De Niro To Play Bernie Madoff [The Telegraph/The Daily Beast]

• Where is the Arab Spring’s Havel? [NYT Week in Review]

• Mazeltov Borukhova, the Queens woman whose murder conviction was covered by Janet Malcolm, lost her appeal, in which she was represented by Alan Dershowitz. [NY Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Eli Valley’s spooky latest is perfect for today. [Forward]

• Bernard Madoff may have been a bad guy, but he actually had nothing to do with the financial crisis, and focusing on him only prevents an honest, effective reckoning with what did. [David Klion]

• Rep. Gary Ackerman, Democrat from Queens, apparently told Ilan Grapel when he first was released from Egyptian prison that the Mets had won the World Series. Cruel. [Hartford Courant]

I have not liked this band for approximately a decade, but the song is called “Halloween,” so.

• Ruth Madoff revealed that soon after her husband’s Ponzi scheme was revealed, the two tried to commit suicide by taking copious amounts of Ambien. [NYT]

• Israeli earthquake aid has begun to arrive in Turkey. Turkish officials have assured the world that while they appreciate it, the two countries are still—don’t worry!—in a diplomatic chill. [NYT]

• In addition to the 25 Israeli prisoners, Egypt also scored an F-16 (for sale) from the United States as part of the deal for the Israeli-American alleged spy Ilan Grapel, who is set to be freed later today. [JPost]

• Information about secret peace talks in 2008, newly revealed in Condoleezza Rice’s memoir, show that a deal was close and that the Obama Administration screwed up by coming in and focusing on settlements, David Ignatius argues. [WP]

• The U.S. ambassador urged the Israelis to institute a partial settlement construction freeze in order to bolster U.S. moves against Palestinian U.N. membership. [Ynet]

-Michael Lewis, in his new, excellent travelogue of Germany’s battered economy.

• The U.S. State Department chastised Israel over its announcement of new building in the settlement of Ariel. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Twilight actress Kristen Stewart, apparently not a Jew, nonetheless got her start singing “a more serious dreidel song” (which is to say, presumably not the “I made it out of clay” one). [W]

• Splitsville for the Madoffs. [JTA]

• The U.S. military has learned several counterinsurgency tactics from the Israelis. [Abu Muqawama]

• Camp Be’chol Lashon, in Marin County, California, is specifically for Jews of color. [NYT]

Amy Winehouse made out of pills? Amy Winehouse made out of pills.

• Speaking beside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Obama said the two agreed that the Palestinians should not seek statehood at the United Nations. [Ynet]

• Israel Shamir, the Jewish-born anti-Semite extensively profiled in Tablet Magazine, has played an even more active role in WikiLeaks than has been believed. [Jewish Chronicle]

• A mosque in a West Bank village near Ramallah was torched; indications are that the arsonists were militant Jewish settlers. [WP]

• The International Atomic Energy Agency’s finding of elements of an Iranian nuclear weapons program obviously discredits its parent body, the U.N., President Ahmadinejad pointed out. What with there being no Iranian nuclear weapons program and all. [AP/WP]

• Contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg points out that Iran clearly has a nuclear weapons program. [Bloomberg View]

• Spurred in part by strong Jewish opposition, an anti-circumcision movement leader dropped her campaign to place an initiative to ban the practice on the Santa Monica, California, ballot. [JTA]

• English Jewish author Harry Bernstein, who precociously penned his acclaimed memoir at the age of 96, died at 101. [NYT]

• The Syrian-American blogger known as “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was arrested. [AP/WP]

• President Obama is so anti-Israel that some are now worried he will lose Arab-American support. Wait, what? [Salon]

• Note to whoever paid $200 for 14 pairs of Bernard Madoff’s boxers: That money could be better spent feeding starving African children. Or feeding me at Le Bernardin. [JTA]

• You know who else drank decaf coffee? Hitler. [berfrois]

JTA editor-in-chief Ami Eden has a grand theory of the X-Men, involving Magneto and Meir Kahane. Watch his video feuilleton:

Of course there is the story that will live forever, even after its protagonist dies, the story of Bernie Madoff (a Strauss-Kahn lookalike, or is it the other way around?) who perpetrated the biggest scam in history (will he replace Meyer Lansky as the chief exhibit in the bad-guy Jewish Hall of Fame?) and ruined thousands of people, many of them fellow Jews.

Confusing!

At the same time, Fish notes, Jews are disproportionately wealthy. “So which is it?” Fish asks. “Jews are victims (expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust), or Jews are victimizers (rapacious bankers, shyster lawyers, land-grabbers and ethnic cleansers)? Jews are devils and sub-human vermin (a Nazi trope), or Jews are God’s chosen people?” This, Fish concludes, makes the Israel question particularly complicated: “Those who offer the criticism can never quite be sure that their distaste for Israel’s actions with respect to the Palestinians is entirely innocent of the influence of centuries of vilification.”

I have some more questions for the distinguished English professor:

What’s Up With the Blacks? They run hip-hop, and they’ve got one of their own in the White House (will he replace Martin Luther King, Jr., as the chief exhibit in the good-guy Black Hall of Fame?), yet some people still want to lynch them. What’s up with that?

What’s Up With the Tibetans? They seem poor, and yet they’ve colonized the labor ranks of the Union Square Farmer’s Market stands. Paradox!

What’s Up With the French? They celebrate a libertine sexual culture and are praised by sophisticated people everywhere. But then one of the most prominent exemplars of this culture is accused of rape, and that, apparently, is uncool. Contradiction?

What’s Up With the Vampires? They are more popular than ever, what with True Blood and the Twilight series, yet they remain at their core a blood-sucking people who fundamentally thrive on killing God-fearing decent human beings (the Jews’ lookalike, or is it the other way around?). How odd!

What’s Up With Stanley Fish? The only work of scholarly importance he ever did, on John Milton, is quite different from the reader-response movement he served as a mascot for, which has been out-of-date for 20 years, and yet he is still received as some sort of cultural and political authority. What gives?

