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
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Many years ago the sociologist E. Digby Baltzel distinguished among the Protestant sects by noting that a Methodist was a Baptist with shoes, a Presbyterian a Methodist who has gone to college, and an Episcopalian a Presbyterian who lives on his investments. That portion of wealthy Jews who have come to live on their investments began more and more to model their leisure and financial lives on those of old-line Episcopalians, with the added benefit of having Sunday mornings free.
Long locked out of the WASP social and commercial institu-tions—the tonier country clubs, the major Ivy League universities, the white-shoe legal and banking firms, large corporations, elegant suburbs—well-to-do Jews in America, where possible, formed their own counterpart institutions, apart from the Ivy League schools. A younger generation has now taken to giving their children WASPy first names, so that today one runs into such comic nomenclatural pairings as Tyler Ginsberg, Mackenzie Rosenthal, Hunter Fefferman, Kelly Rabinowicz and other such preposterosities.
So it is, too, with Jewish country clubs. Madoff's own club, the Palm Beach Country Club, whose members proved such ripe pickings for Uncle Bernie, is a bit exceptional in not carrying a WASPish name, like that of so many Jewish clubs I know in Chicago—Bryn Mawr, Briarwood, Ravisloe, Twin Orchard, Green Acres, everything but Goyesque Pines—in imitation of the names of long-established WASP country clubs.
As part of the country-club drift of well-to-do Jews, of their general Episcopalianization, golf has become a great mania—mishegoss, in the good Yiddish word—for so many Jewish men of my generation. Among many of those who have scored financially, the leading idea of Valhalla is a condominium on a golf course in a dull place with a warm climate. I have one acquaintance who, having rung the success bell resoundingly, is said to belong to 10 different clubs around the country, so that he can play golf no matter where he finds himself.
Another acquaintance, off on a fund-raising trip to Houston for a Jewish institution he heads, discovered upon his arrival on a Wednesday afternoon that almost all his potential wealthy contributors were out on the links. When he remarked on this to one of the few men he was able to reach, the man told him that the former leader of the Jewish community in Houston once told him, "You know, Barry [you have to imagine a southern accent here], our people shouldn't golf."
There is something deeply trivial about golf that is unseemly for Jews, who have traditionally been accustomed to taking themselves seriously. Whacking away at a little ball, hoping, at the end of four hours' effort, to arrive at the finish a stroke or two fewer than the previous time one wasted a morning at this game—no, no, no, I'm sorry, but this is all wrong for Jews. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers didn't undergo pogroms and the struggle to evade conscription in the tsar's army to come to America for their descendants to put on peach-colored pants, spiked Nike shoes and chemises Lacoste to appear on the first tee promptly at 8 a.m. A Jew should be studying, arguing, thinking, working, making money, contemplating why God has put him through so many trials. A phrase like "dogleg to the left" should never pass his lips. If Madoff's depredations will bring a few Jews in off the links, perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing.
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