that Jewish women would stoop to crime or prostitution. When an associate, Meyer Weisgal, who resembled David Ben-Gurion, once told him humorously that a girl had walked up to him on a London street and offered her services, overwhelmed by the idea of sleeping with the 'Israeli prime minister.' Ben-Gurion, clearly troubled, was interested in only one thing: 'Was she Jewish?'"

                                                                   -- Dan Kurzman, 1983, p.                                                                        39                         

 
"I also take a kind of perverse pleasure in the thought that the most important
and influential book ever written is the product of Jewish thought ... I call it
'perverse' becaue it is an instance of national pride which I don't want to feel
and which I fight against constantly ..."I remember once a fellow Jew remarking
with satisfaction on the high percentage of Nobel Prize winners who were Jewish.
I said, 'Does that make you feel superior?' 'Of course,' he said. 'What if I told you
that sixty percent of the pornographers and eighty percent of the crooked Wall
Street manipulators wre Jewish? He was startled. 'Is that true?' 'I don't know. I
made up the figures. But what if it were true? Would it make you feel inferior?'
He had to think about that. It's much easier to find reasons to consider oneself
superior than inferior. But one is just the mirror image of the other.'"
-- Isaac Asimov, 1994, p. 322



'But where do Jews enter the picture?' I asked him.
'Ah!' said Simon [Wiesenthal], slapping his knee. 'I haven't told you something else. A few years ago, I have a talk with a man who went to school with Hitler. I ask him what Hitler was like in school and he says, 'Normal. But maybe this hatred began after got this infection from a Jewish whore.'
'Are you saying that Hitler caught syphillis from a Jewish prostitute?' I asked increduously.
Wiesenthal laughed and said: 'What's the matter? You think only Jews can catch diseases from prostitutes?'
'No, but were Jewish prostitutes common in Austria?'
'Why not? Is there a Gentile monopoly on prostitution?'
'I just don't see it as a vocation for a nice Jewish girl.'
'A nice Jewish girl,' Simon mimicked. 'You have those 'nice Jewish girls' in Israel, too, these days and they had them in Vienna years ago -- when there were more Jews.'
-- Alan Levy,
The Wiesenthal File. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
Grand Rapids, MI, 1993 p. 18

      At the end of the 19th and beginning of the twentieth century, Jews were deeply involved in what was popularly called "white slavery": international prostitution rings. "White slavery," notes scholar Albert Lindemann, "was a concern of Jewish leaders throughout the world, who recognized it as a special problem." [LINDEMANN, p. 33] [Jews have also dominated the pornography and commercial sexploitation business, a trend which continues to this day -- see Mass Media section]

      "Between 1880 and 1939," notes scholar Edward Bristow, "the Jews played a conspicuous role in 'white slavery,' as the commercial prostitution of that era was dramatically called. Not only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was historically unprecedented, geographically widespread, and fraught with collective political dangers." [BRISTOW, p. 1] "Jewish trafficking," says Bristow, "was anchored in brothel keeping, women freelanced or kept houses while their husbands procured ... Jewish traffickers also supplied Gentile-run houses." [BRISTOW, p. 56-57]

     Rooted largely in Eastern and Central Europe where they "dominated the international traffic out of the area," [BRISTOW, p. 2] Jews were involved in prostitution rings that networked, wrote Arthur Mora (of London's Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women) in 1903, to "almost all parts of North and South Africa, to India, China, Japan, Philippine Island, North and South America, and also to many of the countries of Europe." [BRISTOW, p. 1] Jewish criminals trafficked women under their control virtually anywhere, also including the major cities of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Ceylon, Manchuria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. [BRISTOW, p. 181]

     "By 1900," says Bristow, "Jewish commercial vice was largely incorporated in underworld elements and many of it participants were predators of the poor." [BRISTOW, p. 89] Jewish pimps, procurers, and traffickers preyed mostly on non-Jewish women, but even large numbers of Jewish women were part of their stables.

