December 18, 2008

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From Slate.com (which is owned by the Washington Post):

Where Are the Jewish Gangsters of Yesteryear?
Or, what we can learn about "respectability" from Bernie Madoff and Meyer Lansky.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008, at 7:14 PM ET

Four days before the Bernie Madoff bust, I found myself, through circumstances too complicated to explain, in a Bukharan Kosher restaurant in Queens, eating skewers of lamb, beef, liver, and sweetbreads with a wildly mixed group of guys that included a retired Jewish gangster I'll call Lucky, since most of his rackets involved gambling of some type. Lucky had great stories to tell. He saw himself as the last of a dying breed—"I'm the caboose," he kept saying—a breed that spawned legends like Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegel, and Longy Zwillman. He was never a boss, more of an independent operator who specialized in running gambling rackets in South America, street lotteries in Africa, you name it. But it seemed he'd been on speaking terms with—and had stories to tell about—all the icons of the Jewish mafia. He was over 70 but looked like a tough 50 and wore a baseball cap advertising some fighter he was backing, and he fought like a wildman to pick up the tab for the table of eight from a thick roll of big-number bills.

Anyway, the more I read about Bernie Madoff, the more disgusted I am, not just with him but with the whole crowd of country-club suckers he allegedly conned, the phony "gentility" (in every respect) they represent.

It began to seem to me that the whole Bernie Madoff scandal was not about Jews and money but Jews and respectability. (And, by the way, let's cut the crap about Jews and money in the first place. If you look at the history of America, the big money has always been made by criminals of non-Jewish persuasions. The non-Jews who committed genocide to steal the land in the first place. The non-Jews who built up big fortunes through the disgusting and murderous crime of slavery. The non-Jews who built "respectable" old-money fortunes on the broken backs of the wage slaves they exploited. As Balzac famously said, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Old money in America is for the most part just old crime well-varnished by time.)

Still, as I found myself more and more disgusted by the (alleged) crimes of Bernie Madoff, I kept thinking—in light of my encounter with Lucky—"Where are the Jewish gangsters of yesteryear?" These were people an ethnic group could be, well, if not exactly proud of, then certainly not entirely ashamed of. At least Meyer Lansky—or "Hyman Roth," as they called him in the subtly anti-Semitic Godfather II—"always made money for his partners." Bernie Madoff, if the charges are to be believed, always stole money from his partners. (It should be remembered that while the perp was a Jew, oh so many of his victims were, too.)

A great civilization, a great people, is always known by the most brilliant, talented, and learned among them: Einstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leonard Bernstein. But it's also known by the quality of its crooks. (Singer knew that.) And as Jewish crooks go, Bernie Madoff would be a sad step down.

What went wrong? If you ask me, the Bernie Madoff scandal was a tragedy of misguided upward mobility—not about Jews and money but about Jews and a sadly imitative notion of status.

Here's the New York Post on Bernie and his alleged victims:

Working the so-called "Jewish circuit" of well-heeled Jews he met at country clubs on Long Island and in Palm Beach, and through his position on the boards of directors of several prominent Jewish institutions, he was entrusted with entire family fortunes.

"The guy was totally respected. ..."

The key words here are country club and respected. This is a scandal that hinges on a false connection between country-club membership and "respectability." Bernie seems to have preyed on those Jews who worship the false idol of WASP respectability. The sham gentility of country-club life.

Give me a break. Give me a gangster over a golfer any day.

A couple of caveats and a personal confession. First, I don't want to over-romanticize—as some do—Jewish gangsters or gangsters in general. The incomparable Murray Kempton, the greatest writer to grace the pages of newspapers in the past century, had a line about this. Talking to be about the gangsters he knew—and he knew a lot of them (he was pen pals with Carmine "the Snake" Persico when the Snake was in the clink)—he noted that not all of them deserve the raffish, Guys and Dolls dignity they are so often endowed with. Here's what Murray said:

People are very romantic about these guys, but the only thing I've ever learned is that if you talk to gangsters long enough you'll find out they're just as bad as respectable people.

Bada bing! Murray always found the site of contestation, the node of friction, in the way we construe our idols. I loved that inversion of our conventional definition of "respectability."

On the other hand—second caveat—I don't want to hear people, Jews or non-Jews, worrying that we can't talk about Jewish financial crime without arousing cretinous anti-Semites. I think my credentials on this point have been established well enough by the 600-page book I edited on anti-Semitism, Those Who Forget the Past. Yes, Bernie's a Jew, and he seems to have stolen a lot of money, but, as I've noted, stealing is not a genetically Jewish crime that Jews should be afraid to talk about. What's worth talking about is how he got away with it. Which is where the fetish of "respectability" comes in.

