The feds have arrested David Brooks, the New Yorker who made a fortune selling body armor for the troops in Iraq, on fraud charges. There’s always been a Jewish angle on this story. Brooks lavished money on horses but it was his $8 million bat mitzvah that became a scandal. The feds’ indictment says Brooks wrote off as corporate expenses $20,000 in "leather bound invitations" to his son’s Bar Mitzvah in 2000–which I suppose might be excused, taking place in the Clinton era, when we all got leatherbound invitations–but five years later, during the Iraq war, when his daughter had her famous Bat Mitzvah, $122,000 in ipods and digital cameras that he gave out as gifts.
I assume that Brooks’s children have not thought for an instant about serving in Iraq.
No, O.J. does not represent the blacks and Brooks doesn’t represent
Jews, but his grotesque detachment leaves me as a Jew embarrassed. As I’ve reported, Jews are greatly under-represented in the armed forces. When I tell my mother that Jews have a new place in American society, she tells me she will take me to the homes of poor Jews in Philadelphia. I’m sure she’s right. But this golden moment in the bifurcated life of our society has a Jewish component. Jews have been included and done very well. Brooks’s shameless extravagance, or alleged fraud, are not typical, but his privilege is. The great Yiddish writers I.L. Peretz, Aleichem and I.B. Singer all wrote about the dangerous effects of wealth. I see the danger in democratic terms, as the privileged losing touch with the experience of others…
