The Jewish love of mockery is famous. Given the chance, they mercilessly mock many things, particularly their enemies, the goyim. Toward that end, they also mock that which is sacred to goyim, such as Christianity and Christian holidays.

For example, one of Freud’s first students, Theodore Reik, found such aggressive themes and hostility toward non-Jews in Jewish humor. Here is an example:

Little Moritz sees an historical film showing the early persecutions of the Christians. During a Roman circus scene in which many Christians are thrown to the lions, Moritz breaks out in sobs and says to his mother: “Look at that poor little lion there, it has not got any Goy to eat!” Under the disguise of duty for the neglected beast is an old hatred and repressed cruelty toward Gentiles. It breaks through here, surprisingly, and reaches the emotional surface.

Brandeis University professor Steven Whitfield shares this relatively innocuous but revealing joke about Gentiles: “Why did God create goys?” “Somebody has to buy retail.”

Whitfield notes that Moritz Saphi “may well have been the first writer to perceive Jewish wit as ‘the defense and weapon of the oppressed,’ a way of getting revenge and a form of stress management.” As an example, he describes a pious Jew on his deathbed who announces that he wants to covert to Christianity. Shocked, his family asks why. “Better one of them should go than one of us.”

Cutting humor about Christianity is at times a staple of Jewish American humor, though Jews have been careful to gauge the reception such humor among Gentiles is likely to receive.  One comic who pushed these limits — further than many Jews of the era would have preferred — was Lenny Bruce. In a “funny variation on Jewish delusions and gentile nightmares,” Bruce joked about Presidential contender Barry Goldwater:

So dig. Goldwater lives in Arizona. He did a switch, man. He says, “Frig it. I’ll keep my name and I’ll change my religion.” That was his bit.

That’s weird, you know? Finally we have a man in — that’s going to be Goldwater’s last step: gets in, gets before the T.V. cameras for the acceptance speech, and he rips off the mask and you see the big nose and the semitic look and the spittle coming out and [Goldwater screaming vindictively] “YAHAHAHAAAAAA!  WE’LL BURN ALL THE CHURCHES!”

Bruce performed one of his most famous routines in a Chicago nightclub:

You and I know what a Jew is — One Who Killed Our Lord. I don’t know if we got much press on that in Illinois — we did this about two thousand years ago. . . . And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagans or not will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.

Alright, I’ll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: “We killed him . . . signed, Morty.” And a lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?” “I dunno . . . We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.”

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner share a milder story about Christ, “The Two Thousand Year-Old Man,” which begins:

You’re a little storekeeper in Nazareth, and I would like to know what happened the day when they crucified Christ on the mountain. Did you know Christ?

Yes; thin, thin, nervous — wore sandals. Came in the store, didn’t buy much, mainly water, wanted water — so I gave him water. Look! You have a business. You can’t always make a sale. So when people want water, you give them water. But one thing I have to admit.  He was a bit of a troublemaker. He beat up a couple of rovs on the steps of the shul — and you know you can’t do that! But they didn’t have to nail him up. They could have given him a severe lecture. I didn’t agree with such a severe punishment. Oh, such a terrible day! All that yelling and screaming up on the mountain. I tell you it was very upsetting. In fact, it got so bad, I had to close up the store.

The authors of a book on Jewish humor relate a joke that is a good summation of three Jewish themes relating to Gentiles: love of the shiksa [non-Jewish woman], social acceptance, and Gentile gullibility:

Three Jews who have recently converted to Christianity were having a drink together in a posh WASP country club. They started talking about the reasons for their conversions.

“I converted out of love,” said the first, and noticing the dubious looks on his friends’ faces, he continued: “Not for Christianity, mind you, but for a Christian girl. As you both know, my wife insisted that I convert.”

“And I,” said the second, “I converted in order to rise in the legal system. You probably know that my recent appointment as a federal judge may have had something to do with my new religion.”

The third man spoke up: “I converted because I think that the teachings of Christianity are superior to those of Judaism.”

“Are you kidding?” said the first man, spitting out his drink. “What do you take us for, a couple of goyim?”

This joke, Professor Whitfield writes, “reveals more than a hint of contempt toward a sister monotheism.  It slyly stabs at the mental inferiority ascribed to non-Jews, whose religious creed is too preposterous to be credible.”

This sentiment is in evidence in another Jewish joke he cites:

Three recent converts to Christianity were being tested.

“What is Easter?” the first man was asked.

“Easter is when Jesus was born.”

“Go back and study,” they said to him. “Next!”

“What is Easter?”

“Easter,” said the second man, “was when Jesus split the Red Sea.”

“I’m sorry,” he was told. “You’ll have to do some more studying. Next!”

“What is Easter?” the third man was asked.

“Easter,” he said tentatively, “was when Christ was reborn.”

“Excellent. Please continue.”

“Well,” the man said cautiously, “he was in the grave for three days. . . .”

“Very good; and then?”

“And then he came out, saw his shadow — and went back in!”

Finally, we arrive at what must be the most blatantly hostile and offensive portrayal of Christmas ever found in the mainstream American media. The creators of the animated series South Park concocted a Christmas character to replace Santa. This new character is “Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo,” an animated human feces. Mr. Hankey was introduced in a 1997 episode that showed the young Jewish boy Kyle brushing his teeth. Mr. Hankey, wearing a Santa hat, jumps out of the toilet bowl and sings a song about Santa and Christmas. The starkest comment in the scene comes when this animated feces writes “Noel” in excrement on the mirror. (This early version can be viewed here and a long discussion I did of the topic here.)

One hardly knows what to make, then, of recent examples where young Jews really push the envelope on exposing their own power or even crimes, all done with cutting humor.

For instance, the whole question of Jewish power in Hollywood and in TV is a touchy one. In his excellent study The Jews of Prime Time, David Zurawik asks, “What is ‘too Jewish’ yet not Jewish enough?”  Answer: “the strange history of Jewish characters on prime-time network television.” The incongruence to which he refers comes from the fact that nearly all the top TV executives and producers were Jewish, yet they were ambivalent about portraying their own high status or that of Jews in other important areas of American life. To illustrate, he begins with an interview with Jewish comedian Al Franken (now a Senator from Minnesota). Zurawik’s direct access to Franken and TV mogul Brandon Tartikoff provides an inside view of Jewish thinking on the “too Jewish” issue.

Tartikoff was concerned about a sketch on NBC Entertainment’s highly popular Saturday Night Live show, in which actor Tom Hanks plays a fictional emcee of a game show called “Jew/Not-a-Jew.” Alluding to Laverne & Shirley co-star Penny Marshall, Hanks asks, “Okay, panelists, Jew or not a Jew?” Tartikoff allowed that it was funny “but was it anti-Semitic?” After agonizing over it for a week, he gave the skit a green light, whereupon his phone rang off the hook on Sunday morning “with calls from colleagues, many of whom were Jewish.” The most troubling call, said Tartikoff, came from his mother. “I cannot believe it. I’m embarrassed to call you my son. This Jew/Not-a-Jew sketch was the most anti-Semitic thing I’ve ever seen.”

While Tartikoff may have erred in this instance, there were other times he pulled the plug because a sketch or show was “too Jewish.” Why did Tartikoff and other Jewish executives so often react this way? To Franken, it was because “there’s a feeling among some Jews that ‘Hey, let’s not get too out front in our Jewishness, because people might not like it.’ . . . ‘Hey, let’s not . . . draw fire. There’s a lot of us in this business, let’s not call attention to it, you know.’” This may well explain why so many Jewish network executives and TV programmers shaded or avoided any connection between Jewish identity and what characters said or did on so many shows. In fact, Tartikoff in 1991 nearly canceled Seinfeld after just one episode for being — surprise — “too Jewish.”

Why, then, did the heavily Jewish Saturday Night Live crew ever create — let alone run — a skit that makes fun of the prominent role Jews played in the financial meltdown? The skit spoofs Jews such as Herbert and Marion Sandler, Congressman Barney Frank, and even George Soros. Here’s the unadulterated original version.

Who, exactly, are they mocking? True, everyone in the skit is by definition a buffoon, from the character of President Bush to the Yuppie scum so totally self-absorbed in their own lives.

