Yesterday's Times mentioned Jeffrey Katzenberg as one of Obama's big donors. Katzenberg is a progressive. His early support of Obama and refusal to back Hillary–he also gave $2000 to John Edwards last spring–was a widely-observed signal of Obama's strength in left-lib Dem circles.
Here's another way Katzenberg spends his money. It came up in an informal conversation I had: he has a poker game a couple times a year and people drop as much as $500,000 in three days, Thursday-Friday-Saturday. My interlocutor seemed to know what he was talking about; then I looked it up on the internet. Here it is last March at the Totalgambler site, a poker player interviewing poker pro Daniel Negreanu about Katzenberg's game.
PP: Do you think the game has been strongly affected by the showbiz aspect that seems to permeate poker these days?
DN:
That has been mostly positive. It’s brought poker into the mainstream.
There are more events and poker shows that are ‘pro-centric’. It gets
the game out there and gives people opportunities to make more money. I
played in a game with [showbiz executive] Jeffrey Katzenberg and Tobey
Maguire, but I felt uncomfortable with what I won.
The blinds
got kicked up to $200/$400 and I won half a million dollars in seven
hours. I killed it, but those guys were so good about it. They didn’t
care. Those guys have so much money that a game like that is just
recreation. [emphasis Weiss's]
Note that Negreanu differs somewhat from my source in terms of the burn-rate. What's there to say about Katzenberg's game? The new gilded age. A symbol of what is wrong with our society, when so many people are struggling and guys can burn this kind of money without thinking about it. What's the carbon footprint of that game? I'm thinking of all the SUVs running outside, and the air conditioned mansion. Is the pendulum coming back on socialism anytime soon? Maybe Katzenberg's political donations will help there…
And is it good for the Jews? No, it's a shonde as they used to say, a shame. He's just one Jewish guy of course, burning his money according to his personal whim. But as I wrote some time back, Oy, my people are too rich. Richard Witty bucked me then. But Richard, we are the top dogs, statistically, in U.S. society, and this is a marker of it; does the money mean something? Is it hurting the Jewish soul? (I point again to William Deresiewicz's brilliant piece in the American Scholar, where he showed that money has rotted the values of elite intellectual culture…)
