The cartoonishly evil Sheldon Adelson is a Jewish conspiracy theory incarnated. Which is why, no matter how much I despise his politics, election season bankrolling, and ethically dubious gambling empire, I can’t shake a creeping sense of tribal defensiveness when he’s depicted at his worst.

Perhaps my mixed feelings result in a traditional Jewish desire to circle the wagons when faced with outside criticism. Adelson deserves derision, to be sure, but the critiques attract some ugly fellow-travelers spilling anti-Semitic bilge, using Adelson’s love of Israel to brand all of us Israel Firsters.

It’s also hard at times to take Adelson seriously—he seems so ethically bankrupt and misguided that he must have been constructed for our deliberate provocation, a troll out of central casting. After all, the largesse he’s showered on the GOP is almost comical in its lack of discrimination. That Adelson chose to support Newt Gingrich—fatuous, bloviating Newt Gingrich, he of the moon bases and Dynasty-like personal life—makes one wonder if this isn’t an elaborate performance. The uber-rich can’t hunt humans for sport (not yet), so perhaps this game of GOP monopoly is the next best thing.

But maybe I should step back and offer a primer for the uninitiated and some explanation for the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent wondering about a man who could drown me in his change purse.

An elderly, massively rich, transnational Jew who loudly declaims his love for Israel, Adelson is famous for donating tens of millions of dollars to GOP Super PACs—and for being unapologetic about a single thing he does. Adelson gave at least $105 million to Republican organizations in the 2012 election, and while nearly all of the candidates he supported lost, he recently said he plans to double his donations in 2016.

He can afford much more. Adelson’s fortune now clocks in around $21.5 billion, most of it from his gambling interests. His Las Vegas Sands Corporation operates a number of casinos in Vegas, Pennsylvania, and Singapore, but now makes a majority of its money in Macau, the biggest gambling market in the world. The Department of Justice is investigating whether Las Vegas Sands committed money-laundering, which is in addition to a DoJ bribery investigation and one by Macau authorities looking into possible violations of privacy laws. Working in one of the most corrupt industries in some of the world’s most corrupt cities brings risks, I suppose.

In Israel, Adelson is a great booster of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He owns Yisrael HaYom, a right-wing newspaper that, after Barack Obama won re-election, featured the headline, “The US Voted Socialism.” Jingoistic and freely distributed, Yisrael HaYom has become the country’s leading newspaper, devastating the business of competitor papers like Maariv and Ha’aretz (a poor media economy hasn’t helped).

So in sum: right wing, obscenely rich, an aggressive player in a business full of shady operators, mired in legal investigations, throws money around with the enthusiasm of a zayde treating his grandkids to lunch at the deli (except he deals in $10 million checks). If he visited the Upper West Side, one suspects he’d melt on arrival.

I thought a lot—too much—about Adelson during the election season, a numbingly long period that hasn’t so much ended as oozed into its next iteration. And as much as I found him a tempting object of fixation and a disruptive political force—one who, it should be noted, hasn’t been convicted of any crimes—a sour note of sympathy sometimes creeps in. For one thing, Adelson freely admits that it’s his money that makes him a popular GOP figure; speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he referred to his “pocket personality.” There’s a schoolyard sadness to this kind of relationship—a boyish desire to just be liked. But Adelson is rich and powerful and presumably has built up a thick carapace over the years. (His cash-for-loyalty model reminds me of a feudal lord.)

No, what furthers jumbles my view of Adelson are the cartoons of him, particularly when he’s depicted as the most powerful man in the world—this elderly, money-grasping, hook-nosed Jew, a sybaritic smile on his face as he plays with his presidential marionettes. A certain tribal insecurity sets in.

In truth, if anyone deserves the label “bad for the Jews,” it’s Adelson. By proclaiming Israel to be his core concern (that and those dastardly unions of low-paid casino employees), he defiantly refuses to assimilate. He’s vocal and proud about his political machinations in a way that even the Koch brothers, his closest counterparts, aren’t. In this sense, Adelson’s a post-modern figure (the strutting, un-neurotic Jew) who somehow attracts modernist-era prejudice (garish cartoons straight out of Nazi propaganda). I want to defend his right to act within the law, but I also want to take him aside and say, “Don’t you understand how difficult you make things for us?”

In considering Adelson, I’m also reminded of George Soros, another billionaire whose biography resembles that of an anti-Semitic caricature. I find Soros infinitely more respectable—his Open Society Institute does valuable work funding democracy-building initiatives around the world, and he supports socially useful efforts like drug policy reform. But Soros is also infamous for reaping huge profits by speculating on the British pound during a currency crisis and has an insider trading conviction (in France) on his record. He also seems more interested in using his vast wealth to game the political system to his advantage than lobbying for structural change.

