‘I can ‘do Jewish’ on just $40,000 a year’

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Luke Ford

A married father of four writes:

We reviewed this short list of items and my advisor said, “You realize the greatest expense to your life is your religion. It is consuming over half of your post tax take home pay. You are paying almost $150,000 a year to ‘do Jewish.’”

And that’s when I realized I had forgotten to include Passover on the list.

This was the wakeup call of the century for me. I was raised to believe that religion came first; that everything was ‘holy’ and a ‘mitzvah’; that the more you spent on your Judaism the better it was in God’s eyes. And I now realized I had been completely neglecting the financial health and future of my family.

The first thing I did was to ask around how other people were managing it. Word on the street was that to do everything on my list in a “second tier” community, not something in the greater New York area, one would have to earn more than $500,000 a year. Now I work very hard and I do pretty well, but I will most likely never make half a million dollars a year. Granted, some people in the community do, but not many.

What I saw was far more people who were – if they were willing to admit it – getting steady monthly checks from their parents to survive. Adult children 50 years old still living off handouts from their parents in order to “do Jewish.” Some parents had large fortunes and were easily able to afford to help several adult children, but some were slowly being bled dry. I had one grandmother tell me, “It’s wrong that the day schools are now trying to fund themselves off the backs of the grandparents, now that they have already broken the parents.”

Even more concerning, were the large number of families, doctors, lawyers, investment professionals, who, when asked in confidence, replied that they don’t have two pennies to rub together. And that was before their children were setting off to years in Israel and very expensive college in New York.

The day I left the synagogue forever was the Saturday the rabbi preached that day school tuition does not fulfill the obligation to give 10 percent of one’s income to charity — and that from a rabbi making $350,000 a year, along with free tuition, free housing, and free food expenses. As I angrily began to walk out of there for the last time, my neighbor grabbed my tallis and told me “The day the rabbis pay full tuition is the day that the tuition crisis will be solved.”

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Vanity Fair Editor Who Pretended To Be Jewish Steps Down

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Luke Ford

Why would anyone pretend to be Jewish? Because Jews dominate certain parts of American cultural life, such as publishing. Jews occupy the high ground. Someone who wants to make it has an incentive to pass as Jewish or even to convert formally to Judaism.

JTA:

In 2000, the New York Magazine revealed that Carter for years had pretended to be Jewish during the 1970s.

A friend of Carter’s, Craig Walls, recalled one time when Carter told other journalists and writers at a party that his mother “would kill” him for eating pork. Asked why, he said: “Because I’m Jewish,” Walls recalled. Carter confirmed to the New York Magazine that he had pretended to be Jewish.

“I was reading a lot of Kerouac and a lot of Ginsberg,” Carter told New York Magazine. ”And I thought, If you’re going to be an intellectual in New York, you’ve got to be Jewish. It wasn’t some experiment, like Gentleman’s Agreement, or anything like that. It was just … I thought … I just found it… I don’t know. It was so much more exotic than what I really was.”

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Forward: ‘The Radical Class Divide In My Modern Orthodox High School’

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Luke Ford

Yehuda emails: Read the article, especially the following paragraph.

“Even years later, it’s hard to tease out class as one factor in that tangle of clashing cultures and religious dogma, that whole psychosocial mess. But Modern Orthodoxy is a moneyed enterprise in its very tenets: it’s premised on a 50s middle class American Dream, a nuclear family lifestyle in the suburbs with a house and a car, white-collar professional jobs for the parents and an expensive college education for the children, all seamlessly meshing with measured religious observance. Capitalist success was always what we were being trained for. They never offered us any alternative models for achievement. I didn’t learn about the long tradition of Jewish activism, for example, from European anarchism to the Southern civil rights movement, until well after I left.”

Then read the byline at the bottom: “Caty Simon is an activist, dilettante, and writer in Western Massachusetts. She co-edits Tits and Sass, a blog by and for sex workers.”

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LGBT Americans Are Disproportionately Jewish

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Luke Ford

Forward: “While only 2% of Americans are Jewish, the study found that 6% of LGBT Americans identify as Jews. Nearly half (46%) of LGBT Americans are religiously unaffiliated, roughly twice the American average of 24%.”

There seem to be a lot of Jewish gays.

Charles writes:

Do some ethnic groups have more homosexuals than other ethnic groups?
Of course not everyone will agree with him on the issue of homosexuals being “smarter” than those of us who are straight. I suspect they are slightly higher on the verbal and social abilities. I also do suspect that some ethnic groups might have slightly higher proportion, but it’s not like I know if that is so.
(I notice an unusual number of bisexual Jews in the film industry for example.)

Ray Sawhill: “The sorts of gay guys who succeed in the culture world — who manage to keep their heads above water, and maybe even rise, in fields like the media, fashion, theater, etc — are often impressively talented and bright. They’re often lots of dizzying fun to be around too. They can make a lot of straight people look really dull. After 35 years in NYC, I can testify that warmth, exuberance, brains, humor, charisma and drive aren’t in short supply among Jews.”

Charles: “I met a very flamboyant Jewish guy on set a few days ago. Just thinking about how he seemed to master the crowd after hours. It’s made me consider the differences in social power.”

Adam: “Gay men seem great at having intense knowledge In specific interests but very poor generalised knowledge, systematic understanding or analysis of linkages and cause and effect relationships.”

Chaim Amalek: “This is why God wants us inside the Torah Corral, where the only people we can harm are ourselves, and our rebbes keep a vigilant eye on us all to make sure there is no buggery going on.”

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LAT: ESPN’s Sergio Dipp posts a heartfelt video after his awkward debut as a ‘Monday Night Football’ sideline reporter

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Luke Ford

The announcers for last night’s Chargers-Broncos game were the worst I’ve experienced.

I came home after a hard day. I just wanted to watch some football and relax but these guys were awful. It sounded like ESPN was using a tranny to do the play by play but it turned out to be even worse than I expected — a woman. I don’t want women narrating my football games.

Chuck Schilken from the Los Angeles Times writes:

Sergio Dipp became an instant star Monday night with a memorably awkward sideline report during ESPN’s broadcast of the Chargers’ game against the Denver Broncos.

Early the next morning, however, Dipp showed why he was given the “Monday Night Football” gig in the first place, by giving a heartfelt statement about the experience in a video that he posted on Twitter.

“It’s been a couple of hours now, trying to digest what just happened to a 29-year-old Mexican guy like me,” Dipp said in the video. “It’s 9/11, I’m in Denver, Colo., and this is the NFL, a ‘Monday Night Football’ game between the Broncos and the Chargers, the biggest stage possible. I was starting my elementary school Sept. 11, 2001, in Caliexico, Calif., born in Mexicali, Baha California, but growing up in the American environment as a minority — a minority like head coaches Vance Joseph [of the Broncos] and Anthony Lynn [of the Chargers].

Who is Chuck Schilken? Well, this is the picture he uses for his profile:

That’s one scary dude.

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