The myth provided an intoxicating rationale for easy money, lax regulations, and the sort of self-delusion required by the financiers who convinced each other and their clients that they could create brilliant financial mechanisms that would endlessly spin money out of thin air. This, as we now know, led to the unmooring of the financial sector – the driving force of the global economy – and sudden, collective realization that the whole thing was built on the sort of short-lived, rickety edifice we associate with scams.

In this way, Madoff is the perfect embodiment of all the ills and excesses that the myth perpetuated and inflicted on society. Unfortunately there’s nothing metaphorical about the pain Madoff inflicted on the Jewish community. And we will be doing our community a massive disservice if we come to understand this story as the work of one, lone financial psychopath. We have done this to ourselves.

What seems from afar an incestuous miasma of machers, millionaires, billionaires and Jewish philanthropic "leaders" is really a very clear picture of the contemporary power structure of the pay-to-play Jewish establishment, where someone like the inspiring Ruth Messinger is a side-show annoyance without keys to the back room and Bernie Madoff is a marionette controlling the bureaucratic puppets who run many of our communal organizations. 

The myth of wealth’s virtuosity, and the concomitant values it engendered, has had a disproportionate influence over our community. Partly, it’s because we’ve disproportionately benefited from that myth and those values.

One problem is how we’ve come to define success. Our children can choose between a banker, lawyer or doctor as their role model. No surprise, then, that their bar mitzvahs are spiritually meaningless affairs whose primary effect is to introduce the children to an aggressively competitive class structure in which, approximating the popular ‘80s bumper sticker regarding toys and death: "He whose party is the most extravagant wins."

Madoff’s brilliance is how well he understood this class structure and its evolution into adulthood; how he drew such emphatic lines between Us and Them, admitting the chosen to a circle of privilege, a "secret society" in the words of one of Madoff’s victims; such admittance conferred on both gentile and the Jewish Mcmanor-born instant status.  They were "winners."

In a vacuum created by institutional decay, poor leadership, and powerless, uninspiring clergy, our Jewish "winners" (bankers et al) stepped in, often honorably, to fill the void. Even our outreach programs began to stress exclusivity, reaching out to only the most successful and influential among us.

And so ours has become a pay-to-play community where those with the most money have the most influence over the organizations, synagogues, charities, and country clubs that make up our communal infrastructure.

In effect, the myth itself became the central organizing conceit of this period – that ambition, financial wherewithal, and social status were the agents of communal progress.

Better to be a macher than a mensch these days.

We made goo-goo eyes over the megabucks high-financiers, with their turbo-capitalism and hyper-consumption, and now we’re paying the price. And I’m not talking about the billions lost by the Jewish charities Madoff bilked. I’m talking about the perception created in all those people we’ve been crying so much about  — all those unaffiliated Jews who just keep assimilating and intermarrying -who can now feel validated in turning their back on a community not worth turning towards. 

As we have made our bed, so we must lie in it. It’s time to get up and change the sheets.

The post After Madoff: Redefining What ‘Success’ Means appeared first on Jewcy.

Bernie Madoff’s victims are only now overcoming their shame to step forward and tell their story or plead for help. This excerpt comes from an email that is making the rounds:

Dear Friends,

Now that it has been a few weeks and time has past, many more of you have heard about Bernie Madoff. The man who created the largest Ponzi scheme ever…$50 billion.??

My family was severely affected and now we have to rebuild. Rebuilding requires selling the house in NY, getting rid of cars and personal things, and re-launching my Dad’s company for promotional and logo merchandise.

I have been helping other victims as well, via my blog, and I started a Facebook group for families and friends of families. It’s our way to keep up to date with the latest news.??

We will fight, we will survive and we will rebuild.???

The investor euphoria that led to economic bubbles inevitably led to an uptick in fraudulence. In “Manias, Panics, and Crashes,” the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that during bubbles “the supply of corruption increases . . . much like the supply of credit.”

Contrary to the hopes and dreams of antisemites, a historical overview of economic bubbles and the subsequent conmen that arose reveals a scarcity of Jews, especially with any large scale con like Madoff’s. Until now. A con on the scale of Madoff’s can only be done from atop the American power structure, which Jews have only recently occupied.