Revisiting some of Soros’ past comments about George W. Bush—in 2004, he said he’d donate his whole fortune if it would ensure Bush’s defeat, which was “the central focus of [his] life”—an uncomfortable resemblance develops. It’s not quite symmetry—America’s bifurcated politics too often creates false equivalences—and in Soros’ position, I would’ve said something similar. Even so, I better understand the right-wing paranoia that has long surrounded Soros, with Glenn Beck’s vatic histrionics being the most infamous example.

I’m comfortable with neither Adelson nor Soros being the avatar of America’s broken campaign finance system and, by extension, its entire political system. Of course, as long as this system exists, there’ll be men like them. But there’s an undeniable way in which their Jewishness resurrects ugly stereotypes from earlier generations. In many ways, though, our political culture is equally retrograde—built upon stunning inequality, greased by untraceable cash, dependent on patronage. It just so happens that the most easily locatable villains, in recent years, are Jewish (the Kochs rarely speak to the media).

So is Adelson a great antagonist or just a projection of my (our) anxieties about how the culture has gone astray? Do I resent him because of his politics or because of the uncomfortable spotlight he directs on Jewish politics? I can’t quite answer the question, in part because Adelson is simply operating on a level—of influence, of cashflow—that I can’t comprehend. Instead, I think of Sholom Aleichem, who said that life was a game for the fool and a comedy for the rich. When I hear Adelson brag about how much money he’ll spend in 2016, I realize that he must be both.

(Image credit: ABC News)

Previously: Culture Kvetch: Retweet This War
Culture Kvetch: Women Aren’t Funny? Really?

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My favorite tweet on election night came from Alec Baldwin:

You know your party’s in trouble when you read this:A: The rape guy lost.B: Which one?

— ABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) November 7, 2012

It sort of sounds like a joke Tina Fey (or her alter ego Liz Lemon) would write, and while funny, it’s also very depressing. That there were actual candidates representing a major party on the ballot that thought of rape as anything other than a violent crime is astounding. But sadly, it’s been par for the course this year.

Though the most pressing issue for most voters was the economy, 2012 has felt like the year of “I Can’t Believe We’re Still Fighting For This,” which is basically like the buttery spread but with more misogyny. I was raised on the ideas that birth control will always be there for us and that rape is a brutal crime and violation of another person’s body (with no “silver lining”). This election, however, demonstrated that these ideas hadn’t achieved the widespread acceptance I (and many others) had previously assumed. It seemed that the jury was still out on “rights,” “equality,” and “science.” Because this jury closely resembled the one in Twelve Angry Men.

In the months leading up to the election, I found myself getting progressively angrier. I couldn’t believe that progressive women were still putting out fires I had long thought extinguished—whether it’s fighting for insurance coverage of contraception or access to an abortion even if a woman isn’t bleeding to death. Every time a male Republican politician opened his mouth to explain rape, pregnancy, and motherhood to women, I felt my blood pressure jump.

I’ve had more than my fair share of “mansplaining” in the two-plus decades I spent as an Orthodox Jew. (God, am I ever grateful for introduction of “mansplaining” to the lexicon. Would that I had known about it fifteen years ago while I was still a student in yeshiva high school.) In school and out, rabbis were gracious enough to explain the ritual restrictions placed on women, because they knew us better than we knew ourselves. They told us that females were more spiritual, elevating us to unearned spiritual heights in order to keep us out of public synagogue life. (You don’t need to do that cause you’re so much holier than men. What?) They told us we were all destined to become mothers and therefore didn’t need to bother ourselves with time-bound positive commandments cause we’d be caring for babies. Elaine, you gotta have a baby.

During the domestic policy debate, Mitt Romney did an excellent job mansplaining how he understands the needs of working women by repeatedly insisting that females who have families should be allowed to go home early to care for them. As if childcare is the only thing a career woman would be concerned about—and the only acceptable reason a woman, or anyone for that matter, would need to leave work early. (Also he said “if” a woman chooses to work at least three times during that debate as though not working was a realistic choice for most women.)

Well, for all the male politicians who claimed to know women better than we know ourselves, they were mostly resoundingly defeated on Tuesday. The rape apologists, from the vice presidential nominee (though he did keep his congressional seat) on down were voted out of office by the very constituency they professed to understand so well.

But it’s just not the defeat of some openly and dangerously misogynistic legislators. This election has also brought the number of women in the Senate to 20, an all-time high. Some of these women are particularly inspiring progressives, including Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay senator.