Here, I'll admit that one reason I want to talk about Jews and respectability is, in part, personal, familial. There were two sides to the family I grew up in. One, my mother's side, the country-club side (some of them, anyway) made clear—in ways subtle and overt—that they looked down on my father, because he couldn't afford—actually, better—wasn't interested in joining country clubs, much less seeing them as symbols of status and—yes—respectability.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong per se in Jews wanting to belong to country clubs. They deserve a nice place to feel like they belong and get their children tennis lessons. Sure, some Jewish country clubbers turn themselves into pathetic Ralph Lauren manqués. (Manqué manqués?) And it's true the Jewish interest in country clubs probably derives from the "gentleman's agreement" anti-Semitism that excluded Jews from WASP clubs, driving some of the more status-anxious to build bigger and better ones—when they weren't lobbying shamelessly for admission to the very clubs that excluded most of their co-religionists. Nothing wrong with it, human nature across all ethnic groups, I suppose. Yet nothing to brag about either, in its philistinism.

And Bernie Madoff's M.O., Bernie's milieu, Bernie's happy hunting ground was the country club. Bernie was the King of Clubs. If you read the reports in the Times and the WSJ, people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars just to join country clubs that would allow them to hobnob with Bernie and the friends of Bernie, sucking up to the second-raters who sit on country-club admissions boards just so they could spend a weekend with Bernie, in the hope he'd let them into his exclusive money club, his ultrarespectable club of clubs: Club Ponzi.

What an inversion, a perversion of true Jewish respectability to imitate the most dull-witted of their WASP brethren. I thought Jews were supposed to respect brains, not golf bags. Shows you how wrong stereotypes can be. Or maybe the wisdom of Abbie Hoffman's aphorism: that Jews have to decide "whether to go for the money or to go for broke."

Give me a Jewish gangster any day. They go for both.

Take Meyer Lansky, or rather "Hyman Roth," Lee Strasberg's version of Lansky in The Godfather 2. What is it we like about him? The TV dinner tray! He runs the world's underground financial system, an illicit stock exchange and banking system combined, but what he likes most is the simple life at home in front of the tube with his wife. Sure, he'll enjoy an evening from time to time at one of his luxe Cuban casinos, but country clubs? Please. You knew Meyer Lansky wouldn't care whether he got into this or that Palm Beach Country Club, wouldn't care about hobnobbing with the respectable—i.e., Wall Street-approved—gangsters.

For me, the big question about Bernie, if he's guilty of all he's been accused of, is whether he secretly despised the suckers who fell so easily for his "respectable" scams. Secretly enjoyed creating sham castles in the air for rich losers, thereby exposing their stupidity and the emptiness of their idea of respectability.

Could Bernie have seen though it all, been a kind of Buddha of bogusness, teaching the lame-os a lesson about how worthless their sham respectability was? Or did he buy into it himself? I'd like to believe the former, but I think it's probably the latter.

It made me think of something Lucky mentioned in one of his stories about the old days: the controversy among the Jewish gangster alte kockers (old guys) about Mickey Cohen and the Irgun ship.

It seems Mickey Cohen (you know, the L.A. crime boss from the '40s and '50s; he appears in some James Ellroy novels) went around leaning on a lot of respectable and nonrespectable types for money for the Irgun, the Jewish-gangster-favored faction of Zionists in the perilous period of the founding of the state of Israel. It seems Mickey Cohen claimed he'd used the money to buy a ship and fill it full of guns and ammo for the Irgun to fight for survival of the embattled state, but alas—Mickey said—the ship had sunk on its way to Haifa or something.

There were always rumors, according to Lucky, that there never was a ship, that Mickey Cohen kept the money for himself—pulled a Bernie. Lucky didn't believe it. Honor among thieves. There was a ship. He was sure.

I hope it's true. I really think there is a difference between the disreputable but colorful and—in their own way—honorable Jewish gangsters and someone like Bernie. As that Jewish folksinger Zimmerman wrote, "When you live outside the law you must be honest." A lesson about true respectability that Bernie seems never to have learned. A lesson the old time Jewish gangsters could teach us.


Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2207074/

No comment.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

60 comments:

Anonymous said...

Plenty of Jewish gangsters from Russia these days.

Anonymous said...

The non-Jews who committed genocide to steal the land in the first place. The non-Jews who built up big fortunes through the disgusting and murderous crime of slavery. The non-Jews who built "respectable" old-money fortunes on the broken backs of the wage slaves they exploited.