What’s Up With the New York Times? They are the world’s greatest newspaper, and yet they also pay Stanley Fish to write blog posts for which the description “inane” is far too high a compliment. Why?

What’s Up With the Jews? [NYT]
Related: Heilstorm [Tablet Magazine]

• You know how the Last Supper was a Seder? Yeah, it probably wasn’t. [Menachem Mendel/JI Daily]

• Gal Beckerman profiles the left-wing group Jewish Voice for Peace. [Forward]

• Neo-Nazis are marching in Trenton, New Jersey, tomorrow. Enjoy the rain, scumbags. [NYC ANTIFA]

• People are really excited about an Israel slasher film called Rabies, and now I am, too. [Capital]

• Kehinde Wiley—L.A.-born, of Nigerian descent—paints Israelis. [LAT]

• Some 1300 Ethiopian immigrants in Israel will hopefully set the Guinness World Record for largest Seder on Monday. [JPost]

• Unbeatable headline: “Cohen Media Acquires ‘Chasing Madoff.’” [Variety]

• In some Orthodox communities, only immodest women vote, or so they say. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• President Obama acknowledges the Lubavitcher Rebbe. [JTA]

Helen Mirren as a former Mossad agent? Yes, please.

Going Home, he was led and barred into what he called The Cottage, which some call, simply, The House (and still more call, sarcastically, Bungalow 2). His heaving chest concealed a Silent Honor, for Going Home, truly, was no longer an option. The Season of Passion he had embraced amidst the climax of his glamorous life as a Rogue had come to an end as Secrets were exposed; Daddy was embarrassed before his previously Loving Family Ties, a humiliation that was as far-reaching as even would be a Message from Nam. To secure a Second Chance was Impossible—the Ransom that was the assets of many Americans had been taken for a giant Leap of Faith, while the Irresistible Forces behind the Ponzi scheme were Bittersweet, scoring many their Jewels and other Fine Things, but sending most on The Long Road Home—an arduous Journey, a dubious Legacy. Johnny Angel he was not; Full Circle he had come.

“Honor Thyself,” he repeats to himself even still, One Day at a Time, the Lone Eagle now Vanished from the outside world, with only his own Malice as familiar solace. And yet, amidst all these Changes, his Heartbeat throbs as the warden brings his Special Delivery, his Answered Prayers, what is for him No Greater Love and Passion’s Promise. He sits in these Golden Moments, Matters of the Heart satisfied by The Kiss of this Miracle, the Big Girl, A Good Woman: Danielle Steel.

Bernie’s Escape [NY Post]

Libya became so flush with cash that Bernard L. Madoff, the New York financial manager who stole billions of dollars in a long-running Ponzi scheme, approached officials overseeing the country’s $70 billion sovereign fund a few years ago about an “investment opportunity,” according to a State Department summary of the episode in 2010. “We did not accept,” a Libyan official reported.

-The New York Times

• An Israeli panel cleared the military in the botched assassination of a Hamas leader, which killed 13 civilians. [NYT]

• The Southern Poverty Law Center has added Pamela Geller and her organization Stop the Islamization of America to their list of hate groups. [New York Daily News]

• Led by the Arab nations, the United Nations Security Council unanimously(!) voted to impose an arms embargo on Libya, to sanction Muammar Gaddafi, his relatives and closest allies, and to refer him to the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes. [Laura Rozen]

• Bernie Madoff calls collect. [New York Magazine]

• Jay Landesman, Beat writer and cultural macher, is dead. He was 91. [NYT]

• In non-Jewish, but important news: Frank Buckle, the last U.S. veteran of World War I, died this morning. He was 110. [AFP]

This week’s parasha provides a good example of the man’s strange nature. Moses climbs up to the mountain to receive the word of God, tarries in returning, climbs down, and sees the Golden Calf. Reading the story as a child, I was incensed on his behalf: Having just witnessed the true spirit of God, I asked myself, the Israelites couldn’t even give Moses the benefit of the doubt for running a bit behind schedule? Are a few weeks truly that much of a setback that a nation that had just been awarded the Torah would resolve to break the divine rules and erect a shining statue? And, most troubling of all, what to make of Moses’ own baffling response? Rather than fume at the ungrateful idolaters, Moses wrestles with God on their behalf. The supreme being is in a genocidal state of mind; bravely, Moses takes a stand and demands that God spare the Israelites. “If you do not forgive them,” he tells the Lord, “blot me out from the book that you have written.” Why go through all that trouble, risking anonymity in perpetuity, to protect a sinful horde?

Just ask Bernie Madoff.

The disgraced financier is not a man usually associated with biblical wisdom, but a series of recent disclosures, including interviews with Madoff himself, suggest that he and Moses might have shared a fundamental understanding of the human condition. Speaking to a reporter from the New York Times, Madoff argued that the various banks and financial institutions he’d defrauded were guilty of “willful blindness,” and that there was no way these large and savvy investors—as opposed to private individuals—did not know his unnaturally profitable operation was a sham.

Some newly released documents support Madoff’s claim. Earlier this month, for example, internal communications of JPMorgan Chase employees were made public in a lawsuit, indicating that some at the bank were suspicious of Madoff long before he was arrested. On June of 2007, a senior executive at the bank, the Times reported, sent an email to colleagues and said that another executive at Chase “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”

Much of Madoff’s recent statements, of course, are self-serving, an attempt, perhaps, to lessen the effect of his grievous actions. But there’s much more we can learn from his comments that the banks were somehow complicit in his crime: What Madoff understood, the fundamental truth lying at the heart of his deceptions, was not that people are greedy, but that people would go to tremendous lengths to try and overcome the basic unknowability, the profound impermanence that is at the core of human existence. People invested with Madoff because he suggested that he could turn the market—tempestuous, unpredictable, sometimes vengeful, frequently wild—into a tamed beast that behaved just as you liked it to behave, a reliable animal that gave and gave and asked for nothing in return. And the banks collaborated not only because great wealth was being generated, but also because Madoff’s fantasy was too strong to resist.