Is the real target, however, the gentile audience which comprises the victim class in all of these Jewish financial crimes? After all, Jews are no doubt highly cognizant of the fact that co-religionists such as Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and literally hundreds more Jews have been involved in these financial crimes.

Thus, is the joke here in part due to the assumption that the goyim watching the skit will not really understand who has done what and to whom? Further, isn’t there more than a suggestion that the skit really mocks goyim because even if they have figured out the ethnic identity of the bulk of these scammers, they still won’t or can’t do a damn thing?

Now comes an even more blatant example of this kind of humor. The problem is, I don’t really know who should get the credit. It’s a parody newscast from something called Onion News Network, an offshoot of the original newspaper of that name. At this point, I can’t say to what extent it or this particular skit is Jewish-influenced, so I’ll wait for further comment on that.

Still, the ADL has yet to issue a condemnation of the skit, something one would expect had non-Jews created a blatantly anti-Semitic image. Or maybe Nathan Rabin had a hand in it. He’s the head writer at the A.V. Club, the entertainment-oriented sister publication to The Onion. Again, I’d like to hear more about this from readers.

In any case, the title of the parody in question is “Overcome Stress By Visualizing It As A Greedy, Hook-Nosed Race Of Creatures.” Now to someone of my generation, “hook nosed” is an unambiguously negative reference to Jews. We know this because Jewish groups are constantly telling us NOT to think of Jews in this way. To an older generation, such images are right out of Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda magazine:

Have a look now at the image, first a frame from the video, then watch the short video itself.

Overcome Stress By Visualizing It As A Greedy, Hook-Nosed Race Of Creatures

I must say, the set is professional looking and faux-hosts “Jim Haggerty” and “Tracy Gill” are indistinguishable from the real thing.  Under the banner “STRESS RELIEF NOW!” we read about today’s guest: Expert Christine Eckard Shares Stress-Relief Exercises.

On a surface level, the humor succeeds because the hosts and guest are so typical of today’s superficial TV personalities and therapy experts. They’re also very goyish (the name Christine, for example, amplifies this).

As we go deeper, however, it gets more difficult to read. For starters, what they are showing is quite accurate. So how does using the truth perform as part of the humor? I don’t think the skit is making fun of Jews for their appearance or behavior. Rather, I think the writers are making fun, first, of their goy audience. “Look, we’re showing you explicitly what Jews are, yet you’re still too stupid to see it. What can’t we do and not get away with? There is no limit to your goyische kopf stupidity.”

More pointedly, however, I think the Jews behind the skit (again, I have to assume this because I can’t imagine non-Jews ever daring to create images such as these) are getting a thrill out of scaring and offending older Jews. It’s a very adolescent thing — to scandalize your parents. For a young Jew in America today, where physical safety has also been guaranteed and financial or job prospects never a true worry, what can beat the frisson of excitement associated with tweaking the noses of the goyim with some secrets about the tribe and in the process really upsetting mom, dad and uncle Bernie down at the country club in Miami?

For instance, our goyische “expert” tells her audience to

Imagine my money-related stress as the most disgusting terrifying creature I can think of. I’d like to imagine an ugly, greasy little creature with a hooked nose and oily black hair. I call him the Grabbler because he’s a greedy little monster who wants to grabble up all your money. Now think of all the problems. He invented interest rates like the ones on your credit card. He’s taking the jobs because Grabblers only hire their own kind.”

That’s hitting a little too close to home, isn’t it, messieurs Madoff, Blankfein and Soros?

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs

The next part clearly mocks goyim for our penchant of sticking our heads in the sand rather than face up to real problems. Better, it mocks us because rather than face our problems and deal with them, we resort to puerile tactics such as shifting our focus to happy, sappy things. Like, say, rather than dealing with the fact that a gang of Black punks has just knifed your neighbor’s 16-year-old, you light candles, hug each other and visualize a world filled with nothing but love. Goyim can be really, really stupid.

In the case of this video, our expert beseeches us to imagine yourself in a peaceful field full of lilies. Meanwhile, the banner at the bottom of the screen reinforces this: “Picture Yourself In A Quiet Space Free Of Grabblers, Such As A Field Or A Church.”

Get it?  A church is where goyim go.

The expert than asks us to expunge idea that grabblers are scheming or trying to rob you. The power of positive thinking. How utterly stupid. But of course a grabbler by nature schemes and tries to rob people. You’ve just imagined away any defense from these grabblers. I guess that’s funny to some people.

Therapist Christine moves next to “Blabblers,” “people who love to argue and complain in a nasal voices. They’re always lurking like rats.” Here’s the image:

The first thing that came to my mind when hearing the world “blabbler” was an image of Barbra Streisand who is affectionately known as “Babs.”

The mock interview ends with host Haggerty plugging guest Christine Eckard’s latest book. We then get a close-up of the title: The Solution: Kill all the Grabblers.

So our expert with the German-American sounding name, Christine Eckard, has genocide in her eyes, quite appropriate for anyone with German blood. Ha ha ha.

As I’ve said, there is a lot going on in this short video, and I’m far from reaching any conclusions.

A Google search turns up a few hints. A site called Subverted Nation, for one, argues that

to your conscious mind, it all sounds just as silly as it’s presented. The problem is that your subconscious mind only sees things in a literal sense. It does not have the ability to reason, and it is completely unable to use any logic whatsoever. So, when you are told to visualize these problems simply fading away, and replacing the imagery with something soft and sweet, this is exactly what your subconscious mind does.

It’s very subtle, but this kind of neuro-linguistic programming works extremely well, and your enemy is seasoned in this practice in ways many of you are unable to imagine. These are the kinds of techniques taught in the secret mystery schools to all of their kind. This is the stuff you often miss, that is playing a vital role in their battle for your mind, bodies, and souls.

This writer also argues that “90% of the people on planet Earth do not know who this enemy really is, they do not recognize the “grabbler” as the Jew, and they are utterly clueless as to how serious of an issue this really is.” I simply can’t agree with that. I refuse to believe that anything close to such a majority of fellow Americans are clueless about such stereotypes about Jews. Could it be possible?  Again, I’d like to hear from readers.

An acquaintance seemed to think it possible, though. He told me that “Most people watching the ‘Grabbler’ sketch don’t see it with our [Jew-wise] eyes. Indeed, one could come up with a PC, philo-Semitic reading of the spoof: it reveals that all gentiles have anti-Semitic fantasies and thus are in need of sensitivity re-education.” If he’s right about this reading, then we’re in deeper trouble than I had realized.

In closing, let me proffer one last hypothesis for the Jewish medium known as television for offering negative but fairly accurate depictions of Jews: Could these Jews be crying out to get caught? Naaaaawwww.

The leftist Mommy State now growing like a cancer in the U.S. wants to force all the boys and girls to share and get along. That may sort of work with five-year-olds, although not very well as any parent will attest, but it doesn’t work at all with adults.

These days, forcing the boys and girls to “share” and “get along” is called “multiculturalism.” It has never worked in the past, anywhere. It doesn’t work now, anywhere, and it won’t in the future, ever. There are many reasons why it doesn’t work, but I think the simplest is what I call the Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat.

Human nature is such that people instinctively gather into tribes. Every living creature, from ants to elephants, does it; why should people be any different?

This tribalism will never go away, so there is no way around accepting it, although many try not to. People want community, and that community involves being with people like them, or who they like. This has to be dealt with, which is something libertarians rarely do because of their obsession with “the individual.”

“Tribes” may be a primitive term, but it was applicable not only in the past but also certainly today. You might want to call them “ethnic groups” or “nations” instead. It doesn’t matter. They’re still tribes, whether they’re big or little, powerful or weak.

Problems arise because every tribe in the past has, with monotonous regularity, because of our inborn narcissism, grandiosely called itself “the People” or “the Humans.” Anyone outside the tribe was, obviously, devalued into being non-People and non-Human. That gives a foot in the door to murdering them.

All tribes today still consider themselves “the Humans,” even though they use different words. No country today is going to call itself “the United States of All Humans” or “The Union of All People, and Everyone Outside Isn’t,” but all countries will say God has chosen them and is on their side, which logically means the Other Guy is on the other tribe’s side. That’s saying the same thing as “We’re human, and you ain’t.”