      In 1872, for example, Jewish prostitutes in Warsaw numbered 17% of the known prostitution population, in Krakow 27%, and in Vilna 47%. [BRISTOW, p. 23] Within the Jewish community itself, it was not uncommon for recruiters to marry innocent Jewish young women and "deposit them in foreign brothels." [BRISTOW, p. 25]  Many of the Jewish criminal underworld figures apparently saw no gap between their day-to-day activities and their religious lives, often maintaining their religious obligations. A Warsaw thug, Shilem Letzski, organized a small synagogue for Jewish "prostitutes, madams, pimps, and thieves." This criminal community even had a rabbinical court "to settle disputes between pimps." [BRISTOW, p. 60]  In Constantinople, prostitutes contributed money to "have their pimps called to Torah on holidays." [SCHNEIDER, p. 225]  In New York City, "a public school and a large synagogue were situated right next door to the house of prositution." [RUBINOW, I., 1959, p. 114-115]

     In Buenos Aires, Argentina, notes Donna Guy, the Jewish pimp organization called the Varsovia Society

       "ostensibly functioned as a mutual aid society ... In fact, the Varsovia

       consisted of pimps who wanted to maintain their business and still lead

       a religious life ... Varsovia associates established their own synagogue

       on Guemes Street in the midst of the traditional bordello district."

       [GUY, p. 22]

     Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes also, for example, that prominent Jewish American mobster Longy Zwillman "always remained sensitive to his Jewish upbringings." When a close friend died, and the funeral was conducted in a church, Zwillman refused to attend. As he explained it, he was an ancestral member of the Jewish priest caste (the Cohens) and it was religiously forbidden to him to be with a dead body in a room. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 30]

     Dr. Louis Maretsky, the head of the B'nai B'rith in Germany, forlornly noted in 1912 that at least 271 of 402 prostitution traffickers on a Hamburg police list were Jewish; in reviewing similar lists for Eastern Europe and South Africa at least 374 of 644 were from the Jewish community. [BRISTOW, p. 56]  (No mention here is made of even higher possible percentages: as explored later, it has long been a tradition for many Jews in their diaspora to formally change their identifiable Jewish names). Concerning Galicia, Maretsky wrote that "the prominence of Jewish traffickers and brothel operators there is no doubt. From the files of the Austrian and German police there were 111 Jewish traffickers active in Galicia and the neighboring province of Bukovina for 1904-08 alone." [BRISTOW, p. 56]

     By 1889 Jewish women ran 203 of 289 (70%) of the licensed brothels in the "Pale of Settlement" (encompassing over 20 provinces in eastern Poland and western Russia -- an area where Jews were about 12% of the population). 1122 of 5127 (22%) licensed prostitutes in this area were Jewish. [BRISTOW, p. 63] The grievous political dangers for local Jewry in the context of enduring interethnic hostilities, when 78% of the rest of the women were Gentile, many indentured in Jewish houses, is obvious.

     Further in the West, 16 of 19 licensed brothels in Warsaw were run by Jewish women, prostitutes in the low-class establishments were expected to service 40-50 customers a day, up to 60-70 on Holy Days. (In 1905 the respectable part of the Jewish Warsaw community rioted against the brothels; 40 whorehouses -- legal and illegal -- were reported destroyed, 8 persons killed, and 100 injured). [BRISTOW, p. 61]

     In Minsk, Jews ran all four legitimate houses of ill repute. In the Russian province of Kherson (which includes the city of Odessa) 30 of 36 licensed brothels were Jewish-owned. The American Consul in Odessa wrote in 1908 that the "whole 'business' of prostitution is almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews." [BRISTOW, p. 56]

     Martin Fido notes another genre of Jewish Eastern European profiteer in the prostitution world, in England:

     "Latvian ponces accompanied [prostitutes] to help them cross borders and find      accomodation and working premises. These men were despised by police and
     by some of the criminal fraternity for 'living off immoral earnings.' But they were
     not pimps ... They were effectively travel agents, couriers and managers in
     strange and unfriendly places. Their arrival in London ensured that a major
     strand of prostitution would be controlled by organized crime. One of these
     Latvians, Max Kassell, was still running a small stable of hookers in the 1930s,
     when he was murdered in Soho ... Jewish dominance of the East End [of
     London] and its crime was reflected in their Yiddish name, 'spielers' (places
     for games). In the Brick Lane neighborhood, Isaac Bogard, a Jewish villain
     whose swarthy complexion and tightly curled black hair earned him the
     nickname 'Darky the Coon,' extended his interests. He began in the
     early years of the 20th century by supplying muscle for street traders who
     wanted to prevent newcomers from moving in, but he moved on to
     managing prostitutes and drinking clubs." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 19-20]

     Then in London there was Harry 'Little Hubby' Distleman, "a Jewish club manager, gambler and possibly part-sharer (with his brother) in a chain of brothels." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 31] Jewish author Chaim Bermant noted in the Jewish Chronicle in 1993 that "In the same period (1903-1909), 151 aliens [in Great Britain], most of them Jewish, were convicted for keeping brothels, and 521 for soliciting ... Rabbi Avigdor Schonfeld ... protested that to draw attention to the existence of Jewish prostitutes harmed the good name of the Jewish people." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 1-15-93]

      More recently, Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls that "while performing in England in the late 1950s I had become friendly with a Jewish song plugger, a man who eventually left the music business to open a very exclusive whorehouse." [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 293] A little later, there was the infamous Colin Levy:

     "In 1973, one of the better-known and more appreciated solo practioners
     of that tony [London prostitution] underworld was Norma Levy (nee Mary
     Russell), an Irish-born prostitute in her mid-twenties whose career 'on the
     game' ws being managed by her husband Colin Levy, a petty crook ...
     In 1973, Colin Levy found himself short of money. Aware that one of
     Norma's patrons was the celebrated Lord Lambton, he decided to solve
     his problem with a bit of blackmail. Camera in hand, he lay in wait outside
     Norma's bedroom during Lambton's next vist to her flat. At the appropriate
     time, at a signal from Norma, he burst into the room. With flashlights
     popping in his face, the stunned Lambton was frozen on film, in
     flagrante delicto, for posterity." [Levy's blackmail failed, but there was
     a resultant scandal, including the ethics of newspaper (where Levy tried
     to sell his photos] that published accounts of the story] [KIERNAN, T.,
     1986, p. 162]
     

     In Vienna, authorities knew of about 50 Jewish prostitution traffickers based in Czernowitz, "and they were a very inbred lot extending over two generations." [BRISTOW, p. 74] The most publicized 'white slavery' trial occurred in 1892, in Lemberg (once also called Lvov, then a Polish provincial capital, today called Lviv in Ukraine), where 27 traffickers -- all Jews -- were prosecuted for ensnaring women to go to Constantinople, Egypt, and India. Some of the women recruits understood their tasks, but others "were maids, others fieldworkers, one a butcher's helper, all apparently promised honest jobs." [BRISTOW, p. 74]  (Lemberg, "a cradle of Zionism from the 1880s onward," also had anti-Jewish riots in 1918. [KRAJEWSKI, S., p. 340] )

     There was a tradition of Yiddish folk songs about Jewish criminal behavior, like this:

     "I am Salve, the thief,
     Four brothers are we;
     One is hungry, the other well fed,
     But thieves all four are we.

     One is a pickpocket,
     The second a pimp, a handsome fellow;
     One is a hijacker on the lookout for
     packages,
     And I am a house thief.

