The Cost of Belonging

(Mishpacha)

If I had to choose one word to define 2025, it would be ‘affordability’. Contrary to popular Jewish belief, it wasn’t anti-Zionism that propelled Zohran Mamdani to victory. It was the crushing cost of living in New York City. Housing and food have become unaffordable for the average wage earner. That’s what he ran on and why he won.

And this is not just a New York problem. Across the country, prices for nearly everything have steadily risen over the past five years. While economists predict improvement going forward, those projections have yet to translate into lived reality.

Orthodox Jews feel this pressure more acutely than most. In addition to ordinary living costs, we shoulder expenses unique to religious life. Most notably Jewish education. A school that provides a solid religious and secular education can easily cost upwards of $25,000 per child per year. For a family with four children, that translates into a theoretical annual tuition bill of $100,000.  And many Orthodox Jewish families have more than four children.

Add to that the higher cost of kosher food and the extraordinary expense of Pesach, when households must restock their kitchens entirely. Even this partial accounting makes one thing clear: living a middle-class Orthodox life increasingly requires an upper-middle-class income.

How can an entire community sustain that?

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