During World War II, for example, the Russians spoke of “Holy Mother Russia,” which implied that God had chosen Russia. Their opponents, necessarily, had to have the Devil on theirs. We’re the People; you’re the Unpeople!

Their opponents, the Germans, did the same thing the Russians did, when they talked of the “Fatherland” (and today, for us, ominously, it’s the “Homeland”).

German soldiers used to march into battle with “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles, I suppose as a magic talisman to stop bullets. The question is: on whose side was God during the battle of Stalingrad, where both sides lost, combined, more soldiers than America has lost in all of its wars? The answer: neither.

It’s painfully obvious that a grandiose certainty that God is on your side does not equal God being on your side, even if Jerry Falwell believes it. Neither does it mean your tribe is human and the other is not, even if you think God told you that. A movie example that comes to mind: I remember watching a Japanese officer, in The Last Emperor, exclaim, “The Japanese are the only divine race!” Later, when Russian soldiers closed in on him, he scrambled his brains with a pistol bullet. Self-proclaimed divinity always has a price, never a good one.

People in the U.S., cultural differences aside, are in some essential ways no different than people anywhere else. All people have a shared human nature, and in some ways it’s not such a good one.

People say, “God bless America.” It’s never, God bless another country; it’s always, God bless America. God should keep America’s soldiers safe, but never any other country’s. Our soldiers should be saved by God; their soldiers should die. Is that any different than those German soldiers with their talismans? Why should God bless America if America does not follow God’s laws? It should be so simply because we, in our magical thinking, believe it should be so?

It’s all pretty grandiose. It’s assuming Americans are the Chosen, just as every tribe in the past has thought it was the Chosen. They weren’t, and neither are we. Other tribes are full of humans, even if we pretend they aren’t and act as if their deaths mean nothing and are just the “collateral damage” that always happens in war.

The biggest problem, though, is that every tribe projects its problems onto the outsider. There are, not surprisingly, two archetypes in literature called the Scapegoat and the Outsider. Often — maybe always — they are the one and the same.

The most famous, or maybe infamous, story about the Outsider and the Scapegoat is Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, which everyone in the recent past had to read in middle school. Every year, someone was chosen as a scapegoat, which made them an outsider to be stoned to death. It was an example of scapegoating always leading to human sacrifice, of projecting “badness” on someone and then killing them, in order to “save” the tribe.

The human sacrifice in Jackson’s story is also a fertility rite, which scapegoating and sacrifice always are: once we kill them, our culture will be renewed and reborn, since the “evil ones” will have been eradicated. This is why to the Greeks Dionysius was a fertility god, and why the Aztecs ripped the hearts out of hundreds of thousands of people. They thought it made their crops grow.

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The well-known novel that best illustrates the Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat (and fertility rites) is that psychopathology textbook known as Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s grandiose and god-like heroes withdraw into their retreat and, being perfect, have to project their unacknowledged flaws onto the Outsiders and Scapegoats — her “looters” and “parasites.”

These Outsiders/Scapegoats then collapse into a Dionysian frenzy of self-destruction, and after it’s over, Rand’s heroes come out into a plowed-under world where they can plant their seeds of reason, selfishness and capitalism.

Since every tribe grandiosely considers itself “good,” all “evil” must be projected elsewhere. If one tribe considers itself human and good and chosen by God, then the other tribe, the outsider, must necessarily be evil, sub-human, and of the Devil.

Maybe we don’t consciously believe it, but emotionally we do. It’s why many people don’t care — indeed sometimes even cheer — if foreigners die in wars. Then we act shocked when foreigners cheer when we die, the way some cheered about 9-11. How dare they act like us! Since we are good, they must be evil!

It was horrible that nearly 3000 innocent people were murdered on 9-11, but was it was a good thing the federal government murdered all those people in Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq? But since they were outside our tribe, they don’t really count, and sacrificing and killing them doesn’t matter because it was to “liberate” them.

Today in the U.S. you can see our tribe projecting certain of its problems on the outsider. The U.S. attacked Iraq twice when it didn’t attack us, then blockaded the country and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It then placed troops in Saudi Arabia, and supported Israel uncritically no matter what it did. We did this because we are “good,” at least in our tribe’s collective groupthink mind, if not in the mind of other tribes.

And since scapegoating and human sacrifice are always fertility rites, bombing and destroying other countries is of course supposed to make them be reborn and “grow” right — usually by trying to seed them with democracy and feminism.

When resentment, envy, anger and hate sent blowback our way on 9-11, we denied the bad things we had done to others, and instead claimed our attackers had to be “evil,” and attacked us because we are “good.” Maybe things are that simple in the childish, Black-and-White fantasy of Bizarro World, but certainly not in reality.

It’s bad enough to have different tribes in different countries get into wars, but when tribes in the same country fight, that is a prescription for national suicide. And multiculturalism, if it is anything, is several ethnically-different tribes warring over the same land and for political power, which is power over others. It is therefore an attempt at national suicide.

Each tribe is going to grandiosely call itself “the Humans” in some form, then deny its flaws and instead project them onto the devalued other, which it will want to remove or murder. Each tribe will also try to use other tribes as fertilizer, to make their own tribe and its culture grow and prosper.

Every empire in the past has fallen not because of attacks from the outside, but because of attacks from the inside. Once the barbarians are inside the gate it’s harder to remove them. They may claim they’re not barbarians, but apparently the Greek story of the Trojan Horse isn’t taught to Americans in school anymore.

Some examples of tribal warfare? How about “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan,” whose motto is “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” It translates as, “Everything for the race. Everything outside the race, nothing.” That’s clearly grandiose, and fits exactly the idea of one tribe denying its flaws and projecting them onto a devalued other. It is projection/scapegoating leading to human sacrifice. They’re the cause of our problems, not us. Remove them or rub them out!

Another example in the U.S.? In the original teachings of the Nation of Islam (related to Islam in name only) Blacks are gods, the original men, and Whites are devils. Guess who’s completely to blame for the problems of the former? You’ve got it. It’s just another example of “Since we are good, you must be evil and the cause of our problems, so we must eradicate you.” Denial and projection. Lies (to oneself and to others) followed by scapegoating and human sacrifice.

People will always define themselves not just as individuals but as part of family, nation, religion. If large enough different groups of people try to share the same land and vie for political power, each is going to define itself as good, the others as bad, then deny its own flaws and instead project their problems on those defined as outsiders. Leftists who support multiculturalism don’t merely misunderstand human nature but instead don’t understand it at all, not when they believe several large tribes can co-exist peacefully on the same land.

The only way that different tribes can occupy the same land is if one is tribe is 95% of the population, and the other tribe is five percent. But four tribes that are each one-fourth of the population – say, Black, White, Yellow and Brown? There has never been a society in the history of the world that has survived such an attempt.

The problem is made far worse when the State gets involved, because each group will fight for political power to protect itself and hurt the other. Each group will try to capture the State to use for its own purposes, which involves removing the others, or, ultimately, killing them.

State-sponsored “multiculturalism,” a misguided attempt to force different tribes to get along on the same land, will, as it always does when the State gets involved, have the exact opposite effect: it will make them fight even more, to the detriment of those involved, and, ultimately, the nation. Not only are the boys and girls not going to share and get along, they’re going to get into constant vicious, bloody, murderous brawls.

Bob Wallace (email him) has a degree in Mass Communications and is a former newspaper reporter and editor. He writes occasionally about economics and cultural issues.

Too Good to Be True

Erin V. Arvedlund

New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2009

Betrayal

Andrew Kirtzman

New York, NY: Harper, 2009

No One Would Listen

Harry Markopolos

New York: Wiley, 2010

Madoff With The Money

Jerry Oppenheimer

New York: Wiley 2009

The Madoff Chronicles

Brian Ross

New York, NY: Hyperion, 2009

Catastrophe

Deborah and Gerald Strober

Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2009

Madoff’s Other Secret

Sheryl Weinstein

New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2009

Reviewed by John Graham and Kevin MacDonald

[Note: A print version of this article will appear in the Summer, 2010 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Click here for a pdf version of this article.]

Abstract: Initially Bernard Madoff’s record-breaking $65 billion Ponzi scheme was reported in terms of how much harm he had done fellow Jews. Subsequently discussion focused on the ineptitude of the Securities and Exchange Commission in not detecting and shutting down this fraud much earlier.

