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WHEN VICTIMS
RULE,
A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
Source: JTR
Website
20.
* Note: Positions
of power and ownership are
always in flux. Companies
are bought and sold these
days with extraordinary
frequency and career rungs
change quickly. The facts
noted in the next chapters
for those of current power
should be regarded as an
overall pattern and not
an absolute freeze point
for any individual and his/her
controlling interests. Such
facts are also merely a
general sampling, and may
be regarded -- in overview
-- as the proverbial "tip
of an iceberg."
In the
following chapters, too,
many people are identified
as being of Jewish heritage
as part of this investigation
of Jewish power in America.
Often Jewish journals and
scholars identify them.
Sometimes too, when the
subject is portrayed in
a good, or at least neutral,
light, they are identified
as such in the popular mass
media. When Jews make the
news for being in trouble
with the law, they are more
often freely identified
as Jews in the British press
than in the United States.
In America, they are more
likely noted neutrally,
as "white," "Russian," "Iranian,"
or other ethnicities under
which Jewish identities
may be subsumed.
Sometimes the Jewish
heritage of the powerful
or newsworthy is difficult
to ascertain, but their
ethnicity can often be decided
via articles about relatives,
relationships to Israel,
synagogues, religious holidays,
cultural indicators, or
Jewish-configured political
organizations and other
tangential leads. Many surnames
(Cohen, Katz, Kaplan, Levy,
Levine, Levin, etc.) are
instantly recognizable to
the informed as Jewish and,
even if a small minority
of individuals with such
names are only "half-Jewish"
or, rarely, converts to
some other religion, the
familial link to the Jewish
community (especially in
homage to the Holocaust
and often modern Israel)
may fairly be presumed to
be no small thing. For purposes
here, that allegiance, and
all it entails, is the crucial
determinant in determining
who is Jewish. The ambiguous
"community of fate" is,
after all, one of the major
self-defined measures of
Jewish identity. This is
particularly true of those
who hold power of some sort
in popular culture: most
of these people are in significant
degree part of a Jewish
network, especially an economic
and political one.
In these
senses, this work follows
the lead of the Jewish community
(and the Jewish ethnic media)
itself. (Many individuals,
however, who may well be
Jewish, had to be left out
of this assemblage because
public information was too
weak and names were too
ambiguous to presume that
they had a Jewish background).
This entire methodology
(ironically ascribed by
Jews as a manifestation
of anti-Semitism if it represents
anything less than an intention
to flatter Jewry) is popular
in the Jewish world itself,
often noted as "nose-counting"
or "bean-counting": usually
a celebratory emphasis of
who exactly is Jewish and/or
its attendant search for
allegiances.
As Jewish scholar
Nathan Glazer has noted
about this phenomena, and
its tinge of paranoia:
"A leading figure in the Jewish community
affairs relates that a
Jew
eagerly asks, in any situation,
'How many are Jews?' And
when
he gets an answer, he asks
suspiciously, 'How do you
know?'" [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p.
3]
Efforts here to determine
specifically who is Jewish
are, in some ways, more
extensive than most Jewish
organizations' demographic
studies themselves. In a
1999 investigation of the
Jews of the Miami area by
the Jewish Federation of
South Palm Beach County,
for example, the way to
ascertain who was Jewish
was simple. Ten percent
of common Jewish names were
merely tallied, and compared
to other years, from phone
books. From this base, estimates
were made. This method of
determining Jewish population
numbers "has been used by
Jewish demographers across
the country for 40 years."
[BELKIN, D., 5-6-99, p.
