Kassin pleaded guilty in March to taking “donations,” no questions asked, of money that he was told was made illegally and then issuing clean checks from the account of his Magen Israel Society—less 10 percent. The rabbi’s cut helped finance various social services in the Syrian community. Accordingly, he asked the judge to return the forfeited money to the charity so it could be used to benefit his constituents. “I want that money back to donate it,” the rabbi said this morning in court. “They kept it for two years almost—it’s enough.”

The judge, Joel Pisano, denied this request. “At the end of the day,” the judge said, “the reason the charity does not have the $367,500 is because of you.”

Rabbi Gets Probation in NJ Corruption Case [AP]
Earlier: Syrian Jewish Leader Pleads Guilty

From the start, the rabbi, who appears everywhere in a large-brimmed black hat, his white beard flowing, insisted on his innocence. He was, after all, no Madoff; what he did, according to government affidavits, was take checks from congregants and other rabbis, no questions asked, and then return the funds from his own charitable accounts, minus 10 percent. The rabbi’s cut helped finance the vast network of schools and social services that keep the Syrian community together—a mitzvah, of sorts.

But the outcome of the case was all but determined from the start. Even with the best representation—and Kassin’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, is widely regarded as one of the best criminal-defense men in New York—fighting the government’s case, built with help from Solomon Dwek, the man who turned on his cohorts, would have been an uphill battle, and taken its toll on a man Kassin’s age.

So, now what? Kassin agreed to forfeit $367,500 seized by federal authorities after his arrest. Prosecutors have said that, as part of Kassin’s plea, they will not seek a prison term, though the supervising judge could impose a sentence of up to five years. Kassin also faces up to an additional $250,000 in fines. But, as far as the criminal justice system is concerned, that will be that. “Few financial crimes offend our sensibilities like those that hide illegal activities behind the curtain of charity,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said in a statement.

Rabbi Pleads Guilt in Connection with Brooklyn Money-Laundering [NY Post]
Related: Crisis of Faith [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Insider Led Agents to Rabbis, Pols
Dwek, Center of N.J. Fraud Case, Pleads Guilty to Bank Fraud

• The New Jersey Star-Ledger was one of three finalists (though not the victor) for the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the corruption scandal stemming from the state’s Syrian Jewish community. [Pulitzer]

• The Jewish community of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, is anxious for its own safety given the recent coup in the country. [JTA]

• Veteran negotiator Aaron David Miller posits that the Obama administration’s goal may be to encourage a change in Israeli government—so that they no longer have to deal with Prime Minister Netanyahu. [LAT]

• The notorious Norman Finkelstein appeared last week in front of the U.N. Correspondents Assocation. [TNR.com]

• Jewcy uncovers the executive editor of Village Voice Media writing something … really, really questionable about “Jews.” [Jewcy]

Old Jewish negotiator extraordinaire Herb Cohen discusses Real Housewives of New York. Pretty much can’t-miss.

Herb Cohen on Real Housewives of New York, S3E6 from aarongell on Vimeo.

A jury acquitted the former deputy mayor, Leona Beldini, of charges that derived from Dwek’s testimony, even while finding her guilty of other charges that seem to derive, also, from that testimony. It’s a bit of a puzzling development, which at least one other defense attorney attributed to the jury’s reluctance to fully trust Dwek: “[Beldini] got convicted on the same counts she got acquitted on,” said the lawyer, who represents another public official implicated in the corruption scandal (and so, admittedly, has that axe to grind). “The main thing I would take away is that the government is on tenuous ground by the way they conducted this investigation and by putting all their eggs in one basket.”

Beldini’s defense strategy was in part to question Dwek’s integrity as a witness, based, among other things, on his plea bargain related to an alleged $50 million bank fraud. Guessed another attorney representing yet another New Jersey public official who awaits a Dwek-related trial: “I think they’re going to lose one of these high-profile cases, and they’re going to lose it because of Dwek and because of the way the investigation was done.”

Dwek, the son of a prominent Deal, New Jersey, rabbi (who has since disowned him), helped net indictments of 44 individuals, including the Syrian Jewish community’s chief rabbi and numerous north Jersey elected officials.