We contend here that the now extensive literature reveals that the Madoff phenomenon was in fact a massive shift of resources from non-Jews to Jews. Prime beneficiaries extended beyond the Madoff family to a number of other members of the Jewish elite. The scam utilized familiar Jewish social traits to reach the size it did. Far from being protected by SEC ineptitude, it was Madoff’s perceived position as part of the Jewish Establishment that put him beyond the law — by intimidating the SEC. This was accentuated by traditional Jewish inhibitions on reporting Jewish criminality. We suggest that Madoff’s self-destructive as well as socially damaging behavior stemmed ultimately from the conditionality inherent in the Jewish attitude to society at large — and is not unique to him.

*   *   *

In December 2008 the astonishing news broke of Bernard Madoff’s immense Ponzi scheme — the biggest in history, apparently, with a notional value approaching $65 Billion. This was very rapidly followed by loud complaints by prominent Jewish leaders such as the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxmanand the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris, to the effect that the media coverage of this scandal was facilitating anti-Semitism by repeatedly noting that Madoff is Jewish.

To the uninvolved observer, these claims appeared paranoid. The news channels were choked with pitiful and chilling stories of elderly Jews discovering they had been flung into destitution by Madoff, and of Jewish Charities reeling from the blows he had struck them. The well-known among the victims — such as Stephen Spielberg, Mort Zuckerman, and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg’s family — seemed invariably Jewish. Initially the presence of non-Jewish victims was not very apparent. The obvious question was: How could someone do this to his own people? That question could not be asked without acknowledging Madoff’s ethnicity.

For most, probably, the conclusion will have been that this event resembled the depressing procession of stories about clergymen of every creed being involved in pedophilia. Society generates these positions involving trust and power, and from time to time they get occupied by perverts who abuse them.

Subsequently, much fascinating detail has come to light, including the seven books cited above. We suggest here that the Madoff affair does in fact offer important lessons as to the nature of the Jewish community, its relationship with the non-Jewish community, and its influence on Public Policy.

The Madoff facts need to be established.

• Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities right out of Hofstra College (later University), in November 1960. He focused on dealing in the shares of small firms, not listed on any Exchange — “Over-the-Counter” or “Pink Sheet” stocks (the latter from the color of the daily publication which listed the broker-dealers willing to quote prices in particular equities over the phone). In 1971 a computerized communications network was established which made the quoted prices easily visible (NASDAQ). This evolved through several phases to the point at which it is now arguably as efficient a marketplace as any. Bernard Madoff was in the thick of this development, serving on many industry bodies including as Chairman of NASDAQ itself. In the late 70s Madoff began offering competitive markets in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (which he never joined). By 1989 Arvedlund (45) reports Madoff’s firm was handing 5% of the NYSE volume (others say it reached as high as 10% [Weinstein, 166]). In 2002 there was talk of it being worth $1 billion (Kirtzman, 131).
• This firm was a genuine business and a considerable technological achievement. There seems to be no evidence that the many non-family professionals employed there ever had any inkling that the investment side of the business was a fraud. It also provided perfect cover.
• As soon as he was able, Madoff began taking in “discretionary” accounts from the public. These are accounts where the broker is authorized to act without first consulting the client. Initially, funds were attracted by promising high returns, but in the later years the pitch was fairly modest returns with a very high degree of confidence (“low volatility” — the “Jewish T Bill”). From raising money among New York-area relatives and friends, he moved on to using agents to tap the wealthy across the country. Ultimately, over the last two decades, Madoff was able to use some of the professional fund-allocating operations which have developed with the hedge fund boom (“Funds of Funds”). Unlike the previous contributors, many of the owners of this money were not American and not Jewish.
• This operation may well have been a fraud right from the start. There is no evidence of trades for the investors for many years. The long number of years involved and the power of compounding means that many of the accounts were bloated with fictitious profits. Some suggest that something around $20 Billion may have been paid in over the years, of which a good deal was paid out, so that most of the $65 Billion investors thought they had at the end was fantasy.
• Madoff’s claimed returns were intrinsically implausible, and in later years numerous investment professionals believed that his activities were fraudulent. This point of view was repeatedly and forcefully brought to the attention of the SEC, in particular by a Boston-based analyst, Harry Markopolos.  In a fascinating response, in 2006 the agency finally launched an investigation which scrupulously ignored the investment operation and in November 2007 “found no evidence of fraud” (Arvedlund, 217). Why this absurdity happened is the Public Policy question addressed in this essay.

Transferring Wealth from Non-Jews to Jews

From a sociobiological point of view, the first thing to grasp about the Madoff phenomenon is that it was a large scale transfer of wealth from non-Jews to Jews. This is because of the shift in the Ponzi scheme funding basis at the beginning of the 1990s. The big professional fund raisers (and consequently the biggest creditors) entered then or later: Fairfield-Greenwich ($7.9B), Banco Santander ($3B), Banco Medici ($2.1B), Access International ($1.4B), Tremont/Rye/Kingate ($5.8B) and others. Arvedlund (142) reports these outfits in aggregate were owed some $20 Billion; because of their comparatively late entry and accelerating contributions, a much higher proportion of this loss would represent real cash invested. In addition, the $659 million the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) has paid out to Madoff account owners should be included — the SIPC is funded by its member broker-dealers, and so ultimately by its customers.

Fairfield-Greenwich and Access International were focused on the ultra wealthy jet-set/titled European crowd, but most of the other European conduits accessed the general European public. Some Jewish money may have been added via Bank Medici, the Vienna-based vehicle established by one-time US resident and Orthodox Jewess Sonja Kohn, who is rumored to have brought in some Russian Oligarchs (as a result of which she is now in hiding). But even here, via complex arrangements with various banks, the main contributions came from the general public in Europe.

Markopolos asserts that the European losses were “substantially more than losses in the United States” (114). His book has among its illustrations a charming two-page map detailing the location of the 255 foreign funds of funds in over 40 countries who were Madoffed.

This has effectively put the early investors with Madoff in a strange position. Over the past 20 years, as Kirtzman (140) notes: “Hundreds of Bernie Madoff’s investors were retiring early, moving into bigger houses, on the money they made” Whatever else Madoff may have thought about his large entourage of elderly early small investors and their descendents, as Kirtzman says, he couldtake the view that “he was taking care of all of them in their old age” (251).

It is simply a fact that many people lived very well for many years from the proceeds of Madoff’s depredations.

This is not to suggest that they had the faintest idea their life styles were in any sense illegitimate and were rooted in fraud. Nor does it mitigate the appalling shock they went through in late 2008, discovering that their Guardian Angel had devoured them. And while the Trustee may have legal logic behind his stance that no recoveries can be obtained in the many cases (reported as over 83% of the direct Madoff Securities accounts) where cash withdrawals exceed the amount paid in, had their money been honestly invested, most could have expected substantial gains, given the securities markets of the last generation. So they have enormous opportunity losses and very real grievances.

But, nevertheless, they were beneficiaries too.

The Jewish Ethnic Nexus That Enabled Madoff’s Fraud

Several writers have discussed the arresting idea that the genetic mutations which supply Ashkenazi Jews with their high intelligence are also those which cause the ravaging of this group with cruel and lethal ailments such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s disease (see here, here, and here). Bernard Madoff was like a Tay-Sachs occurrence within the Jewish community: The characteristics which make them such formidable competitors for resources also rendered them pathetically vulnerable to a Madoff.

Most salient of these was the practice among this otherwise skeptical and independent community to coalesce around rabbinical/guru figures, who are treated virtually as gods, revered, unquestioned, and fiercely defended. Obvious examples are found to this day among the Hasidim. Kevin MacDonald has demonstrated in The Culture of Critique how this pattern imposed itself on Western intellectual life, as seen in the rise of Freudianism, Boasian Anthropology, and the Frankfort School, among others, all equipped with their prophet. “Flying wedge” tactics and conscious intra-group loyalty has made this characteristic exceptionally valuable in seizing control of professional entities such as university departments from the disorganized and atomistic non-Jews.