It's just like a Jew to preface any talk about scandals or crimes involving Jews by bringing up a laundry list of non-Jewish crimes that The Chosen weren't around participate in. But then, I'm certain those moral eagles, the Ashkenazim, would have taken no part in those crimes if they had been present. Still, one wonders about all those Sephardim who made bank in the Caribbean and South American slave trades?

Jews are excused from their crimes by virtue of underrepresentation: they were, by and large, not around to participate in stealing the land or enslaving North American blacks. Jews are also excused from their crimes by overrepresentation: Jewish mega-criminals like the Boeskys, Milkens, Madoffs, Shalom Weisses, Fastows, and Mark Schwarzes aren't the product of any unique Jewish criminal pathology, but indicators of a general Jewish prevalence in finance and business. Jews insist on having it both ways.

As I've mentioned before, Jews often want collective credit for a non-practicing ethnic Jew like Einstein, but they refuse to take the blame for Marx precisely because he wasn't a practicing Jew.

Perhaps this commitment to moral hypocrisy arises from Judaism itself. The Talmud and its most important interpreters seem to have long advocated three separate standards of behavior:

(1) Behavior to be practiced by Jews toward other Jews.

(2) Behavior to be practiced by Jews toward non-Jews. (It's fascinating to read how many heinous acts toward non-Jews are prohibited not because of the harm they will cause non-Jews, but merely by reason of "chillum HaShem." That is, the fear that non-Jews will blaspheme Yahweh if the act is discovered. I kid you not.)

(3) Behavior non-Jews are supposed to practice toward Jews and non-Jews alike.

Anonymous said...

Ron Rosenbaum wrote:

" The non-Jews who committed genocide to steal the land in the first place. The non-Jews who built up big fortunes through the disgusting and murderous crime of slavery. The non-Jews who built "respectable" old-money fortunes on the broken backs of the wage slaves they exploited. As Balzac famously said, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Old money in America is for the most part just old crime well-varnished by time.)"



Boy, he seems to really love this country and the people who built it. No wonder he is so happy here.
I wonder how many "great fortunes" Rosenbaum can link with slavery that still exist today? Any old plantation names that are still "great" anyone? Ive never heard of any personally.

Anonymous said...

Rosenbaum, Ron
File under: Racists, Jewish

Anonymous said...

A correction to my previous post. I think I spelled the phrase "chillum haShem" when it is actually "chillul haShem." Also, given that Hebrew isn't written in the Latin script, the phrase may be transliterated somewhat differently depending on the source.

Anonymous said...

Extraordinary: confused, self-contradictory, and ending with approval for a terrorist gang - is he paid for this tosh?

Anonymous said...

"I hope it's true. I really think there is a difference between the disreputable but colorful and—in their own way—honorable Jewish gangsters and someone like Bernie. As that Jewish folksinger Zimmerman wrote, "When you live outside the law you must be honest." A lesson about true respectability that Bernie seems never to have learned. A lesson the old time Jewish gangsters could teach us."

What's Rosenbaum trying to say? That Lansky was an honorable gangster who'd never sell out a fellow jew? Tell that to Bugsy Siegel.

And that folk song lyric - "When you live outside the law you must be honest." - is a load of crap. That kind of 60's era prisoner-rights, outlaw worship has been enormously corrosive to our society. Criminals are not, for the most part, honorable. They are callous, amoral, and stupid.

When writers like Rosenbaum use the term WASP, do they realize that there are other kinds of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants than the kind who send their kids to Choate? I'm not sure he knows the difference. I guess we're all just idiot, neer-do-well trust-fund kids to him.

I don't know what he was trying to say with this article - all I took away from it was the general disdain for gentiles with which it dripped.

Anonymous said...

wow. Ron - now tell us how you really feel!

Anonymous said...

There's truly nothing more callow and puerile that the idolization of gangsters by members of the effete intelligensia.

The very notion that gangstesr are in anyway honourable or dignified is absurd to those who have encountered them first hand. They're nothing but destructive parasites. The author of the article might find decrepit gangsters admirable compared to a more seemly fraud like Madoff, but I'm sure he'd far prefer to share a jail cell with men closer to the latter than the former.

I'm shocked that Slate is willing to publish an article that subscribes to such adolescent delusions. I know too little about Ashkenazi Jewry to make any firm assertions, but the sentiments expressed in this article are redolent of those found in the book "Tough Jews" by Rich Cohen. The impressionable males of an ethnic group which is perceived by many to be effete and unmanly (Sean Penn, James Caan and Israeli military success notwithstanding) revel in very though of thuggish men who hail from the same tribe.