For far left writers like Philip Weiss, the takeaway here is that Madoff’s Jewishness is secondary to the fact that he’s entrenched in the Establishment elite. Weiss writes:

Like Franken-Coleman in Minnesota, Madoff shows the degree to which Jews are just another component of the Establishment, and Jewishness does not define their presence…Jews are members in good standing in the Establishment, they come and go socially in upper class places. And no one really notices the Jewishness. They’re just Jewish…. But as time passes, and the blonde waves of philosemitism crash at the walls, Jewishness in the Establishment will signify less and less difference.

For Weiss, who is chomping at the bit for the American assimilationist machine to bulldoze Jewish ethnocentrism, this is but another sign that we’re just like everyone else. And here we are, one more step towards the breakdown of the American Jewish community as currently constituted.

I agree with Weiss that the community is crumbling, but I’m not happy about it, and I think it’s not because we’re assimilating but because of what and how we’ve chosen to assimilate.

Like any community, were not immune to the best and worst of any moment’s cultural and economic gestalt. But given the small size of our community, and the elevated position within the Establishment our success has granted us (just how entrenched we are in this whole mess), the assimilation of the particular configuration of values and norms that will come to characterize this period will be particularly detrimental to any sense of Peoplehood for American Jews.

We thought it was hard attracting the unaffiliated before all this went down. Think how difficult it will be to attract Jews hungry for meaning and connection when the perception is that established Jewish community is nothing more than a glorified investment club promising networking opportunities.

The post After Madoff: Where Do We Go From Here? appeared first on Jewcy.

Recently, I received a link to a Daily Beast story (more of a wrenching sob-worthy saga, really) penned by Madoff victim Alexandra Penney, a New York artist and former editor of Self magazine, who describes her thoughts after learning she’d lost everything:

I began to think about my options: I’d have to sell the cottage in West Palm Beach immediately. I’d need to lay off Yolanda. I could cancel the newspaper subscriptions and read everything online. I only needed a cell phone. I’d have to stop taking taxis. And who could highlight my hair for almost no money? And how hard was it to give yourself a really good pedicure?

Then there is my jewelry. I’ve always collected nice watches and pearls. In the back of my mind I’d think, "Buy good stuff because if you’re ever a bag lady, you can sell it." It might have been a rationalization then-but here I am now: The nightmare may be coming true.

On an individual, person-by-person level, the only appropriate reaction to such hardship is one of compassion and sympathy. But Penney also talks about how she became involved with Madoff, which brings us to the larger socio-cultural level, which is repugnant.

I suddenly had a lot of money. I was in my late 40s, and I felt that I was just too old to have it in a plain old bank account. But I was a creative person, not a savvy investor, so I asked around and talked to my smartest friends with Harvard and Wharton MBAs. There appeared to be a secret society of Madoff investors. A friend who was older, wealthier, and more established somehow got me in. I’ve always had good luck, and I thought it was another stroke of good fortune to be invested with the legendary Bernard Madoff.

Every month I got detailed statements, and my money looked to be growing around 9 to 11 percent. It didn’t seem greedy because I knew people other people who were making 15 or 20 percent. I thought, "This is just a very smart investor."

The reaction to Penney’s tell-all has been venomous. And from the passage above, it’s not hard to understand why. In two paragraphs, Penney unwittingly serves up a buffet of nearly all the revered iconography of a culture that has thrived for the last twenty years: financiers as the new rock-star heroes, addiction to a pornogaphry of meritocratic emblems and pedigree (Wharton! Harvard!) as a sign of our lust for social power, exclusivity and the promise of "secret societies," and the no-guilt thrill of making more and more money.

The venom Penney is experiencing is nothing compared to people’s reaction to Alex Kucynski’s December New York Times Magazine story detailing her experience hiring another woman to bear her child. Kucynski’s marriage to a hedge-fund billionaire – the totem of this period’s bonfire of grotesqueries – provides the appropriate backdrop for the now-infamous photographs that accompanied the story. The powderkeg was an image of Ms. Kuczynski holding her new child surrounded by her black nanny on the lawn of her massive Southampton estate juxtaposed with photographs of the surrogate, barefoot and alone, on the rickety porch of her house in Pennsylvania.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank found Kuczynski’s story an example of just how "profoundly ugly" American society’s "massive inequality" had become. "At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close," he wrote. "The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them."