To many, Madoff was such a deity. “He was like a God” Kirtzman quotes professional Holocaust victim Elie Wiesel saying of Madoff (96). (Wiesel lost most of his savings and his foundation’s endowment to Madoff.) “There was a myth that he created around him. That everything was so special, so unique”(Kirtzman, 96). Oppenheimer reports a member of an extended family long involved with and heavily damaged by Madoff saying that they “regarded Bernie like a messiah. He was spoken of as if godlike” (93). The accounts of the stir he created attending Jewish gatherings are almost comic: “He was received like visiting royalty, mysterious and unapproachable” (Kirtzman, 89).

The consequence was an extremely useful suspension of disbelief.

Infatuations of this type are rare among whites generally, and usually mild and fleeting. This makes them more difficult to organize — but less vulnerable to a Madoff.

A consequence of this ethnocentric infatuation was that would-be whistle-blowers were subject to savage attack, if they were not simply tuned out. Laura Goldman, an investment advisor now resident in Israel, had come to negative conclusions about Madoff and liquidated her own exposure to him. The Strobers relate how when in 2001 both Barrons and the trade publication MAR/Hedgepublished stories (here and here) insinuating Madoff’s returns were incredible, she mailed copies to contacts in Palm Beach (where the ultra-wealthy Jewish community had become a major funding source for Madoff): “They said that the publications were anti-Semitic — that Jews have more faith in Bernie Madoff than they do in God” (81).

In her own book, the author of the Barrons article (Arvedlund) reports that as a result of her efforts Goldman “was promptly accused of being anti-Semitic by Palm Beach residents… “And I live in Israel!” she noted” (252). This response is a factor to remember when we consider the behavior of the SEC. (The author of the MAR/Hedge article, Michael Ocrant, is Jewish.)

Until quite late in the history of his fraud, Madoff relied on drawing in funds from (wealthier and wealthier) individuals. Mechanically, this was a remarkable achievement. A value in the Madoff literature is the documentation it supplies on the characteristic group loyalty from which Madoff benefitted. Kirtzman notes:

He was a member of the tribe. Jews of his generation were brought up to think of other Jews as extended family members, with a shared responsibility to look out for one another. They felt more comfortable going to Jewish doctors, Jewish lawyers, Jewish accountants. Madoff became known as “the Jewish T-bill.” (73–74)

Kirtzman quotes from a contemporary from Laurelton, Madoff’s home district of Queens:

The Jewish world was very tight and highly networked. … Everything was done through “the phone call”. My brother wanted to go into retailing, so a call was made to Mr. Temona on the board of Lerners. I wanted to transfer to NYU and live in one dorm: a call was made to Professor Levine. (74)

Of course, from the point of view of a non-Jew, this kind of cohesive efficiency makes the Jews lethal competitors in the zero-sum struggle for resources. In the case of Madoff, however, the efficiency turned out to enable the fraud to spread more widely and to be more damaging to the Jewish community itself.

Other characteristics of his victims tended to amplify the Madoff damage. As a broker, rather than a hedge fund, he supplied his clients with pages and pages of transaction history — all fabricated — rather than an overview. Over the years, thousands of hours were evidently sunk by his clients into going through these statements looking for errors — Sheryl Weinstein, the CFO of Hadassah had an assistant committed to the task (Weinstein, 97). A good deal of fanatical seriousness about the investments was thus sublimated. The modest, low double-digit but extremely reliable returns offered in later years were accurately pitched to rational and careful investors. And, sadly, it has to be said that the attitude many brought to middle age from their upbringing increased their vulnerability. As Kirtzman’s Laurelton informant said of her and Madoff’s hometown, “The more money, the better your things…The more money, the more esteem. The more money, the more people looked up to you” (27) — a revealing comment on the importance of financial success within the Jewish community. Like Weinstein, many long-standing Madoff clients refinanced their homes in the easy credit conditions of recent years to maximize their Madoff investments. Many apparently had virtually all their liquidity with Madoff — hence the tales of desperate sales of jewelry in Palm Beach after the arrest.

This passionate intensity about money has worked well historically — but in the Madoff situation, it led to utter disaster.

So did lack of scruple. Kirtzman recounts how a Palm Beach Madoff client, dubious about Madoff’s success, asked his accountant in the early 90s to investigate. The accountant concluded that Madoff was most likely doing something fraudulent, probably front-running (trading ahead of client orders). The client’s response: “I don’t want to hear anything about it” (Kirtzman, 75–77). Clearly, many Madoff accounts thought they were safely benefitting from illegal activity — and did not care.

Jewish networking was also crucial, perhaps ironically, to the Madoff financial Black Hole spreading beyond the Jewish community. Fairfield-Greenwich Group, the biggest funds allocator caught by the implosion, is generally presented as haute WASP because of founder Walter Noel’s social image: but FGG was brought to Madoff by Noel’s partner Jeffrey Tucker, who is Jewish. Arvedlund suggests Tucker met Madoff via his in-laws the Schneiders of Allentown, Pennsylvania, wealthy garment manufacturers (114). Similarly, she says, access to the US annuity product and general hedge fund market came through Tremont Capital Management and its affiliate Rye Investment Management, run by Sandra Manzke and Bob Schulman (83–84). Manzke had other similar interests, one of which, Kingate Global, brought in wealthy Italian families. And also in Europe, besides Sonja Kohn of the imaginatively-named “Bank Medici” already mentioned (Arvedlund, 129–137), there was Union Bancaire Privee and the Safra Banking group run by Edgar de Picciotto and Edmond Safra. Arvedlund says:

De Picciotto and Safra shared similar backgrounds. They were both Sephardic Jews…and…more than just bankers — they were gatekeepers to billions…Once these men had signed off on someone, … the rest of the Swiss banking world would line up to invest, practically without question. (139–140)

What Kirtzman sneeringly describes as “the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses” (254) who invested with Madoff through FFG and Access International (the founder of which, Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, actually was a French nobleman) and the other members of the “Swiss banking world” who trusted Madoff’s prestigious endorsements were in fact following the old European tradition of the court Jew — “a general financial confidant of a territorial sovereign” (see here, p. 102; see also here). For centuries it was customary for aristocratic landowners, particularly in Eastern Europe, to delegate the task of managing the businesses operations on their estates to Jews, sometimes using the same families for generations. Similarly, throughout German-speaking areas, court Jews typically managed the financial affairs of the nobility, provisioned the military, arranged for loans through Jewish banking families and collected revenues in the form of taxes. Using a Madoff to manage their interests on America’s financial steppes and interface with the barbarous Americans was quite consistent with the long-standing behavior pattern of this social group.

Arvedlund notes that the European capital FGG attracted was of a type known in the hedge fund world as “dumb money” because of its herding habits (117). Of all the feeder fund leaders involved with Madoff, only Magnon de la Villehuchet has committed suicide. Bertrand de la Villehuchet commented, “Madoff wouldn’t understand the reaction of my brother. It was…honor, a word that’s not in his vocabulary” (Ross, 160–161).

Another pattern noted by MacDonald in his study of Jewish social organization is a structural tendency towards the enrichment of its elite. Wealth tended to flow upward within the Jewish community to the upper, scholarly, rabbinical class.While these groupings can be plausibly argued to promote the overall interests of the Jewish community as a whole, they also involve heavy transfers of resources within the community from the mass of Jews to a self-selected few — the Rabbinate, in the case of traditional society.

This was dramatically so in the case of the Madoff operation. Health Care entrepreneur Jeffrey Picower holds the prize: Arvedlund reports he and his family over many years withdrew “at least” $5.1 billion of phantom profits as part of a total of $6.7 billion of disbursements (237) (more recently the Madoff Trustee has claimed $7.2 billion). According to Oppenheimer, West Coast “money manager” Stanley Chais and his family are accused by the SEC of pulling out $500 million more than they ever put into Madoff themselves (77–78). (Chais did not tell his clients he was simply placing their money — some $1 billion — with Madoff.) Both Picower and Chais notionally had access to these funds partly because of extraordinarily high un-Madoff-like returns which conveniently appeared in their personal accounts. They also apparently were able to use their Madoff accounts to generate fake tax losses when needed.

