January 5, 2012 | 6:56 am

Sticky Fingers Pointing at Us Dampened My Holiday Cheer

Posted by Pini Herman

An Employee, Vendor or Executive?

I haven’t seen many shoplifters, but I’m was told in a widely published piece by the Associated Press’ Sarah Skidmore that I wasn’t looking hard enough and that there was going to be an increase of 6 percent.

I like to think that I’m living in an environment, despite Winona Ryder, where the majority of people identify with being honest. Even Winona is basically honest and just needed and hopefully benefited from therapy. The FBI’s preliminary Uniform Crime Report data for 2010 shows continuing crime decreases.  Violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) fell by 5.5% and property crimes (burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, arson) fell by 2.8% from the year before.

How is it that news stories are trumpeting an increase?  It turns out that a private company, Center for Retail Research, which sells security consulting to companies asked a very small and inadequate sample of retail companies’ theft reduction departments what they felt their their experience with theft will be this season.  This survey has been done for years and I can’t find where these estimates of future crime were ever reviewed to see if they panned out with with actual crimes.

Interestingly, when one checks back to the data another picture of company employees and vendors stealing far more retail goods emerges. It turns out that a third of expected theft is by customers, half of theft is by company employees and vendors and about a sixth is lost to company internal error.

The above description of the retail world may pretty well sum up the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis, except the customers didn’t even have to shoplift. These sub-prime customers were convinced by “money retailers” to use purchase loan plans that the lenders knew most couldn’t afford at terms contracted. Ironically, most sub-prime borrowers try or tried valiantly to pay because they see themselves as honest people who signed a contract that they are beholden to.

The AP shoplifting story came out the same week Bank of America Corp. settled to pay record $335 million to compensate borrowers who were charged more for discriminatory home loans based on race and national origin. Still, not one sub-prime corporate executive is sitting next to convicted shoplifters populating our jail cells.

Pini Herman, PhD. has served as Asst. Research Professor at the University of Southern California Dept. of Geography,  Adjunct Lecturer at the USC School of Social Work,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position (I was just notified that with 40,000 visitors this year the 15 year old study of the LA Jewish population was Third Among The Top Ten Publications Downloaded from Berman Jewish Policy Archives in 2011) and is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com To follow Pini on Twitter: Follow @pinih

December 29, 2011 | 3:46 pm

Jewish Identity Spectrum Has Been Giving Way to Two Poles - Day School Enrollments Indicate

Posted by Pini Herman

Again, the Jewish community will be whipsawed by information that may or may not be valid, far from comprehensive and surprisingly superficial from an organization that has the resources to do better.  This time it’s about Jewish day school education. 

J.J. Goldberg of the Forward writes about the findings from the AVI CHAI foundation which is purported to be bad news for Jewish day school advocates.  Its even worse news for the majority of non-ultra-orthodox advocates of Jewish day schools. Day schools left of the ultra-orthodox declined precipitously, while ultra-orthodox strongly increased.

Dr. Steven Cohen has stated with regard to this educational phenomenon “The middle of the Jewish identity spectrum has been giving way to the two poles of most traditional and fervent and most postmodern and tentative.” What remains is less enrollments in the schools in the middle, such as the Solomon Schecter schools and greater enrollments in the ultra-orthodox schools.

I went looking for the survey report at the AVI CHAI foundation, spending down its half-billion dollar corpus to the tune of about 85 million dollars in 2007 in North America, one the largest funders of Jewish education in the world. 

I expected the AVI CHAI foundation to expend a bit of its largess on following up on whether the hundreds of millions it has spent have had some effect. A serious survey of the Jewish community would question individuals in households about their Jewish education to help inform policy. Enrollment information gathered provides little to analyze and much to speculate about.

What I found was a brave research soul, Dr. Marvin Schick, who for years, single-handed, has tracked Jewish day school education as best he could with lists and phone calls to schools about their enrollments.  This is all good and well and may provide a valid macro picture of the Jewish day school situation in the U.S.

What Dr. Schick and the AVI CHAI foundation may miss are the why of what is happening.  Dr. Schick has his plate full looking just at day schools, but most Jewish education to most North American Jews may be delivered outside those boundaries. Dr. Jack Wertheimer undertook a similar Census of Jewish Supplementary Schools in the United States in 2006-2007 which also looked only at patterns of enrollment reported by the schools.

Recently I looked at adult Jewish education finding in the 1996 LA Jewish Population Survey and the heaviest users were those adults who had Jewish after-school (supplementary) educations.  Adults who had day school or Sunday school Jewish educations tended to report significantly lower
use of adult Jewish education.  Unfortunately, after-school Jewish education had withered on the vine in North America in the past decades for lack of notice and support.