The post After Madoff: Blaming the Rich? appeared first on Jewcy.

When it comes to tickling and smacking specifically the Jewish world, I’ve recently discovered Gerardo Blumenkrantz, whose talents are reminscent of our own Eli Valley. He’s one to watch.

For a little taste of Mr. Blumenkrantz’s work, a light and sweet Brooklyn Chanukah card followed by a couple of dark jabs:

The post Jewcy: Cartoonist Gerardo Blumenkrantz appeared first on Jewcy.

Christian media outlets, as the New York Times reported a week ago, have enthusiastically responded to a book that condemns greed, promotes charity, and attempts to outline a holistic existential blueprint balancing financial imperatives with spiritual ambitions. The Times’ article implicitly begs the question as to why Jewcy would be the only Jewish outlet to feature the book and its authors.

For an answer to the Times’ question one doesn’t need to go further than the ADL’s Abe Foxman, an almost full-proof barometer of the most fear-driven and ignorant elements of the Jewish communal psyche. Foxman’s public refusal to endorse the book is but one point in a constellation of public and private interests that continually stifle any discussion around Jews and money.

It’s a shame. Brackman, a Judaic scholar and teacher who runs a consulting practice for business-people in search of career fulfillment, and Jaffe, a former Wall Street Journal staffer and entrepreneur within the renewable energy space, have written a book with an undeniably fascinating premise: that is, the statistically disproportionate success Jews achieve in business is not due to "smart" genes or a secret Yiddish cabal that controls the levers of power, but to the religion itself. Their book is an attempt to prove this hypothesis. 

Join us this whole week as Jewcy will devote its lead space to the posts of Brackman and Jaffe as they wrestle with Jews and money, not only from a perspective of altitude, to elaborate and often counter the explosive mythologies that have developed around this issue, but also at street-level, to show readers how Torah and the culture that it spawned established concrete ideas and lessons to help anyone – Jew or gentile – achieve greater success in business. 

Today’s posts:

Sam Jaffe on whether God has a place in the worlds of business and money

Levi Brackman on writing a How-To Guide on Becoming Rich Like the Jews

The post Is Torah the Solution to the Global Economic Crisis? appeared first on Jewcy.

Because there is great doubt if the new U.S. presidential administration, whether Republican or Democrat, will okay a military strike against Iran, Israel – which is itself in a deep political crisis – faces a huge dilemma. Should it launch a military strike, limited as it may be, on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to set its nuclear program back a few years and risk Iranian retribution; or should Israel accept that its era of nuclear monopoly in the Middle East has ended, and assume a new role as passive witness to a regional nuclear arms race

The post News That Makes an Israeli Strike on Iran More Likely appeared first on Jewcy.

 I get the crazy email forwards that make the rounds of the circuit I like to call Jews-over-40-who-are-secretly-afraid-of-black-people ("Fwd: Barack Obama’s Secret Muslim Origins Revealed!"). He, in turn, gets the crazy email forwards that make the rounds of the other circuit I like to call Jews-under-40-who-are-humorless-self-righteous-liberal-fascists. Those emails are almost always a litany of dry, bulleted policy points. His forwards are entertaining, if always a little scary. It does seem to prove out the observation that liberalism and comedy are incompatible. This morning Mike was understandably gushing over Sarah Palin’s speech. I was not.

From: Tahl Raz To: Mike Subject: Sarah Palin: Anti-Abortion, Anti-Environment, and. . . Anti-Semite?

