Last Sunday the Times ran an Op-Ed about the Madoff scandal by the formidable Daphne Merkin, blaming the victims for their credulity–a piece the Times has now expressed misgivings about (the piece did not make clear that Merkin is the sister of a major actor in the mess). I would just like to register this line–
What Mr. Madoff brought to the table, I think, was a sense of mishpocha, of being part of an extended family, but one you carefully chose rather than being arbitrarily born into.
This is a helpful insight, but also somewhat jarring, inasmuch as mishpocha, which is Yiddish, wasn't italicized, wasn't identified as Yiddish, doesn't appear in Webster's (and appears in Rosten's as mishpocheh), and the piece nowhere said anything about the Jewishness of that mishpocha. Hey–not every reader is a Member of the Tribe.
