I've been reading Michael Wolff's shrewd/thoroughly-enjoyable bio of Rupert Murdoch for a review and have one preliminary observation. Wolff routinely uses the word WASPy to dispatch an older way of being that of course has a religious/ethnic basis. This is an entitled and fusty mode of being, in Wolff's view, a social structure that to his puzzlement capitulated without firing a shot a decade or so ago.
Fair enough. A lot of people feel this way about WASPs, even as I love em, having married into em. Or anyway I feel I can list their good points: among them a sense of environmental stewardship, noblesse oblige, tolerance of eccentricity, great respect for boundaries (No Personal Comments formality I have struggled to learn), dirt roads, chinos. As I list those points, I realize I have to write, The Assimilationist.
Anyway, to my points. Wolff works for Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, and back in the day when Graydon and Kurt Andersen edited Spy, the word WASPy was removed from copy, or mine anyway, as a crude slight. I respected that policy. It was a time when my wife was clueing me to anti-anti-semitism. The glib anti-Christian attitudes one encounters in Jewish life.
Though this baldness on these matters is alright with me. Wolff's readymade WASPy reminds me that it is much easier to speak of the Old Boy Network than the new one. Wolff doesn't go in for Jewy, one of the actual words my wife and I use in our private chambers, and a good chewy word. And descriptive of a real part of the world. Like Madoff's world.
Jewy. A Times team (including Eric Konigsberg) has done some wonderful reporting on Madoff's world. What the Times demonstrates is that Madoff launched himself inside a world of Jewish "clubby"ness, in which ethnic/religious reputation amounted to everything, and then found his way into a fancy WASPy world, because as Willie Sutton famously said, Jews are not the only ones with money these days.
The Times piece is the first reporting on Madoff with real sociological bite. Without using the word yiches, or prestige, it gets at this fatal beauty of Jewish culture: the prestige that attaches to wealth and learning. (Leo Rosten: "The crucial ingredients of yiches are: learning, virtue, philanthropy, service to the community.") Thus Madoff associate Ezra Merkin, who has absolute frikkin yiches because of his wealth and learning and Israel-idolatry, burnished the moreso by his sister Daphne Merkin, the formidably talented writer and spankee. The Times doesn't get into Daphne, but here are some excerpts:
But in the clubby world of Jewish philanthropy in the New York area,
his increasing wealth and growing reputation among market insiders
added polish to his personal prestige…
He used his support of organizations like the Public Theater
in Manhattan and the Special Olympics to build a network of trust that
began to stretch wider and deeper into the Jewish community..
Through friends, the Madoff network reached well beyond New York. At
Oak Ridge Country Club, in suburban Hopkins, Minn., known for a
prosperous Jewish membership, many who belonged were introduced to the
Madoff firm by one of his friends, Mike Engler.
The quiet message became familiar in similar pockets of Jewish wealth and trust: âI know Bernie. I can get you in.â
âIn a social setting â thatâs where it always happened,â said Jerry
Reisman, a lawyer from Garden City, N.Y., who knew Mr. Madoff socially.
âCountry clubs, golf courses, locker rooms. Recommendations, word of
mouth. Thatâs how it was done.â