It’s the same story, essentially, as this week’s parasha. As the story begins, the Israelites are introduced to God, a mysterious and invisible being that presents them with rules but is never entirely familiar to them. They are awed, but their awe soon turns to anxiety. Like the Wilpons and the Picowers and Madoff’s other victims, they needed something permanent, something they could grasp, something controlled and controllable, something so unlike God. They ask for a calf, and Aaron, the great priest, doesn’t hesitate for a moment: He collects their jewelry and fashions them an idol. Like the gentlemen at JPMorgan Chase, he understands that what’s truly at stake is not material but spiritual, and that what the people are asking for is assurance in a world that has none.

Moses, the wisest of leaders, knows all of this, and he refuses to succumb to the Lord’s wrath. Even God’s divine book, he knows, is written for humans, and no story is more human than striving to eliminate uncertainty. If the punishment for such human actions is genocide, he tells God, write me out of the book.

And God is soothed. He understands—neither for the first time in the Good Book nor for the last—that his people are stiff-necked, and that no matter how many signs they’re given, they’re still likely to abandon his ways for any fleeting chance at tangible, earthly representations of divinity. He realizes that the laws he advocates depend on faith, not evidence and are, therefore, an abstraction. And he knows that the people congregated in the desert, sweating and scared, vie for the concrete. Therefore, he forgives—he orders the Israelites to destroy their remaining jewelry, but he spares them their lives. There’s no other way to reconcile God and Man.

If he’s studying the Torah in his North Carolina jail cell, Bernie Madoff may take some comfort in this bit of divine good will. And let us, too, show Bernie some mercy: His crimes are terrible, but they transcend simple greed or sheer arrogance. As we learn from this week’s parasha, we’ve had Madoffs since the dawn of time, and we will continue to have them, most likely, for as long as we strive to impose order on a world that is unruly, for as long as we think we can fashion our own gods, for as long, that is, as we’re human.

• Drunk Serb killed alleged Zionist shark in Egypt. [MINA]

• Jeffrey Picower’s estate will pay the $7.2 billion it earned from fraud to Irving Picard, the man overseeing the liquidation of Madoff’s firm . [Bloomberg]

• Rahm shows the world what’s in his crawlspace. No, that’s not a euphemism for anything. [Gawker]

• Does Israel need the West Bank to remain secure? Not according to Martin van Creveld, an Israeli military historian. [Forward]

Yesterday was Jane Austen’s 235th birthday and in honor of the marriage obsessed writer’s milestone, here’s a romantic YouTube video proposal making the rounds. With Muppets. Austen, here’s how we do romance in the 21st Century. (And if the couple is Jewish, do you think they’d make a Muppet marriage with a mini chuppah? A girl can dream.)

• Ahmadinejad sacked his foreign minister and replaced him with the head of Iran’s nuclear energy agency, in a sign that the president has successfully consolidated power. [Laura Rozen]

• Bernard Madoff is likely not eligible for a furlough to attend the funeral of his son, who killed himself over the weekend. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Vox Tablet contributor Hugh Levinson has a podcast about Safed, a northern Israeli town with a fascinating spiritual past. [BBC]

• Hitch on Kissinger. Always a good time. [Slate]

• Classic headline: “Suspected Israeli Neo-Nazi Arrested in Kyrgyzstan.” It’s like I always say, those crazy Kyrgyz! [Haaretz]

Somebody was listening in on that argument you were having with your uncle about Israel (h/t Goldblog).

That changed on Saturday, when Madoff’s elder son, 46-year-old Mark, was found hanging by a dog leash from a ceiling pipe in his SoHo loft, on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest and in the shadow of new lawsuits filed against the extended Madoff clan. The death, which the medical examiners quickly ruled a suicide, propelled the scandal into the realm of Greek tragedy—because it has now visited misfortune on one of the only members of the family to be definitively innocent in the mess: Mark Madoff’s two-year-old son, Nick, was peacefully asleep in the apartment where his father killed himself.

In the predawn hours, Mark sent emails to his wife—who was vacationing with their four-year-old at Disney World—telling her to “send someone to take care of Nick,” evidence that he knew exactly what he was risking: That his toddler, effectively left home alone, would wake up and come across the grisly scene himself.

Even if the boy, who reportedly slept through the whole thing, is too young to remember this weekend’s events, he’ll inevitably grow into a teenager and a young man left to struggle with a legacy not just of a grandfather but a father pathologically willing to make their own children their greatest victims.

Madoff Son Found Dead in NYC Apartment [ABC]
Death of Bernard Madoff’s Son Ruled a Suicide by Hanging [LAT]
Related: Life After Madoff’s ‘Big Lie’ [WSJ]
Madoff Lawsuits Are Headed for Court [NYT]

• Thomas Friedman approves, and his pox is cast on both their houses. [NYT]

• Bernard Madoff’s elder son, Mark, was found dead of a likely suicide on the two-year anniversary of his father’s arrest. He was 46. [JTA]

• As the White House plans further economic sanctions, it openly fears that new negotiations are simply Iran playing for time. [LAT]

• A year ago, Syrian officials told Iranian counterparts that they would not join a Hezbollah or Iran war with Israel, according to a WikiLeaked cable. [JTA]

• How adoptions are—the literal metaphor cannot be avoided—changing the face of American Judaism. [WP]

• Obama administration officials clamored to have their ideas heard over what the United States’s next step vis-à-vis the peace process should be. Their deadline is tonight, when Secretary of State Clinton is set to give a big speech expected to lay out the new strategy. [LAT]

• Columnist Jackson Diehl blames the failure of the latest round of talks on Palestinian President Abbas—who, he reports, has a history of declining good deals—and on the administration for failing to recognize this. [WP]

• Roger Cohen’s column is about an activist-y young American Jew who went to Israel, was spat on by haredim, and then joined J Street. [NYT]

• Hadassah will pay back $45 million of Madoff-related money as part of Bankruptcy Court proceedings. [eJewishPhilanthropy]

• A WikiLeaks cable revealed U.S. plans to try to get Spain an underwater treasure in exchange for a Camille Pissaro painting, now in Spain, that the Nazis confiscated from a Jewish family. The ploy failed. [ARTINFO]

Margarita Korol/Tablet Magazine

“Hey, Shalom, how are you doing?”

