A Request to Infectious Greed Readers

Paul Kedrosky publishes one of the best blogs I've ever read. Instead of logorrhia, readers are presented with a few short posts a day. Each one raises an interesting nugget of data that often challenges my assumptions and sometimes leads to new ways of looking at things. He even sometimes does real research just for a blog entry (something which I avoid at all costs).

That's why I asked Paul to send out an old-fashioned call for help to his readership for me. My book, Jewish Wisdom for Business Success , co-written by Rabbi Levi Brackman, is coming out next week. The Rabbi and I are on a mission: to open up the debate about Jews and money. We feel that it's been locked in a box out of fears of political incorrectness. That only leaves the conversation to the anti-semites and the ill-informed.

I'm scheduled to do some public debating regarding the subject. I'm trying to find some solid statistical evidence of economic success rates of various ethnicities, including Jews. I want to be armed with solid data when I make the case for our hypothesis that the religion itself is part of the reason for the business success of Jews.

I've combed through lots of census data, most of it unhelpful because there's no entry for "Jewish" on the long form. I've read all the social sciences literature and the economics literature on the subject that I could find. But sociologists tend not to write about economics and economists tend to stay very far away from ethnicity.

So here's my request: Do you know of any datasets, studies or raw data sources with regards to the Jewish community (and other ethnic groups in the U.S.) that shows economic or income performance compared to the population at large? If so, please let me know about it by emailing me at samjaffe (a) gmail.com (whether it supports my hypothesis or not).

Two points:
*I'm looking for data that is more bulletproof than "I know a lot of Jews who are lawyers...".
*This is not an exercise in anti-semitism. If your data is comprised of secret minutes for last week's meeting of the Elders of Zion, send it to mahmoud.ahmadinejad@deathtoisrael.com, not to me.