Adult Jewish education does 1) encourage those of the Jewish faith towards greater commitment to Jewish observance and lifestyle by increasing their understanding, appreciation and practice of Jewish traditions, customs and laws and 2) encouraging mutual understanding and sensitivity among Jews of different religious backgrounds and commitments to observance. These are are the primary stated objectives in the AVI CHAI Foundation goals.

The day school model was what could be practicably studied, with a relatively weak research methodology by an underfunded researcher, Dr. Schick, who began his modest scale research prior to AVI CHAI’s support. 

Dr. Schick’s limited data is being trumpeted as the next worry and dark cloud to befell the Jewish community.  I would have like to be armed with a proper national Jewish population survey that would have confirmed or contradicted Dr. Schick’s findings and and been able to find the silver linings in the dark cloud, such as after-school Jewish education. A National Jewish Population Survey should have been fielded two years ago.  So, I expect we will witness the blind opining at other blind about the directions of Jewish education with no reliable information on which to base their opinions or plans.

Pini Herman, PhD. has served as Asst. Research Professor at the University of Southern California Dept. of Geography,  Adjunct Lecturer at the USC School of Social Work,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position (I was just notified that with 40,000 visitors this year the 15 year old study of the LA Jewish population wasThird Among The Top Ten Publications Downloaded from Berman Jewish Policy Archives in 2011) and is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com To follow Pini on Twitter: Follow @pinih

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December 25, 2011 | 1:54 pm

Jewish Identity Caught Up in the Spirit of Christmas - It’s OK

Posted by Pini Herman

A Light Unto The Nations?

A slice-in-time contemporary survey analysis by three Israeli academics at Stanford showing that Hannukah achieved its popularity with many American Jews use Hanukkah as a way to provide their children with an exciting alternative to Christmas, entitled “Is Hannukah Responsive to Christmas?” highlighted in a recent Rosner blog, ignores how Jews actually influenced the American Christmas that Hannukah is thought to be competing with.  Its a classic case of association being mistaken for causality.

Jews don’t have to stay off the streets on Christmas Eve anymore and create devices like Nitel Night celebrated by some Hasidim. This little known Jewish custom with some decidedly resentful Kabbalistic overtones was thought to be created because Anti-Semites would ambush Jews, as they were going to or coming from a House of Learning,  and savagely beat them, sometimes even killing them, in the streets on Christmas Eve. Thus, Hasidic rabbis decreed that Torah Study was counterproductive on that night and Jews should remain at home that night and not wander in the streets.

My son, Joey, who had just starred in his extracurricular off-Broadway Temple Emanuel Academy Day School Gesher/Kindergarten musical as Shrek, longingly looked at green striped Shrek candy canes at the Smart & Final checkout set out at his eye level.  When I refused his request by saying the confection symbolized Christmas and we don’t celebrate it, he looked around at some of the other waiting shoppers, a few attired with Christmas regalia, and asked: “Why is Christmas so popular?”

Demographer that I am, I explained that the word “popular” comes from the Latin term populi meaning people and it just means that more people celebrate it than celebrate our Hannukah because there are less Jews.

History buffs may know that Christmas in the U.S. wasn’t popular at all until the 1820 - 1880 waves of Catholic immigrants arrived and Christmas wasn’t strongly associated with gifting to each other, even among the Catholics.  The 1857 Jingle Bells song was still associated with Thanksgiving in it’s heated war with Christmas.

Jews continued to celebrate Hannukah in the traditional way with menorah candles in their home windows for all to see during the eight days of Hannukah.  Candles, expensive items at the time, migrated as adornment to Christmas trees in the 18th century. Only during the 1880s did they come into use more widely, often in schools, inns and stores.

Jewish peddlers graduated from walking to customers with a backpack, to riding to customers in wagons.  Later as stores could be opened, the customers came to Jewish established stores.  Finally Jews used the earnings from the stores to create a new type of commercial establishment by inventing the department store.

As Jewish retailers were pioneering the department store commerce, predictable customer traffic had to be built up.  The Jewish tradition of the Talmud study, specifically tractate Avodat Zarah, which encourages familiarity with the holidays of the non-Jews in order to avoid commerce that could benefit “idol worship.”  Being attuned to non-Jewish celebrations of all types, the themes and theology were naturally analyzed as to their relevance for commerce.

