The feds have arrested David Brooks, the New Yorker who made a fortune selling body armor for the troops in Iraq, on fraud charges. There’s always been a Jewish angle on this story. Brooks lavished money on horses but it was his $8 million bat mitzvah that became a scandal. The feds’ indictment says Brooks wrote off as corporate expenses $20,000 in "leather bound invitations" to his son’s Bar Mitzvah in 2000–which I suppose might be excused, taking place in the Clinton era, when we all got leatherbound invitations–but five years later, during the Iraq war, when his daughter had her famous Bat Mitzvah, $122,000 in ipods and digital cameras that he gave out as gifts.
I assume that Brooks’s children have not thought for an instant about serving in Iraq.
No, O.J. does not represent the blacks and Brooks doesn’t represent
Jews, but his grotesque detachment leaves me as a Jew embarrassed. As I’ve reported, Jews are greatly under-represented in the armed forces. When I tell my mother that Jews have a new place in American society, she tells me she will take me to the homes of poor Jews in Philadelphia. I’m sure she’s right. But this golden moment in the bifurcated life of our society has a Jewish component. Jews have been included and done very well. Brooks’s shameless extravagance, or alleged fraud, are not typical, but his privilege is. The great Yiddish writers I.L. Peretz, Aleichem and I.B. Singer all wrote about the dangerous effects of wealth. I see the danger in democratic terms, as the privileged losing touch with the experience of others…
I hate to bring this subject up, but it will have to be faced eventually: As we begin to openly discuss the extent of Jewish power and influence in contemporary American society, certain historical debates will inevitably come to be seen in a different light. Is this really the first time Jews have held power? Or did they hold similar positions in past societies and make mistakes similar to the mistakes they are making today?
There are good reasons for suspecting that political decision making might not be a field where Jewish culture is likely to shine. Unlike in other fields, a burden of ethnic grievance is likely to be an impediment rather than a spur to successful contribution.
But of course we are totally unprepared to undertake this discussion, because it has been excised from polite discussion for so long. Time to take back not just discussion of our Mideast policy, but our discussion of history too.
Mr. Weiss – Do you have an statistics about the representation of American Jews in the military when compared with their socio-economic peers and/or with their political peers. Most American Jews, not all, tend to be upper middle class and socially liberal. If you were to take the universe of upper middle class and socially liberal Americans – what proportion of them serve in the US military? What proportion of Jews serve in the US military.
If you don't have these statistics then your argument is little more than ill informed opinion.
I'm just thinking of the excessive consumption of rich and middle Class Lebanese, both at home and abroad. Of course since most of them are Christian or Muslim, then they aren't spending $ on bar mitzvahs. But the excessive displays at weddings, the fancy cars, the luxury goods bought, the nightclubs, restaurants and resorts, the jewelry and electronic gizmos — all horribly wasteful, while the lower middle and poor in Lebanon suffer. And the middle middle goes into debt trying to keep up. My cousins have told me that the whole wedding present extortion has become so onerous that they won't go back to Lebanon because of it.
When I sent $40 cash to my village church, and $60 to a monastery I care about, my uncle (the middleman on the transaction) told me that it's customary now to give a thousand dollars US to the church, and if he gave the priest my measly forty dollars, the whole village would hear about it and our family would be dishonored. He took the whole $100 and gave it to the monastery (kicking in his own $100 so it wouldn't look too cheap). This is in a country where a teacher's monthly pay is something like $200.
This sort of worship of money and display is a human failing and not limited to Jews. Jesus told us to give alms and pray in secret – don't let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Most Christians in Lebanon do NOT follow this advice.
Let's not even discuss how they treat their servants. It's shocking.
McStein wrote: "If you were to take the universe of upper middle class and socially liberal Americans – what proportion of them serve in the US military? What proportion of Jews serve in the US military."
You're not analyzing this question clearly. The representation of Jews in the the broad population is about two percent. The representation in the military is about two-tenths of one percent.
link to jewishjournal.com
Your argument that that's because their higher economic status allows them to avoid serving is probably correct, but why does that make you feel any better? They were, after all, generally behind the idea of the war at the beginning, at least according to the AJC's survey–
link to ajc.org
And there's also the little matter of these guys to explain–
"Record Number of Americans Join Israeli Army"
link to israeltoday.co.il
Philip,
This seems like a red herring. Would it make any difference if 2% of the US Armed Forces was Jewish?
"Brooks doesn't represent Jews, but his grotesque detachment leaves me as a Jew embarrassed."
Phil, you say this kind of thing embarrassingly often. In the next post you say that the attitude of the editor of Haaretz makes you proud to be a Jew. What have you got to do with him, or with Brooks for that matter?
Is this 'tribal feeling' not the root of the problem (since its mirror image seems to me anti-semitism)?
I can't tell you how many times I've been embarassed to be a WASP. Of course I've taken pride in the great accomplishments of WASPs, but there are so many WASPs that I hate to be associated with that I wish we would just stop thinking in such terms.