The press continues to sidestep a central issue re Madoff. The geography of Madoff's fraud is Jewish geography. These people trusted Madoff because he was Jewish and other Jews liked him. Steven Spielberg, Mort Zuckerman, the Lappin Fund:
Our
mission is helping to keep our children Jewish, thus reversing the trend
of assimilation and intermarriage.
Madoff's fall is doubly a blow to such efforts. It has broken Lappin, but also broken Lappin's idea. As Scott McConnell writes to me, "the Madoff event may be the greatest example of intelligent people being blinded by ethnocentrism I've ever seen." An argument for Jewish universalism/integration into American society.
