Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Activating the Jewish Community at Occupy Wall Street
A Q&A With Activist Dan Sieradski
By Sarah Pumroy
Over the last three weeks, lower Manhattan has been filled with thousands of people protesting against economic injustice, greed, and corruption. These folks are Occupying Wall Street, and “we are the 99%” has become their battle cry.
Occupy Wall Street has started to gain greater momentum as protests pop up in other U.S. cities and as labor unions, environmentalist groups, and the Jewish community join the cause. Dan Sieradski, a new media activist and Director of Digital Strategy at Repair the World has organized a Jewish presence at the protests, beginning with a Shabbat dinner potluck on September 30th and a Kol Nidre service on Friday, October 7th, for which more than 500 people RSVPd.
We asked Dan a few questions about the protests and why he’s decided to rally the Jewish community.
What’s happening at Occupy Wall Street and what motivated you to get involved? What made you want to activate the Jewish community?
Occupy Wall Street is a nonpartisan, broad-based protest against economic injustice in the U.S. and abroad, involving thousands of demonstrators, hundreds of which are occupying a park near the financial center in lower Manhattan, sleeping there each night. The protest is a call for accountability on Wall Street and in Washington, for getting corporate money out of politics, and for restoring fairness to our economic order. As a person whose parents are presently enduring bankruptcy and the loss of the house I grew up in due to the present economic downturn, these demonstrations clearly hit close to home and resonate strongly with me.
I was very active in the New York City anti-war and anti-globalization activist communities earlier in the decade. While protesting against the Iraq invasion, I was part of an affinity group — a small cluster of activists that engaged in direct actions that sought to disrupt America’s march towards unjustified war. After spending several years in Israel doing coexistence work and several more working in the Jewish nonprofit space, promoting progressive Jewish causes, I fell out of touch with most of the activist community in New York City and found myself far more connected to the Jewish community, eventually coming to see it as my affinity group. Therefore, as a Jewish person connected to both the Jewish prophetic and social justice traditions, I felt that the best way for me to play a role was to help bring out the Jewish community to support the demonstrations.
On Yom Kippur, we read Isaiah 58 which compels us to fast, not merely by refraining from eating, but by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and housing the homeless. I can think of no better way to express those values than by standing in solidarity with the thousands of protesters calling for justice down on Wall Street.
We are all familiar with the stereotype of the Jewish banker. Do you think Americans see Wall Street as Jewish? What are the implications of that?
There is no question that Jews are over-represented in all areas in which they take a strong interest, finance being one of them. In addition, Jews were for centuries forced into usurious trades by antisemitic governments which prevented them from engaging in artisan trades, and have therefore excelled within the field. So there is an undeniably strong presence of Jews in the financial industry. As a consequence, Jews therefore also feature prominently among the most corrupt and despicable bankers on Wall Street, much to the detriment of the Jewish people.
While it is understandable that people would associate Jews with banking because of this over-representation, when people start theorizing grand Jewish conspiracies to exploit and impoverish non-Jews, or when they make grandiose claims about Jewish banking families ruling the world, and other such nonsense, they are not making an ethnographic analysis, they are perpetuating Jew hatred. We Jews have a responsibility to hold our fellow Jews accountable for their misdeeds, particularly when those misdeeds reflect poorly on the greater Jewish community (see Bernie Madoff). However, we must also be vigilant in combating the demonization of Jews and the tarnishing of an entire people for the misdeeds of a few among them. By being present at the protests, one message I hope to make explicitly clear is that not all Jews are greedy bankers, and we’re not all down with what’s happening on Wall Street.
Outside of the formal Jewish gatherings you’ve organized, have you noticed a strong Jewish presence at Occupy Wall Street?
Last night I was talking to one of the folks staffing the welcome table and mentioned to him the plan for Friday’s Yom Kippur service. “Gut yuntiff,” he proclaimed! “A lot of folks down here are Jewish.” I don’t doubt it. Nearly one in five New Yorkers are Jewish. And Jews, again, are always over-represented in areas in which they take interests, social movements being one of them. Therefore it would not surprise me at all to find a significant Jewish presence on the ground in Zuccotti Park. On my regular visits over the last few weeks, I have encountered at least a dozen friends from the Jewish non-profit field, as well as several Israeli activist friends who were involved in the Israel tent protests this summer, as well as in joint-resistance work in the Palestinian territories.
You’re well-known in the world of Jewish communal work. What has the reaction from the Jewish world been?
