Jewish Poverty Is Real — And Our Silence About It Is Making Things Worse |
There is a stereotype so pervasive, so deeply embedded in the global consciousness, that even many Jewish people have internalized it without question: that Jews have money. Always. Without exception.
It is a myth. And our collective failure to challenge it is causing real harm. One in five Jewish people lives in poverty. Let that sink in. For example, in the U.S, these are elderly Holocaust survivors who outlived their entire families and now struggle to survive on their own. They are Soviet Jewish immigrants who arrived in America with nothing after the fall of the USSR. They are families, just like millions of other American families, who never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. They are poor. And almost no one is talking about them.
That silence is not accidental. Poverty has become a taboo within the Jewish community itself — an inconvenient truth that disrupts a carefully maintained image of collective success. I’ve spent five years trying to secure funding for my documentary Jews Got Money — a film........