I am at a teacher-parent function at my son’s school, and the man—let’s call him K— is smiling broadly as he approaches me. K’s daughter is in my son’s class; he is in his mid-50s, with a small beard and a pot belly that hangs over the front of his pants. He smells of coffee and office machines and paperwork. I reach out to shake his hand, which he bypasses instead for an adolescent shoulder bump and a hearty slap on my back.

“Good to see you,” he says.

The thing about K is that I hate him. Hate is a strong word, but not strong enough. Abhor? Revile? Something to do with nausea? There’s not much time; let’s go with hate.

I hate K so much I can’t believe how much I hate him. He’s never done anything to me, never said anything bad about me, we’ve never been anything but cordial to one another. But I hate who K is, I hate the way that he is; I hate, I think, his soul, assuming he has one. None of this would be a problem for me except for this: K is a Jew.

The worst thing about being Jewish, for me, is that you can’t hate someone else who’s Jewish without being accused of being a self-hating Jew, even when his Jewishness isn’t the reason I hate him. I’d hate K if he was a Christian. I’d hate K if he was an atheist. I’d hate K if he was a labrador retriever. He happens to be Jewish, so all of a sudden, I’m self-hating? It really is unfair. Tell me I can’t eat bacon, tell me I can’t drive on Sabbath—but don’t tell me who I can’t hate. I can only tolerate three or four people in the world to begin with, and there’s something like 15 million Jews out there. That’s not a lot of overlap.

The situation is further complicated in K’s case because the things I hate about K happen to be the very things an anti-Semite would hate about Jews: he’s stingy, he’s sneaky, he cheats.

For the record, I don’t associate these qualities with Jews; I associate them with people, with mankind in general. I find it almost sweetly optimistic of anti-Semites to suggest that only Jews are stingy, that only Jews obsess about money, that only Jews lust for power. If only, Hitler my man, if only.

So, I’m torn.

What can I do?

Like him?

That’s ridiculous.

It’s as if the SS or the Klan or the Tea Party (trust me, they’ll get there) handed K a checklist of “Reasons We Hate Jews” and he spends his every waking moment trying to check them all off: Sleazy lawyer? Check. Obsessed with money? Check. Loose morality when it comes to business? Check. He hasn’t yet made matzo out of Christian children’s blood, not that I know of, but maybe 2012 will be the year he does so and completes the list.

“Good,” I say. “Good. How are you?”

He cheats at everything and loudly decries anyone else who does so; he manipulates teachers and coaches, donates heavily to the school in order to influence their decisions regarding his daughter; he skirts every regulation, bends every rule, he is the first one to arrive at every school function and the last one to leave, and never without a conspiratorial whisper to the principal, a calculated aside to the teacher.

“Good,” he says. “Nice to see you.”

I try to remind myself that I hate all people.

I try to tell myself I hated K before I knew he was Jewish.

And then it happens: The teacher walks in, asks everyone to sit, and while everyone else does as they are told, while everyone else plays by the rules, K approaches her, and whispers in her ear. She listens intently, pats him on the back, and says, “We’ll take care of it,” and then K takes his seat—front row center—sits upright, winks at her, gives her a thumbs-up, and she nods back. I hate her, too, now, just for falling for it.

I don’t know what they were talking about, but I know what they were talking about: some special treatment his daughter required, some special attention, some grading on a curve, some handout of a position—class president, group leader, blackboard wiper—that all the other children would have to honestly work for. And I stare at the back of his head, and I think, despite myself, despite everything I just thought before:

You fucking kike.

I feel bad for this at first, but it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last because not all Jews are kikes, but some are. It doesn’t last because I see the other parents who know K, and who have seen what I just saw, and I see them look at each other and frown and shake their heads in disgust. It doesn’t last because shouldn’t the Jews who don’t fit the stereotypes—who strive, in fact, to prove those stereotypes false—be able to call out those Jews who make them all seem true?

Listen to him, so concerned about what the goyim think.

I hear on the news that a man has stolen billions of dollars, and that he lives in New York City, and I hold my breath and I think, Please don’t be a Jew, please don’t be a Jew, and then they say his name—Madoff—and they show his doorman building and they show his synagogue, and I think, You fucking kike.

I hear Chelsea Clinton is getting married, and I hear that her father-in-law was in prison for financial fraud, and I think, Please don’t be a Jew, please don’t be a Jew, and then I see the wedding photo in the newspaper and there’s the groom, the ex-con’s son, and he’s wearing a goddamn tallis, and I think of Chelsea’s new-father-in-law, You fucking kike.

Sure, sure—all he can see is the bad Jews. God forbid he should say a nice word about his own people.

I know, I know—one person doesn’t represent an entire group. But then why are we so vocal in demanding that “good” Muslims speak out against the bad? Why do we applaud when Bill Cosby reprimands African-Americans for not being good fathers? Why shouldn’t we police ourselves, too?

Police ourselves? You hear him, police ourselves? He’s nothing but a lousy Kapo, that’s what he is. A self-hating Kapo.

Oh, well. A thousand words ago I was worried I was a Nazi. I guess I’m doing better than I thought.

• Three members of Islamic Jihad’s armed wing died in an Israeli bombing in Gaza. [NYT]

• According to a new Pew poll, the American religious group most knowledgeable about the Bible, Christianity, and other religions is … atheists/agnostics. Second-most is Jews. [NYT]

• Via email, a boat with Jewish activists headed for Gaza was boarded by the IDF and is being taken toward Ashdod.

