Jewish Villains

At my synagogue’s Yom Kippur service in October, a congregant gave the drash, and a highlight of the talk was his recollection of a childhood Hebrew teacher who would often call out a pupil’s misbehavior with a question laced in irony: “Are you Jewish?” This question, the congregant suggested, had lingered with him as a moral guide through the years. 

What he was alluding to was the array of ethical principles that Jews have traditionally clung to, though individually we may not always live up to them. Nevertheless, when an egregious Jewish violator surfaces, “Are you Jewish?”  seems like a deft rebuke. The wider community should know that such misconduct is anathema to the Jewish people, and while our Torah almost always offers opportunities for forgiveness and redemption, we don’t shrug off the wrongdoing.

Rather than succumb to defensiveness, it would be prudent not to give the antisemites excuses for lashing out.

In mulling the disturbing outbreak in recent months of antisemitic expressions and assaults on liberal college campuses and a spate of even more hateful slurs by right-wing podcasts and radio hosts, I have been pleased to see vigilant communal, political and educational leaders call out the culprits. I‘ve also been heartened by anti-bias advertising campaigns and efforts to educate the young about this scourge. 

But I’ve also wondered whether something else is called for, that is to apportion some responsibility for the upsurge of hate to the fact that the last two decades have produced a roll call of rogues with unmistakably Jewish names: Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. (The first two financial fraudsters, the latter two sexual predators.) In response to the considerable and long-running scandals they have stirred up, not much has been made of their Jewish roots. But I would argue that it’s worth pondering whether their crimes have perhaps provided antisemites—or anyone who harbored long-smoldering resentments of Jewish achievement or prosperity or had even more preposterous motives—with a license and the ammunition to assail Jews. 

I’ve not been alone in feeling shame at the stories that emerged about these Jewish moguls, wishing only that the headlines would die out. The Epstein scandal, especially, seems to have a life longer than Watergate, embroiling corporate chieftains, diplomats, college and even American presidents and a British prince. Somehow, the scandals marred the pride I had felt as the son of immigrant Holocaust survivors in the rising Jewish prominence in American life during the second half of the 20th century, a period some writers have correctly labeled a Golden Age for the outsized Jewish accomplishment in science, literature, government and entertainment. 

But I think private shame and pain were not enough. Perhaps there needed to be more unequivocal and outspoken condemnations of these miscreants by rabbis, Jewish organizations and publications and deeply engaged Jews. While the Madoff affair drew rebukes from Jewish religious and social organizations, many of which had invested with him, their leaders’ remarks, with some exceptions, did not sufficiently emphasize the resulting shonde (disgrace), the stain such misconduct leaves on the image and souls of Jewish Americans. It was disturbing to read during the 2008 financial crisis, for example, that a survey conducted by Stanford University professors found that a remarkable quarter of Americans blamed Jews for the crisis and another 38.4 percent said Jews were at least partly at fault. Most Jewish communal leaders were silent during the Weinstein and Epstein sex scandals as well. It was as if those opting for silence felt it was wiser to ignore the Jewish tie-in and let sleeping dogs lie until the tumult had passed. (Of course the release of the Epstein files means that scandal isn’t going away anytime soon.)

It’s true that putting the onus for an upsurge in antisemitic hate on Jewish misconduct would appear to be blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator. It would be holding Jews to a higher standard than other people. But it would be a recognition of a grim reality: Antisemitism will always be with us and the challenge Jews in public leadership positions face is figuring out how to react effectively. While firmly calling out antisemitism wherever it rears its head, Jews may also have to undertake some communal soul-searching as to what in contemporary culture and Jewish religious life could have spawned such outlaws and monstrous abusers or failed to discourage their behavior. We may also need to develop ways to monitor our own tribe. 

I would argue that a similar approach should be considered in weighing the Netanyahu government’s wildly disproportionate response to the savage massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. The callousness of the Netanyahu government evident in the excessive deaths of Gaza civilians—more than 70,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children—did not garner Israel any friends and invited scorn for the aura of righteousness that Israel has always claimed in its policy toward the Palestinians. It also undercut reasonable arguments that today’s anti-Zionists ignore the labyrinthine history of Israel’s founding and the unrelenting antagonism of Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors ever since.

Sure, Israel’s zealous defenders are right in arguing that Israel is being held to a higher standard than other countries caught up in conflict, that in Libya, Congo, Iran, Sudan and Russia, to name a few, targeted killings of civilians who oppose the regime are commonplace. But the people of the Torah have been commanded to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard—struggling with this obligation is the hard task for which we were chosen. That credo may help explain the remarkable Jewish achievements and Israel’s breathtaking progress as a nation, but admittedly it can be a diplomatic and public relations albatross when moral flaws are exposed. Nevertheless, a welter of Torah and Talmudic teachings tell us there is a need for appropriately taking responsibility for wayward behavior. That is the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur work of teshuva—repentance.

The dilemma that the Jewish world faces is that calling attention to the background of scoundrels like Epstein, Weinstein and Madoff can unwittingly feed into antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as scheming financial manipulators or sexual predators. Why should a faith held by 16 million people be tarnished by the malevolence of four or five men? Yes, combating antisemitism requires vigilance of hateful remarks and writings by politicians, media stars and celebrities, not to mention acts of violence or vandalism. But I would argue it also requires some policing within our own tribe. Perhaps Jewish leaders should respond more forthrightly when another notable becomes mired in scandal.