Anonymous said...

I think that column has turned me into an anti-semite. And we need that guy in America for what purpose? When I read a diatribe like that I think to myself the Muslim invasion might not be so bad after all.

Anonymous said...

Ron Rosenbaum: Four days before the Bernie Madoff bust, I found myself... with a wildly mixed group of guys that included a retired Jewish gangster I'll call Lucky, since most of his rackets involved gambling of some type. Lucky had great stories to tell. He saw himself as the last of a dying breed - "I'm the caboose"...

Richard Ben Veniste begs to differ.

Anonymous said...

Every parent out there conscious of the underlying struggle going on in the West for the past 50 million years or so must require Rosenbaum be read by their children somewhere around high school. This cookie cutter intellectual exemplifies so much we've all come to recognize and love - the snarkiness, the lying, the hypocrisy, the "we're okay, you all suck", the hypocrisy, the double standards, the reliance on mythological terms to explain history (i.e. "evil"), and the utterly banal predictability.

It's great to watch the chosen become bourgeois, not merely in status, but in thought.

Anonymous said...

What an asshole. I hate people who call the conquest of this country "genocide". For hundreds of years, the Indians held the balance of power on this continent, allying themselves with one or another European nation. In the end, they played their cards wrong and they lost. Anyone who thinks this was some historic crime on the part of Europeans can get on the first boat back to the old world.

This Jew votes for us excommunicating this douchebag Rosenbaum and posthumously letting Spinoza back in.

- Fred

Garland said...

Stormfront, VNN et al should shut down their scary forums and just post this on their front pages.

If VDARE were as bad as them this would be tonight's pledge drive letter.

Anonymous said...

I know too little about Ashkenazi Jewry to make any firm assertions, but the sentiments expressed in this article are redolent of those found in the book "Tough Jews" by Rich Cohen.

I've read that one and I think you are spot on. The book is less interesting for its gangster history than for the attitudes of Jews relating that history.

The always unentertaining Larry King makes a surprise appearance in the book. (He's a close friend of Cohen's father.) Like Rosenbaum, he is apparently one of those who makes a pastime of drooling over the Jewish thugs of yesteryear.

Cohen wrote another book called The Avengers along the same lines. For all of his focus on tough Jews, you get the sense this upper-crust Hebrew has a serious post-Holocaust inferiority complex.

Anonymous said...

Anyone who thinks this was some historic crime on the part of Europeans can get on the first boat back to the old world.

Yes, Rosenbaum is livid about the crime of stealing Indian lands, but judging by his continued presence in our country, he apparently doesn't realize that the fencing of stolen goods is also crime.

This Jew votes for us excommunicating this douchebag Rosenbaum and posthumously letting Spinoza back in.

I'm not Jewish, but I would second that vote if I was.

mnuez said...

This is like one of the most confusing prophecies of Ezekiel: Layers upon layers wrapped in riddles within riddles. Apparently Lucky had some sort of point to get across which animates Rosenbaum to even deeper points which is then encapsulated in Sailer's pithy but powerful, "no comment" which undoubtedly will bring the wild-eyed Judenhaasers (Judeo-phobes might be more accurate) to a series of confused exclamations regarding what this series of emanations tells us about "the chosen ones" (I have yet to read the comments here but I'm sure they're as awesome as they've been over the past few "Jew" posts).

Anyhow I personally don't really know or care what Rosenbaum is talking about and I suspect that he doesn't have a much better idea of it either. I'll comment however on what I do likely know more about than other readers here which is the Mickey Cohen story. I'm only speaking off the top of my head here but I'd say that a) the story about the ship needn't be shrouded in legend being as the time period is damn well documented from almost every angle. Jews were news back then just as they are today (in fact Jews have always been news, excepting of course during the periods when they're being slaughtered in their millions, then even the ZOG and Jewish media fails to mention anything to do with them or advocate on their behalf - soon as the slaughter's over though, they go back to being news, especially if they happen to be committed the unforgivable sin of defending themselves from their would-be slaughterers).

Yeah, so as I was saying, there's no distant-history legend here, the thing should be easy to figure out.

Until one o' you all crack researchers does that though, my basic guess regarding the thing (and I've read various accounts regarding Mickey Cohen's fundraising over the years) is that the fellow who first wrote about Cohen's mention of the ship sinking was a real bad researcher who didn't realize that he was talking about the Altalena, which of course was sunk. I'm guessing that the fellow was more interested in some other aspect of Cohen's life and wasn't proficient enough in Irgun history to have realized that he was talking about the Altalena all along. In any case, I believe Ben Hecht even made it clear in his autobiography that he had enlisted Cohen's help to raise funds for what was to become the Altalena. But I could be wrong.