• Richard Cohen says the Obama administration botched the peace process by emphasizing the freeze. [WP]

• Stanley Chais, a big investment manager and philanthropist whom federal regulators accused of mismanaging $900 million in relation to the Bernard Madoff scandal, died at 84. [NYT]

The main action of Imagining Madoff—playing at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, New York—takes place during a long, scotch-soaked, pre-recession evening in the study of Solomon Galkin, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and Jewish community leader who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a certain Nobel laureate. Madoff, as imagined by Margolin, manages the funds of the Manhattan synagogue where Galkin (Howard Green) is treasurer; now Galkin, dazzled with the results, has summoned the magician to his home, hoping Madoff will take on his personal investments as well. The men banter easily, and their business meeting becomes a rambling debate over money, morality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and sex, with Madoff playing the whip-smart cynic to Galkin’s erudite moralist. What Galkin doesn’t know is that, like the hapless mortals of religious allegory who try to out-reason the Devil (as in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) or Death (as in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), his interlocutor holds a stacked deck—and Galkin’s fate—in his hands.

In Margolin’s telling, Madoff (played wonderfully by Mark Margolis) may not literally be Satan, but like the devils of literature, he can be charming, sadistic, and profound at the same time. Sitting in his prison cell, telling his story to a biographer (the scene in Galkin’s study is actually an extended flashback), he makes what may sound like a laughably outrageous claim: “I didn’t really care that much about the money.” But perhaps it’s not so outrageous. Serial killers, we know from the movies, are motivated less by practicality than by perversity—even, like Hannibal Lecter, by refined aesthetics—so, why can’t the same be true of serial extortionists? “There was the music of it,” Madoff says wistfully. The dollars don’t just flash before his eyes; he waltzes with them. Later, he remembers a dream in which his penis is a vagina and his vagina is a wallet. The play’s third character, a former Madoff secretary whom we periodically see testifying before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, offers the deliciously creepy fact that in 10 years, she never saw her former boss get up to go to the bathroom.

Most devilishly of all, Madoff as portrayed by Margolin is a kind of unconscientious objector to the moral universe presided over by the god of Abraham, where piety and obedience are rewarded and hubris is shunned. Galkin, then, is his natural enemy: a man who has seen hell and, instead of capitulating to its amoral code, has embraced Torah, ethics, and the Jewish people. He also happens to be a bit of a sap. Prattling about God and Sandy Koufax in his plush study, he comes across as self-satisfied and somewhat soft in the head. Madoff repeatedly attempts to convince Galkin that the latter’s beloved Talmudic riddles are not paths to higher wisdom but to complacency. Galkin will have none of it: For him, the very fact that a financial sorcerer is managing his synagogue’s funds is evidence of divine favor. “A lot of people ask me: Who is this Madoff? How does he make these miracles with money?” he says. “And I tell them: No one knows! That’s what makes it a miracle!”

Galkin, in short, is Madoff’s perfect mark: His belief in providence and in the goodness of fellow Jews makes him easy to exploit, and that, in turn, means Madoff wins their philosophical debate. His ability to betray his own people reveals the limits of Galkin’s moral imagination. “I wanted to rip up the picture he had of the world,” Madoff tells us. “His picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral. I wanted to say, ‘Wake up, asshole! Wake up!’ It’s a danger to the world, that picture, that idea of moral men. With that picture in your mind you’ll be murdered in your sleep.”

Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe. “Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t any man, still follow the leader blindly without knowing where he was going?” Madoff demands. Galkin will not entertain the possibility that despite his hard-won moral insights, he too is capable of “just following orders”; Madoff, meanwhile, never seems to consider that such a consummately human failing deserves sympathy rather than contempt.

In the end, the only character willing to consider the possibility that she has erred is the one without a bone to pick about the essential moral character of the world. “I never asked many questions,” Madoff’s secretary tells the SEC guiltily at the beginning of the play. By its end, she has charged herself more harshly than a judge, earthly or celestial, ever would. “I committed a crime,” she says, “and I didn’t even know it.”

• What exactly are the U.N. soldiers in southern Lebanon supposed to do? No one is actually sure, and Hezbollah is exploiting the confusion. [LAT]

• Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system is ready and will be deployed starting in Sderot this fall. [NYT]

• An update on the play that imagines a meeting between Elie Wiesel and Bernard Madoff, which opens upstate later this week. [NYT]

• A womens’ group periodically drives Palestinian children from the West Bank to an Israeli town on the Mediterranean coast in order to give them a day at the beach. [WP]

• Head-Jew-in-charge (and contributing editor) Jeffrey Goldberg nominates editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse to be his replacement following her essay on the Rotem Bill. [Atlantic]

Jerome A. Chanes has a fond eulogy:

The AJCongress pioneered the use of legislative and judicial action to improve conditions for American Jews. This direct-action method—using the law and litigation, often in coalition with like-minded groups such as the NAACP and the ACLU—concentrated on actively fighting discrimination, not simply on reforming prejudicial attitudes. …

The model of democratic governance in the Jewish community was a creation of the AJCongress, and was its hallmark from its earliest days. (The AJCongress did not make the transition until recently to the model of elite—that is, moneyed—governance that had long characterized many other national Jewish organizations.)

American Jewish Congress Suspends Activities [JTA]
Related: What The Congress Gave American Jews [Forward]

• As the Turkish-Israeli pissing match (and worse) continues, what is the United States—which for various reasons needs both in its corner—to do? [Politico]

• Ethnic tensions in Kyrgyzstan—mostly against the Central Asian country’s Uzbek minority—have led a dozen Jews to leave and make aliyah. Most its 1200 or so Jews, however, have elected to stay. [Ynet]

• Opposition leader Tzipi Livni criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu for easing the Gaza blockade under international pressure and not defending the Supreme Court’s recent decision integrating a religious school. [Ynet]

• A man convicted of helping Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was released in exchange for continuing to cooperate in the search for extant funds. [NBC News/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Tablet Magazine contributor David P. Goldman’s contest: Why do Palestinians deserve a nation-state and Kurds don’t? [First Things]

Yeah, just Drake asking his very obviously Jewish mother for a tuna sandwich. No big deal.