The late Norman F. Levy, a New York real estate mogul who died in 1995, is a particularly colorful case. A long time intimate of Madoff’s, he was, according to Kirtzman for some prolonged time getting a daily visit from a Madoff driver carrying a check “usually for millions of dollars. Every now and then they’d be for tens of millions.” What kind of legitimate transaction necessitated this is hard to see. As Kirtzman says, “it’s…plausible that Bernie was using his friend’s bank account to park stolen money” (126–127). (In January, 2010 Levy’s daughters agreed to pay $220 Million to the Madoff liquidator to settle his claims against “the family and its entities.”)

On October 25, 2009 Jeffrey Picower drowned in his Florida swimming pool after a heart attack. This is eerily similar to the 1991 drowning death of Robert Maxwell, the Ruthenian-born Jew and UK publishing entrepreneur, who was shortly afterwards discovered to have looted the pension funds of his public companies of hundreds of millions of pounds.² As the result of his death, the investigation into Picower’s activities is likely to be crippled. (Recent reports suggest the Picower estate is getting ready to pay the Madoff trustee $2 billion or more to settle.)

Whether Ezra Merkin, the long-time President of the socially elite Fifth Avenue Synagogue, was a member of this small circle of massive Madoff beneficiaries is no doubt a question of considerable interest to his fellow congregants. They are reported to have $2B of exposure to Madoff, much of it through Merkin’s hedge funds. Kirtzman reports that Merkin had $2.4B of his client’s money with Madoff — including that of 30 Jewish charities — but “Of the $470 million in fees he earned from Madoff, Merkin allegedly invested just $9 million back” (Kirtzman, 98).

If not an “insider,” Merkin would belong to a group that immediately came under fire in the aftermath of the collapse — the fundraisers. Besides the professional operations mentioned previously, these included a number of individuals like Robert Jaffe of Palm Beach and the late “Mike” Engler of Minneapolis-St Paul who in Kirtzman’s words

were usually prominent members of the Jewish community, working out of exclusive country clubs. While investors thought they were just friends…they were actually getting a percentage of the business. (89)

Because the apparent inside beneficiaries generally controlled substantial charities which reported large losses to Madoff, they initially escaped much of the opprobrium directed at the money raisers. Possibly the concept of a rogue being a large charitable donor is counterintuitive. But in principle there is no reason why a rogue would not fund charities. Being a philanthropist is in a sense a luxury good and a status symbol — a public marker of having arrived, particularly within the Jewish community.

Jewish Ethnic Networking Props Up Madoff’s Fraud

A remarkable fact that emerges from surveying the literature on Madoff was how widespread the belief was within the professional investment community that the Madoff operation was crooked. This opinion was spread far beyond the saga’s whistle-blowing hero, Harry Markopolos who noted, “The industry knew, there’s no question about that” (176) and his friends, about whom more later.

There were two Madoff theories. One was that intelligence derived from watching the firm’s order flow to its large trading operations gave the investment activity a crucial advantage (Graham remembers being told this — by an ultimate victim — more than 25 years ago.) If true, this would be front-running (taking advantage of a client’s business) and quite illegal. Concern about being exploited in this manner was doubtless why, according to Ross, such big brokerage firms as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would not do business with Madoff Securities (80).

As it happens, this theory was wrong. Since Madoff did not trade for his investment clients, he did not need this type of inside information. So the SEC was quite safe to focus on this question in its final investigation of 2006–7.

The other theory was that the Madoff Investment arm was crooked because it was to some degree at least a Ponzi scheme. Options specialists were led to this conclusion by realizing that Madoff’s alleged “Collar” or “Split strike” activities

• could not be replicated to produce the results he claimed.
• needed to be conducted on an impossibly large scale to accommodate the size of money Madoff was employing
• mysteriously left no trace at all in the close-knit world of options dealing.

This view was apparently widely held. The Strobers report the above-mentioned David Harris of the American Jewish Committee saying after the arrest

the Madoff name had come up here in the AJC’s investment committee some months ago when someone suggested we ought to explore investing … with Madoff. And the chairman of our investment committee actually said, “No, I think it’s a Ponzi scheme.” He actually used those words to the ten or fifteen people in the meeting. (42)

Arvedlund reports an account by Harry Markopolos of a meeting with Leon Gross, Citigroup’s global head of equity derivatives. Gross told him that “Bernie is a fraud and there’s no way his purported stock and options strategy can possibly beat Treasury bill returns. [Gross] also can’t believe the guy hasn’t been exposed yet” (218).

The famed Jewish co-founder of the Odyssey Partners hedge fund, the late Jack Nash, and his son, Joshua, seem to have had a hobby of denouncing Madoff. Jack Nash liquidated a less-than-two-year investment with Madoff in the early 90s after his son reviewed the Madoff statements and smelled a rat. Arvedlund reports they repeatedly told Ezra Merkin this over several years, to no avail (258–259).

Wall Street, of course, is an environment which encourages intense and exclusive concentration on one’s immediate financial activity. Furthermore, challenging Madoff was predictably dangerous. Arvedlund reports a meeting between the head of Lehman Brother’s alternative investment division and Merkin:

The Lehman guy fired first.

“C’mon, Ezra. You know what’s behind Madoff’s operation, don’t you? Don’t act like you don’t” he said.

Merkin and the man nearly got into a fistfight … and Merkin left Lehman Brothers in a huff. Not long after…the man at Lehman Brothers lost his job. (98)

Sheryl Weinstein, CFO of Hadassah (The Women’s Zionist Organization of Amerca) when it invested with Madoff, has a similarly informative story. In 1995, after several years of Madoff managing their money, new members of the investment committee became restless. “They were implying that maybe Bernie’s methods weren’t quite kosher” (166). A meeting was held in which Madoff succeeded in pacifying the all the board members except one, who apparently himself ran some Hadassah capital.

He later tested Bernie’s investment technique with some of Hadassah’s money. With results in hand, he told the board he could not replicate Bernie’s rate of returns.

The board’s response was to stop using him (Weinstein, 168–169) — not because his performance in his own style of investing was poor, but apparently for having the temerity to question this lion of the Jewish Establishment, Bernard Madoff.

(Hadassah’s case illustrates the arithmetic of long-time Madoff investors. The charity invested some $40 million in the late 80s and early 90s. It withdrew a total $130 million and thought it had $90 million when the end came.)

With so many prominent Jewish investment industry figures apparently aware that something was wrong with Madoff, the question arises: Why did they not turn him in? After all, a big scandal raising doubts about the integrity of independent investment advisors would be bad for everyone’s business, Jew or non-Jew (as it indeed proved to be). Because of Madoff’s high-level social-networking fund-raising techniques, many must have been aware that a great many fellow Jews were likely to be vulnerable (one third of the elite Jewish Palm Beach Country Club are reported to have been Madoff investors (Kirtzman, 245).  Some might even have thought such a scandal would best be headed off by the Jews themselves for the sake of their community. (David Harris and the Investment Committee of the American Jewish Committee could also have taken this line — but they did not.) Furthermore, the standing of some of these men was such that action by them would have necessitated a serious response by the authorities.

MacDonald has demonstrated that group strategies forged in the stressful climate of Medieval Europe continue to be highly influential in determining modern Jewish social behavior. For centuries, it was absolutely forbidden to tell the Civil Authorities about law-breaking by a fellow Jew, an offence known asMesirah (informing). Some took the view that informing should be punishable by death. The concept of mesirah is alive and well amongst strongly traditional Jewish communities to this day — for example recently, in  the community of Syrian Jews centered in Brooklyn where a prominent rabbi renounced his son after the son had informed on illegal financial activities within the community. A perusal of their web sites suggests that while there is some thought that, in the modern environment, informing about crimes of violence might be permissible, for other “lesser” offences (such as financial wrongdoing) it is still forbidden. There seems to be no concept that it might actually be a citizen’s duty to report criminal behavior.

Harry Markopolos Exposes Corruption in High Places

Deeply ingrained traditions fade slowly. The clear message of the facts of the Madoff scandal is that Americans generally cannot rely on American Jews to halt financial fraud by someone who is Jewish.

There was, however, a group who simply could not have tried harder to secure action by the authorities on Madoff. The fate of their efforts opens the most important public policy matter pertaining to the Madoff story.

Professional competiveness was what drove Harry Markopolos, a Boston-based options expert, to challenge Madoff. In 1999, he was asked by his employer, which managed options strategies similar to those claimed by Madoff, to figure out how Madoff was getting consistently superior returns. Within hours he decided that the Madoff claims were fraudulent.