As for the rest of the piece, thanks for bringing it to my attention because, even though it doesn't teach me anything at all other than the fact that Rosenbaum has a few issues he needs to work through, I found it interesting enough to read. Hey, Jews are news.

mnuez

Anonymous said...

Steve

If you and your devotees maintained even a small sliver of hope that someday you could be restored to mainstream respectability, these Madoff threads have killed it. The comments of some your readers are beginning to sound those found in a VNN forum.

Anonymous said...

Slavery was an institution all over the world. But the culture crackers are trying to brainwash the people of the Anglosphere countries to believe that their actions were unique.

Europeans were enslaved by Muslims raiders for centuries and Jews played an active role as slave merchants in old Europe.

Many American Indian tribes had an institutionalized slavery system. Not to mention the Mayas, Aztecs and Spanish, i.e. La Raza.

Newport, Rhode Island was slave merchant ground zero in the old America. Jews played a large role.

Of course the abolition of slavery goes unmentioned. Who abolished slavery? The Jews? The Muslims? The Spanish? The French? The Japanese? The Koreans? The Turks?

No, it was the vicious, uniquely sinful and miserable WASP who abolished slavery. What a scumbag.

Anonymous said...

Yikes. "No comment," eh Steve? Good choice, this piece really speaks for itself.

Anon: I think that column has turned me into an anti-semite.

I know what you mean, and I'm one of the most philo-Semitic people I know.

mnuez said...

I knew this thread would be awesome!

Tommy the Talmud scholar. Classic. Tomms, who was Babba Metziah and when did she live?


Hey, he's back again! This time with producing the critical edition of the Talmud! With scholarship like that we Jewish istevers can take a vacation. Thanks for picking up the slack, Toms.

Oh, by the way, did you know that a Jewish man is allowed to have sex with a girl under the age of three? It's right there in the Talmud in Kiddushin, page 11!

Scholarship my boys! The Jew is bested at his own game.


Zhang here actually does bring added value. I had no idea that Caan was Jewish (but don't really care) and would never have guessed that Penn was half Jewish (not that I really care either, but it's unexpected).

Tell me that Twain or Mencken was really Jewish and I'll give you Roth, Dylan and Elvis. Eh? It's a good deal. Those are more likely to go up in value more than Twain or Mencken. Heck, Twain's no more than a school-boy's chore and "Mencken" is just a sound snobby people tend to articulate when they want people to believe that they're better read than they are. Trust me, take my trinity. Heck, Roth alone will never depreciate, what with his being a favorite of antisemites in seventeen languages...


Fred - Rosenbaum can gazump himself but I think Spinoza would accurately see it as a chutzpah to be "let back in". Methinks we can no more claim him than Germans can claim Nietzsche. As best I've been informed, Nietzsche hated Germans and only "became" Nietzsche out of being surrounded by this people whom he found so repulsive and thus strengthened his intellectual muscles fighting them. Same for Spinoza. I've read the excommunication edict and it's horrifying. The political situation being what it was, excommunicating him may have been good for the community for whatever reason, but while Spinoza's cranial genius (of various sorts) may perhaps be related to Maimonides' and Einstein's, it's ridiculous for the "establishment" of the Jewish community to claim him. They claim him when everything that he was was revolting against them. As a hereditary Jew I can claim him as a cousin, as a skeptic I can claim him as an intellectual ally, and as one who was raised in a similar sort of community I can empathize (to some small degree) with what he must have been going through emotionally - but if any Jew had a right to remove himself from the Jewish cannon, it was Spinoza.

Anonymous said...

Where have the “tough Jews” of yesterday gone? Well, they’ve all gone legit, well, sort of legit…in a way.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if Mr Rosenbaum feels as strongly about the illegal Israeli settlements displacing Palestinians from their land.

Anonymous said...

This guy is just another stinking hippy who thinks that everybody is a hypocrite unless they're completely, openly evil. What a tool.

Anonymous said...

That Balzac line Rosenbaum quotes, "behind every great fortune is a great crime," is inscribed on the title page of The Godfather. Apparently a great introductory book if you're not from the continential United States and plan to get involved in US politics. In the second movie, Hyman Roth promies Michael that the plan is for him to be president one day.

Anonymous said...