Some hints of the themes of the existing American proto-Christmas may have been buttressed in the service of commerce. Altruistic giving resonates with the central Jewish value of Chesed, as does the meme “Good will towards all men.”  The popularization of a bearded Santa Claus with a fur hat, somewhat reminiscent of the embarrassing bearded and stubbornly ethnic costumed Jewish coreligionists from the Old Country. Rather than a bishop’s miter, department stores made Santa into a figure on whose lap you could confess your wants to, rather than your sins.

Commercialized Christmas advertising art, popular Tin Pan Alley Christmas tunes, often designed, composed, written and performed by Jews emphasized the gifting and Chesed elements of the Christmas which are familiar today.  Catholic and Protestant clergy of the time loudly decried the commercialization of Christmas as some do today, though somewhat more softly, being fearful, along with rabbis and imams, of being labeled as a Grinch by their adherents.

Establishment of the American style Christmas may have become the Eighth Noahide Law spreading to non-Christian Asia, the Middle East and Africa. This Christmas implicitly incorporates in its spread the Jewish value of Chesed, selfless loving-kindness, in societies where it may not be culturally emphasized or native.

It was only natural that Jews adapted and adopted a tradition that we were central to popularizing among non-Jews.  Stanford economists Ran Abramitzky, Liran Einav and Oren Rigbi perhaps gave free rein to the familiar Israeli disdain of “assimilating” American Jews and assumed causality in their title “Is Hannukah Responsive to Christmas?” A more correct title for them would have been “Is Christmas Responsive to Hannukah?

Pini Herman, PhD. has served as Asst. Research Professor at the University of Southern California Dept. of Geography,  Adjunct Lecturer at the USC School of Social Work,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position and is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com To follow Pini on Twitter: Follow @pinih

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December 19, 2011 | 3:47 pm

Getting the Millionaire treatment as part of the 99 percent

Posted by Pini Herman

No More Special Taxes or "Donations" to the State For Jews

As a demographer, I often ask people about their earnings and wealth.  We often have a top figure that we hope won’t feel too intrusive, such as $100,000 and over….$250,000 and over. Demographers can’t say very much about Jewish millionaires from Jewish population studies. 

The US Census Data is able to measure some millionaires but it is inappropriate for measuring income inequality because it consistently understates the income of the wealthiest families. To protect the privacy of reporting individuals, the Census “top-codes” income, which means that no one is ever recorded as making more than about $1.1 million in a single year.

The best wealth research is done with IRS income reporting data but very little demographic characteristics information is available. IRS data analysis is where we best know about income inequality and that the wealthy are becoming wealthier and how.

Al Capone was put in prison for evading giving information on his income to the IRS.  In our day, Capone might have given a full disclosure and perhaps avoided paying taxes with good accountants and lawyers, likely Jewish, as we are over-represented in those professions.

I was only able to talk about LA Jewish millionaires because they were surprisingly and conspicuously absent among the millionaires demanding higher taxes on millionaires.

Part of my identity as a Jew is being a good and honest taxpayer. 

I think that fair taxes and equitable distribution are congruent with normative Jewish values.  It’s a right the Jewish Emancipation brought me with the abolishing of specific taxes targeted at Jews. The corollary to that, for me, is that I not seek Jewish exemption or favor in terms of taxation because I am Jewish.

One of my surprises was, being on the receiving end of a reader’s comment, that I should gift the U.S. government my personal resources and leave the inequitable taxation alone.

I was given the millionaire treatment because I was taken aback that my Jewish co-religionist fellow Angelinos were absent from the disproportionately Jewish patriotic millionaire signers of a petition to raise their taxes so our American society would be more equitable in its treatment of citizens. 

The Patriotic millionaires received somewhat the same message from Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) who commented that: “We hear this quite a bit from rich Democrats. ‘Please tax us more,’ they say. Well I know a lot who don’t say that I’ll tell you that. As the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee I feel obligated to inform [the Patriotic Millionaires] that the president and all those rich, liberal democrats who are eager to pay higher taxes can do just that. They can write a check to the IRS and make an extra payment on their tax return to pay down the federal debt. The option is right there at the bottom of their tax return.”

After arguing that higher taxes would benefit the U.S., the reply of the Patriotic Millionaires was nothing more than a millionaire’s pissing contest:

...In the meantime, if Senator Hatch would like to make a personal contribution to the IRS to help his country, we pledge to match his contribution.”

Something in the U.S. has made wealth sacrosanct and taxing this wealth, whether earned or inherited akin to sin.  I can only attribute this to the Protestant ethic where the Elect are rewarded in this life as a sign of the Almighty’s favor and taking away their “wealth” is akin to taking away something given by god. 

