December 22, 2008--Self-Hating Jew
The public has been mesmerized by the unfolding news about Bernard Madoff and his collapsing $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Case in point--the attached story from today’s New York Times.
Thus far we have learned about how he structured it, who got duped, and how Federal regulators failed for decades to adequately follow through when questions were raised about his business practices.
And it is serving as the perfect metaphor for our greedy, gilded times.
Though much is still unknown, there is at least one clear theme—most of what transpired took place within what the New York Post called “the Jewish circuit.”
Since this is a delicate subject not much more than this has been said about the Jewishness of his life and fraudulent schemes. But he and his eager victims and how he operated are all too familiar to those of us who are Jewish and suffer from similar impulses derived from millennia of being marginalized and persecuted and worse.
Relatively little is known about Madoff except that he is of Russian descent, was born and raised in New York City’s outer boroughs, went to a downscale as opposed to and Ivy League college and law school (which he never completed), and made his first move in the world of Wall Street with $5,000 which he allegedly earned as a lifeguard on Long Island.
Nothing about him suggests that he was on a fast or inevitable track to success or that his people were in any way associated with anything resembling the Our Crowd of the City and thus had neither networks nor connections to lubricate his rise. Quite the opposite.
He was born in 1938 just as the Nazis were taking control of Poland and about to swing west and overrun France. His parents must have not too long before that escaped the pogroms of Russia and been all too familiar with the growing and virulent anti-Semitism that would soon find hideous expression in the Holocaust.
I assume that in their sons Bernard and Peter they saw the promise of a more secure and hopeful future and did all they could to protect them from the threats they must have seen looming all around them. I would not be surprised if the young Bernie’s mother hovered over him, making sure he was well fed and that he took his vitamins and for his digestion his daily tablespoon of castor oil and that she warned him not become involved with the bad boys who also grew up in their lower middle-class neighborhood. Not to get into fights, not to learn bad habits and bad language from them. To keep a low profile, go to school, and focus on making a future for himself that also involved developing a concern for those less fortunate than he, which included them as they aged and their health inevitably declined. As a good son he would be expected to provide for them in their old age.
In other words, it is easy to assume that Peter and Bernie were raised by a quintessential Jewish Mother.
There is though for many another side to this kind of childhood so well recounted by authors such as Philip Roth—the impulse to shrug off the constraints of this kind of nurturing, which to them feels smothering, and in compensation seek ways to transgress. This at times was overt and best exemplified by the cult of perverse admiration surrounding Jewish gangsters and at other times more hidden as young Jewish boys dreamed their lusty dreams of forbidden sex and plunder. And in some cases, I suspect as with Madoff, this eventually played out during the course of their lives.
In Madoff’s case, as best I understand it, his first moves were respectable. With his $5,000 of lifeguard money he launched Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, which quickly became successful. But soon thereafter, secretly, on another floor and office in the same building, he set in motion his ponzi scheme.
To it he initially attracted some of the Jewish elite from New York City, Long Island, and Palm Beach who knew him from his membership in exclusive country clubs, which ironically were founded by other Jews since most clubs at the time did not allow Jewish members, and from Jewish philanthropic functions.
He worked the Jewish Circuit and most of his “clients,” marks to use a term from the Confidence Game, were wealthy and prominent Jews and Jewish institutions and organizations: Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mort Zuckerman, Fred Wilpon, Elie Wiezel, Eliot Spitzer (yes, him, Client Number Seven), the Ramaz School, and Yeshiva University among hundreds of others.
It is not clear if Bernie, in his transgressive persona, meant to defraud his “friends,” which would fit one side of the Roth alter ego Portnoy-Zuckerman paradigm, or wanted to include them in a good and benevolent thing, which would fit the mama’s-boy side of his being. After all, some of his largest clients were a wide range of Jewish philanthropies, including some of his own—the UJA, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (no irony intended), various Israel charities, and lymphoma research.
The good Madoff included many members of his family seemingly in the legitimate side of his business—his brother, his two sons, a niece, and a nephew. But Old Testamentally, after confessing to his boys that he had been perpetrating a fraud, they were the ones who turned him in to the authorities.
Yet other aspects of Madoff’s life hint at the depth of his darker, self-hating self.
Start with the pronunciation of his name—Made-off rather than its more ethnic Mad-off. Not unlike the current generation of Lefraks who insist on being called the pseudo-French Le-Frak so as to distance themselves from any vestige of the fact that the family fortune was derived from the decidedly unglitzy Lefrak City apartment complex in Corona Queens.
And the fact that after calling his first firm Bernard Madoff Investment Securities most of the other companies he dealt with, in effect front organizations for his schemes, had decidedly goisher names that included Greenwich, Fairfield, Ascot, and the like.
Classic posturing, classic self-denial, classic responses to the embrace of the worst of one’s own ethnic stereotype.