B1] An American Jewish Committee
examination of voter patterns
in the Philadelphia was
in large part "based on
surnames gathered from voter-registration
records." [FELDMAN, S.,
3-2-2000, p. 1] Jewish author
George Gilbert, like many,
notes in his introduction
to his volume about "Jewish
photographers," that "for
the purposes of this study,
individuals are deemed Jewish
even if they do not meet
the halakhic structure responsible
for traditional Jewish religious
criteria: being born of
a Jewish mother." [GILBERT,
G., 1996, p. ix] Stanley
Rothman's and S. Robert
Lichter's definition of
Jewry to qualify for inclusion
in a book about Jewish political
radicalism goes like this:
"We classified students
as Jewish if the ethnic
background of both parents
was Jewish, or if only one
parent was of Jewish background
but had raised the child
as a Jew or without religious
training." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 213] In 1973 Harry
Golden noted United Jewish
Appeal methodologies to
find the Jewish nouveau
riche to pester for philanthropic
donations: "[UJA] researchers
go over every prospectus
issued by the Securities
and Exchange Commission,
attentively study advertised
stock offerings in every
city, and plow through hundreds
of year-end reports to the
stockholders issued by major
industries, always on the
lookout for that Jewish
name that they have never
read before." Another UJA
division scans obituaries,
looking for affluent Jews
by surname, intent upon
contacting survivors. [GOLDEN,
H., 1973, p. 119] No apologies are thereby made for such
popular Jewish research
methodologies that are in
large part followed here.
"Having money is a good thing, having power
over money is
-- Old Yiddish folk saying [KUMOVE,
S., 1985, p. 16]
Old Yiddish folk saying,
[KUMOVE, S., 1985, p. 179]
"The rich breed more rich."
Old Yiddish folk saying,
[KUMOVE, S., 1985, p. 251]
"The rich man's way is without
fair play."
-- Old Yiddish folk saying, [KUMOVE, S.,
1985, p. 251]
"Villains fare well in this
world, saints in the next
world."
-- Old Yiddish folk saying, [KUMOVE, S.,
1985, p. 84]
"Behind every fortune lies a crime." --
Balzac
"Jewish money," noted
Gerald Krefetz, "-- its
purported influence and
power-- is one of the oldest
canards of anti-Semitism.
Therefore, the topic is
usually dealt with in the
softest of voices by Jews
for fear of raising the
specter of anti-Semitism;
and by non-Jews for fear
of being tarred by the brush,
of being called anti-Semites
for even ventilating the
subject. The omission is
startling since money --
its use and abuse, its acquisition
and disposition -- was and
is a central element in
the Jewish experience."
[KREFETZ, p. 3]
As
an Eastern European Jewish
fable notes about the subject
of anti-Jewish hostility,
traditional tension between
Jewish haves and
Gentile have-nots,
and the wisdom of keeping
relative Jewish affluence
hidden:
"Once
the good-hearted rabbi of
Chelm was interrupted in
his devotions
by the sudden appearance
of one of his townspeople,
Yankele, bleeding
and howling in pain. The
shabbes-goy [non-Jewish
Saturday servant for
Jews] had gratuitously punched
Yankele in the mouth. The
rabbi asked
solicitously if he could
inspect the damage. But
when Yankele opened
his mouth, the rabbi was
horriifed. How does a Jew
come to have such
a healthy set of teeth?
Are these the very teeth
that Yankele had exposed
to the shabbes-goy?
Well, then, no wonder he
had been brutalized.
For a Jew to show such strong
tetth is in itself a provocation.
The
rabbi counseled Yankele
never to show his teeth
to any Gentile again.
In
susequent weeks, although
Yankele keeps his mouth
dutifully shut, the
shabbes-goy beats
him up repeatedly. Each
time the rabbi, after due
analysis of the situation,
discovers a provocation:
once Yankele had carried
a loaf of bread home from
the marketplace, obviously
attracting the shabbes-goy's
envy;
a second time he had strayed
too far out of town, obviously
transgressing what
the shabbes-goy considered
to be the Jew's legitimate
bounds. Finally,
after
still another beating, the
rabbi realizes the gravity
of the situation and
calls
a public meeting of the
local Jewish elders to resolve
the matter. The
meeting unanimously concludes
that Yankele is too dangerous
to keep in town.
