah (meh-ZOOZ-uh): a little parchment scoll with Bible verses hand-written in Hebrew, that is enclosed in a decorative case and affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes. A trash can has no doorpost, so it doesn't need a mezuzzah.
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© Copyright 1986 by Yonassan Gershom. Revised 1994. "Jews Without Money" originally appeared in the Opinion column of The Alley, the Phillips neighborhood newspaper in South Minneapolis.
Feel free to use "Jews Without Money" as a class handout for educational purposes, provided you print the entire text. For written permission to bundle with other software or re-print in other publications, contact the author at the e-mail address below:
rooster@pinenet.com