Gathering around him an informal group of like-minded professionals, Markopolos spent most of the next decade trying to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to act. Numerous meetings with different officials as well as providing extensive documentation and apparently scores of phone calls and emails produced almost no response. Finally in November 2005 Markopolos submitted a report titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud” (on linehere [PDF]).

This 19-page document is a nuclear bomb. No one even slightly used to reviewing serious discussions of complex matters could fail to see that it is written by an expert, very carefully thought out, and devastatingly cogent. (Kirtzman — who appears to dislike Markopolos — is quite wrong to describe it as “a dense, rambling thicket … of mathematical formulas, and Wall Street jargon” [197].) One would have thought anyone in the line of responsibility for regulating Madoff would have been absolutely terrified.

The SEC did act. As noted above, in 2006 an investigation was launched. Markopolos was not consulted in any way and Arvedlund quotes a former SEC staff member:

When you look at the closing documents, it seems clear that the Markopolos allegations of Madoff being a Ponzi scheme were never even investigated. (216–217)

In the end the SEC paid itself a kind of fee by demanding that Madoff register as an investment advisor, and in November 2007 terminated the probe — barely a year before the collapse.

What happened?

It has to be said that the SEC compliance operation has evolved into a classicalrent-seeking bureaucratic monster, happily and expensively papering files in cooperation with a symbiotic tribe of functionaries inside investment operations and their law firms. A parasite, it is not designed to actually do anything substantive.

Furthermore, dark suspicions are increasingly common that large targets are exempt.  Arvedlund quotes Markopolos recounting the remarks of a former SEC official: “The SEC is bureaucratic and political and turns down slam-dunk cases all too often” (199).

But the Madoff case was obviously enormous and the SEC had been presented with a very concrete and serious accusation — which was not difficult to test. And this was only the last and most elaborate of a series of investigations which inexplicably stopped (Ross, 34).

Now it is true that Madoff had ingratiated himself deeply with the SEC. And he was prominent: already he had served 2 terms as NASDAQ chairman. Quite possibly this explains the very odd lack of interest the SEC  showed in the Madoff investment management activity after having shut down, in 1992, the unregistered fund-raising operation — exclusively for Madoff — run by the accounting firm of Avellino & Bienes. Over the previous 30 years, this outfit had developed into being Madoff’s main funding source. Ross says:

According to a person involved with the firm at the time, SEC investigators were looking into allegations that Avellino & Bienes were involved in a Ponzi scheme. The investigators discovered that Madoff was handling the investments … but they did not or would not connect the dots that would have exposed Madoff’s role as the true master of the scheme. (134)

Instead, the SEC allowed A&B investors to switch their funds to Madoff Securities directly — rendering nugatory the settlement which required the pool to be returned to the investors.

In the 80s and early 90s, Bernard Madoff was popular with the SEC because of the central role his firm was playing in automating stock trading and competing with the New York Stock Exchange. But by the late 2000s, that was ancient history. Furthermore, the SEC had almost ten years of presentations from Harry Markopolos to consider — and, Markopolos reveals, tips from others too. The scale of the matter was of the first magnitude. Why was there no effective action?

We submit that the answer to this question is the same as to why America is engaged in an unpopular war with the Muslim world with no Congressional dissidence, and why nation-breaking immigration continues — in the midst of recession — with only a little more dissent — and that after the topic had been virtually driven out of public debate for several years. The Bernard Madoff matter was one about which a significant segment of Jewish America cared very much — some for financial reasons, others, perhaps, because of community pride and loyalty. Challenging this group was well known to be extremely dangerous. As in other matters, they awarded themselves a veto, and they used it — as it happened in this case, to their cost. All in all, the Madoff affair and the cover-up is another indication of Jewish power in America.

An insight into this process arose during the 2006–7 SEC investigation. Harry Markopolos, accurately sensing a cover-up, contacted John Wilke, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter with an exceptionally fine record. Kirtzman reports:

With characteristic overkill, Markopolos bombarded the reporter with documents, contacts, questions for him to ask ….

But the Journal never did investigate Madoff. Markopolos believed it was the fault of “senior editors” at the Journal who “respected and feared” Madoff. (208)

Sadly, Wilke died on May 1^st 2009 at 54, of pancreatic cancer. Oppenheimer reports the then WSJ Managing Editor, Paul Steiger, flatly denying having heard of the approach (157). Steiger now heads the heavily Jewish Propublica Foundation, set up by Herb and Marion Sandler who sold their Golden West mortgage operation to Wachovia Bank with ruinous consequences for the latter. Ironically, Propublica, established to promote investigative journalism, has done some valuable work on the Madoff story, particularly the Picower angle(although nothing recently).

In his book, Markopolos reveals that he actually met with and had extensive discussions with Wilke, who seemed very responsive. Throughout 2006, Wilke gave him to believe he was about to start on the story. As late as November Markopolos wrote his “team” that “John told me that his editor has read my Madoff analysis and is very, very excited to start their investigation in January” (166).

But early in 2007 Wilke abruptly cooled off, never actually refusing the story but now raising quibbles. Markopolos (who continued to have a working relationship with Wilke on other stories) says

In my mind, at least, I was convinced that someone high up at the Journal had decided it was too dangerous to go after Bernie Madoff. … I was finally beginning to consider the possibility that Bernie Madoff was untouchable — that he was simply too powerful to be brought down.” (Markopolos, 166–167)

This analysis — as a practical matter effectively true in our opinion — is very different than the cover story generally presented that Madoff survived because of SEC incompetence. And it is not plausible that the Wall Street Journal’s management did not know what was absorbing so much one of their best reporter’s time.

A remarkable insight into how this power works appears in Markopolos’ No One Would Listen. When, in the aftermath, Markopolos was interviewed by David Kotz, the new Inspector general of the SEC, he was surprised to be told that the meeting was part of a criminal investigation and told to take an oath. He was then asked what he knew about Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) calling the SEC about their Madoff investigation (243).

Markopolos knew nothing, but as he points out “for a middle level SEC employee with ambitions, any case in which an important politician is involved is a case he or she wants to stay far away from” (141).

Bernie Madoff and his sons Andrew and Mark generally maxed out contributing to Schumer’s campaigns. In more recent years Bernard had also contributed significantly to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and some other Democratic candidates, mainly, like Schumer, Jewish.

But it gets stranger — and more ominous. In September, 2009, Markopolos appeared before the Senate Banking Committee, scheduled to follow H. David Kotz, SEC Inspector General, who was there to discuss his recently-publishedinvestigation (PDF) of the SEC’s Madoff failure. There was a recess between the two testimonies and then:

Only Senators Chuck Schumer, who had made a phone call to the SEC, and Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Washington, returned. Schumer took over the questioning …. The entire room was filled with SEC staffers …. The victims had been shunted to a hearing room … to watch the proceedings on closed circuit television. We couldn’t have picked a more adverse audience. (Markopolos, 261)

Schumer (who apparently felt no need to recuse himself or even disclose that he had intervened on Madoff’s behalf) then ran the session so that Markopolos would be able to speak as little as possible. This became so extreme that the lawyer Markopolos had brought “started handing me cards urging me, ‘Jump in whenever you can’” (Markopolos, 262).

There is nothing to suggest Schumer was actually involved with or even knew Madoff: yet No One Would Listen makes it clear he treated Markopolos with rudely dismissive curtness. Why deprive this genuine public hero of his moment in the sun?

Similarly strange things had happened when Markopolos went (voluntarily) in March 2009 to brief the newly appointed chief of the SEC, Mary Schapiro. David Becker, the career Wall Street lawyer imported the previous month as SEC General Counsel, picked a quarrel over extraneous trivia and threw a tantrum so violent that Markopolos’ lawyer “thought that he was about to come right over that table and go for my throat” (Markopolos, 249). Consequently, the meeting was terminated.

