| Modest Sums by Allison Hoffman, Tablet Magazine, June 9th, 2009 |
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When it came to Eva Longoria, the ultra-Orthodox women who gathered on a recent weekday morning for a crash-course in marketing drew a total blank. “Who is she?” asked one behatted, bespectacled woman, peering suspiciously at an ad for L’Oreal hair dye that was supposed to represent the power of “transformation” as a marketing metaphor. The instructor, a serial entrepreneur from Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community named Rebecca Harary, paused, waiting for a sign of recognition. Crickets. “Well, she’s an actress,” Harary began. “On a show called, um, Housewives.” Pause. Deep breath. “Desperate Housewives.” Chuckles. “We don’t get that here,” explained one of the women. She gestured around, apparently indicating not just the basement classroom in a row house in Brooklyn, lined with bookshelves packed tight with Talmuds and other religious texts, but the entire Hasidic enclave of Williamsburg–an exclusion zone when it comes to American consumer culture despite being a single subway stop from Manhattan. “It’s lost on us,” said another woman, dressed in a chic printed jacket and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, who introduced herself by her Yiddish name but asked to be identified only by her English name, Judy. What wasn’t lost on Judy or anyone else, though, was the power of “sizzle,” as Harary–taking on the cadences of Don Draper–put it. “Add more sizzle, not more steak!” she exhorted her students, participants in the first business-basics class for women ever offered in New York’s fast-growing ultra-Orthodox community. The monthlong course, patterned after a class introduced last year for Hasidic men, is designed not just to help their wives start businesses, but to give them the tools and the confidence to apply–and qualify–for seed loans of up to $25,000 available from the Hebrew Free Loan Society. “In Bangladesh you can just extend the credit and buy a cow for the village,” said Shana Novick, the executive director of Hebrew Free Loan, who previously worked on microenterprise programs in third-world countries through the Ford Foundation. “In this country, if you want to position a micro-entrepreneur for success you have to provide all the pieces–how to write a business plan, how to deal with legal issues.” Novick said she felt it was vital to give women in the ultra-Orthodox community equal access to financing–not least because many men study full time instead of working. Already, a handful of graduates from the men’s course have qualified for loans, including a 23-year-old who opened a recording studio for ultra-Orthodox musicians. Click here to read the rest of the article Tablet Magazine (www.tabletmag.com) is a rebrand of Nextbook's online magazine, offering "up-to-the-minute reactions to the day’s news, sophisticated cultural coverage, and in-depth explorations of broad trends in Jewish life."
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Armed with microfinance loans, ultra-Orthodox housewives learn entrepreneurship