A couple months back at the 92d Street Y, someone on a panel said that Bernie Madoff could have happened to any community. I mocked the comment at the time because it was willful indifference (on the part of a person whose duty it is to make social observations) to this special Jewish moment in the American Establishment. Yes there are crooks in every ethnic/religious group; but the Madoff scandal was special in magnitude and character. It exposed the new Jewish place in America in a fresh way. We are equal partners in the Establishment. We have extremely wealthy kinship networks, and country clubs. And we tend to believe that other Jews will treat us more fairly than non-Jews. The credulity issue.
"Six Degrees of Separation" was John Guare's read on liberal credulity toward "good" black people, who would con them. And Madoff is about Jewish credulity in smart ethnocentric Jews, who would con them.
This brings me to my bimonthly post on how Jews are all over the American Establishment. I do so because it's news that is largely unreported (but murmured everywhere), because it represents a great new motion in Jewish history, and because it's an important trend in U.S. ruling elite. Then when you throw in the American Jewish devotion to Israel, we have to talk about it, because it's an important factor in foreign policy-making. Latest datum:
The other day I was watching C-Span when I saw Stan Kasten, the president of the Washington Nationals, talking at the National Press Club about his efforts to create the Nationals' product and brand. Kasten is part of a trend I've often noted: Jews as executives of ball clubs. He went to Yeshiva High School in New York and wikipedia says he almost became a rabbi. Kasten strikes me as very Jewish in a modern American way; he's great at marketing. He reminds me a little of the hero of Michael Wolff's book on Murdoch, Matthew Freud. Freud is a genius promoter, married into the Murdoch family, and is related to both Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays, the guy who invented modern p.r. Freud is the hero of Wolff's book because he is such a marketing necromancer. Wolff seems to have gotten a lot of his take on Murdoch from Freud, whom he identifies with. Because htis is one way that Jewish talents have asserted themselves in the information/media age, the ability to imagine a brand/a story. Wolff has some of this himself. And so does his friend Jeffrey Epstein, the financial guru who was always more of a brilliant talker/idea guy than a numbers guy.
When we talk about the Jewish Century, to use Yuri Slezkine's term for Jewish success, we are talking about priests and merchants, and almost-rabbi Kasten has that combined air to me.
And yes, I bet he's to the right of Atilla the Hun on Israel. The FEC says he gave money to Joe Lieberman. And I bet he's Jewish-centric. He works for the Lerners, a Jewish family that owns the Nationals; and when he spoke about concessions at the stadium, he was excited about bringing in a company from Chicago called Levy.
Discussion of Jewish success/prominence is verboten because the last time we had the discussion it ended in the Holocaust. Jews were seen as too uppity in Europe.
We don't live in Europe, is one answer to that. Another is that the two Zionists whose diaries and letters I'm reading most closely now-- Franz Kafka and Theodor Herzl-- both spoke about Jewish success all the time. They marveled at it, and recognized that it would have repercussions. Kafka said that the German anti-semitism, which frightened him no end, was a reaction to Jewish achievements. “Perhaps the Jews are not spoiling Germany’s future, but it is possible to conceive of them as having spoiled Germany’s present,” he wrote in 1920 of a report of anti-Semitism in Munich. “From early on they have forced upon Germany things that she might have arrived at slowly and in her own way, but which she was opposed to because they stemmed from strangers. What a terribly barren preoccupation anti-Semitism is, everything that goes with it, and Germany owes that to her Jews.”
As for Herzl, he was constantly dealing with Jewish economic powers and the antisemitic reaction. He dealt with one Jewish banker after another, and offered to buy Palestine from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Kaiserof Germany joked to him that he was broke but the Jews had allthe money. Herzl learned that a map of Berlin's good neighborhoods that reflected ownership by religion was dipped in red-- red being the color code for Jews. The Russian minister under the Tsar, V.K. Plehve, complained to Herzl that small Russian towns were economically "overborne" by Jews with financial smarts. Herzl didn't deny this; though he was alarmed by Plehve's anti-Semitism. Herzl's answer was to get them all out. A wise plan for his time.
My sense of the Holocaust Memorial and other Holocaust commemorations are that they don't emphasize this chapter of the Jewish experience: the rise of Jews in central and western Europe. The interesting thing about Albert Lindemann's work on anti-semitism is that he does just that: he uses the context of the Jewish rise. He's not blaming the victim. He's describing sociology.