I thought Palin was good last night. If she were running for PTA, I would vote for her. But she’s not. She’s running for second-in-command to the leader of the free world. And frankly, I don’t want my commanders to be ordinary or "just like me." Call me a snob but I want my leaders to be more Plato’s philosopher king than O’Reilly’s patriotic populist.  I think they probably should be worldly, schooled, extraordinarily intelligent, and full of integrity. Palin seems to have the last one in spades.  She’s a principled woman. But that’s another problem, Mike — her principles, her politics. She’s against abortion even in the case of incest or rape. She stinks on the environment. Like some ignorant hill-billy who "don’t trust no scientists," she’s on record as saying the climate crisis is overblown and has nothing to do with humans.  She supports the death penalty. She doesn’t think gay people should be allowed to get married and is for a constitutional amendment to deny health benefits to same-sex couples. She has no foreign policy positions on record. I think it’s important for a vice presidential candidate, who is one 72-year-old heart attack away from the presidency, to have thought as much about the world outside of the U.S. as they have about whether to bring oranges or cookies to her son’s hockey game. She also thinks creationism should be taught in schools. If you’re for such positions, I can understand your excitement over Palin. If you’re a real populist, what with its noble origins in the call for the empowerment of ordinary people in all areas of life and its fight of the "unnumbered throng" against corporations, moneyed interests and the like, than Palin is a real inspiration (though I’m thinking your Upper East Side address probably means you’ll have your throng membership revoked). I, on the other hand, don’t agree with her positions. And I’m not much for today’s political populism either, as its become more about values than class, and populist values have been appropriated and molded by the Christian right. That’s the important stuff. But I know how you love the ancillary theatrics, how you passionately reveled in the impropriety of Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright, and so I have a theatrical tid bit for you that Ben Smith at Politico.com recently dug up on America’s girl. When Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, turned its pulpit over on Aug. 17 to David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus, the vice presidential candidate apparently listened intently as Brickner declared terrorist murders of Jews represent God’s judgment against them for not embracing Christianity. According to a transcript of the sermon found on the church’s website: "Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It’s very real. When [Brickner’s son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can’t miss it." Oof! What’s next? Maybe McCain will be forced to balance his gentile populist everywoman VP with a Jewish version. Roseanne for Secretary of Defense? 

The post Sarah Palin: Anti-Abortion, Anti-Environment, and. . . Anti-Semite? appeared first on Jewcy.

Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired's blog on national security, and in my mind one of the best reporters on that beat, has a great post on how Israel's military connection to Georgia is fueling increasing discord between Israel and Russia:

The Russian military blasted Israel today for supplying weapons and training to its adversaries in Georgia.

"Israel armed the Georgian army," Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn told a Moscow press conference. Jerusalem provided Tblisi with "eight types of military vehicles, explosives, landmines and special explosives for the clearing minefields [sic]. "

"In 2007, Israeli experts trained Georgian commandos," he added. Georgia's Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia previously said that "Georgian corporals and sergeants train with Germans, alpine units and the navy work with French instructors, and special operations and urban warfare troops are taught by Israelis."

Tensions between Georgia and Russia ratcheted up the spring, after Russia and her allies in the breakaway region of Abkhazia shot down a number of Georgian spy drones. Those unmanned Hermes 450 reconnaissance planes were made by Israel's Elbit Systems.

The two countries have been doing military hardware deals for almost seven years, "following an initiative by Georgian citizens who immigrated to Israel and became businesspeople," Ynetnews notes. "The fact that Georgia's defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew contributed to this cooperation."

 Continue reading "How Israel Trained. . " 

And if you've got the Shachtman bug, check out his still very relevant Wired feature (published in November, '07), How Technology Almost Lost the War. One of the better pieces of analytical reporting on the war-planner's miscalculations, providing what amounts to a fascinating primer on the evolution of military strategy. 

The post How Israel Trained and Equipped Georgia’s Army appeared first on Jewcy.

Confronting the question of what value Judaism will offer its adherents and the world at large is too complicated, creating so much fear that questions start getting asked while the checkbooks remain closed.

Judaism's rasion d'etre surfaced in an online forum of that shadowy and exclusive Jewish non-profit, Reboot (it's really quite innovative and filled with fine folks). Everything Judaism seems to be about these days – intermarriage, antisemitism, who qualifies as Jewish, the silly political machinations of this or that denomination – is so uninspiring. Tell me, the questioner pleaded, that there will be something more.

What exactly that addition will be strikes at the heart of this transitional, and one hopes transformational, moment in Judaism's history; a moment encapsulated by the shift of the central question facing the non-Ortho Jewish community of the last 100+ years from how to why be Jewish.

I'm optimistic. From monotheism to civil rights to socialism, you'd be hard-pressed to identify a social movement that Jews weren't somehow involved in or directly responsible for, including the American evangelical movement of the last 20 years (see Jewcy's story, The Jewish Jihad for Jesus).

In those movements, in the advent of monotheism itself, I see the answer in Judaism's utopian imagination. We need to reignite that imagination – on a conceptual level, in the conversations we have communally, and on a practical level in how we live our lives. We need to apply that imagination from 30,000 feet – creating movements or getting behind existing ones — and then, on increasingly granular levels — to our country, our states, our neighborhoods, our homes, and in our selves.

