21 April 2011

Schnorers

Do you want to guess?

Is it in Missippi, or Alabama, or maybe Arkansas?

Nope, it's in New York State, just an hour from Times Square. It's Kiryas Joel, which has a mind boggling 70% poverty rate: (number 2 only has a 56% rate)
The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.
Normally, I am not inclined to tell people that they need to get off their asses, and get a real job, but in this case, I'm going to say get off your asses and get a job.

Kiryas Joel is a hole in the map created by cynical New York politicians in order to pander, and since then it has been used to suck up various welfare payments, so that able bodied residents could game local government for handouts.

Judaism is very clear about this:  Studying is good, but there is also an obligation to work and support a family.

8 comments :

Sortition said...

> get off your asses and get a job

How would that help? There are lots of people looking for jobs and who can't find any - this will just add more people to the long queue.

Matthew G. Saroff said...

Fundamentally, and this is speaking as someone who has been on public assistance during my period of unemployment (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) the idea that people are deliberately raised in a way to ensure that they lack life skills with the goal of their being on public assistance so that they can "study" Torah full time is offensive to me as a Jew.

They are schnorers in Kiryas Joel, just like the Heredim in Israel.

Torah scholars are supposed to work for a living, whether this is being a rabbi, a professor, or a computer programmer.

Sortition said...

If your objections to their way of life is based purely on Jewish teachings and moral indignation then that is one thing, but if your objections are based on economic considerations (draining the public coffers, living parasitically on the labor of others), then that is a different matter.

In a modern Capitalist economy, Keynesian theory asserts, and liberal idols such as Krugman and Steigliz would explain, the problem is not lack of productive powers but lack of demand. The problem is not that people do not want to work, but that there aren't enough jobs to go around. Therefore, by removing themselves from the job market, the ultra-orthodox are doing us a favor. They are willing to live in poverty and let us, crass materialists, enjoy the cushy lives associated with having jobs.

This may sound like a joke, but that is exactly what theory implies. This may sound less absurd when you realize that, as I already wrote, with more job applicants than positions, if the ultra-orthodox do manage to get jobs, this will simply displace some other job applicants (and drive down wages).

Finally, it is essentially an arbitrary decision by the government to fund certain activities (such as military adventures, space exploration and various forms of scientific research) and not fund others (such as Jewish scholarship). Why would the those engaged in the latter activities be called schnorers while the those engaged in the former activities be called workers? Aren't they all living at the expense of the taxpayer?

Matthew G. Saroff said...

It's probably a mix of the two. 
 
I think that feeling religiously entitle not to work is bad, for Jews, who are supposed to proactively engage the world, it is worse.

I agree that in a modern economy, there is always some unemployment, and that there should be a robust welfare state to accomodate this.

Anonymous said...

Somewhere, I think in Pir K'Avot, it is said "The torah is not a spade."  One is supposed to work.

Rashi was a vintner, and the Besht ran an inn.

Sortition said...

Someone who is selling Torah books for profit or makes a living dispensing Halachic strictures is living off of the Torah.

The residents of Kiryas Joel don't do that - they are living on welfare and learning the Torah at the same time.

Matthew G. Saroff said...

Your response is orthogonal to the Pir K'Avot post.

The Pir K'Avot posts is stating that one is supposed to work, and that Torah is should not be an excuse avoid work.

Many of the people in Kiryas Joel are in fact using Torah as a justification for not working or contributing to the world.

The examples of the Besht and Rashi are important here.

Sortition said...

> Many of the people in Kiryas Joel are in fact using Torah as a justification for not working or contributing to the world.

First, I think that "working" (a very slippery notion, by the way) and "contributing to the world" are two very different things.

Second, to the extent that the people of Kiryas Joel really think that they should be supported by the public because they are Torah scholars, then you are right. I am not sure that this is really the case at all. Since they are not being paid to learn the Torah, this is more about their state of mind than about their activities.

BTW, the spelling should be Pirkei Avot.

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