For the true anti-Semite, Christmas came early this year.
The anti-Semite's new Santa is Bernard Madoff. The answer to
every Jew-hater's wish list. The Aryan Nation at its most delusional couldn't
have come up with anything to rival this:
The former chairman of Nasdaq turns out, also, to be
treasurer of the board of trustees at Yeshiva University and chairman of the
university's business school. Rich beyond human comprehension, he handles
fortunes for others, buying and selling in a trading empire that skirts
investment banks and other possible sources of regulation. He redefines
avarice, knowingly and personally bilking charities and retirees in the most
classic of con games.
Even better, for those obsessed with the idea that Jews control
finance, entertainment and the media, is the idea that Madoff's greed was
uncontrollable enough that he targeted fellow Jews, even Holocaust survivors,
some of them his own friends, as well as Israeli companies who insured Jews,
including Holocaust survivors.
The beauty part, for the anti-Semite: Madoff's machinations,
which could have been put to use for the sake of humanity, have directly harmed
Jewish welfare and charity institutions.
He has managed to harm contemporary Jewry in ways
anti-Semites could only dream about. He has sapped the Jewish Federation of
Greater Los Angeles of 11 percent of its endowment, or more than $6 million. In
the words of prominent educator Avraham Infeld, he "obliterated"
long-standing charitable foundations for Jewish causes in Israel, Eastern
Europe and North America.
Along the way, Madoff assured the story enormous play, not
only with the scale and the impudence of the scheme, but with his A+ roster of
celebrity victims, among them Stephen Spielberg, Elie Wiesel, and billionaire
real-estate tycoon, media mogul, commentator and former chairman of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Mort Zuckerman.
A senior U.S. senator is one of his client-marks, as well as present and past
owners of professional football and baseball teams.
Then there was the betrayal of old friends like
philanthropists Carl and Ruth Shapiro, megadonors to the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston, Brandeis University and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
"The scandal rippled far beyond the multimillion-dollar
private foundation run by Madoff that channeled money into hospitals and
theaters," Reuters reported, "and swept up charities large and small,
directly and indirectly, along with wealthy Jewish investors Madoff personally
advised."
Adding the element of clannishness, The New York Post was
more direct.
"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. He was a heymishe
Jewish guy. He had sweet old ladies and he let their children in," said a
Manhattan lawyer who invested with Madoff.
"This guy was dealing with all the rich Jews in Roslyn
and the rich Jews in Palm Beach. This was passed down from family member to
family member because he wouldn't open up to new people."
It remains to be seen how far we've come from the days of
the frank Jew-hate and genteel anti-Semitism of the likes of Henry Ford and F.
Scott Fitzgerald. We can only hope that the Meyer Wolfsheim Effect remains
dormant, the Great Gatsby heritage of "the man who fixed the 1919 World
Series."
" ... If I had thought of it at all, I would have
thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable
chain," Fitzgerald's narrator confides. "It never occurred to me that
one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people - with the
single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."
In the meanwhile, Bernard Madoff, you've made the days of
uncounted devout Jew-haters. This year, all they want for Christmas, is you.
Anti-Semitism