A dinner tonight at the six-year-old Center for Jewish History in Chelsea will confront an age-old stereotype with members of New York’s financial community and scholars who have examined how Jewish culture intersects and diverges with money.

“I think we’re confronting it from the prospective of scholarship,” the center’s chief administrative officer, Michael Glickman, said yesterday.

The fund-raiser is being held at 15 W. 16th St. at the center, which describes itself as the world’s largest repository of the modern Jewish experience outside Israel — an archive, library, and museum that opened in October 2000.

And at prices ranging from $2,000 to $25,000 a plate, the benefit is priced for the kind of investor and hedge fund manager for whom the cost can often amount to a rounding error.

Organizers say that tonight’s benefit for the center is an attempt to transcend the standard fundraising evening where people gather, gobble up fine food, drink cocktails, and politely listen to speeches.

The cocktails and fine dining won’t be missing tonight, but the organizers are keeping one-way speeches to a minimum and instead using the hour-long breakout sessions to host candid discussions led by professors from universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. The breakout groups will revolve around how the professions represented at the dinner are often linked with their thousands-year-old culture.

“Rarely is there an opportunity for you to sit in a place and have an open dialogue” with scholars, Mr. Glickman said. “These professionals are going to to interact with scholars and academics in a way that they wouldn’t necessarily do at this stage in their life.”

The event, which is sponsored by prominent names in finance from firms like Pershing Square Capital Management and Leucadia National Corporation, is expected to attract about 150 people.

An Evening of Candid Thought

Tonight, investors, hedge fund managers, and other people who work on Wall Street will gather to discuss Jewish culture and money. Here are some of their provocative topics, according to the Center for Jewish History:

• Why the Chosen People, long associated with commerce, are only one of many “merchant minorities,” such as the Greeks, Chinese, and Indians in southern Africa, who have advanced themselves by finely-tuned appeals to the tastes of large groups.

• How Jewish people have handsomely prospered in the New World as peddlers, merchants, doctors, lawyers, and accountants.

• Why the stock stereotype of Jews having a flair for both money and humor continues to be common, and how money and humor meet in Jewish culture.

• How philanthropy has molded Jewish life.

• How rock ‘n’ roll music exploded largely from a collaboration between Jewish businessmen and African American performers.