Frankly, I found this article offensive. Epstein is criticizing Jews for not living like Jews are supposed to live. It's as if someone criticized American blacks for trying to become lawyers instead of doing what they do best: play basketball. Or saying Hillary Clinton shouldn't have run for president... women are supposed to be home cooking dinner. Just because some Jewish stereotypes are positive doesn't make them any less offensive when they are forced on a person. In reality, the assimilation of Jews into American society is a good thing - it's a sign that we are living in a free society (more or less) that strives to treat everyone equality and enables one to pursue his/her goals no matter who he or she is or where he or she comes from. The only reason Jews have this "tribal" mentality to begin with is that it was a necessity for survival during centuries of persecution and discrimination. If there is no longer persecution and discrimination, Jews will become exactly like Methodists and Presbyterians in American society (in other words, indistinguishable as a group from their fellow citizens), and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. The less tribalism we have, the better. There will still be variety in America, but it will be based on individual choice, and not imposition of ethnic stereotypes. Madoff was a scumbag, no more no less. Mr. Epstein, you may have been shocked, but the fact is Jews can be scumbags too. All our ethnics groups have saints and sinners. In the end you are just reinforcing the negative stereotype of the greedy Jew by emphasizing the importance of Madoff being Jewish. It doesn't matter; he's a crook and should be punished. It has nothing to do with law-abiding Jews who just want to live their lives as they see fit.
‘Uncle Bernie’ And the Jews
The Madoff scandal plays to an ugly stereotype. But maybe there's a silver lining for his cultural cohort.
PHOTOS
Superrich, Superbad
In the Company of Madoff: Excesses and low-finance shenanigans of the world's moneyed elite
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Bernie Madoff gave off fumes of quiet but deep confidence that can be immensely seductive. I have never met Madoff, but I have met men of his physical and psychological type: smallish, unathletic in build, wearing expensive yet unflashy clothes, nothing dazzling about them. They manage to seem substantial in an unthreatening, even avuncular way. They appear to be in possession of a deep secret: they have gotten in on the ground floor, they know how the game is played; should they choose, they could put you on to a few good things. They have deciphered the magic of money; they feel no need to brag about it, but clearly they have everything under control. Except, of course, they don't, not really, because one of the things we have learned from the recent economic meltdown is that nobody does.
An archeologist of human character could scrutinize and analyze Bernie Madoff for decades without getting at what must be the complex layers of response he must have felt as his monumental stock-market fraud played out. Imagine the delirious delight he must have taken in his global deception, the panic he must have felt when he first heard the whir in the air of axes about to fall, the terror commingled with relief he now must feel knowing he is permanently established as one of the world's major frauds, up their with Sacha Stavisky, whose worthless bond scheme nearly brought down the French Third Republic. A great novelist of the kind the world does not now house may perhaps one day be able delve below this rocky psychic ground to read the soul of a man as complexly twisted as Bernie Madoff.
For the rest of us, the best we can do is examine the shards that such diggings from the Madoff affair have thus far brought aboveground. Not least prominent among them is the effect of Bernie Madoff's colossal swindle of his coreligionists, the Jews. Madoff soaked the rich, but he seems to have specialized in soaking the Jewish rich. The spectacle presented by a Jew swindling Jews is itself flush with interest.
The first thought that must have gone through the minds of most American Jews as Madoff's financial machinations were revealed had to have been: this can't be good for the Jews. Jews of a certain generation—Madoff's and my own—even now are always on the qui vive for anti-Semitism. ("How come there are no Jews in the front four of the Green Bay Packers?" ought to be the punch line for a joke not yet written illustrating this psychological condition.) According to the never-dying anti-Semitic stereotype, Jews are above all financially astute, with a highly flexible sense of ethics, sharpies, operators par excellence. Bernie Madoff, alas, plays to this stereotype to perfection.
Jews are still tribal enough to think of their coreligionists vaguely as family, and that Madoff bilked his own family, so to say, takes, one supposes, some of the anti-Semitic stigma off, making Madoff a truly equal-opportunity son of a bitch. This epithet, I promise you, is a euphemism for the way many Jews feel about Madoff's cheating any number of Jewish charitable institutions out of their endowments—Hadassah, Yeshiva University, Elie Wiesel's Foundation for Humanity—putting some of them out of business. In a nice reversal of Robin Hood, Madoff robbed from the poor and gave to himself.
Might the cloud the Madoff affair has cast among the Jews have not a silver but perhaps a zinc lining? One wonders, for example, what effect Uncle Bernie's (as I have come to think of him) amazing caper will have on the attempt at WASP-ification of well-to-do Jews in America. American Jews, the scholar and wit Milton Himmelfarb said, "earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." But with the passing decades of prosperity many Jews have also begun to live like Episcopalians, or at least as they imagine Episcopalians live.
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