Increased female representation in Congress and other governing bodies is essential and not just because all women think the same about all issues. We’re not exactly a monolith. But the more women (and other genders and orientations) present in government and positions of power, the less “mansplaining” we’ll be subject to. I might vehemently disagree with some female elected officials, but at least I won’t have to deal with them explaining women like they’re a relationship expert for Cosmo or the authors of The Rules. (Unless one of these women happens to teach my high school’s “Family Living” class, which prepped us for marriage after graduation and stood in as our sex education. Learning about the different colors of menstrual blood is the same as learning about STIs, right?)

Does this mean that I won’t have another rage fit in a few weeks or months when some conservative politician or pundit or rabbi says something deeply sexist? I’m sure I will freak out. The basic conversation about women’s right and opportunities hasn’t shifted all that much despite the recent electoral success. Merely defeating odious men who have no compassion for rape victims is not really a breakthrough.

But despite my traditionally pessimistic nature, I’m feeling very optimistic right now. (I even re-watched will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video from 2008. God help me.) With more women in Congress (and with Obama likely to appoint new justices to the bench), I’m hopeful that one day in the not-so-distant future women’s reproductive rights no longer need to be explained and translated quite as much. Like all majority rights, I’d like them to become so accepted and normalized that they’re taken for granted, allowed to fade into the background and not be given much thought, just as men’s Viagra and vasectomies don’t get the full congressional treatment. (And certainly not by a panel of women to the exclusion of men.) They’re just there, like background noise, no mansplaining necessary.

(Image via Shutterstock)

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• A list of ways to help after Hurricane Sandy, no matter where you live. [Tablet]

• The Simpson’s diabolical CEO Mr. Burns endorsed Mitt Romney. Krusty the Clown would never have done that. [LA Times]

• “The Vienna Rite,” Judith Berkson’s new opera, follows Salomon Sulzer’s real-life creation of the modern synagogue. [NYT]

• Jewish actress Marissa Jarret Winokur, best known for her role as Tracy Turnblad in the Broadway production of Hairspray, lost 60 pounds—and says she’s still considered a chubby actress by Hollywood standards. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Jewish author Mitch Albom was the Mick Jagger of Southern New Jersey in the 1970s. [Tablet]

• Barbra Streisand explains why she’s voting for Obama:

The post Daily Jewce: Barbra’s Voting for Obama, Mitch Albom’s Moves Like Jagger appeared first on Jewcy.

But seriously, can they? The Jewish Council for Education and Research, or JCER, the Super PAC behind recent viral gems like Samuel L. Jackson’s “Wake the F*ck Up” and Sarah Silverman’s “Let My People Vote,” sure hopes so.

Jewcy editor Stephanie Butnick talked to Mik Moore and Ari Wallach, the two masterminds at JCER, about whether or not the videos, which are clearly popular, can make a difference come next Tuesday, election day:

But do video shares translate to anything other than laughs? “It’s hard to go into the election and see what caused what,” Moore said. But Wallach sees their campaigns as part of a larger shift in political advocacy. “Not everyone is going to become a door knocker for Obama,” he said. “The other 90 percent still want to engage and be part of the process.” The more strategy-focused of the pair, Wallach insisted that JCER’s videos provide an opportunity for those progressive Jews who aren’t going door to door. “Our videos are meant to spark conversation between people, to ask important questions,” he said. “There are ways of engaging Jews that aren’t all or nothing.”

Guess we’ll have to wait and see. Until then, here’s “Call Your Zeyde,” the latest from the folks at JCER:

Going Viral for Obama [Tablet Magazine] Previously on Jewcy: Watch Sarah Silverman’s New Election Video Calling Out Voter ID Laws
Sarah Silverman Wants to Scissor Sheldon Adelson for Obama
Update: 100 People Make ‘Schlep’ to Florida on Sarah Silverman’s Whim
Sarah Silverman Wants You to Schlep Your Fat Jewish Ass to Florida

The post Can Sarah Silverman and Samuel L. Jackson Get Obama Reelected? appeared first on Jewcy.

• Two of Amy Winehouse’s dresses—including her wedding dress, which was going to be auctioned for charity—were stolen from her home in London, alleges the Amy Winehouse Foundation. [Access Hollywood]

• Mensches are in short supply in the family depicted off-Broadway in Bad Jews. [NY Observer]

• We’re not sure how we should feel about this, but the ark replica from the upcoming Russell Crowe film Noah was damaged during Hurricane Sandy. [NY Daily News]

• Meet the Jews of Cuyahoga County, OH. [NYT]

• Elijah Wood is starring in a horror film … called Cooties. [Hollywood Reporter]

• What happened when Israeli photographer Noam Galai discovered one of his photographs was being used, without credit or reimbursement, all over the place.

The post Daily Jewce: Amy Winehouse’s Wedding Dress Stolen, Elijah Wood’s ‘Cooties’ appeared first on Jewcy.