The response has been pretty great. With the exception of a few detractors, I’ve been getting lots of supportive emails from folks thanking me for pushing this issue onto the Jewish communal radar and keeping it there over the past few weeks. If the response to our Kol Nidrei service is any indication, people are definitely on board with the Occupy Wall Street agenda.
Do you see a connection between Occupy Wall Street and this summer’s Israeli tent city protests?
Absolutely. They are part and parcel of the same movement towards social and economic justice we are seeing spring up all over the world. Everywhere you look, the 99% is getting shafted by the 1%. Israel’s protests, just as with other protests throughout the Middle East and Europe, are indicative of a sea change and really a tidal wave of opposition from the public to decades of policies that have impoverished working class people that have been accompanied by the stripping away of their civil and human rights. The movement here and the movement in Israel are both towards the same end: Putting people over profits and ensuring corporate and government responsiveness and accountability.
****
Related links:
- Occupy Judaism Facebook page
- Inspirational Yom Kippur at Occupy Wall St. - The Forward
- Yom Kippur Service Taking Place At Occupy Wall Street – Huffington Post
Photo by david_shankbone, licensed under Creative Commons.
Why I Give
By Robby Kaufman
I donate to a few Jewish causes that I care about deeply. I can give you the 30-second elevator pitch on why you should stop what you’re doing and open up your wallets to these organizations, but this is not my goal.
While I had a Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school growing up, I never had a desire to involve myself Jewishly until I went on my Taglit-Birthright Israel trip in college. I can go on and on about how incredible, motivational, inspirational, etc., the trip was, but I want to talk about one outcome of my Taglit experience – the trip made me understand why many Jewish organizations exist and how donations from generous individuals literally enable them to exist.
When I returned from the trip as a freshman at UC-Berkeley, I became involved with two particular Jewish agencies: Hillel and AIPAC. I learned a lot from these organizations and they helped me develop into the person I am today. Without Berkeley Hillel, for example, I would not have had a rich Jewish college experience or met some of my best friends today. I think these two organizations have important missions and are successful in achieving their goals. At some point, I realized that I wanted to help these organizations because I am a true supporter of their goals and purposes and that they are vital to the Jewish community.
Although I have limited knowledge of the philanthropic world, I have become a strong believer in developing a culture of giving. A Jewish nonprofit organization that is seeking to be around in the future needs to grow and develop a donor base. This may be common sense, but the harsh reality is that large donors that make up a significant portion of an organization’s budget will likely not be contributing in a generation or two. Most Jewish organizations lack significant endowment structures that are designed to sustain them indefinitely.
Instead, younger donors – such as myself – may very well be the donors that enable these organizations to succeed in the future. So when I write my $18 check and motivate my peers to do the same, my goal is to instill a sense of importance to donating to causes that we find important. These $18 checks may not be terribly meaningful by themselves, but my hope is that each individual who is donating at a young age will gain an understanding of the importance, necessity, and value of philanthropy. I am also hoping that these donors will step up to the plate when the time comes many years down the road when an organization they care about needs them more than they do today.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by Mr. Kris, licensed under Creative Commons.
J.A.P. – "Jewish American Princess" or "Just Another Person"?
By Emily Kapit
Somewhere between growing up in the South with a Jewish doctor as a father, having a private school education, going on countless cruises, and owning a second home at the beach, I became somewhat used to the epithets thrown around at my expense:
“Yeah, the Schwartz’s are going on a cruise this year…again.”
Or “Do you think Emily’s parents will invite us down to their house in Hilton Head for Labor Day? Not if it’s around their New Year, of course…”
And, my favorite, “Ohhh…you go to THAT school…makes sense.”
The comments never bothered me very much, as my parents were far from flashy and strove to raise me and my siblings to be the same way. They believed in the importance of working hard; to that end, allowances were small and academic expectations high. Of course, I am the first to argue that they went too far in making us perform extensive lawn work, including pushing a heavy lawn mower up a sizable hill. Though my father claimed it “built character,” I still suspect he took great joy in ensuring that we knew how to get our hands dirty. Even so, those who knew us well understood that, upper-middle class status aside, we were a fairly humble bunch.
So while I occasionally heard comments like those written above, I rarely thought about my parents’ level of affluence and never really believed others cared about it either. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but that blissful shell was broken by the unlikeliest of sources one Sunday afternoon during my early tween years.
One of my closest friends growing up in Winston-Salem was another Jewish girl who was in my Sunday school class at our temple. Since she went to the area public school, we rarely saw each other during the week and would catch up on the weekends. On any given Sunday afternoon, she and I could be found at each others’ houses, dreaming we were back-up singers for New Kids on the Block, pretending to be the 8th and 9th members of The Baby-Sitters Club, and generally just wreaking havoc with early 90s kid culture.
