people with money
over the last year we (gbjcl) fascilitated the building of a library in a school in south boston that didn't have one (roughly 70% of public schools in the boston area dont have libraries). it was an effort between the school, who raised money for the furniture, a synagogue in boston whose bnai mitzvah class raised money for the books, and us who dealt with all of the red tape and cataloguing and legwork bs that seems to be involved in trying to do anything good in the school system. it was also up to us to keep the synagogue families involved after most of the money was raised (aka the parents wrote their kids biiiiig checks); the parents were insistent that this was their kids' project, that they should 'own' it, yet never wanted to prioritize it and have them come back to the school to help shelve the books or put in bookplates. we finally got them to the school one afternoon to put in bookplates that had the kids' names on them. none of them bothered to introduce themselves to me, whom they'd never met, and when julia, my boss, tried to give them an update on all of the work thats been done and progress that we've made they literally ignored her and talked over her to each other. the final straw was when one parent noticed that two of the kids' names were wrong: they were each missing half of a hyphenated last name. now you know that i am the last person to ever leave out a hyphen, i used the information that was sent to me by one of the mothers. still, i tried to apologize for the mistake, standing maybe a foot away from the guy. he not only didnt bother to acknowledge my presence, but turned to the other people sitting around him and said "well, it's not like we're ever coming back here, what do we care?" dont get me wrong, i was relieved that we werent going to have to figure out how to get the bookplates reprinted, but i was so disgusted to see such a horrible stereotype of rich jews acted out in front of me.