Split Verdict in Dwek Corruption Trial Has Both Sides Claiming a Measure of Victory [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

Earlier: Did Dwek Get a Good Deal?

• Mideast envoy Tony Blair will take a more active role alongside envoy George Mitchell in helping facilitate peace talks. [Ynet]

• More on the mumps outbreak among Orthodox Jews in the Tristate Area. The 1500-plus cases are mostly religious males in Brooklyn, particularly boys and adolescents; the outbreak originated at a religious camp upstate and has spread to New Jersey and also Quebec; most of those who got it did receive the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. [NYT]

• The suspended deputy mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, became the first person to be convicted in the corruption scandal broken by informant Solomon Dwek. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A bizarre story: the Yonkers, New York-born “president” of the Dominican Republic’s Sephardic community is giving legal advice to ten Americans who allegedly tried to unlawfully ferry almost three dozen children out of Haiti; but El Salvador police now accuse him of trafficking in Central American women. He denies the charge. [NYT]

• Israeli officials are reportedly banking on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s believing their internal inquiry into IDF conduct during the Gaza War is adequate, in order that efforts to establish an independent probe will peter out. [JPost]

• Solomon Dwek, who wore a wire to help break open a corruption scandal within the Syrian Jewish community of Deal, New Jersey, started sobbing on the witness stand when the cross-examiner asked him if he has any friends. [NJ.com]

• The treacherous world that is the Orthodox Jewish singles scene. [Guernica]

• Introducing “nasology”: a phrenology of noses. Includes “The Jewish or Hawk Nose.” [the ragbag via The Awl]

• How Israel deals with its 300,000 foreign workers—one-third of them illegal—from such places as the Philippines, China, and India. [Foreign Policy]

• In Jerusalem, former Arkansas Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee accused the Obama administration of a “one-sided” approach, disproportionately harsh on Israel, to the peace process. [JTA]

Comparing the Vote in the Governor’s Race [NYT]
Related: No New Deal [Tablet]

“He was just doing his job—I don’t judge him,” said one 60-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. Dressed elegantly against the fall chill in a leopard-trimmed leather jacket, the woman—an Arabic speaker whose grandparents emigrated from Syria decades ago, and who splits her time between Deal and Brooklyn, where she grew up and where her children now live—said she wasn’t so much pro-Christie as against everyone else in the race, including the independent candidate, Chris Daggett. “To be honest, I don’t know if I like Christie,” she admitted. “But I hate Corzine, and you can’t waste a vote.”

Other voters emerging from Deal’s public elementary school—its sole polling place, only a short drive from the synagogues whose rabbis are currently facing criminal charges—didn’t make the link at all between Christie and the arrests, and few were willing to answer any questions about ongoing repercussions of the arrests. Instead, they offered a litany of explanations for supporting Christie: healthcare reform, the economy, the Obama administration’s apparent willingness to put pressure on Israel. Some said they considered themselves open-minded when it came to partisan issues—several recalled voting for John Kennedy—but tended to side with the Republicans when it came to state and national politics. Deal’s Syrian Jewish mayor, Harry Franco, who stopped by midmorning with his wife, offered a more straightforward explanation for Christie’s popularity in Deal. “Right now I think the main issue is property taxes,” Franco explained.

The Christie campaign—aided by the national Republican Jewish Coalition—has pushed the tax issue, targeting politically conservative Orthodox Jews, and Jewish swing voters, with pocketbook arguments, attacking Corzine for his decision to roll back property tax rebates in the face of a state budget deficit. “We’ve been getting e-mails for weeks in my crowd,” said one retired man, a McCain supporter who said he was an avid watcher of Fox News. Meanwhile, Democratic operatives spent the day focusing their efforts on turning out liberal Jewish voters in suburbs closer to New York and Philadelphia, leaving Corzine’s supporters in Deal mostly to their own devices.

One man sporting a large satin kippah described himself as a regular Democratic voter, and said he had voted for Corzine because Christie—a Bush appointee—represented “the same old business.” And over at M&A Kosher Meats, a few minutes from the school, one shopper said she planned to cast her ballot for Corzine on her way home, because she’d grown up in a Democratic household in Brooklyn and saw no reason to switch sides now. “I’ll tell you, none of them are any good,” she said, laughing. “But I always vote, because otherwise I couldn’t complain.”

