In conversations across the Jewish community – at dinner tables, school auditoriums and community events – a painful truth has emerged: The American Jewish Orthodox middle class is dying out.
We’ve been sold the myth that earning between $300,000 and $500,000 a year as a family means you’ve “made it.” Yet in metropolitan centers like New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and even parts of Texas and Florida, that income barely keeps a family afloat and can leave you worse off than a family that earns half as much but qualifies for subsidy programs.
Scholars who study the middle class define it as households earning between two-thirds and twice the median income, adjusted for household size and local cost of living. That definition might work nationally, but it breaks down in high-cost metro areas. In cities like New York and San Francisco, a family of four often needs well above $300,000 a year to cover housing, transportation, childcare, healthcare and savings, just to be what could reasonably be called “middle-class.”
Research from Brookings shows that one-third of middle-class families cannot afford basic necessities in their own metro area, even when earning a middle-class income, and at least 20 percent of middle-class households in every city studied struggle to make ends meet.
Earning $300,000 to $500,000 in America’s Jewish hubs doesn’t buy what it once did – especially for large families.
Why the Orthodox middle class is especially strained
Day school and yeshiva tuition are a major line item that most middle-class planners ignore in national studies, yet Orthodox parents must budget for. While tuition varies widely, Jewish day school costs can easily reach tens of thousands per child each year, even in communities with relatively lower rates than Manhattan.
Housing costs in Jewish centers dwarf national norms: median home prices in the NYC area are around the $1 million mark or higher, far above what a typical middle-class income can buy in other cities. The average price of a home in other parts of the US is $400,000, less than half of what it would cost in a not-so-affluent Jewish community in New York.
Healthcare, transportation, kosher food, and summer camps further inflate annual budgets in ways that are rarely captured in mainstream analyses. Kosher food is two to three times more expensive than non-kosher food.
Meanwhile, federal and state subsidy programs are structured in binary ways: Families making too little qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, childcare subsidies and the like, while those in the middle qualify for almost nothing, even if they don’t truly have disposable income beyond essentials. Many Orthodox families making $250,000-$400,000 a year find themselves in this gap: They’re deemed “too well-off” for assistance but still lose ground each year.
It isn’t uncommon in our community to meet parents who say in private what official statistics don’t capture: “We’re getting by only because of family support, loans, and credit cards.” Anecdotally, this has been confirmed in community meetings from Long Island salons to teachers’ conventions, where a majority of educators and their families have a combination of government aid, food subsidies or deferments – not because they’re poor, but because they’re middle class with Orthodox expenses.
This mirrors a national reality. Recent polling indicates that 65% of middle-class Americans, often defined as those earning well above the federal poverty line, say they are struggling financially and can’t save for the future.
Credit card debt, emergency bills, and borrowing from loved ones are common stopgaps but they are not sustainable strategies. But we also have unique communal strengths and historical models that can help us adapt:
Embracing community business networks.
If we assume that we don’t need to patronize each other’s businesses because the outside world is affluent, we’re making a huge mistake. Building economic ecosystems within our communities (hiring Jewish vendors, supporting Jewish entrepreneurs, investing in Jewish-owned businesses) keeps dollars circulating where they can have the greatest impact.
Building tailored communal financial literacy
As a community, in addition to investing in each other, we should be teaching financial literacy to our youth in middle school and high school. Since we can control the curriculum in our own private institutions, adding a course that delves into the subject would be beneficial in the not-too-long-run. After all, even parents who are financially stable right now worry about the future of their grandchildren: what kind of money will they be required to make to live a life similar to the one we live now?
General financial advice doesn’t always translate to Orthodox family life. Thankfully, there are programs designed for us offering more tailored guidance that takes the rising costs of Orthodox living into account.
From maximizing IRAs and employer 401(k) matches to fully utilizing 529 plans for education savings, targeted financial planning matters more when the margin is tight. But it isn’t enough to blindly follow mainstream advice. We must apply strategies that acknowledge our family sizes (Jews have, on average, 3 to 5 kids vs the average 1.7 figure across the US), tuition obligations, and career patterns.
Encourage entrepreneurship and insular economic support
Whether it’s encouraging small business ownership or creating spaces for community-based commercial partnerships (kosher markets, service platforms, professional networks), this isn’t a call to isolation but to economic intentionality. In a world where the middle class is stretched thin, we need to innovate within our communities, rather than rely solely on external markets that don’t understand our unique cost structure.
There was a time when the American Jewish community proudly maintained a robust middle class: Families who could afford to buy a home, send their kids to school, save for retirement, and build a life without fear of financial collapse. Today, all that requires effort, strategy, and communal cohesion more than ever before as a set of new expenses are coming our way, from security fees to increased cost of living
To reverse the death of the Orthodox middle class, we must invest in each other, socially and economically. If we don’t, we’ll continue to see talented families default to debt, subsidy dependence, forced career shifts, and even assimilation, given the difficulties involved in surviving in the costlier-than-ever Jewish communities around us. It’s time for all Jewish communities to talk about this and to implement a strategically advised course of action that will ensure our children’s ability to afford the lifestyle that we are sacrificing for them.
The writer is owner of Klyman Financial in midtown Manhattan, specializing in the Jewish community. The views expressed are his own and do not constitute investment advice or an offer of advisory services.
Source:
www.jpost.com