Rosenbaum contradicts one of my stereotypes: I thought Jews were smarter than that. Such ethnocentric glorification of scum usually comes from some Italian-Americans wrt the Mafia.(Does anyone else find the last para of The Godfather an utterly nauseating boast of the triumph of an inferior culture?).
Rosenbaum's article does seem to confirm something I've always suspected: when the Sicilians drove all the other ethnic groups out of organised crime, the Jewish gangsters became the state of Israel. (This may be a slight over-simplification).
For an enjoyable account of Jewish gangsters in Canada (Montreal specifically) read Mordecai Richler's novels.

Anonymous said...

mnuez,
not to belabour the point, but since you like to remind us of your superior intelligence, the word "Judenhaasers" is spelt "Judenhassers". Now if you used the sz your post would have been even more sexy.

Anonymous said...

twit-

You mean Judenhaßers? I'm not sure that Germans would actually use the Eszett for that word,

I have to agree with the anonymous who said the Madoff threads are starting to sound like VNN. I do think the Israel Lobby and its cohorts in the US deserve fierce criticism, but some of the comments in these threads go well beyond legit criticism and into the range of raving Judenhassen.

Planetary Archon Mouse

Anonymous said...

Another two-minute hate about Jews. Great.

The column is confused and insignificant, not a reason to starting crying Jew this and Jew that.

Your "no comment" only makes sense, Steve, if you share a lot of negative assumptions about Jews which not all of your readers share, though the consensus here does seem to share them.

neil craig said...

It also strikes me that status not money was Madoff's goal. He was certainly very rich but had money really been the goal then about 10 years ago he would just have transferred all the assets to the Cayman islands or Cyprus & disappeared. He built up a very succesful business by contnuously paying a couple of points over the odds, achieved by taking these points from capital rather than investment. The investors got the money, though not always the same investors & in dividends rather than capital - those who got out early doing better by getting the dividends & the capital, those who stayed in getting the dividends 7 those who joined late getting nothing.

And Bernie got to show off at the country club for 40 years & in jail for 20.

togo said...

On the other hand—second caveat—I don't want to hear people, Jews or non-Jews, worrying that we can't talk about Jewish financial crime without arousing cretinous anti-Semites. I think my credentials on this point have been established well enough by the 600-page book I edited on anti-Semitism, Those Who Forget the Past.

Alas, a forgotten classic!

BTW, Rosenbaum , with this piece, has thoroughly established himself as a cretinous Semite.

Anonymous said...

Don't tell me you're not going to put in my comment about Sidney Korshak and the Japanese-American landgrab, a story I never knew until I was hipped to it by my old Japanese neighbor in L.A. a few years back. Even the people at the Post (NY) were excited to find out the news. Pick up the book that talks about it all.

Supermob: How Sidney Korshak And His Criminal Associates Became America‘s Hidden Power Brokers, by mnuez. No. By Gus Russo.

Seamus said...

Yes, Rosenbaum is livid about the crime of stealing Indian lands, . . .

No, what he's livid about is "genocide to steal the land." If he were upset about simply stealing land from natives, he'd have to condemn Zionism.

Anonymous said...

Two comments: I fail to see how anyone can cite Godfather II as even "subtly" anti- semetic.

Re Murray Kempton's comment that gangsters are "just as bad as respectable people": Murray was a fine writer,but if he really meant that , he was also a fool (I suspect that he kept that silly line in his column because it was memorable and he liked the sound of it). Any one who has spent even a minimal amount of time around mob people and their hangers-on (my experience with them was in the garbage, demolition and recycling business)can tell you that the majority of them are repulsive people, utterly without honor. They destroy the livlihoods of hardworking people, and many will roll on their friends when caught.

Anonymous said...

Pearlmann...ever since 1945, we have been spoon-fed this tosh that saintly Anglos singlehandedly defeated Hitler and "saved the world". You court the world's admiration, you court the world's scorn. The ethical bath of WWII is beginning to dry as people reacquaint themselves with the crimes of the British Empire and their colonial cousins against the (ever-increasing) colored masses.

Black Sea said...

There is a category of writing best relegated to personal journals. Such writing should remain private because it provides only a record of the author's failed attempt to work out some very personal grievance, neurosis, or delusion, ultimately dissolving into incoherence.

For such writing, this article serves as a near perfect example. It isn't interesting in anything other than a pathological sense. I can't imagine that many readers, Jewish or not, would find it anything other than laughable or sad. Norman Mailer already worked this particular vein, admittedly to little effect, but he was miles above Rosenbaum's effort. Even Woody Allen has handled this subject in a periodically entertaining way.

It's never anything other than disturbing to watch someone embarrass himself in print. A better editor would have told Rosenbaum to keep this one under lock and key.

DK said...

Still, one wonders about all those Sephardim who made bank in the Caribbean and South American slave trades?