The challenge will be to get beyond the organizational rot that has made many of our institutions useless; to get beyond the scarcity of effective leadership, religious or otherwise; and finally, get to a place where we can revive Judaism as a viable conceptual technology that provides the tools and language to make good on those utopic impulses.

The post What should be Judaism’s raison d’etre in the 21st century? appeared first on Jewcy.

We make a big case of saying that a primary principle of ours is that we're not partisan so much as polypartisan. In practice, that means we work toward integrating the views and opinions of unorthodox voices across the continuum (right, left, Gentile, Hindi, and so on). This sets us distinctly apart from the rest of Jewish media, as does the knowledge that such inclusion makes for the best conversation.

'Polypartisanship' doesn't mean that Jewcy won't take a stand, or that we don't work towards articulating a specific worldview and a shared set of values. The brand's origins stem from an incredibly polarizing shirt, "Shalom Motherfucker." "Shalom Motherfucker" was a passionate and strong announcement of a very particular and new kind of J ewish identity, one that repulsed a significant segment of the Jewish community. We're not a news organization. And we're not unbiased.

In our editorial objectives, we've stated that:

for all the prosperity America Jewry has enjoyed — its charities, its new temples, its countless organizations — the community is in a moment of transition where the outcome is far from certain. Much of the Jewish establishment is unsound at its roots, built on ugly ethnocentric, parochial values, mortified of change, riddled by hypocrisy, resistant to criticism and prone to empty self-congratulation, and completely out of touch with the needs and desires of a new generation of Jews. We've had enough; it's open season on these pretenders, phonies, and purveyors of intellectual, communal, and spiritual snake oil. At the same time, there is an emerging new community with its own legitimate heroes and heroines, its models and mentors. We'll set out to identify the values of these people who are creating change, leading lives, and building organizations that embody them.

And:

With a sense of imagination, we will undermine the distinctions and blur the boundaries between what is and isn't considered Jewish. In an effort to recreate a Jewish culture that feeds the soul, that enervating both intellectually and creatively, we need to transform the community from one based solely on ethnocentric, tribal, belonging….Choosing either modernity or religion is a false choice

The point is, we can take a stand on Obama because we're not just a media outlet (though it's worth noting that newspapers do endorse candidates). We're attempting to create a new community. We're attempting to create the largest, most intellectually engaging Web-based discussion about how to be a hyphenated American in the early 21st century, and more specifically, what it means to be Jewish in America now.

Jewcy's take on what it means to be Jewish in America will be tempered, and tested, by the alternative viewpoints we include in the discussion and by you, our readers, who will have the last word on what works for you.

Over the last year and a half, Jewcy's proudest editorial accomplishments have all articulated a well thought out bias that provoked both those who agreed with us, and those who didn't, into action. I'm talking about provocative topics like our confrontation of the ADL over their policy of genocide denial,our debate about the future of Jewish peoplehood with Jack Wertheimer, our editorial on why Israeli assholes should be a source of Jewish pride, our argument that writers should stop mining the Holocaust for material, and our debate between Sam Harris and Denis Prager, which arguably established the template for the rest of mainstream media on how to cover the growing Atheism phenomenon.

Action is the best case scenario (we want participants, not just readers). And hopefully, as we do better and better work, the aggregation of all those biases will constitute a somewhat unified, clear vision of the world that does more than ask what it means to be a Jew now, but actually provides a compelling and persuasive answer to a growing amalgam of Jews and other Americans disenfranchised and alienated by the institutions and leaders that once provided them with a sense of community and meaning.

As for Obama, our coverage has made it clear that he's the Jewcy New Jew candidate for a hundred different reasons, not least because of our reaction to the extraordinary racism, xenophobia, and dirty tricks employed by the Jewish establishment to discredit him.

So, yes, an Obama tee would alienate people in our audience. Precisely, and perfectly, in the same way our Shalom Motherfucker Tee did a couple years ago, and still does today.

We're interested in hearing your take. And if you have design suggestions, email our art director Tara Rice at tara@jewcy.com.

The post Why We’re Making An Obama T-Shirt appeared first on Jewcy.