When I talk about the American Jewish rise it is not to oppose it or to seek a reaction to it. (Though yes, I have my critique, as I do of all power elites). I talk about it because it is fascinating to me as a student of history. And also because Not talking about it is, I think, dangerous. These are real sociological trends in our society. Not talking about them won't make them go away. A theme of this site is that History doesn't repeat itself. History moves. I'm not going to bring on another Holocaust by acknowledging Jewish prominence in the Establishment. In fact, I think I'm going to help make sure it doesn't happen. Herzl's answers were mass assimilation, then transfer-- Zionism. America has other answers.
Jeffrey Epstein is also a pedophile.
I watched an hour special entitled Madoff, Crime Of The Century last night on cable TV–I think it was on CNBC busines news; earlier, the hours before were filled with Madoff talk. Anyway, the special described perfectly what Phil is talking about–including with interviews of many investors, and depictions of the Jewish country club and the Jews who were Madoff helpers, both his family and chiefs of feeder funds–a whole hour of Jewish faces, mannerisms, networking and psychology revealed sans any mention of the word Jew or Jewish. Jewish networking, Jewish trust that their own people would never screw over them. The only gentiles I remember in the whole hour was one investor, one of the representative voices of the little investors, an Italian Immigrant who had made a million or so in his construction business but had invested it all with Madoff on the tip of a cousin who worked as a clerk or something for Madoff. The other was that (again Italian-American, if memory serves) one guy who blew the whistle multiple times to the SEC but was always ignored. Oh yeah, one more gentile appeared, or at least I think he was gentile, a chief of the SEC at the time. I think Phil's article here is profound and lays out the whys. Forgive me, I also can't help think of the Talmudic sayings that say it's OK to screw a gentile, but got forbid a fellow Jew. Even if the Jewish investors in Madoff never read a word of the Talmud, I can't help but wonder if that too was not part of their underlying psychology–why they trusted him (along with his track record of paying good rate of profit return on paper come hell or high water even during the dot.com bubble collapse. The Jewish people interviewed often characterized themselves as savvy investors. I think with one exception, a model who came very late into the game at precisely the wrong moment–and that Immigrant Italian housing constructor who made a point of saying he built real things and nothing else was trustworthy for value…
I think the status of Jews as an elite group will be viewed as corrosive in the end. What else can a tiny minority group that makes a point of being separate from the majority in every way, and then promotes the same from every group it welcomes to the nation, as long as they don't question Jewish sensibilities, be called? I have no warm feelings for the northeastern WASPs, but why not admit that the "meritocracy" is a fraud and a disaster for most Americans? If Jews are the major players in finance, foreign policy, entertainment and culture that many claim, then why not give them credit for the changes that they tend to favor as a group, and that have largely taken place as they have ascended? Examination is better than spin, no mater what the findings are.
it is so admirable that you, Phil, are bringing this phenomenon of Jewish influence and prominence to the fore. my own frustrations (as a non-Jew) of not being able to talk about Jews in positions of power, without fear of being labeled, or actually feeling like an antisemite, can now dissipate. your insistence to raise the historic and social roles that Jews have played relieves pressure towards antisemitism. whatever the 'role' is of Jews through 3000 years, it is significant. Jews, for their small numbers, and scattered amongst nations, trickle to the top into positions of influence (and cultural prominence). this has often resulted in reactionary consequences: antisemitism, progroms and displacement. to bring Jewish influence and contribution both positive and negative (most recently Bush's Zionists/ Iraq) out of the closet and into open discussion amongst the gentiles is quite revolutionary, and can only be beneficial.
In regards to Stan Kasten, he got his start under Ted Turner, who was something of an advertising and business "genius" himeslf. If you consider the willingness to reduce everything to a slogan, busines deal or an advertising pitch, a good thing for a culture, then people like Turner and Kasten are wonderful. One thing that differentiates the men, if Phil is right about Kasten, is that Turner is an individualist who has moved far from his roots.
I agree that there are serious drawbacks to meritocracy (i.e. arrogance and a lack of noblesse oblige), but the areas you describe seem to have a more serious problem with ideological nepotism.
Ideological and group nepotism is why I tend to view the "meritocracy" as a sham.
It wasn't just rising success of the Jewish communities that was the focus of hatred toward Jews. When I just visited the National Holocaust Museum this past week, it struck me again how often Jew was synonymous with anarchist or communist, sometimes with good reason. Our experiences with oppression often made us challenge the system. More and more it seems so many of us want nothing more than to be at the top of the hierarchy – no matter what or who we have to compromise to get there.