Ashkenazim have a bad habit of pretending that American Jewish history started in the late 19th century, absolutely ignoring not only the Sephardic role in the Confederacy, but all of Sephardic American history in its entirety, which began in 1654.

Give me a gangster over a golfer any day.

This guy simply isn't normal.

Anonymous said...

"If you and your devotees maintained even a small sliver of hope that someday you could be restored to mainstream respectability, these Madoff threads have killed it."

Well, Ron Rosenbaum has just wrote an interesting piece about the perils of seeking respectability. Have you read it? In Steve's case the central message actually applies, if you strip away the ethnic ax grinding and hubris.

Gaining repectability on the mainstream's current terms would be the death of his intellectual and creative importance.

Anonymous said...

As usual, the comments of mnuez are full of sound and fury, and signify nothing, as is expected in a tale told by an idiot.

Rosenbaum seems to fall onto the path of so many of todays literati, hipsters, and cultural elites - glorifying crime and criminals. Through TV shows like "The Sopranos" and the excressences of nihlist-hipster Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood has turned gangsters and low-lifes into culture-heroes.

Anonymous said...

When the Old Testament says 'servant', it really means 'slave'.

Anonymous said...

"...not to belabour the point, but since you like to remind us of your superior intelligence, the word "Judenhaasers" is spelt "Judenhassers"

Last time I checked, "haas" is rabbit auf deutsch.

Jim Bowery said...

The top demographic determinant at the level of State ecology is HIV Positives with Russian-Americans a close second.

Anonymous said...

Anglo-Americans aren't the only people Rosenbaum hates. Try reading The second Holocaust- and European complicity if you can stomach it.

Anonymous said...

As regards 'Judenhaasers' vs ' Judenhassers', German pluralization would leave off the 's' and give use merely 'Judenhasser' (for both plural and singular). Inflection of the articles would be used to distinguish, i.e. we would have 'Der Judenhasser' for one or 'Die Judenhasser' (plural) in the objective case. Mind you, 'Judenhassers' pops up again in other situations, e.g. something like 'das Buch des Judenhassers', which is singular but I can't recall whether this is dative or genitive case, though I know it is correct.

The funny thing about Rosenbaum is not so much his opinions. A mishmash of ethnic narcissism, thug glorification, and liberal euro-bashing - each common enough even if finding all three in one place is a little unusual. What *is* remarkable is the ability to get things like this published in what is supposed to be a respectable venue. That, really, is the lesson here.

C. Van Carter said...

"The non-Jews who built up big fortunes through the disgusting and murderous crime of slavery."

All kinds of people did that.

"The non-Jews who built "respectable" old-money fortunes on the broken backs of the wage slaves they exploited."

Who does Rosenbaum think owned all those sweatshops?

The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise has more on Jewish gangsters.

Anonymous said...

This article is beyond stupid. How about this: Madoff is a piece of shit. I'm a Jew, and that's pretty obvious -- no need for excuses or discourses on the old-time Jewish thugs. Madoff is a big piece of shit, and as far as I can tell most decent Jews are appalled at the fact of Madoff's Jewishness. Who really cares what R Rosendouche thinks anyway? Is this guy famous or something?

It's not too much more complicated than that. But on another note I'd wager that Madoff is the tip of the iceberg. Let's see: The authorities go to Madoff and say, 'We know your game.' He says, 'Oh shit.' They say, 'Listen. You turn yourself in and help us out and we'll go easy on you.' So Bernie got his two sons to turn him in. It's just a little suspicious that his sons would turn him in so very quickly. I mean, their dad -- he's a big-time crook -- but he's 70 and he'll die in prison. It didn't take the sons a long time to think things over? No, because they were set up to do it. The tip of the iceberg. And I'm sure there'll be all sorts of races and creeds in the ice under the Berg.

Anonymous said...

"No, it was the vicious, uniquely sinful and miserable WASP who abolished slavery."

Well, to be accurate, it was WASPs who abolished slavery in WASP countries (and took a dent out of it on the high seas, via the Royal Navy). In predominantly non-WASP countries (e.g., Brazil) it was the local dominant group (Portuguese Catholics, in Brazil's case) that abolished slavery, often with less fanfare than in the Anglosphere.

"Such ethnocentric glorification of scum usually comes from some Italian-Americans wrt the Mafia.(Does anyone else find the last para of The Godfather an utterly nauseating boast of the triumph of an inferior culture?)."

The glorification of the Jewish mob seems to be a relatively recent phenomena limited to some douchebag Jewish writers like Rosenbaum. I don't recall hearing anything about it growing up in a proud American Jewish family.

