Last Sunday the Times ran an Op-Ed about the Madoff scandal by the formidable Daphne Merkin, blaming the victims for their credulity--a piece the Times has now expressed misgivings about (the piece did not make clear that Merkin is the sister of a major actor in the mess). I would just like to register this line--
What Mr. Madoff brought to the table, I think, was a sense of mishpocha, of being part of an extended family, but one you carefully chose rather than being arbitrarily born into.
This is a helpful insight, but also somewhat jarring, inasmuch as mishpocha, which is Yiddish, wasn't italicized, wasn't identified as Yiddish, doesn't appear in Webster's (and appears in Rosten's as mishpocheh), and the piece nowhere said anything about the Jewishness of that mishpocha. Hey--not every reader is a Member of the Tribe.
But if they had acknowledged the word's identity, the part about a family "you chose rather than being arbitrarily born into" would have been patently ridiculous.
There is actually someone called 'Merkin'? When I use the term, I intend it as a diminutive of 'American' (a term that US citizens grandiosely and racistically arrogate to themselves, negating all other inhabitants of the continent).
Madoff's mostly Jewish investors knew they were getting an extraordinarily high rate of return, which means that some other other investors somewhere were getting an extraordinarily low one. I wonder who they thought these people were.
Yes, but all the readers that count understand the word.
Mishpacha is HEBREW, the Jewish national language, later adopted by Yiddish.
Merkin: "He took the edge off the harsh reality of making money and in the process gave filthy lucre a warm, haimish glow."
haim⋅ish [hey-mish]
–adjective Slang.
homey; cozy and unpretentious.
Also, heimish.
Origin:
< Yiddish heymish < MHG heimisch, OHG heimisc lit., pertaining to the home; see
haim·ish also heim·ish (hā'mĭsh)
adj. Slang
Warm and comfortable; homey; folksy: "It is very gentle and sweet up here. It's . . . sort of haimish" (Janet Malcolm).
[Yiddish heymish, from Middle High German heimisch, from Old High German heimisc, from heim, home; see tkei- in Indo-European roots.]
The American Heritage® D
Merkin again: "Mr. Madoff a sociopath isn’t really to explain him so much as to explain our failure to pick up on his scam."
mishpocha, mishpacha, haimish, heimish, heymish–abra codabra, not everybody is a MOT, and not every MOT that lusted to get inside Madoff's tent was allowed in–not for lack of trying.
Fore some reason Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice comes to mind…
As Merkin also says, nobody put a gun to the losers' heads; ditto those who signed sub-prime mortgage documents barely glancing at them; ditto the hedge funders.
Now we are asked to bail out all these "victims" out. Actually, we weren't even asked.
Just a tiny post – and so many comments… You're enviable, Phil…
Printe
Madoff multiplies endlessly, and with a bigger ugly face (if that's possible):
link to pimco.com
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“Obama’s Ponzi scheme is doing the same thing that Madoff’s did. He’s taking money from people not even in the system, taxpayers not even in the system, and he’s going to scourge them for money down the road.”
link to businessandmedia.org
Mishpocha is, in fact, Yiddish (to bar_kochba), and it's pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the the last, which is how the Hebrew word mishpacha is pronounced in the Sephardi accent. Though of course Yiddish is largely made up of Hebrew words, it's not accurate to say that the word isn't Yiddish in its own right, unless a word like "androgynous" isn't English because its roots are clearly Greek.
I thought so, spikele, thanks for that clarification!
it's the yiddish croutons that make daphne's salad so crunchy. and we all know that the times is not for amharatzim.