Weiss ethnocentric half emerges in this post and adopts the same kind of self-congratulatory and elitist tone that his liberal half regularly rejects. I'm speculating here, but when Jews fall into self-reverential "egrogore" mode and start obsessing about how special and unique they are, something inside them seems to psychologically snap, and a very unflattering, smug and self-worshipping side emerges. The unflattering face emerged in this post apparently as a result of Weiss' readings of Jewish writings on Jews; in the Israelis, the supremacist egregore probably emerges as a result of Jewish daily interactions with other tribal Jews, and its accompanying supremacist banter vis-à-vis Palestinians. (Background: The God of Moses is a universal God; the Jewish egregore is the exclusivist, elitist, supremacist God, which might also be the God of Zionism, the two of which might partially explain this bi-polarism. See: http://www.rense.com/general75/godthat.htm ) The Romans apparently dealt with the problem of the Jewish egregore through de-centralization — by scattering the Jews to the winds.
I think its a dangerous topic. And, I don't feel that Phil frames it skillfully enough to avoid it degrading to fascist claptrap. A good private study. How do people succeed financially? A good study for ones own health and for examination of social empowerment and transfers. This is the most informative piece on the Madoff scams. Not who was victimized, not the social networking, but WHO were the beneficiaries? A Ponzi scheme is primarily a transfer. In Madoff's case, he paid on average 5 – 6% better return than his fund and the market as a whole was earning. To a rational investor, that was plausible, indicative of a skillful investor. The early investors, that sell before the crash, do well. Its the same in the general market. If you had a South Florida home that sold for $300,000 rather than the current $140,000, you were smart, not a parasite. But, the nature of the economy was the same structured transfer, so you as beneficiary are something less than pristine. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/shou... Should Charities Repay Their Madoff Money? June 29, 2009, 8:38 am [The Deal Professor by Steven M. Davidoff] Madoff Today, Bernard Madoff will likely be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary. But his sentencing is merely the beginning of the litigation and recrimination he has spawned with his vast investment fraud. The inevitable accusations — and perhaps criminal charges — against his co-conspirators, and particularly his family, are sure to continue. And another troubling aspect of the Madoff fraud has emerged in the past few weeks. It is now being alleged that certain charitable foundations and individuals on the whole reaped profits in the millions, if not billions of dollars, from Mr. Madoff’s misdeeds.
Great! Phil wasn't clever enough in his framing of the issue to keep us fascists from commenting. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1049441.html I wonder where the Picower/Chais foundation is hiding the $6.5 billion? http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1049441.html
Well, some charities that profited from the Madoff scam should also be called out as supporting Israeli elements of illegal settlement building on occupied territories in Palestine. What we see now in America is the same group that has stolen our economy and high jacked media, Senate and Congress supports Israel and has no qualms in fooling America into supporting the theft of another peoples land just like the same pro- Israel billionaires who are calling the shots here have gotten rich through theft of U.S. citizens property. It's a mind set based on power, greed, and elitism. Don't brand me with the old canard of anti-Semitism here as no specific group is mentioned beyond the ruling elite, you fill in the blanks with your own understanding of events.
Madoff is a symptom of a deeper malaise: Rich American Jews & Geert Wilders.
I see Picower was mixed up with Ivan Boesky in an earlier prequal of today's Jewish-network centered economic meltdown finale. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/1014/068_print.... These Jewish plutocrat/gentile collaborator networks have been robbing the American public blind for decades right under the noses of the two-party regime, which has done absolutely nothing to stop any of it. I think a sequel to the French Revolution may be brewing. These epically evil, money-worshipping networks are going to make Jacobins of us all.
My theory is that Madoff was a well-paid patsy, that the big beneficiaries were specific individuals and groups, likely with some connection to organized crime frankly. You know, "legitimate" businessmen.
Money WELL laundered.
INcluding Jewish and other figures.
He got off though, didn't he?
That makes no sense. How do you get from Jewish Establishment (businessmen/capitalists) to communists and anarchists? Wouldn't they oppose each other?
To some extent banker Jacob Schiff served Jewish communist interests when he acted on the basis of the distorted information that he read about the Czarist Empire in news accounts produced by Jewish journalists biased in their sympathy for Jewish radicalism.