Let’s hope that little Bernie’s mama is not longer around.
Thus far we have learned about how he structured it, who got duped, and how Federal regulators failed for decades to adequately follow through when questions were raised about his business practices.
And it is serving as the perfect metaphor for our greedy, gilded times.
Though much is still unknown, there is at least one clear theme—most of what transpired took place within what the New York Post called “the Jewish circuit.”
Since this is a delicate subject not much more than this has been said about the Jewishness of his life and fraudulent schemes. But he and his eager victims and how he operated are all too familiar to those of us who are Jewish and suffer from similar impulses derived from millennia of being marginalized and persecuted and worse.
Relatively little is known about Madoff except that he is of Russian descent, was born and raised in New York City’s outer boroughs, went to a downscale as opposed to and Ivy League college and law school (which he never completed), and made his first move in the world of Wall Street with $5,000 which he allegedly earned as a lifeguard on Long Island.
Nothing about him suggests that he was on a fast or inevitable track to success or that his people were in any way associated with anything resembling the Our Crowd of the City and thus had neither networks nor connections to lubricate his rise. Quite the opposite.
He was born in 1938 just as the Nazis were taking control of Poland and about to swing west and overrun France. His parents must have not too long before that escaped the pogroms of Russia and been all too familiar with the growing and virulent anti-Semitism that would soon find hideous expression in the Holocaust.
I assume that in their sons Bernard and Peter they saw the promise of a more secure and hopeful future and did all they could to protect them from the threats they must have seen looming all around them. I would not be surprised if the young Bernie’s mother hovered over him, making sure he was well fed and that he took his vitamins and for his digestion his daily tablespoon of castor oil and that she warned him not become involved with the bad boys who also grew up in their lower middle-class neighborhood. Not to get into fights, not to learn bad habits and bad language from them. To keep a low profile, go to school, and focus on making a future for himself that also involved developing a concern for those less fortunate than he, which included them as they aged and their health inevitably declined. As a good son he would be expected to provide for them in their old age.
In other words, it is easy to assume that Peter and Bernie were raised by a quintessential Jewish Mother.
There is though for many another side to this kind of childhood so well recounted by authors such as Philip Roth—the impulse to shrug off the constraints of this kind of nurturing, which to them feels smothering, and in compensation seek ways to transgress. This at times was overt and best exemplified by the cult of perverse admiration surrounding Jewish gangsters and at other times more hidden as young Jewish boys dreamed their lusty dreams of forbidden sex and plunder. And in some cases, I suspect as with Madoff, this eventually played out during the course of their lives.
In Madoff’s case, as best I understand it, his first moves were respectable. With his $5,000 of lifeguard money he launched Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, which quickly became successful. But soon thereafter, secretly, on another floor and office in the same building, he set in motion his ponzi scheme.
To it he initially attracted some of the Jewish elite from New York City, Long Island, and Palm Beach who knew him from his membership in exclusive country clubs, which ironically were founded by other Jews since most clubs at the time did not allow Jewish members, and from Jewish philanthropic functions.
He worked the Jewish Circuit and most of his “clients,” marks to use a term from the Confidence Game, were wealthy and prominent Jews and Jewish institutions and organizations: Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mort Zuckerman, Fred Wilpon, Elie Wiezel, Eliot Spitzer (yes, him, Client Number Seven), the Ramaz School, and Yeshiva University among hundreds of others.
It is not clear if Bernie, in his transgressive persona, meant to defraud his “friends,” which would fit one side of the Roth alter ego Portnoy-Zuckerman paradigm, or wanted to include them in a good and benevolent thing, which would fit the mama’s-boy side of his being. After all, some of his largest clients were a wide range of Jewish philanthropies, including some of his own—the UJA, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (no irony intended), various Israel charities, and lymphoma research.
The good Madoff included many members of his family seemingly in the legitimate side of his business—his brother, his two sons, a niece, and a nephew. But Old Testamentally, after confessing to his boys that he had been perpetrating a fraud, they were the ones who turned him in to the authorities.
Yet other aspects of Madoff’s life hint at the depth of his darker, self-hating self.
Start with the pronunciation of his name—Made-off rather than its more ethnic Mad-off. Not unlike the current generation of Lefraks who insist on being called the pseudo-French Le-Frak so as to distance themselves from any vestige of the fact that the family fortune was derived from the decidedly unglitzy Lefrak City apartment complex in Corona Queens.
And the fact that after calling his first firm Bernard Madoff Investment Securities most of the other companies he dealt with, in effect front organizations for his schemes, had decidedly goisher names that included Greenwich, Fairfield, Ascot, and the like.
Classic posturing, classic self-denial, classic responses to the embrace of the worst of one’s own ethnic stereotype.
Let’s hope that little Bernie’s mama is not longer around.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:57 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home