At the rabbi's suggestion
he if forced to leave, and
the shabbes-goy's
wages
are modestly raised to placate
him and 'move him to pity.'"
[SHORRIS, E.,
1982, p. 98-99; written
by WISSE, RUTH]
"Jewish success in
America," says Henry Feingold,
"appears to rest partly
on the pre-existing Jewish
culture (which gives it
behavioral cues, a unique
entrepreneurial vision,
plus connections and capital);
and American culture (which
gives it a success ethos,
economic opportunity, and
open society)." [FEINGOLD,
p. 41]
"Jews," noted Israeli
scholar Boas Evron in 1995,
"are among the most powerful,
best integrated and wealthy
groups in the United States,
Britain, and France." [EVRON,
p. 48] "Jews," adds Joseph Heckelman, "are
disproportionately visible
in every area of human endeavor.
In other words, Jews are
disproportionately successful."
[HECKELMAN, J., p. 68] "Success
is a basic fact of Jewish
American life," observed
Roger Kahn in 1968, "...
Success surrounds and infuses
their lives. Success in
business; success in educating
children; success in entering
the most hotly-sought endeavors.
Jews are business owners,
business managers, professionals,
writers and artists. Few
are laborers. Virtually
none is a farmhand." [KAHN,
R., p. 4] "We didn't
progress because we were
Jewish," a Jewish factory
owner in Brooklyn told researcher
Jonathan Rider in 1985,
"but because we are a driving,
pushing people." [REIDER,
J., 1985, p. 45]
Karl Marx's
mid-19th century comment
that America had already
become "Judaized" (i.e.,
commercialized and rendered
excessively materialistic)
through Jewish influence
upon America's own stringent
brand of Protestantism,
was echoed in 1911 by the
Jewish anthropologist, Maurice
Fishberg:
"Fifty years ago the
criminology of the Jews
was a good indication of
what modern
society is coming to under
commercial and financial
activity. In
this respect, as was the
case with many other peculiarities,
such as the
excessive number of psychopathics
and neuropathics, the
Jews have only
been the advance agents.
Many publicists of Europe
have, in fact,
often designated conditions
in the United States as
'Jewish.'" [FISHBERG,
p. 549]
"The power of commercialism
in the United States was
hardly to be denied," says
Albert Lindemann, "The English
themselves were often taken
aback by the commercial
scramble in the United States
in the nineteenth century,
by the 'Jewish souls of
the Yankee.'" [LINDEMANN,
p. 206]
"It has been the
Jews," says Edward Shapiro,
"who taught Americans how
to dance (Arthur Murray),
what to wear (Ralph Lauren),
how to behave (Dear Abby
and Ann Landers), and where
to complain (David Horowitz).
[SHAPIRO, Anti-Sem,
p. 1]
Jews even gave the
world the idealized images
of the Barbie doll and Superman.
"If you live in New York
or any other major city,"
said comedian Lenny Bruce,
"you are Jewish." [RUBIN,
p. 89]
As
Chaim Bermant notes:
"There is probably less anti-semitism and certainly less overt
anti-semitism in
the world today than at
any other time since the
rise of Christianity. Auschwitz
is,
of course, one reason; another
is the decline in religious
fanaticism and, indeed,
in
religious belief in general,
and while rampant secularism
may be a threat to Judaism
it has made life easier
for the Jew. A third reason,
which is connected to the
second,
is
that the western world has
become more Jewish. The
commerical drive which
was said to characterize
the Jew and which was regarded
with such disdain by the
European (if not the American)
bourgeoisie, has become,
if not respectable, then
at
least more widespread and
acceptable ..." [BERMANT,
C., 1977, p. 37]
"If the religious
traditions of the shtetl
had accustomed Jews
to think of luxuries as
a type of instrument for
dignifying the holy days,"
says Andrew Heinze, "the
secular American environment
refocused this awareness."