One Sunday, as we were saying goodbye to our Temple Emanuel classmates, and I climbed into the back of her mother’s white-out colored minivan, the topic of conversation somehow turned to interesting acronyms.
“I know one!” I said, volunteering what little information I knew about my dad’s ophthalmology practice. “LASER. My dad told me it stands for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.’”
“That’s a good one,” my friend responded, mouthing the words in an attempt to remember the acronym itself. “Know any others?”
“SCUBA, as in scuba diving,” I replied, drawing on the brief lecture we’d received prior to jumping into the warm Caribbean Sea a few months prior for an introductory scuba lesson. “Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.”
At this point, I noticed my friend’s mother raise her eyebrows at me as she pulled up to a light. My eyes wandered outside, taking in the restaurants, stores, and gas stations that lined the road. At that moment, another acronym popped into my head, the result of a recent Jeopardy! answer that I happened to remember.
“BP! I saw it on TV the other night! It stands for-”
“British Petroleum,” her mother cut me off before the words had a chance to pop out of my own mouth. “Really, is that what they’re teaching you over in that private school of yours?” She spat out the words, “private school,” sounding not only caustic but with a pinch of resent thrown in as well.
The shell to my ignorant world cracked a little at that moment, as I tried to respond in a respectful manner without showing my hurt feelings. I don’t recall my response but do remember thinking about the whole exchange later that evening and in the days that followed. While I was aware of the supposed connection between Jews and money, I was under the impression that non-Jews were the ones who harped on such lame stereotypes; but instead, this thirty-second conversation shed light on a much different landscape for me: Jews criticizing one another for having more or less money and breaking my own belief that Jews stood up for one another whenever possible.
Though I now realize that this was a classic case of keeping up with the Jones—er, Steins, I still find it somewhat unfathomable as to how a group of people who have been targeted for countless reasons for, well, countless generations, would actually turn on one another for the smallest of reasons. The incident in that car so many years ago was my first experience of hearing one Jewish person negatively comment on another’s financial status, though it’s hardly been the last. I wonder if this trend will continue and my own children will also deal with members of the Chosen People choosing to insult one another unnecessarily. If so, I wonder what other stereotypes about Jews we risk perpetuating in addition to people believing there is a connection between Jews and money?
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by Refracted Moments™, licensed under Creative Commons.
Labeled Goods
The first time I realized that Jews had money was when I began attending Hebrew school at my synagogue in fifth grade. I remember staring at Lindsay Stein’s maroon wool sweatshirt that said “Fitch” in white letters and having no idea what it meant. I thought that maybe it was a bad word, since it rhymed with one.
But no, it was a brand name, Abercrombie & Fitch, of course, and it was the first time I realized there was a such thing as a “brand name.” Suddenly it seemed like everyone but me was wearing brand name clothing. I began noticing how lame my Kohl’s bootcut jeans looked next to their A&F flares. When I asked my mother to buy me these expensive lines of clothing, she laughed.
“What do you need those for?” Â she said.
“You want me to pay $90 for jeans that come with holes already in them? They’re shmatas – I don’t think so.”
That was when I started feeling inadequate.
Once the bar and bat mitzvah years approached, the differences between my background and theirs became even more apparent. I remember the after-parties: artists hired to draw caricatures of guests, photo booths where you could take a photo that would be transferred to a button that said “Jacob’s Bar Mitzvah – July 10th, 1997″ around the border, entire buildings of country clubs rented out and elaborately decorated to look like a “winter wonderland.” My bat mitzvah party was in the synagogue social hall. It was nice, but certainly humble compared to my peers’.
We’ve never been poor. My parents both have masters degrees and good jobs. We’ve never had financial assistance from the government as far as I know, not that there’s anything shameful about that. We took vacations, went out to eat every Thursday, and my parents paid for my entire college education. But we were simply always middle class, like most of my peers that attended public school with me in St. Paul, MN. And I never felt bad about that until I started my Jewish education. My peers at Hebrew school were all from the suburbs, had huge houses, their mothers all had plastic surgery–you could simply tell they just came from money.
If it were just that they were richer than me, maybe I would have gotten over it. But these girls were also snobby, cliquey, and simply not that nice. I never became good friends with any of them. I remember crying one Sunday morning on the way to the synagogue because of how much I dreaded feeling like an outsider when I was there.
