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Did you know that one in five Jewish persons in New York lived in or near poverty? This reality is often obscured by antisemitic clichés and mere ignorance, but it exists: we even did a full documentary about it, which we ironically titled "Jews Got Money." 

1. Dedicated charities have been supporting NYC's many Jewish poor with kosher soup kitchens and other philanthropic actions, targeted for instance at the elderly. One of them is the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty:

2. Jewish poverty is nothing new. In NYC, it persisted long after WW2; a Village Voice story in 1972 helped renew public awareness of this issue:

3. Years later, Jewish poverty still remains fairly invisible, in part due to shame. According to one of our intervieweees, Malcolm Hoenlein (pictured below, and once described as "the most powerful Jew in the Western world"), there's a certain stigma in the Jewish community about getting assistance.



4. Our shooting then took director Sasha Andreas to Staten Island, where he visited the Hebrew Free Burial Association:




5. Since its creation in the 1880s, the HFBA has buried over 60,000 indigent Jews, from newborns and elderly people to victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It caused the deaths of 146 Manhattan garment workers, many of them Jewish immigrants, such as Kalman Donick:

6. One of the duties of observant Jews is to perform Tzedakah, "a Hebrew word literally meaning justice or righteousness but commonly used to signify charity." Their donations help support the work of associations such as the HFBA, which have witnessed an influx of poor Jews from the former USSR in the past decades. 

(Image from Wikimedia Commons: Tzedakah box, Charleston, 1820, National Museum of American Jewish History)

A prescient documentary on Jewish poverty, by Sasha Andreas, busting the myth that "Jews got money" (an epithet used by anti-Semitic thugs). May not have received the attention it deserved because people don't get that the title is ironic. J£w$ Got Mon€¥ https://t.co/kBQR51uF6P…

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) March 3, 2024