[HEINZE, p. 5] ... By exploiting
the Jewish concept of honoring
a holiday, merchants and
consumers turned the religious
occasion into a pretext
for shopping ... [HEINZE,
p. 66] ... As a pretext
for shopping, Jewish holidays
merged subtly with the fashion
cycle." [HEINZE, p. 67] "The turn of the century New York Yiddish
press," writes Paula Hyman
and Deborah Moore, "abounded
with references to the enthusiasm
of Jewish women, even the
newly arrived, for the latest
style of dress and interior
decoration. Furthermore,
there were certain clear
contrasts between Jews and
other groups in respect
to the consumption of goods
... [Jewish] attraction
to new kinds of products
and pleasures also contributed
to the rapid development
of a resort culture among
Jews, which set them apart
not only from other immigrants,
but from virtually all Americans
of similar modest means."
[HYMAN, p. 24] Among the best known of these
resorts in the Catskill
Mountains was Grossinger's.
"In the 1860s and
1870s," notes William Leach,
"luxury was seen by many
Americans as morally corrupting
... By the 1920s, luxury
seems to have lost for many
people much of its negative
meaning." [LEACH, p. 295]
"The modern definition of
luxury," decided an influential
Columbia University economist,
Edwin R. Seligman, in 1927,
"is neutral so far as ethical
connotation is concerned."
[LEACH, p. 295]
"Nourished by American
conditions and values,"
says Andrew Heinze, "Jewish
merchants were able to make
a profound impact in the
era before World War I.
In the areas of street marketing
and film marketing, they
would completely change
the prevalent mode of operations,
thereby demonstrating that
Jewish adaptation in America
entailed the creation as
well as the reception of
new forms of consumption."
[HEINZE, p. 181-182]
"The contemporary
historian John Higham,"
notes Edward Shapiro, "has
concluded that the Jewish
emphasis on the materialistic
and competitive values of
business is also 'deeply
ingrained in American life.'"
[SHAPIRO, p. 11]
Even modern advertising
and the selling of "brand
names" can be traced to
Jewish origins, particularly
rooted in the Jewish Rothschild
banking monolith in Germany
in the 1800s. The House
of Rothschild, notes Sam
Lehman-Wilzig, "developed
... institutionalized advertising.
Advertising today is taken
for granted as a central
cog in the capitalist system,
especially in regard to
fueling demand. This was
not always the case; for
as [German economist Werner]
Sombart points out, a pretty
display in a window was
considered unethical business
practice a mere three hundred
years ago. Noteworthy is
that this institution was
elevated by HR [the House
of Rothschild] to new heights,
advertising not any specific
product but a corporate
name." [LEHMAN-WILZIG, p.
256]
In a more recent expression
of the "brand name" archetype,
Christopher Byron traces
the Israeli Nakash brothers
(of Jordache
jeans) road to success
in America in the 1980s:
"Steeped in the Middle
Eastern arts of obliqueness
and guile, the
brothers seemed manipulative
by nature. And as the youngest
of the
three, Avi's guile
certainly showed through
when he came up with a
gimmick that would
make them all rich. Catching
on quickly to the
American way of doing
things, he suggested that
they forget about
the product and invest
in the image instead. In
other words, spend
the money on an ad
campaign ... And what more
mesmerized the
masses than sex, wealth,
and social power ... If
a four-dollar swatch
of denim could be
turned into a symbol of
success, there was just
no telling how much
people would be willing
to pay for it ... [The
first TV commercial
they personally created]
the three networks
all rejected ... as lewd, but New York area independents
agreed to
carry it, and within
weeks Jordache
was the rage of every
high
school in the Greater
New York area." [BYRON,
p. 34-35]
Another example of
the artificial construct
of economic value is the
entire world of diamonds,
largely controlled internationally
by Jews. The idea of an
"engagement ring" (and specifically
a diamond one, as an expression
of eternal love) is a recent
phenomena, created by advertising
agencies to sell more diamonds.