In 1977 the actor Cliff Robertson, seeking to correct an erroneous report to the IRS of income from Columbia Pictures, inadvertently triggered the discovery that the (inevitably Jewish) head of the studio, David Begelman, was a large scale embezzler. As a result, Robertson, then at the height of his career, wasblacklisted and got no major movie roles for several years. Evaluating Andrew Kirtzman’s Madoff book Betrayal purely subjectively, one would think Harry Markopolos was the villain. The Schumer and Becker performances are in the same tradition: unrestrained rage against someone deemed to have caused damage to a community member — quite regardless of the ethical facts.

Written after the Kotz report on the SEC/Madoff fiasco was published, Markopolos’ No One Would Listen conveniently adds to the evidence presented in the report, thereby destroying the idea that only ineptitude and dislike of Harry Markopolos protected Madoff.  In fact, the SEC had had quite independent and very plausible inputs suggesting Madoff was fraudulent:

• “In 2003 … an unidentified fund of hedge funds manager alerted the SEC … explaining during a conference call he … ‘couldn’t figure out how he was earning his returns’ …. This was lost in the bureaucracy.” (our emphasis)
• An intelligent SEC examiner in 2004 looking (as was his right) at internal correspondence at the fearsomely quantitative Renaissance Technologies Hedge Fund pool headed by James Harris Simons found a discussion concluding Madoff’s activities were “inexplicable.” Evidently he forwarded this to his superiors with no result. (Renaissance Technologies itself did nothing either.)
• In 2005 an anonymous tipster claiming to have withdrawn $5 million said he was “deeply concerned that Madoff is running a very sophisticated fraudulent pyramid scheme.” They even got an anonymous letter in 2008 alleging Madoff was keeping two sets of books! (Markopolos, 257–258)

Quite apart from all this, the SEC 2006–7 investigation itself did produce the information that Madoff had lied about the number of clients he was handling — an issue which drastically alters regulatory requirements. Markopolos says:

“What really bugs me is that the SEC caught Madoff lying to its investigators repeatedly and making false statements to a federal official. This is supposed to carry a five year … maximum sentence; yet they never referred him to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.” (161)

Nothing was done.

We submit that the SEC failed to stop Madoff not because it was incompetent, but because it was afraid — of the Jewish Establishment.

Looking Like a Goy: Growing Up in the Jewish Community

While we are focused on the way the Madoff case illuminates and reflects the relationships between Jews and non-Jews, there is also the question of how Madoff the man related to the Jewish people.

Looking back, his childhood contemporaries have realized Madoff could well have come to resent his own people — that he had, in the words of an Oppenheimer informant, an “inner need to screw the system” (87).

In the competitive, upwardly mobile Jewish society of Laurelton, Queens in the 1950s, the Madoff family did not command much respect. They were not prosperous, nor were they involved in a prestigious profession. Bernard himself won no academic laurels — Kirtzman quotes a middle school girlfriend recalling a poignant occasion with him sitting silently through a school lunch at which his circle were comparing and boasting about their report cards (21). He had nothing to boast about. Shortly afterwards she broke up with him: “I didn’t think he was smart enough” (23).

In fact, Madoff had a concrete reason to feel alienated — what Weinstein describes as his “beautiful blue eyes” (25). These are not necessarily appreciated in Jewish circles — Graham recalls being curtly told they represented a fault in the bloodline when once asking a Jewish friend about her eye color. Weinstein reports Madoff’s grandmother disliked his High School girlfriend and future wife: “She thought she was a “shiksa”…because Ruth was blond and had blue eyes” (61).

There was no doubt about Ruth Alpern’s Jewishness — the two families were in the same town, virtually neighbors — but Oppenheimer reports a school friend remembering of Ruth that a candy store proprietor was ““shocked — shocked —to learn she wasn’t a gentile because of her goyish look.” Ruth Alpern “looked like a shiksa. She did, absolutely…extremely shiksa looking” (34).

Madoff’s choice of such a partner may have said more about his attitude to his own community than his circle realized. Weinstein reports the Madoffs were not at all observant, and in fact frequently used Yom Kippur as a day to fly to their villa in France (47).

When the British tried to figure out what caused the socially elite and privileged Burgess/Maclean/Philby circle to damage their country so much by spying for the Soviet Union, they found that anguish about minor status blemishes could be argued to have triggered this murderous resentment. Being on the margin of a highly judgmental group can apparently cause extremely anti-social behavior.

Postscript: Where’s the Rest of the Money?

What will be the aftermath? Ross reports that “Investigators believe there could be a billion dollars or more that Madoff had stashed in foreign bank accounts” (207). He also quotes an investigator who noted that

someone who plans ahead so well that he pre-positions his clothes around the world, don’t you think he has some hidden bank accounts around the world too? (89–90)

(Besides wardrobes at his four homes, Ross notes, Madoff maintained steamer trunks of clothes at six hotels around the world.) A recent story in the New York Post quotes a former fellow prisoner alleging Madoff claims to have $9 billion squirreled away.

Beyond the question of the Madoff loot, there is the — if anything even more interesting — question of the apparent enrichment of the non-family insiders, Picower, Chais, Levy — and perhaps others. (The Wall Street Journal has reported a total of “at least eight.”) What was going on here? How did these men come to cooperate? What was Madoff’s motive for cutting them in?

Our prediction is that nothing significant will ever emerge on these questions. Observation of a long list of scandals, from 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty to the dropping of the espionage prosecutions against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last year, leads inevitably to this conclusion. Thoroughly investigated, the Madoff scandal has the potential to illuminate the economic and political prerogatives usurped in late 20^th-century America by what can only be described as the new ruling class. That will not be allowed to happen.

Indeed, an article that appeared too late to include in the print version questioned “whether anyone will be charged with being an accomplice to the fraud….Given the slow pace of the investigation, it is questionable whether the government will ever be able to show that there was anything more than a few willing enablers.” This is despite the fact that in at least some of these cases the defendants knowingly committed fraud. For example, in one case, “each woman ‘knowingly perpetuated the fraud,’ but there is no claim that they helped to perpetrate it. This means that once again the government accuses defendants of enabling Mr. Madoff’s fraud but not with having any responsibility for it. It is a bit puzzling why this is only a civil case, and not a criminal indictment.”

If Bernard Madoff has a redeeming quality, it must be the unflinching courage he has shown in refusing to implicate his family in any way. Sheryl Weinstein, his mistress for some years, knew the score: “From our very first lunch, I understood that Bernie was very wrapped up in his family” (57).

So the question is, how could he do this to them?

Absent the almost unprecedented financial crisis of late 2008, Madoff’s fraud might never have been revealed, as Arvedlund reports (265). Markopolos told the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets that Madoff could have gone to $100 Billion (Markopolos, 228). It would probably have outlived him. With the remarkable renaissance in confidence in Hedge Funds in 2009, he very likely would indeed have gone on to new heights. But, eventually, the piper would have had to be paid — especially, as seems plausible on the basis of the literature, if the sons did not know exactly what their father was doing.

Was Madoff so extremely present-oriented that some years in a very warm sun were worth decades of obloquy for his descendents?

Perspective is supplied by the case of one of the most outspoken skeptics about Madoff in Florida, named by Arvedlund as Salomon Konig, a “Fund of Funds” manager who “also hails from the Florida Jewish community.” Konig’s penetrating critique of Madoff was well informed for good reason, as Arvedlund discovered: he left Venezuela in 1993 and is under indictment there for running a Ponzi scheme. Yet he has been able to establish himself in his new country in the financial business (239–240).

Perhaps in the back of Madoff’s mind was the idea — possibly the instinct — that after a few years, perhaps in a different country, maybe speaking a different language, his family would live on, possibly with a new name (surname changes are under way among the Madoff kin) and perhaps with some portion of the loot.

Americans need to ask themselves if parties with this larcenous and nomadic tradition are appropriate stewards of our national institutions.

John Graham (email him) is retired after a career in the financial sector.

Kevin MacDonald (email him) is professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach and editor of the Occidental Quarterly andthe Occidental Observer.

1. Good marriages and business opportunities flowed to individuals with scholarly ability. However, wealthy individuals were also expected to contribute to communal charity for the less able, although indolence was not tolerated.

2. “Robert Maxwell.” Ketupa.net: A Media Industry Resource. The report begins, “Robert Maxwell, aka the Bouncing Czech, demonstrated that you can have a lot of fun in publishing … especially if you are using other people’s money and are not inhibited by ethics or concern about legality.”