As any reader of this blog knows, I count Jewish noses. Hey, it's a living. And I sure have noticed a lot of my landsmen on TV the last couple days doctoring the sick economy. On Charlie Rose, Hank Greenberg (formerly of AIG) and Barney Frank (brother of Ann Lewis). On Hardball, Congressmen Robert Wexler and Eric Cantor. On CNN today Neil Weinberg of Forbes and Josh somebody. At least he looked Jewish. What does it all mean?
First, at the risk of being prosaic, Jews have had a long intimate history with modern finance. Read Fritz Stern's book Gold and Iron, on Bismarck's banker, Bleichroder. Bismarck was an antisemite but it didn't keep him from giving the sharpest guy in the realm his money. Or Benjamin Ginsberg's book on the rise of the Jewish financier, The Fatal Embrace. Or Slezkine's classic, The Jewish Century–We've gone from an age of princes and peasants to an age of merchants and priests, the Jewish age. Or the great and under-recognized To Free a People, by Gary Dean Best, where he shows how Jacob Schiff and the other great German-Jewish bankers put the screws on the Russians during the Russo-Japanese war to help spring my grandpaw from the Pale.
The other reason is that Jews are principals in the American Establishment, as I keep braying. We're the richest American group by religion, going away. We're all over the turrets and crenellations of the castle. So when something big happens, we're going to be there. As heads of congressional committees and as reporters.
My response to this overall is, No big deal. It's cultural and political; and it's changing as other people absorb bookish values that have advantaged Jews in the modern world. I sure hope it's not a club. Hank Paulson formerly of Goldman Sachs is a Christian Scientist, so reports the Telegraph. And as I have noted before, my tribe is right now in IQ freefall, because the parents are instructing their children to argue that Israel is justified in doing everything it does to the Palestinians. That kind of lie, endlessly repeated, has mental consequences.
And that of course is where it makes a difference. You can't be such prominent players in the Establishment, and have such an orthodoxy on the Middle East, without giant consequences to the polity. Here's Wexler saying that McCain's pick of Palin was an offense to all Jewish Americans because she once supported Pat Buchanan, who I think Wexler likens to Hitler? (It's hard to read this stuff twice.) Barney Frank is doctrinaire about Israel. So is Eric Cantor across the aisle. There's no wiggle room in Congress. Not when Frank's sister, a power broker, asserts: "The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel." And everyone cheers.
This kind of power is also the reason that Harvard is having a neoconservative hoe-down next week, with all the backward ideas of the last 10 years trotted out again as the best ideas at the thinktanks. Thinktanks are the worst. That's where money matters. Lorand Matory wrote about this: "At what point do imbalances in access to money, media, and society’s
administrative apparatuses constitute the censorship of dissent?" Smart. And he's leaving Harvard for Duke. Further and further from the administrative apparatuses.