In my understanding, Judaism relates to wealth as something to be redistributed on a regular and predictable basis.  The Jewish ethic of voluntary and even socially imposed self-taxation and personal and communal obligations has been the signpost of Jewish vitality.

Its only natural that Jewish millionaires should be over-represented among millionaires lobbying for equitable wealth redistribution.  I just don’t understand why the LA community’s 250-300 Jewish million-dollar-a-year earners are so under-represented.

Pini Herman, PhD. has served as Asst. Research Professor at the University of Southern California Dept. of Geography,  Adjunct Lecturer at the USC School of Social Work,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position and is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com To follow Pini on Twitter: Follow @pinih

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December 14, 2011 | 12:20 pm

Missing Jewish Millionaires of Los Angeles

Posted by Pini Herman

From: sandiateaparty.com/ 2011/10/06/fiddler-to-the-faddler/

Of all the 128 millionaire signatories on the “tax us” Patriotic Millionaires letter Jews constitute about two-fifths of the signers.  None of the Jewish millionaire signers are from Los Angeles.  Only one millionaire signer, Brady Brim-Deforest, probably not Jewish,  is from Los Angeles. 

It’s estimated only 375,000 Americans have yearly incomes of over $1,000,000, resulting in an estimated twenty-three hundred American Jewish high earners. The Los Angeles Jewish millionaire share should be at least two hundred and fifty Jewish people earning over $1,000,000 a year.

While most of the Jewish millionaires signatories are from the East Coast, there were nine Jewish millionaires in California, most from the Bay Area and and one from Santa Barbara and one from San Diego.  Our Los Angeles Jewish millionaires were missing.

Is our Jewish community not raising our millionaires right?  Are our Jewish millionaires not under the influence of their Jewish roots of communal responsibility? Maybe our LA millionaires aren’t listening to their rabbi’s sermons on social justice or they are choosing rabbis who don’t raise social justice issues often.

Our Jewish millionaires may be missing not only in the general civic sphere as represented by the “tax us” Patriotic Millionaires, but also in the self-taxation sphere of local Jewish communal life.

Its not surprising that Los Angeles may have one of the lowest per capita contributions to a major metro Jewish Federation in the country. 

With the billions of dollars in cuts in areas where many Jews find employment and public services heavily used by the Jewish community such as services to the elderly, general education, special education and developmental services, universities and Medi-Cal funded health services, the organized Jewish community in Los Angeles is poorly situated financially to soften the blows.

To this point, public Jewish leadership from Los Angeles is hardly seen from among those who have the resources to enable the self-help that Jewish communities in the U.S. American Jews have been consistently known for. 

American Jews have been taking care of our own and others since 1654 in Peter Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam.  The American Jewish model of civic responsibility has served as a template for the larger American community throughout American history.  Why are is our LA Jewish community not up to par?

Pini Herman, PhD. has been an adjunct Research Professor at the USC Dept. of Geography,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater LA following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position and is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal at and is a principal at Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com

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December 12, 2011 | 3:41 pm

The Lonely Cry of the Jewish Millionaires

Posted by Pini Herman

The Lonely Cry of the Millionaires

It’s not lost on the anti-tax forces that Jews are disproportionately involved among the Occupy-sympathetic one-percenters.  Much media attention has been given to the million-dollar-a-year earners who in the spirit of Warren Buffet have organized as a group to lobby for higher taxes, the Patriotic Millionaires.

For his part anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist  has even tailored his message to the Jewish high earners., Norquist said he was ready for the group with a tongue-in-cheek Torah lesson: Maimonides and his “eight degrees of charity.” That’s what Norquist says the million-a-year earners are essentially proposing with their tax-me-more pitch. Perhaps there should be a ninth, Norquist suggested.

“Nobody’s holding them back” from donating money to the federal government, he said as he prepared for the group’s arrival. “They’re saying, `Gee, I’d sure like to write a big check to the federal government, if someone would just stop stopping me.

Even President Obama with his “Freudian slip” when he misspoke saying: “If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a Jew — as a janitor….” was probably channeling his impression of the Patriotic Millionaires high concentration of Jews.

A simple of surname analysis of the Patriotic Millionaires listed as the 128 public signers of the millionaire’s “tax us” petition, over a third (39 percent) have distinctive Jewish surnames.  That is twenty times the expected rate for Jews in the U.S. population and almost seven times their rate among all U.S. million-a-year earners.  Their message, as high earners, want to share the burden as responsible loyal citizens and are fighting for taxation with representation rather than looking for giving opportunities.