     A pimp is common,
     As all agree:
     From his own wife,
     He gets the disease
     To be a hijacker is bitter:
     You can rupture your lung,
     It's hard to earn something with some of
     the packages,
     The best thing is to be a house thief."
     [RUBIN, R., 1979]

    "In an age of pandemic anti-Semitism," says Bristow, "a Jewish pimp was a political as well as a social force," [BRISTOW, p. 4] very emotionally reinforcing anti-Jewish sentiments of the day. Jews were already blamed in central Europe for a financial crash in 1873 and economic competition between Jews and non-Jews was heightening.

     A young and enraged Adolf Hitler paid particular attention to the highly visible phenomenon of Jewish street hustling and prostitution rings in Vienna, and was incensed that many non-Jewish women were coerced into the largely Jewish-run trade. "In no other city of Western Europe," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution, and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better than in Vienna ... an icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the Jew as an evil, shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking vice, the outcome of the scum of the big city." [BRISTOW, p. 84]

     The Jewish prostitution business extended from Europe across the world, where it sometimes overlapped with French, Italian, Chinese, and other rings. In the Punjabi (Indian) capital of Lahore, "Jewish pimps were in the habit of leaving their women penniless only to reappear after workers had accumulated some money." [BRISTOW, p. 195] In Rio de Janeiro Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania were so much identified with prostitution in the late 1800's that "the kaftan, a Jew's traditional long gown, became synonymous with pimp." [BRISTOW, p. 113]

      Thirty-nine Jews were expelled from Brazil in 1879 for soliciting women for prostitution and running illegal whorehouses. [BRISTOW, p. 114]  Of 199 licensed whorehouses in Buenos Aires in 1909, 102 were run by Jews and more than half the prostitutes were Jewish. [FRIED, p. 71]  4,248 Jewish women were registered for licensed brothels in Buenos Aires between 1880-1913, and those represented only the licensed ones. Edward Bristow estimates that 9,000 Jewish women immigrants came to Brazil in a 25-year span in that era as prostitutes (many were no doubt highly transient), when the total Jewish population of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay combined amounted to less than 60,000 people in 1910. [BRISTOW, p. 119] (Brian Viner, a columnist at England's Jewish Chronicle, underscores these figures from Argentina in this manner: "That I know all this is thanks largely to my estimable cousin Ben, a fount of information on Jewish gangster matters. I phoned him the other night and he told me, just as I might tell someone that Arensal are top the league by a point, that of 60,000 Jews living in Argentina by the 1920s, 9,000 were involved in prostitution rackets. You have to admit it's a conversation stopper.") [VINER, B., 11-29-02, p. 37]

      In 1889, the Buenos Aires Bulletin Continental reported that 200 German/Austrian women were held against their will by Jewish pimps from Poland. [GUY, p. 5] "Jewish procurers," says Donna Guy,

        "... became an organized ring in major cities all over the world.

        They were particularly powerful in the Argentine port cities of

        Buenos Aires and Rosario ... [GUY, p. 10]   ... Turn-of-the-century

        reports by the Hamburg B'nai B'rith [a Jewish fraternal organization]

        concluded that most prostitutes in Buenos Aires were Jewish and that

        traffickers 'dress with ostentatious elegance, wear large diamonds, go

        to the theatre or opera daily; they have their own clubs and

        organizations where wares are sorted, auctioned, and sold ... They

        have their own secret wireless code, are well organized, and-- heavens!

        -- in South America everything is possible." [GUY, p. 19]

      "Pooling their financial resources in a kind of guild," notes another Jewish scholar, Howard Sachar,

     "the [Polish Jewish] newcomers [to Argentina] in 1909 controlled

     slightly more than half the nearly two hundred licensed brothels in

     Buenos Aires. Jewish women served as their madams, and Jewish

     immigrant girls often were recruited and lured into their hands as

     prostitutes." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 283]

     In Cuba, Jews "became engaged in the 'White Slave Trade,'" says Robert Levine, "importing prostitutes -- some Jewish -- from Poland ... Many women recruited to the business had been trapped in the Russian and Polish Pale and throughout the Hapsburg Empire by force or fraud, and the human dilemma was great." [LEVINE, p. 66]
  