I would have eventually figured out that there were people out there who were much wealthier than me. But I regret that it had to be Judaism that introduced me to it. It put a bad taste in my mouth — one that took many good Jewish experiences for me to get over. As I became older, I started life guarding at the Jewish Community Center. I volunteered with little kids for the JCC plays. The summer after 9th grade, I became a camp counselor at Jewish day camp, where I made a ton of friends and had one of the best summers of my life, and great experiences over the three summers that followed. I went on a Birthright Israel trip my senior year in college, which gave my perception of Judaism a new richness, and eventually led me to where I am now, working at an exciting Jewish organization that does follow-up for Birthright Israel alumni and their peers.
I want to excel in my career and become successful to the point where I don’t have to worry about money, where I can go out to eat whenever I want, own a nice home, and take vacations. I value money to the extent that it can help me live a comfortable lifestyle. But my views on money will always be informed by the way my parents raised me and the things they taught me – that I shouldn’t flaunt my money, that I should follow a budget and pad my savings account, and as for brand names, they can be overrated.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by margolove, licensed under Creative Commons.
Loose Change
By Benjamin Pinkhasik
My first lesson in dealing with money took place on one of those long double buses with a stretchy accordion middle. I must have been six or seven years old at the time and was holding a shiny new coin. While this doesn’t sound like much, it was enough to buy a delicious, carbonated, syrupy drink, and I was looking forward to having one that day.
For a six-year-old, those long buses held incredible allure as the middle rotated while the bus took turns.
“You should put that away,” I remember my father telling me, pointing to the coin held loosely in my fingers.
But did I listen? You can probably predict how this story ends. The bus hit a pothole, Newtonian laws of motion took over, and the coin escaped from my fingers, leaped into the accordion part of the bus I was so fascinated by, and got lost in an abyss of wrappers, chewed gum, and grime. The loss of this coin was agonizing and brought on much personal unhappiness at the time.
My view on money – why we need it, the drive to have it, and the best way to spend it – took shape as I grew up and observed how my family dealt with money. While I never had a real need for money, by the time I reached my early teens, I realized it was important to have it. It gave you the ability to buy things without being a burden on your parents, without having to ask anyone for anything. It gave you personal freedom, which I strived for, and so I started working to amass it. At fourteen, I packed my briefcase, put on a suit, donned shiny shoes and a pink tie, and got a job. I spent the summer building park benches and flower boxes for the town – hard, sweaty work – and I still remember that first paycheck. I felt incredible – I cashed that check, asked the teller to give me all singles, and for the next few hours I had a “stack” of cash.
A decade ago, my thoughts on money could be summarized by this opening line of an essay I wrote in high school – “Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness surely didn’t know what he was talking about.”
i.e., money=happiness.
I predicted that George Bush Jr. would be the next president. My logic: “the monetary contributions to his campaign are greater than the other candidates. Doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know who the leader of Pakistan is.”
i.e., money=power.
I espoused that happiness and money are intricately linked – “just ask the local bum if a little money would make him happier.” I proposed and reflected on the idea that the rich don’t really have problems. These were childish sensibilities, for sure, as I had never, at that point, given money or even talked to those bums.
A little more than ten years passed and my thoughts on money evolved. While money is still important to me, today I focus on the the ability to earn it and how to utilize it once I’ve attained it. You can go to that hot new restaurant, buy yet another piece of clothing, purchase that new iPod when your old one is still good, but do you really need it and would it actually make you happy?
My first trip to Israel was not a traditional tour like a Birthright Israel trip. It was titled “Mission Possible” and it had a philanthropic bend to it. Before leaving, all the participants were asked to present an Israeli charity that they were interested in and convince the rest of the group why it should support that charity. Then we voted for the best four. While in Israel, we visited these organizations, saw what kind of work they did, and in the end, the top charity selected by the group received ten thousand dollars. I wanted to learn how to best choose a deserving charity and was pointed to the Torah. In Deuteronomy 15:7, there are references to the “maser” or what’s called the 1/10th rule – the eight levels of tzedakah and the explicit guarantee that the mitzvah of observing maser comes with a assurance of wealth.
My lofty goals for earning money didn’t change over the years, but what has changed are my goals of what to do with it once attained. Armed with the power of tikkun olam, I think about how to become active in philanthropy, why one charity performs over another, and how I can have a lasting impact. Today I realize that money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it can buy happiness for others. For many, a few extra dollars are meaningless, but for a homeless person, the money can mean survival and potentially the start of a new life.
As I learned on that bus, money can be in your possession one moment and not the next. Today, I’m determined not to let it slip away, and to do some good with it.
If you feel you have the answer to why and how we should choose one charity over another or on philanthropy in general, please comment below.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by cometstarmoon, licensed under Creative Commons.
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