That all this needs to be said stands in stark contrast to the increasingly optimistic world in which I came of age and grappled with as an adult. I was born in 1945, the year that saw the end of a war whose brutality was capped by the systematic slaughter of the 6 million in Hitler’s explicit effort to annihilate the Jewish people.  Yet, as I grew up and set off on my own family life and career, I gradually came to believe that I was living through a rebound era. In America, Jews were starting to thrive everywhere, in almost all fields, from Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine to Saul Bellow’s novels to Stephen Sondheim’s musicals to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s tenure on the Supreme Court. Laws, restrictive covenants and quotas that once squelched their progress were falling away. Despair was turning to promise and promise to extraordinary achievement. This was astonishing for someone whose family had emerged homeless and displaced from the ruins of Jewish Europe only to wait five years until the American government fully opened its doors to the tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors.

A certain Jewish chauvinism set in, enhanced by our ability to live, work and play almost anywhere. Indeed, a highlight of the quarter-century my wife and I dwelt in a once-restricted suburban town was dancing horas at a 50th birthday party in a WASP country club. We had Jewish neighbors who were partners at white-shoe Manhattan law firms and Wall Street investment banks. As we commuted to work on Metro-North trains, these neighbors would casually report their children’s admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia, colleges that had historically placed quotas on the number of Jewish students they would accept. Soon enough each of those institutions would be headed by a Jewish president.

In addition to the array of Jewish accomplishments, flagrant antisemitism appeared to be on the wane. Israel’s rout of four Arab armies in six days in the war of June 1967 touched off an unaccustomed swagger among American Jews that endured into the current century. After learning of the victory, my mother, who lost her parents and six siblings in the Holocaust, and harbored a sense of shame that Jews had not done more to stave off the slaughter, told my sister: “Now we can hold our heads high.” 

That self-confidence and complacency was shaken by organized terrorist attacks like the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and has been punctured in recent years by bloody antisemitic attacks by individuals, the most recent horror at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. As worrying has been a seemingly overnight and fairly ubiquitous upsurge in hostile campus protests and assaults against Jewish students in response to the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis and the war in Gaza that followed. These were accompanied by brazen cries of “Globalize the Intifada!” and “From the River to the Sea,” slogans that seemed to urge the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. There has also been a normalizing of antisemitism by popular figures on the right like Tucker Carlson and their defenders—our president and vice president. 

Epstein, Weinstein and Madoff lived lavishly, ostentatiously—immodestly flashing their Hamptons mansions and yachts and flights on private jets. Intoxicated with the power and wealth at their command, they may have deluded themselves that they were untouchable in a world where Jews had amassed power in so many fields. They would be protected from their crimes by canny lawyers or influential friends. Out of hubris and a sense of impunity, they were blind to the resentment  they were stirring. Stories about Epstein’s Caribbean island, his opulent mansions off Fifth Avenue and in Palm Beach, and his circle of powerful associates like Leslie Wexner, Leon Black, Larry Summers and Brad Karp provided more fodder for those who took the view that here was a rich, well-connected Jew exploiting and abusing poor, uneducated gentile girls sadly seduced by his money and his potential as a sparkplug for their careers.

But perhaps the larger Jewish community deluded itself as well, growing too comfortable in the belief that the bugaboo of antisemitism was a peripheral phenomenon, one largely confined to right-wing yahoos and hillbillies, a malady that would not emerge in polite company even with the scandalous headlines. The Jewish pedigree of people like Epstein then was something that could be ignored or kept quiet.

Similar delusions may have contributed to Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack. That massacre initially drew a world-wide wave of sympathy for Israel. But again, hubris set in among Israel’s leadership and in their crushing, ruthless counterattack, Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition squandered the initial surge of sympathy. The heartless disregard for collateral deaths and injuries, the destruction of most of Gaza’s housing, hospitals and schools, the failure to ensure that adequate nourishment and medicine reached Palestinian children seemed to corroborate overt accusations of genocide against a people notable as the most conspicuous victims of genocide. 

For me, the son of a Warsaw-area native, videos of hungry, scrawny children in Gaza called to mind the forsaken skeletal children dying on sidewalks in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation, scenes which I had seen in Holocaust documentaries. How could a people, my people, who had lived through such a calamity tolerate famine-like conditions for Palestinian children? 

Amid legitimate cries of outrage at the military campaign’s cruelty, the dogs of bias had been unleashed, shocking many American Jews even if the bias had been simmering there all along. Critics seemed to revel in the schadenfreude of telling Jews that they were as flawed as anyone else—though usually in shrouded language. Calling the toll in Gaza a holocaust or genocide seemed a deliberate effort to rub Jewish noses in the muck of hypocrisy. You have gloried in your victimization, the critics seemed to be shouting. Now you’re committing a holocaust of your own. Look at what the Chosen People have come to! 

The almost daily flares of explicit antisemitism on both the right and left have led me to ask: Where did we Jews go wrong to have let the Golden Age slip through our fingers? Rather than succumb to defensiveness, it would be prudent not to give the antisemites excuses for lashing out. If we Jews don’t look deeply at ourselves and find ways to thwart or denounce the behaviors of the Madoffs, Epsteins, Weinsteins and Netanyahus, we will continue to provide fuel for the impulses of the bigoted. 

Rather than worshipping and exploiting power and wealth, which incentivizes the Epsteins and Madoffs of this world, concentrate on prioritizing and nurturing such values as creativity, generosity, integrity, honesty, communal caring and a striving for quality in all endeavors. Those values deserve credit for the remarkable harvest of Jewish achievement. Prolonging that harvest should be the focus of Jewish identity and self-esteem regardless of what any antisemites might say. 

Joseph Berger was for 30 years a reporter and editor with The New York Times, retiring in 2015. He is the author of five books, including the memoir Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust and most recently a biography of Elie Wiesel.