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.