Madoff’s Hidden Booty [NY Post]
Earlier: The Lion in Winter

5. “Food is a very big thing in prison.” -John Conza, convicted counterfeiter.

4. “Bernie adjusted better than I did. He didn’t seem like he had any worry or stressed too much or had nerve or panic attacks, like I did. Going from an $8 million house to an eight-by-ten cell, I would feel smothered. Bernie never complained that I heard.” -Shannon Hay, convicted drug dealer.

3. “You couldn’t get an ice-cream cone off him.” -John Bowler, convicted drug trafficker on Madoff.

2. “You are going to pay with God.” -Jonathan Pollard, convicted Israeli spy, to Madoff.

1. “Fuck my victims. I carried them for twenty years, and now I’m doing 150 years.” -Bernard Madoff, convicted Ponzi schemer.

Bernie Madoff, Free At Last [NYmag]

The central irony is that the head of the theater (which is funded by the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center) has been known for pushing the envelope—he staged a controversial play about slain pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, for example. Additionally, a rewrite of the script, in which Wiesel’s character was slightly altered (and no longer called Elie Wiesel), probably removed all grounds for legal action. Still, fear of the hassle that a lawsuit brings—as well as, just maybe, Artistic Director Ari Roth’s personal relationship with Wiesel—led Theater J to nix the world premiere, which will now take place this summer in upstate New York. (Roth has also pledged to stage the revised version of the play next year.)

As originally written, the play had only three characters: Madoff; Wiesel; and Madoff’s secretary. Yet, according to playwright Deborah Margolin, these figures, and particularly Wiesel, were primarily allegorical. Madoff stood for, well, all the bad stuff Madoff stands for; Wiesel stood for moral force. “A recurring element in the play,” WCP notes, “is Wiesel’s insistence that Madoff handle his personal assets as well as those of the foundation; by play’s end, Madoff has yet to agree, a poignant ellipsis that mirrors Madoff’s desire and inability to confess his sins to Wiesel.”

However, having received an advance copy of the script, Wiesel—whose foundation lost $15 million to Madoff, and who personally lost over $1 million—called it “obscene” and “defamatory,” prompting Margolin to change his character’s name. In the new version—which is the one being produced upstate—the character, a Long Island rabbi, is described as “Novelist, holocaust survivor, humanitarian, professor, lifelong witness,” which should sound familiar.

“Wiesel is part of the family,” Roth told WCP. He meant this figuratively, of course, except maybe not exclusively: His mother, who was hidden from the Nazis during World War II, has been friends with Wiesel for half a century. Though the altered version of the play almost certainly removed the chance that a court would find for Wiesel, “that wasn’t enough for Roth, who felt,” the paper reports, “that the gray areas of the law could land him in court—a place he’d willingly go to defend some sorts of creative freedom, but not the right to offend Elie Wiesel.”

Who’s Afraid of Elie Wiesel? [Washington City Paper]
Earlier: Madoff Play With Wiesel Scene Still On

Well, if you still want to see the play—which is called Imagining Madoff, and was written by Deborah Margolin—you can check it out at Stageworks Hudson, a couple hours’ drive north of New York City.

Also, the NPR show All Things Considered did a brief segment on the legal legitimacy of Wiesel’s objection.

Theater Cancels Play With Wiesel Character [NYT]
When Truth Meets Fiction, Lawyers Intervene [NPR]

• A planned Ashkelon, Israel, hospital is not to be built on a onetime Jewish cemetery, as angry ultra-Orthodox alleged. Turns out, the ancient cemetery was pagan! Build away! [AP/Haaretz]

• Harold Bloom’s big essay on British anti-Semitism provoked a huge number of letters in response, and you can read them now. [Paper Cuts]

• The Forward was at DAWN 2010! [Arty Semite]

• “Great Jewish Moments in Law & Order.” Well played. [Heeb]

• Mel Gibson tells us how he really feels:

Oh, and yes, this is Madoff’s fault.

After Madoff, AJCongress Looks For Merger [JPost]

Some historical personalities lived so long and ranged so widely that they pose unusual challenges to biographers. Take Moses Montefiore, who lived from 1784 to 1885 and was among the most prominent men, let alone Jews, of his era. An Italian-born British banker, he made a fortune working with the Rothschilds, was knighted by Queen Victoria, and extended his philanthropic and humanitarian activities from Damascus, Morocco, Romania, and Russia to Jerusalem, where he founded the neighborhood of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. For the first scholarly biography of this towering figure—Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Harvard, March)—Oxford historian Abigail Green chased down sources in nine languages, housed in archives in 11 countries.

* * *

The subject of Tom De Haven’s new book started out from humble Jewish beginnings but has had adventures and wielded influence in even more countries than Montefiore did—and, unlike Montefiore, this guy can leap buildings in a single bound. Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Yale, February) surveys the vast legacy of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s mythic creation not just in comic books but also on television, radio, film, and a hodgepodge of marketing tie-ins (Superman sliced bread, anyone?). Those who interpret the Man of Steel’s Kryptonian name, “Kal-El,” as a nod to Hebrew tradition should note that, as De Haven explains, it was not Siegel and Shuster, but George Lowther—announcer for the Superman radio program, and author of the first Superman novel written in plain old prose—who changed Supes’s birth name from “Kal-L” to “Kal-El.”

