Week in Review: February 27, 2009Click here to view in High Definition (HD).
Lame-Duck Commission Could Vastly Alter Israel’s Immigrant PopulationInterior Minister Sheetrit appoints special committee to discuss refining law which he says has been abused, allowing ‘people that have nothing to do with Judaism’ to receive automatic Israeli citizenship. Interior Ministry says 1 million illegal immigrants living in Israel.
It’s surprising that any lame-duck government official would install a commission that could lead to so much change in the country — but particularly when the new government is in the process of forming.
Tell Us What You Really ThinkIn December, the draconian Medicaid spending cuts announced by Gov. David Paterson caused worry that the UJA-Federation network would have to shut down nursing homes and other health facilities.
[Emphasis added]
The New York Jewish Week certainly won’t be winning any awards for distanced objectivity any time soon.
The story concludes:
Cuomo’s approval rating among Jews was 66 percent, compared with Paterson’s 40 percent, which is a likely casualty of Paterson’s tough-medicine budget cuts.
[Emphasis added.]
If the rest of the Jewish community is referring to the cuts as “draconian,” I wouldn’t doubt it.
CNBC’s Neo-Confederate Marketing PushUPDATE: AUDIO ADDED.
Listen to the relevant part of the house ad currently running on CNBC, where they describe Rick Santelli’s “Rebel Yell”:
The business channel is hoping to make the most of Rick Santelli’s famous comments, and is now running ads for CNBC.com on the channel featuring Santelli’s rant, encouraging viewers to go to the site for more and etc.
The big deal, though, is that in the ads they’re calling it “Rick Santelli’s ‘Rebel Yell’” — which isn’t at all the same as the idea of a Santelli “Tea Party.” While it’s certainly questionable to refer to the Obama administration in ways that compare it to the British, at least that upholds an effort — the American Revolution — that presumably all Americans think is valuable. But in using “Rebel Yell,” CNBC is pushing a line that grabs a very different set of values — invoking not just the Confederacy but also the Neo-Confederacy that is very real today and has actually been a significant factor for a number of Republican candidates throughout the South in the past couple decades.
This commercial has been airing roughly every 30 minutes throughout seemingly most of the day.
Week In Review: February 20, 2009Click here to view in High Definition (HD).
JDub’s New Site & BlogJDub has redesigned its site, adding a blog that could become a valuable source of news and information on the Jewish music scene.
Week In Review: February 13, 2009Click here to view in High Definition (HD).
YU Layoffs & The Fallibility of LaypersonomicsWith Yeshiva University laying off 60 employees, the suggestion has been raised that the school should have cut senior salaries to make up for the shortfall, as in the reporting of the Jewish Star:
An angry YU employee who lost her job on Monday spoke to The Jewish Star on the condition that she not be identified. “They affect the little people, the people that make the university run,” she said. “The administration is the bread and butter of the university. Had all the senior staff taken a two percent cut it wouldn’t have been necessary to cut all these jobs for the people that aren’t making that much money… Richard Joel makes half a million dollars a year. Why didn’t he take a pay cut?”
Interestingly, that approximately 2% number is also picked up by Jewlicious:
Yesterday, Yeshiva University let go of closer to 120 people (if you include forced retirements)… in what many are saying is a massive screw up by the people on top. Rather than having the senior level staff take 2-5% paycuts, they decided to let go of al the “little people”, people who in fact make the university run. I wonder how the rabbis in the various departments are going to get stuff done without their trusty assistants. Only time will tell.
Is this correct? Probably not: assuming the average laid-off employee had a total compensation package of $45,000 (likely a too-conservative assumption, but we’ll just go with that for lack of a better example), then the 60 employees cost YU $2.7 million annually.
According to YU’s 2007 form 990 filing (available at Guidestar), the total compensation of “current officers, directors, key employees, etc.” was $3,965,502; of which that $2.7 million would be a very hefty 68%. So, had YU’s truly top people taken a 68% pay cut, and had all the laid-off been willing to work at total compensation packages of $45,000, these jobs could have been preserved.
The numbers get very different from there when you try to plug in some actual compensation figures: salaries and wages of employees other than those listed above comprise a total of more than $270 million dollars. Given it’s been reported that these 60 staffers were 2.5% of YU’s workforce, that means the average employee not in that elite grouping is compensated to the tune of $112,772.39 per year. Obviously that includes a lot of extra-large salaries that raise the mean — such as the five medical school professors making $475,000 or more, as listed on page 10 of the form 990 — but those salaries are even more difficult to suggest could be cut, since professors are far more likely to get hired away by other universities if YU doesn’t compensate them competitively (in the area of administration, it’s hard to believe that President Richard Joel, whose religious outlook is part of what makes him fit to be YU’s president, will have to respond to offers from competing universities anytime soon; though other Jewish institutions could of course come calling).
