Caine Blog

I went to a Community Board 1 Executive Committee tonight to check up on little old Studio B, the Greenpoint club that all the neighbors hate.  In looking up one of the members - Joseph Weber, a Hasidic rabbi who is also the first vice chair of CB1 - I came across “Welfare Neighborhood,” a fascinating 14-part NYT series from 1988 that focuses on different Southside Williamsburg constituencies’ reliance on welfare.  The fourth article, about the Hasids’ use of welfare, is definitely worth reading, in part because it highlights how effective unified groups can be in working within a given political framework.  See here:

One foundation of the Hasidim’s economy is an organized, aggressive approach to winning welfare benefits. For example, the office of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, the Hasidim’s main social services center in Southside, has a staff that fills out applications for aid and telephones city officials to contest adverse decisions. Advocates for Southside’s Latino poor cite with envy the Hasidim’s unified efforts at obtaining public assistance.