* * *

At least as iconic a 20th-century coupling as that of Superman and Lois Lane, the improbable marriage of Marilyn Monroe to the playwright Arthur Miller captivated the world in the mid-1950s—and marked, at least according to some readings, the entrance of Jews into the American mainstream. In The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (Illinois, March), serial biographer Jeffrey Meyers retells the tale of the playwright and the starlet, focusing on why they got together, what they managed to create together, and why they fell apart.

Troubled and brief as the Miller-Monroe marriage was, a few years cohabiting with Marilyn has sounded a lot like heaven to a surprising number of male Jewish intellectuals. But then everyone has his own vision of paradise, as Newsweek’s religion editor, Lisa Miller, explains in Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife (Harper, March), her ecumenical survey of the idea of an afterlife through history and across religious traditions.

* * *

American Jewish writers fascinated by Monroe included Norman Rosten, Alvah Bessie, and most notoriously Norman Mailer, who published Marilyn: A Novel Biography in 1973. A couple of years later, Mailer met Barbara Davis Norris, a woman half his age who had been raised as a Free Will Baptist in Arkansas and had previously dated another womanizer by the name of William Jefferson Clinton who was destined for national celebrity. In 1980, she married Mailer in his Brooklyn Heights home, taking on the name Norris Church Mailer and becoming his sixth wife. She describes their tumultuous lives together in A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir (Random House, April).

While his weddings kept him plenty busy, Mailer pursued interests in more than just matrimony: In fact, the greater and more universal the icon, the further he pushed himself to capture it with his prose. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of his Of a Fire on the Moon (1970)—not to mention the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that the book lovingly describes—an enterprising art publisher has packaged Mailer’s text with high quality photographs to produce a volume titled Norman Mailer, MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11 (Taschen, April). The 1969 limited-edition copies retail for the appropriately astronomical price of $1,500.

* * *

During the past year, two very different men who represent Jewry at its best and worst, respectively—Maimonides and Madoff—have been the subjects of an astonishing number of books. This month sees the publication of yet another volume about each of them, by a single publisher; the pleasant surprise is that both constitute worthwhile additions to their respective crowded bookshelves. T. M. Rudavsky, an expert in medieval Jewish thought at Ohio State, offers up Maimonides (Wiley, March), a brief, philosophically inclined introduction to Rambam’s life and works. Harry Markopolos, meanwhile, describes his attempts to alert authorities to Madoff’s fraud over eight years  and the SEC’s uselessness in No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Wiley, March). According to this persistent whistleblower, Madoff wasn’t just a financial fraudster, but a gangster—his scheme was, as Markopolos says, “a remake of the Jewish mafia of the ’30s and ’40s, with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Only instead of using a Tommy gun, Madoff used a pen, a computer, and a set of golf clubs to lure in his victims.” Yes, it’s an overblown and clumsy metaphor, and one wonders if Markopolos might strain his arm a little, patting himself on the back so much. But being on the record against Madoff nearly a decade before the story broke surely earns him the right to some self-righteous rhetorical excess.

• Syria symbolically reaffirmed its membership in Iran’s bloc by hosting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the Iranian president said he hoped for a Middle East “without Zionists and without colonialists.” [JPost]

• Bernard Madoff’s daughter-in-law is changing her and her children’s last name to “Morgan,” due to the name’s association with “defrauding numerous investors in his companies.” [HuffPo]

• A profile of a Polish neo-Nazi turned ultra-Orthodox Jew describes a broader trend that has seen many Catholic Poles, particularly those who learn of different pre-World War II roots, convert to Judaism. [NYT]

• Another arrest was made in connection with Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A visual adaptation of our Vox Tablet podcast with Fugs frontman Tuli Kupferberg. [Vimeo]

Tuli Kupferberg Jon Kalish Fuggin’ Around from Thelma Blitz on Vimeo.

That’s because, according to Time, plenty of Rothstein’s allegedly illegal money went into state politics, which may in and of itself have broken campaign-finance laws. And most of that money, moreover, went to the state Republican Party … which currently finds itself embroiled in a brutal primary campaign. Depending on which side is more implicated—incumbent Gov. Charlie Crist or state House Speaker Marco Rubio—Rothstein could affect the outcome of the race. On top of which, the contest has implications beyond itself: it is serving as a proxy for the national intra-Republican conflict between moderates (represented by Crist) and hard-line conservatives (represented by Rubio). So very quickly, you can see Rothstein having a major national impact.

Finally, since the bulk of Rothstein’s political donations went to the more powerful state Republican Party, a political scandal tied to the Rothstein case could also conceivably help state Democrats. And maybe national Democrats too? The sky’s the limit for this guy!

Florida’s Mini-Madoff: Scott Rothstein’s Fall [Time]

Report: Madoff Treated for Facial Fractures, Broken Ribs [ABC Local] (via Vos Iz Neias?)

Madoff: A Year Later [Forward]

Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, is frank about the situation, saying that we’ve “been embarrassed” by Bernie and the July arrest of several rabbis for money laundering. He’s also blunt about the opportunity afforded by the High Holidays to drum it into congregants heads that this is not how Jews are expected to behave: “[T]he rabbis of America have a lot of Jews trapped in synagogues this weekend, and it’s a wonderful time to focus on who we are and how we are.” Joel, along with Rabbi Moshe Kletenik, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, and two others have signed a letter urging rabbis to talk to their congregations about ethics during Rosh Hashanah services.

Their letter raises the question of whether ideas of Judaism should be proscriptive or descriptive: are we what we think we should be, or are we, well, who we are? Of course, in this case it may be a simpler matter, of the annual need for especially poignant material for the one time of year many Jews actually attend synagogue, and a year that has handed rabbis an obvious choice.

Jewish Leaders Calling for Ethical Renewal [AP]

Bernie Made Off With My Wife [Daily Beast]
Earlier: Madoff Had Affair With Hadassah CFO

Followers of a Mystical Religion Were Taken in by Madoff Scheme [Boston Globe]

The first time I had that dream was five years ago. In the middle of the night, when I got out of bed, covered in perspiration, I made do with a glass of iced tea and watched an episode of The Wire. It’s not that I’d never had a bad dream before, but when I saw this one start to make itself at home in my unconscious, I knew I had a problem, one that even the winning combination of iced tea and Officer Jimmy McNulty couldn’t solve.