But even if there were 60 such professors making more than $475,000 per year (which there aren’t), and even if all the laid-off staff were willing to work for total compensation $45,000 per year (which they presumably aren’t), that’d mean the fictional 60 professors would actually have to donate nearly 10% of their salaries to make up for the shortfall. Plug in the likely mean for upper-tier salaries of well below $300,000, and it’s yet a greater chunk of their income that’s being called for.
So, clearly, the idea that the most-compensated could save the laid-off with a simple haircut to their salaries is very distant from reality, and ignores the fact that much of operations at YU, like all non-profits, is actually funded by mega-donors and not small amounts of $10,000 here or there.
But what’s more separated-from-reality about this idea is the notion that senior management of non-profits should essentially donate even 2% or more of their compensation to that same institution, just so it can keep people employed. Why would they do this? YU, like all non-profits, does not find ways to make profits and thus generate greater compensation for its employees when it does. A public company might freeze or cut high-level executive salaries to avoid layoffs, because those layoffs will mean less productivity, sales, and thus a smaller bonus pool/stock price for those in leadership. But at a non-profit, there are no such motivations.
This kind of call is essentially saying to senior personnel at YU, “please, give me a hand-out, because I work for the same institution you do.” In doing so, they’re prioritizing themselves as worthy of a level of charity equivalent to their previous full-time salaries, when plenty of others affected by this economy are, at best, living off of government assistance and savings that don’t even approach the level of a full-time salary.
It’s a selfish attitude that is surprisingly out of sync with the realities of charity and poverty in today’s world. Had those making these calls for hand-outs been more in touch with those realities while employed by an institution that ostensibly stresses a strong engagement with Jewish values of tzedakah, perhaps they’d be holding their tongues.
Popper on Orthodox Jews & AgriprocessorsThe man who is largely responsible for bringing most of the Agriprocessors story to light takes a step back in the WSJ to reflect on why this has become such a big story, and what it says about Orthodox Judaism.
These divisions are, at their most basic, about the proper way to interpret religious law and values: Should we read our ancient texts literally or adapt them to a changing world?
Now that most of the Agriprocessors news has happened (whether or not Sholom Rubashkin is convicted of the crimes he’s been indicted for really won’t have much impact on community sentiment, since both those who think he’s guilty and those who don’t likely won’t change their minds if/when the verdict goes in the other direction), it’s appropriate to look at these past few years and think about the whys, wherefores, and howsos.
On the basic point, about whether this entire Agriprocessors thing — this indictment, this immigration raid, this hand-wringing over what we’re really eating — is actually about what’s kosher and what’s not, if we’re true to ourselves and thorough in our examinations, will undoubtedly come out on the side of the latter.
This couldn’t be more clearly highlighted than in Popper’s own piece here in the WSJ:
As part of this push, these rabbis, who were representing the Conservative movement, created a new program, known as the Hekhsher Tzedek or Justice Certification, which aims to evaluate the business ethics of kosher producers.The Hekhsher Tzedek generated intense pushback in large segments of the Orthodox community, where there is a belief in strict adherence to the laws set down in the Jewish holy texts — these are the Antonin Scalias of the Jewish world, to continue the Supreme Court analogy. One influential Orthodox rabbi told me, “I don’t keep kosher because of some sense that it is the right thing to do socially — I do it because God said so.”
Legal theories aside, what’s most clear is that the Hechsher Tzedek, much like the fight against Agriprocessors, isn’t actually about what’s kosher and what’s not. This is a point that the creators of Hekhsher Tzedek have tried to explain from the beginning, but which was ultimately made most clear when, a month and a half ago, they actually changed the name: it’s now Magen Tzedek, not Hekhsher Tzedek, to clear up any confusion over the issue of whether or not this new symbol can assert something is kosher that wasn’t, or assert something isn’t kosher that was.
The battle over Agriprocessors wasn’t about what kosher is, was, or will be. What is it about, then? Many other things, and surely we’ll get to many of them soon.
TJC Week In Review: Feb. 6th, 2009Click here to view in High Definition (HD).