     In 1909 one Jewish observer, Marcus Braun, estimated there to be 50,000 Jewish immigrant prostitutes in America and 10,000 pimps. (Edward Bristow considers these figures grossly inflated, but notes that one of Braun's colleagues, echoing at least public feelings about the problem, thought there were up to 100,000 American Jewish women of ill repute.) In any case, the Jewish pimps of New York City (who owned many of the "so-called French" bordellos in the Tenderloin district and "sought to fill them with French prostitutes from abroad") [BRISTOL, p. 165] had their own official organization: "The New York Independent Benevolent Association."  Frances Kellar, a respected social worker, wrote in 1907 that "the two nationalities who may be said to be central to the disorderly house business in New York [are] French and Jewish ... French houses ... are not ... to be so much feared as the Jewish ... [which are] thoroughly vicious and bad." [BRISTOL, p. 165] By the turn of the century, "hundreds and hundreds" of Jewish women walked the Lower East Side of New York City as prostitutes. [FRIED, p. 8] Benjamin Altman described the whores he saw on Allen Street: "A hundred women on every ... corner. Tall women, short women. Fair women. Ugly women." [FRIED, p. 12]

     Between November 15, 1908 and March 15, 1909, almost three-quarters of 2,093 prostitute cases before the New York City courts were "native-born" women, "a preponderance," noted Albert Fried, "who were presumably Jewish." (Ethnic categories included "Russian" and "Polish," but not Jewish). [FRIED, p. 8] Of "foreign-born" prostitutes in court, 225 were Jewish, 154 French, 64 German, 31 Italian, 29 Irish, and 10 Polish. [FRIED, p. 8]

     "The Jewish pimp," says Albert Fried, "freely used marriage brokers and unemployment agencies to snare his victims -- the young, the lonely, the innocent, the weak, the alienated, the oppressed." [FRIED, p. 14] Starting out with one whore in 1890, for example, by 1912 Motche Greenberg had a "controlling interest in eight whorehouses and 114 women and was earning $4,000 a month, an incalculable amount by today's standards." [FRIED, p. 18]

      In Chicago, by 1907 Rabbi Emil Hirsch declared that 75% of the "white slavery" in his city was controlled by Jews. [BRISTOW, p. 177] The Jewish periodical the Forward forlornly reported that "the facts that were uncovered at the trial [for corruption] of [police] inspector McCann are horrifying. 75% of the white slave trade in Chicago is in Jewish hands. The owners of most of the immoral resorts on the West Side are Jews. Even in Gentile neighborhoods Jews stand out prominently in the nefarious business." [FRIED, p. 70]

     (Even in 2001, as a result of an undercover police investigation, Joel Gordon (a cantor, i.e., the man who sings liturgical songs and leads prayer in a synagogue) and his wife Alison Greenberg were tried in Chicago for running a brothel. Ginsberg was also charged with acts of prostitution. "We now realize," said Howard Peritz, a member of Gordon's synagogue, "that in starting a congregation around a man [Gordon], we were canonizing him." [JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY, 1-5-01] The same year, a synagogue room (Finchley Synagogue's Kinloss Suite) in Great Britain made the news when it hosted a "stag party with three strippers performing 'sexually explicit acts.'" Some of the money raised was supposed to go to a Jewish charity.) [ZERDIN, J., 29-01]

     In 1987, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox group bought a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, and began hiring illegal non-Jewish aliens from Eastern Europe to do the menial jobs at their company. Despite the fact that only Jews dominated the upper eschelons of the firm, and Jewish author Stephen Bloom's underscores Jewish exploitation and condemnation of the entire non-Jewish community in his book called Postville, he frames the following in cautiously distancing, apologetic form:

     "[A woman in her mid-twenties said:] 'The managers are incredibly rude. One
     manager fired me because I wouldn't go to bed with him.' The translator used the
     word 'manager,' but the woman was most likely speaking of one of her
     supervisors, who would have been a Christian. 'If the manager wants to sleep
     with you and you do, you get a raise. If you don't, he makes your life
     miserable. Girls have no choice.' No one [of a group of fellow workers] disputed
     what the woman said." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 138]

     In 1932, a few Polish-American officials of the city of Hamtramck (within Detroit) were charged by a grand jury with the "familiar charge of collusion with vice interests for gratuities." The central player among those convicted was Jewish, Jacob Kaplan, "head of a vice syndicate" who collected $2,000 a month from disorderly houses in the Syndicate." [WOOD, 1955, p. 53-54] In 1941, the Detroit Free Press listed the names of those involved in another exposed vice ring in the area of Hamtramck, a ring that drew city officials and administrators into its web with bribes and payoffs. The racketeers included "Sam (the Jap) Gross, Hamtramck area brothel operator;" Charles Berman, "charged with operating a vice resort;" Irene Kaplan, "defendant in accusations as brothel keeper;" Ike (Forty Grand) Levy, "vice resort operator;" Kitty (Big Nose) Silverman, "reputed vice resort keeper;" and Jack (alias Jack Jesus) Silverman, "husband of Kitty." [WOOD, A., 1955, p. 84, 86]   

    Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes the dimensions of Detroit's all-Jewish Prohibition-era Purple Gang:

     "Detroit's Canadian border and existence of Jewish-owned Canadian distilleries,
      such as those of Sam and Harry Bronfman [Jewish founders of Seagram], offered       opportunities to Detroit's Jewish gangsters that rivaled bootlegging operations in
      Chicago and New York. Instead of transporting the liquor themselves, the Purples       arranged for the Jewish-dominated 'Little Jewish Navy' to bring it across the river
      for them ... The Gang's dealings also extended to the sale of stolen diamonds, narcotics       and prostitution in Canada." [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]

     Green Bay, Wisconsin? George Tane, also Jewish, "was a bootlegger who controlled Green Bay, Wisconsin. After Prohibition, he owned all the houses of prostitution in the city." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 214] Atlanta, Georgia? In 2001, Steven Kaplan, owner of the nude "Gold Club," faced a Federal indictment on counts of "loan sharking, money laundering and bribing police officers." He was also accused "of building a $50 million fortune in part by providing prostitutes for celebrities ... Atlanta's Gold Club is one of the most profitable nude clubs in the country." [COURT TV, 4-30-2001] [See also evidence in this volume -- Mass Media 2 Chapter -- about prostitution rackets controlled by today's "Russian" mafia, which is largely Jewish in organization; Heidi Fleiss (the much-publicized, high-priced Jewish prostitution "madam" to Hollywood stars), famed Jewish prostitute Xaviera Hollander ("The Happy Hooker"), and details of enormous Jewish influence in the worlds of "smut" and pornography]

     With the American public beginning to note the high Jewish representation in the prostitution trade; some journalists implied wider corruption. In the June 1909 issue of McClure's magazine, for instance, George Kibbe Turner wrote:

      "Out of the Bowery and Red Light districts have come the new

      development in New York politics -- the great voting power of the

      organized criminals. It was a notable development not only for New

      York, but for the country at large. And no part of it was more

      noteworthy than the appearance of the Jewish dealer in women, a

      product of New York politics, who has vitiated more than any other

      single agency the moral life of the great cities of America in the past ten

      years." [BELL, p. 187]

     "It is an absolute fact," wrote Ernest Bell in his 1911 book about white slavery, "that corrupt Jews are now the backbone of the loathsome traffic in New York and Chicago. The good Jews know this and feel keenly the unspeakable shame of it." [BELL, p. 188] "The criminal instincts that are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jew," wrote Frank Moss in a popular volume called American Metropolis (1897), "come to the surface in such ways as to warrant the opinion that these people are the worst element in the entire make-up of New York City ... A large proportion of the people of New Israel are addicted to vice." [FRIED, p. 55-56]