Jewish millionaires are still a small minority in terms of absolute numbers of the total number of American million-dollar earners.  Its estimated only 375,000 Americans have yearly incomes of over $1,000,000, resulting in an estimated twenty-three hundred American Jewish high earners, an estimated 6 percent of American top earners as compared to 94 percent non-Jewish million-dollar earners.  That may be why Jewish million dollar earners are not indicative of a groundswell among all top earners, but are somewhat still a lonely voice in the wilderness that continues to be derided and ignored by anti-tax Republicans.

My curiosity as to the Jewish activism of these Jewish patriotic millionaires was satisfied when I took a random sample of nine of the 49 Jewish millionaire signers.  All of the Jewish millionaire sample had donated to a Jewish cause, with eight of the nine to a synagogue, mostly Conservative synagogues and the minority to Reform synagogues.  From this I infer that this group of Jewish millionaire activists has a very high synagogue affiliation rate, at least double that of the general Jewish population.

Pini Herman is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com

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December 9, 2011 | 12:40 am

Echoes of the Demise of a Diverse Boyle Heights in Today’s Foreclosure Crisis

Posted by Pini Herman

Would today’s foreclosure crisis have been so bad if Jews had been able to get housing loans and remain in Boyle Heights? Its hard to say what would have happened if middle class Jews were able to get loans to buy and improve the housing stock in Boyle Heights rather than being financially forced to move west to where the banks were lending.

Bruce Phillips, my blog partner, was interviewed in Friday’s LA Times by Hector Tobar and brought Goerge Sanchez’s analysis of Boyle Heights as a multi-racial community destroyed by redlining, resulting in the forced exodus a Jewish community who couldn’t get housing loans to stay there.

Redlining by banks, the refusal to make home loans in certain zip codes, including those of the culturally diverse Boyle Height was a major factor in driving out Jews from Boyle Heights and the death knell of the ethnic and racial diversity that the Jewish community and Los Angeles enjoyed there.

Much research has shown that discrimination in lending had a strong effect on racial segregation across 40 metropolitan areas in the 1970s and 1980s.

Rugh and Massey found “residential segregation constitutes an important contributing cause of the current foreclosure crisis, that segregation’s effect is independent of other economic causes of the crisis, and that segregation’s explanatory power exceeds that of other factors hitherto identified as key causes (e.g., overbuilding, excessive subprime lending, housing price inflation, and lenders’ failure to adequately evaluate borrowers’ creditworthiness). Simply put, the greater the degree of Hispanic and especially black segregation a metropolitan area exhibits, the higher the number and rate of foreclosures it experiences. “

Douglass Massey argues, the more segregated a metropolitan area is, the easier it is to find exploitable clients. Segregation creates natural pockets of financially unsophisticated, historically underserved, poor minority homeowners who are ripe for exploitation. 

Massey goes on to say that in the forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, two thirds of all black urbanites continue to live under conditions of high segregation and nearly half live in metropolitan areas where the degree of racial isolation is so intense it conforms to the criteria for hypersegregation. If we had somehow been able to eliminate segregation between blacks and whites in the years since 1968, the average metropolitan area would have experienced a foreclosure rate 80% lower than that actually observed during 2006-2008. Segregation is the reason for the unusual severity of the foreclosure crisis in the United States.

(Photo credit: Nancy Friedman)

Pini Herman is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com

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December 6, 2011 | 6:29 pm

Unintended Intermarriage between Jews?

Posted by Pini Herman

Interesting reading: http://www.jewlicious.com/2011/02/the-unofficial-guide-to-sex-on-birthright-israel/

In the arcane world of inter-Jewish relations we step back about a hundred years when marriage between an Ashkenazi Jew and a Sephardic Jew was termed, not always jokingly, an intermarriage. It seems that Israeli Jewish and American Jewish marriages may now be looked at in the same way.

An Israeli government ministry, the Ministry of Absorption, decided that Israel was losing too many of its young to the charms of American Jews and leaving Israel, so it embarked on a spirited publicity campaign to counter the phenomenon.  This week an embarrassed Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Natanyahu stepped in and axed the widely criticized campaign.

Marriage between Israelis and American citizens has increasingly accounted for about half of US Permanent Resident Alien Visas, or green cards, obtained by Israeli-born persons immigrating to the U.S.  A decade ago majority of Israelis getting green cards received them through employment based visa preferences. Recently, in 2010 family preference visas became the larger category. 

The increase in family preference visas to the U.S. could be that the U.S. born children of Israelis are returning to the US with their own Israeli-born wives and children or this could be an unintended outcome of Taglit Birthright where hundreds of thousands of young marriageable Jewish adults visit Israel….and things happen. 

This gives another dimension to young American Jews learning to love Israel.

Pini Herman is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com

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