My best friend Uzi, a well-known dream-and-hot dog buff, worked out its meaning in no time. “You’re a second generation Holocaust survivor,” he said. “Your parents were forced to leave their country, their home, their natural social environment overnight. That unsettling experience filtered down from your parents’ unsettled consciousness to yours, which was unsettled to begin with. On top of which there’s the unstable reality of our lives in the Middle East. Stir it all up and what do you get? A dream that includes all of those fears: of being uprooted, of arriving in a strange, alien place, of being forced to work at something unfamiliar or unsuitable. You’ve got it all.”

“That makes sense,” I told Uzi. “But what do I do to make sure that that nightmare doesn’t come back—see a psychologist?”

“That won’t do you any good,” he interrupted. “What’s the therapist going to tell you? That your parents weren’t actually persecuted by Nazis, that there’s no chance of Israel being destroyed, leaving you a refugee? That even with your lousy coordination you can do a good job selling hot dogs? What you need isn’t a bunch of lies from a Ph.D. in clinical psych. You need a real solution: a nest-egg in a foreign bank account. Everybody’s doing it. I just read in the paper that foreign accounts, foreign passports, and four wheel drives are the three official trends this summer.”

“And that will work?” I asked.

“Like a charm,” Uzi promised. “It’ll help the dream and the reality. It’s not going to keep you from becoming a refugee or anything, but at least you’ll be a refugee with a bundle. The kind who even if he winds up with a hot dog stand at a train station in Japa-Germany has enough cash to hire another refugee with even lousier luck to stand there and stuff the sauerkraut.”

Taking advantage of refugees wasn’t an idea that appealed to me at first, but after a few more nocturnal visits to the hot dog stand I decided to go for it. On the Internet, I managed to find a nice website of an Australian bank, with a promotional video that showed not only breathtaking landscapes but a smiling teller, who looked like Julia Roberts’s even-nicer sister and urged me to deposit my money with them.

Uzi nixed the idea straight away. “Ten years from now Australia won’t even be there. If the hole in the ozone layer doesn’t get to them, the Chinese takeover will. It’s a sure thing. My cousin works in the Mossad, Pacific Division. Go for Europe. Any place except Russia and Switzerland.”

“What’s the problem there?”

“The Russian economy is unstable,” Uzi explained, taking a big bite of falafel. “And the Swiss… I dunno. I don’t like them. They’re kind of cold, if you know what I mean.”

Eventually I found a nice bank in the Channel Islands. Truth is that before I started looking for a bank I didn’t even know there were islands in the Channel. And it may well be that even in the worst-case scenario of a world war, the bad guys who’ll conquer the world won’t realize there are islands there either, and that even under global occupation, my bank will stay free. The guy at the bank who agreed to take my money was named Jeffrey but he insisted that I call him Jeff. A year later he was replaced by someone named John or Joe and then there was a very nice new guy named Jack. All of them were pleasant and polite and when they talked about my stocks and bonds and their secure future they made sure to use the present perfect tense correctly, something that Uzi and I never managed to do. Which only reassured me even more.

All around me, squabbles in the Middle East were growing more aggressive. Hezbollah’s Grad missiles were hitting Haifa, and Hamas rockets were thrashing buildings in Ashdod. But despite the deafening explosions, I slept like a baby. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have any dreams, but what I dreamt about was the pastoral setting of a bank, surrounded by water, and Jeffrey or John or Jack taking me there in a gondola. The view from the gondola was dazzling, and flying fish swam along with us, singing to me in a human voice that sounded a bit like Dido’s about the splendor and beauty of my investment portfolio, which was growing by the minute. According to Uzi’s Excel charts, it had grown to the point where I could open at least two hot dog stands or, if I preferred, one roofed kiosk.

And then came October 2008, and the fish in my dream stopped singing. After the market crashed, I called Jason, who had replaced the last J on the list, and asked him if he thought I ought to sell. He said I’d do better to wait. I don’t remember just how he said it, except that he too, like all the J’s before him, made very correct use of the present perfect. Two weeks later, my money was worth another 30 percent less. In my dreams, the bank still looked the same, but the gondola had begun capsizing and the flying fish, which didn’t look the least bit friendly anymore, started talking to me in the same familiar Japo-German dialect. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have bribed them with a good hot dog. Uzi’s Excel charts left no doubt that I hadn’t enough money left for a stand. I kept phoning the bank. In our first few conversations, Jason sounded optimistic. Then he began getting defensive, and from a certain point on, simply indifferent. When I asked him if he was looking at my investments and trying to do something to salvage what was left of them, he explained the bank’s policy: proactive management began with portfolios of one million dollars and up. I knew then we’d never again take a gondola trip together.

“Look at the bright side,” Uzi said, and pointed at the picture of a friendly looking man in the newspaper’s financial supplement. “At least you didn’t invest your money with Madoff.” As for Uzi, he made it through the crisis unscathed; he gambled all his money on wheat crops in India or weapons in Angola or vaccines in China. Before that conversation, I’d never heard of Madoff, but now I know all about Bernie and Ruth. Looking back, apart from the bit about the rip-off, we have a lot in common: two restless Jews who love to make up stories and have been sailing along for years in a gondola with a hole in the bottom. Did he too, once, years ago, dream he was selling hot dogs at the train station? Maybe he also had some true friend, like Uzi, who never stopped giving bum advice?

The guy on the news just announced a state of alert in the middle of the country and that there were roadblocks on some of the highways. There are rumors about a soldier being abducted. On my way home I bought two bottles of green tea and stopped at the video store to pick up the first few episodes of the last season of The Wire. Just to be on the safe side.

Translated by Miriam Shlesinger.