David Koskoff notes that:
"Harry
Oppenheimer [the head of
the South African-based
De Beers
diamond
syndicate] is usually credited
with augmenting demand [for
diamonds]
through advertising, which
De Beers undertook in 1939 ...
Most
diamantaries [those in the
diamond trade] appreciate
that the value
of
their product is illusory
and dependent on the props
maintained by
De Beers." [KOSKOFF, The Diamonds,
p. 272
In 1993 the Israeli
author Amos Oz paraphrased
a Jewish critic's referral
to the special Jewish entrepreneurial
vision:
"We Israelis hear
now and then that the very
state of Israel might
have been a mistake
... George Steiner goes
even further by adding
that a national state
per se is vain, childish,
anachronistic, and a
dangerous concept.
We should aspire to 'Judaifying'
the entire world
by turning it into
the arena of one hundred
different civilizations,
rather than a single
nation state." [OZ, p. 117]
"Western civilization,"
says Albert Lindemann, "is
undeniably a 'jewified'
civilization, however offensive
the word may be to our ears
because of the ugly use
made of it by anti-Semites
... Anti-Semites believed
that Jews were everywhere,
and in a sense they were
almost everywhere that counted
in modern society." [LINDEMANN,
Esau's, p. 20]
WASP
economic and social dominance
in America was well along
in the process of being
dismantled when Jewish commentator
Peter Schrag wrote in 1971
that
"In the
last twenty-five years,
dissecting the establishment
has become a
highly
popular academic endeavor.
C. Wright Mills (among others)
took
it on in The Power Elite,
E. Digby Baltzell in The
Protestant
Establishment,
G. William Domhoff in The
Higher Circles and Who
Rules
America? One might suspect
that the very existence
of these
studies
indicates that the subject
bears more resemblance to
a carcass
than
to a living body." [SCHRAG,
p. 161]
******************************************
The first
immigration group of Jews
to America came in the colonial
era; they were largely Sephardic
and established themselves
as a merchant elite. "They
were "among the founders
of such Establishment institutions
as the New York Stock Exchange,
Columbia University, New
York University, the American
Medical Association, and
the Boston Atheneum." [ZWEIGANHAFT,
p. 9] Hayman Levy was the largest fur trader
in colonial America; even
Daniel Boone was hired by
a Jew, "Jacob Cohen, and
other Jewish merchants to
survey the land, mark out
roads and locate land claims
in Kentucky." [DAVIS, D.,
129] A second immigrant
group arrived in the middle
of the 19th century; some
of these "made their way
into investment banking,
where they were joined by
an equally successful group
of Jews stemming from the
banking houses established
by the Jews in Germany."
[FEINGOLD, p. 39]
By the 1870s, "proportionally
speaking, in no other immigrant
group have so many ever
risen so rapidly from rags
to riches." [ZWEIGENHAFT,
p. 11] "The first generation
of [Jewish] millionaires
included the manufacturer
Philip Heidelbach, the bankers
Josephs Seligman, Lewis
Seasongood, and Solomon
Loeb, the railroad magnates
Emanuel and Mayer Lehman,
and a good many more. The
generall body of American
Jews participated in the
same upward thrust; a survey
of 10,000 Jewish families
in 1890 showed that 7,000
of them had servants." [HIGHAM,
J., 1957, p. 8] "Many Jews,"
noted Richard Zweigenhaft
and G. William Domhoff,
"were influential in founding
the very clubs that helped
set the upper class apart
from the rest of society
... Like the Sephardim who
preceded them, the wealthiest
German Jews were accepted
in the most prestigious
social clubs, and many interacted
with and were entertained
socially by 'the best' of
gentile society." [ZWEIGENHAFT,
p. 10] In 1889 62% of American
Jews in the occupational
world were either bankers,
brokers, wholesalers, retailers,
collectors, or agents. 17%
more were professionals.
[LIPSET/RAAB, p. 82]
The third wave of
Jewish immigrants, the largest,
came from Eastern Europe
at the turn of the twentieth
century and mostly settled
in New York City; occupationally,
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