I don't recall the last paragraph of The Godfather offhand, but the parts of the book set in Sicily were a pretty clear-eyed take on what happens when the organized crime is taken to its logical conclusion (e.g., Michael doesn't trust the local physician since he realizes that he, like everyone else on the island, got his job not through merit but through mob dealings). Your comment about the "inferior" culture of Italians brings to mind a line from Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny though, abut how among some New York WASPs of the day, listening to opera was a sign that you were cultured -- unless you were Italian, that was.

"Rosenbaum's article does seem to confirm something I've always suspected: when the Sicilians drove all the other ethnic groups out of organised crime, the Jewish gangsters became the state of Israel. (This may be a slight over-simplification)."

That's not an over-simplification; that's a falsehood. Whatever minor association Jewish gangsters had with the Irgun, the Irgun itself was marginalized soon after Israel's statehood -- that was the point of the Altalena affair.

- Fred

Anonymous said...

Have y'all read Spengler's latest on Madoff? In a way he's right, 'The man deserves a medal' for making fools out of the rich and famous.

Anonymous said...

"This Jew votes for us excommunicating this douchebag Rosenbaum and posthumously letting Spinoza back in."

"I'm not Jewish, but I would second that vote if I was."

BTW, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg asks Rabbi David Wolpe about this: "On Excommunicating Bernard Madoff". From the interview:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Should Bernard Madoff be excommunicated for his sins against his people?

David Wolpe: We do not practice formal excommunication. I would not prevent him from entering a synagogue to pray. We are in the atonement business. However, he should be barred from any honor or recognition. To the extent permitted by his sentence he should do something of service to the community to make small reparations for the incalculable harm he caused. Short of formal excommunication, however, informal 'shunning' has a nice, solid ring to it.

JG: "Shunning," huh? Does that imply that you believe his crimes might be irredeemable? At what point do you give up on a sinner?

DW: Maimonides lists sins -- following the laws of the Mishna -- that cannot be fully forgiven. Common to most is an inability to make restitution (another example is one who coldly assumes "I'll sin, be forgiven, sin, be forgiven" etc.). Madoff cannot conceivably make restitution to the unnumbered he has hurt -- from lost personal savings to people dependent on the bone marrow registry whose holdings he squandered. Perhaps someone of purer soul might be persuaded to find redemption possible for him. I confess I cannot.


- Fred

Anonymous said...

Madoff is a crypto-goy?

Anonymous said...

This kind of crap is not that rare among American Jews of a certain age, who seem to have a lot of anti-WASP issues that are unlikely ever to go away and, indeed, may resurface as they age and come to care less how they come across. But it is totally unheard of among young, assimilated American Jews who've never been sneered at and have nothing to resent.

-Bushrod

Anonymous said...

So many Jewish gangsters used to run all kinds of things in America - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_American_mobsters

Anonymous said...

Pearlmann: "Newport, Rhode Island was slave merchant ground zero in the old America. Jews played a large role."

You are correct about that - Jews played a massive role in the American slave trade.

Do not forget about Charleston, South Carolina either - until about 1830 that city had more Jews than any other America city. It also had a massive slave market.

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...

.........the Irgun itself was marginalized soon after Israel's statehood -- that was the point of the Altalena affair.

- Fred"

Marginalized to the point that it's leader, Menachem Begin, would go on to become a long-serving prime-minister of Israel.

Yeah, marginalized.

Anonymous said...

Anon sed:
"Last time I checked, "haas" is rabbit auf deutsch."

The German for rabbit is Hase, not haas. Haas is Afrikaans for rabbit.

Anonymous said...

kijkfaas mcgee sed:
"I'd wager that Madoff is the tip of the iceberg. "

I'd second that. Bascially the SEC has an interest in keeping the amount of shit flying about under control, for fear of losing their faces.

Anonymous said...

Jews owned many slave ships. They made serious coin, don't kid yourself. Arabs caught 'em, Jews shipped 'em, Southern Hemisphericans (most) and North Americans (some) bought 'em, and Anglo political principles freed 'em.

But of course, in the mind of the Jewish racist, country club Anglos caught, shipped, sold, and bought. While Lincoln (crypto-Jew?) freed! Yay! Jews are heroes and WASPs are villains again!!

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Anonymous said...

Why are American Jews so obnoxious? In Britain, when Mrs. Thatcher was Prime Minister, 35 out of 36 Jewish MPs in Parliament were Tories. There is almost no sign of the kind of barely concealed hatred for the Christian majority that one sees among American Jews (not all but a lot of them) among British Jews.