     "Vice and crime did pervade the Lower East Side," remarks Albert Fried, "and no one knew it more keenly than its residents. The better part of wisdom, so far as they were concerned, was to keep the disgrace quiet, to avoid publicizing it." [FRIED, p. 59] Meanwhile, in the early 1900's the National Council of Jewish Women even had Yiddish-speaking volunteers working to keep new female immigrants at Ellis Island "out of the clutches of men (often Jewish) who would try to entice them into prostitution." [SCHNEIDER, p. 224]

      By the early years of the twentieth century, large urban department stores had reputations "as breeding grounds for prostitution." In New York City, for example, Macy's fell under suspicion to some, in part for its proximity to a former red light district. In 1913, Percy Strauss, the Vice President of Macy's, hosted a "vice vigilante" group to investigate his store. "Strauss," notes William Leach, "no dour Puritan, had a personal interest in leading a campaign against vice. For one thing, as a German Jew and spokesman for the Jewish community, he had to disprove the charge -- widely made -- that immigrant Jewish women (and many of his own employees, therefore) were more likely than other women to be prostitutes." [LEACH, p. 117] By 1915 the Committee Against Vice (of which Strauss had conveniently become chairman) published a report that affirmed that Macy's was "normal." "On the other hand," says William Leach, "testimony in the 'secret reports' told a different tale.  Saleswomen, it was revealed, passed around pornographic cards and poems about themselves, talked openly about 'sex' and 'sex desire,' and 'gossiped about fairies,' as one investigator put it. Private accounts by other investigative reformers echoed this view, that things at Macy's and in other department stores were hardly 'normal' or 'decent.' 'The strongest temptation of girls in department stores,' warned one reformer, 'is not poverty but luxury and money.'" [LEACH, p. 118]

     Although Jewish poverty was -- and is -- often argued as a major reason for their high international representation in such a vice, a 1914 League of Nations survey of 25 Jewish prostitutes in Buenos Aires showed that only 4 of them claimed to be poor before their new trade. Nine, however, stated that their family lives had been "immoral or abusive in some way." [BRISTOW, p. 95] (As Robert Rockaway notes about the dozens of members in Detroit's all-Jewish criminal Purple Gang, which was involved in everything from murder to prostitution: "[Purple Gang members] were not products of crushing poverty, broken homes, or widespread economic despair. Most of them had been raised in lower middle class households where the father had a steady, if not well-paying, job.") [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]

      And what, in complete dismissal of the facts of history, is the common Jewish perspective about the unabashed prominence of Jews in the "white slave trade?" This, in 1998, from Jewish scholar Gary Tobin in a popular Jewish newspaper:

       "For those with a knowledge of history of 19th century anti-Semitic

       propaganda, the idea that Jews are running "the white slave trade" is

       nothing new. Cartoon like stereotypes of loathsome Jewish villains

       trading on the lost virtue of non-Jewish maidens was standard material

       for the Nazis and their precursors ... It took a sick mind to imagine that

       Jews were running the world's oldest profession." [TOBIN,

       Distinguished, p. 51]

     Tobin was responding to a very disturbing article in the New York Times (January 11, 1998) which described the horrible situation that Slavic Gentile prostitutes face today, trapped in Israel. As the Times notes, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a resulting economic chaos, literally hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian women have been dispersed throughout the world, most entrapped in an international prostitution trade run by the "Russian mafia." (Although it is certainly inferred, what the Times article does not overtly mention is that a significant part of the Russian mafia is Jewish. See later chapter). Glenn Frankel, however, a Washington Post correspondent in Jerusalem, took the perspective in 1994 that "there was much talk about the Russian mafia muscling in [to Israel], although the police and most crime experts agreed that the brothels