If you're a baseball fan, you're thrilled by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who sadly dropped the Devil from their name this year and have been rewarded by the deity; they've shocked baseball by leading the best division, the American League East. Last night they played a cliffhanger with the Red Sox for 14 innings, and won. (I dropped off in the 12th; conjugal responsibilities.) ESPN kept cutting to young Theo Epstein, the Red Sox wunderkind gm, in his Fenway box.
Well it turns out the Rays also have a wunderkind Jewish gm. I'm guessing that's the case from names here, but I think you'll agree. This St. Petersburg Times piece says after the Rays were bought by Stuart Sternberg a few years ago he turned to a kid he'd met at Goldman, Sachs: Matt Silverman.
graduated cum laude with an economics degree from Harvard; has written
some 60,000 words of a novel that's on indefinite hold;… in true bachelor
fashion, relies heavily on microwave cuisine and fast food; and, most
important, has the full trust of Sternberg.
"I couldn't have more confidence in anybody else at this point in my
life to run a business on a day-to-day basis," says Sternberg, 46. "His
sensibilities are pristine. His willingness to work is unparalleled.
His thoughts and compassion are A-plus. It's like a dream to me to have
Matt come down here."
Steve Sailer recently had a funny post about Saakashvili of Georgia making the calculation that Jews run the world, and so he had to get on the good side of the Jews and he could do anything.
This isn't purely a joke. You have to wonder about Jewish social networks, if you consider the rise of the neocons and the prominence of Jewish money in the political process.The question is, How much of the Jewish advance in the establishment is Pure Jewish Genius and how much of it is connection (or gonnegtions, as the antisemitic caricature Meyer Wolfsheim says in Gatsby).
Jews like to believe it's genius. I certainly thought so most of my life. We have the shtik, we have the book, what more could the information age want? Back when I was at the Harvard Crimson newspaper, Mary Ridge, an Irish girl from Watertown, MA, interrupted my tirade on the evils of the WASPy club system at Harvard to tell me that the Crimson was just a Jewish boys' club. And that we selected for one another. My jaw dropped. We were comfortable with one another's ways, she said. What were those ways? Urban, middle/uppermiddle class, fast-talking, funny, irreverent (used to be anyway), lovers of prestige, ambitious out the wazoo, and yes Jewishness. Haimishe, as they say in Yiddish. I remember non-Jews not feeling entirely welcome. But of course we were smarter than everybody else, so we deserved it!
I get some of that smug vibe from Sternberg's comments about why he chose Silverman, above. Like likes like. I'm not saying it's evil, but it's not entirely a glorious story of American freedom. Elites have always had social cohesion. E. Digby Baltzell wanted to destroy the last social order, the WASPs, back in the 60s, because he regarded them as an exclusive caste which wasn't interested in talent and energy. I sometimes wonder whether some of the new Jewish elite isn't exercising a similar type of bar, based on unconscious cultural prejudices. I've heard about gentile professors sensing prejudice in certain prestige institutions that will go unnamed.
These issues are even an element of Sarah Palin's splash. She is the Anti-Jew– in that she's outdoorsy, rural, kicked around in a bunch of colleges, is evangelical, didn't abort her Down's baby, doesn't care about prestige, has probably not read a serious book in 10 years, and egad, has a child in the military. There's a lot more to say about all this, obviously, I'm just biting off a piece. What is the world that successful Jews have made in the establishment? How cohesive is it? Do you have to be a philosemite to join? (My sister-in-law, who's successful in Hollywood, is a giant philosemite). Etc.
I'll be watching the Rays and the Red Sox go at it next week. Go Rays! Last year I blogged about all the Jewish owners and execs of professional baseball teams,
prompting Jerry Haber to note that he was related to the Indians'
general manager Mark Shapiro. I guess all Jewish gms aren't
geniuses.