And what did that assistance buy? Dwek pleaded guilty yesterday on one count each of money laundering and bank fraud; he is now a pariah in his community, where his own father publicly referred to him as though he were dead (though he did not actually sit shiva, contrary to some reports). And since all these people are so angry at him, he’s now apparently living under federal protection. Plus, it turns out, the U.S. Attorney’s office still plans to recommend that the presiding judge sentence Dwek to serve between 105 and 135 months in prison—which is a little less than nine years or a little more than 11, give or take whatever extra they offer for his services as a trial witness, if needed.

In other words, he got about 70 percent off. We think that sounds like a great setup for a MasterCard “priceless” ad, but apparently Peter Willis, a lawyer representing two politicians ensnared in the case, thinks it’s a bargain. “The U.S. attorneys gave him his Hanukkah gift early this year,” Willis told the Star-Ledger. “That is pretty lenient.”

Details Revealed on Solomon Dwek, Informant in N.J. Corruption Probe, After Guilty Pleas [NJ.com]
Earlier: What’s Next for the Syrian Jews?

Dwek, the son of a prominent Syrian rabbi, was arrested in May 2006 after he allegedly tried to kite checks worth more than $50 million, including a $25.2 million check he tried to deposit at a drive-through ATM. Court documents filed in July indicate that Dwek agreed to help prosecutors break open multimillion-dollar money-laundering rings allegedly being run through religious charities in the tight-knit Syrian communities of Brooklyn and northern New Jersey and, in one gory instance, an organ-trafficking ring between the United States and Israel. The five rabbis arrested in the case, including 87-year-old chief rabbi Saul Kassin, face an array of conspiracy and fraud charges.

Dwek, who faced up to 30 years in prison on the original bank fraud allegations, is expected to be the star witness in any cases that go to trial.

UPDATE: NJ.com reports that Dwek, who made his first appearance in federal court this morning since his initial arrest, entered guilty pleas on two counts of bank fraud. Sentencing was set for Feb. 9. Dwek is due in state court later today to enter pleas on similar charges.

Solomon Dwek, Central Witness in N.J. Corruption Probe, Expected to Plead Guilty [NJ.com]
Related: Crisis of Faith [Tablet]

Meanwhile, New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie—who as the U.S. Attorney in Newark oversaw the two-year investigation of the Syrian Jewish community—met yesterday with Orthodox leaders from around the state in an apparent effort to head off any political fallout from the case. Polls show Christie, a Republican, holding a 14-point lead over Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine—but Corzine last week added self-described “feisty Jewish grandmother” Loretta Weinberg to his ticket. According to a press release from the Orthodox Union, which brokered the meeting, Christie reminded the assembled rabbis of his anti-terrorism and security prosecutions—and, not incidentally, promised to support tax credits for Orthodox families in the cities of Elizabeth, Lakewood, and Passaic. As they say in the drug wars: legalization is one way to cut crime.

Rabbi Fraud Case in Los Angeles Echoes N.J. Scandal [Bloomberg]
N.J. Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Meets With Orthodox Jewish Leadership [VoxIsNeias]
Related: Crisis of Faith [Tablet]

But, as they say, read the whole thing. Please check out our coverage of the Dwek fiasco as well. For a people who claim to be ashamed of such characters, we sure do talk about them a lot.

Bad for the Jews? [New York]
Previously: Crisis of Faith
About Us: Alana Newhouse

Meanwhile, last week Slate tackled the question of whether organ donation, illegal or not, accords with Jewish law. As to Jews serving as organ donors, the short answer is, Yes, Jewish law permits it, despite the claims of some that one may only be buried with all one’s organs. As to Jews selling their organs, the question is more complicated, though there is an argument that it can be considered okay if done under the Jewish injunction to do practically anything you can to save a life. Yet despite organ-donation’s kosher status, Jews are significantly less likely to be donors than Gentiles: only 8% of Israelis hold donor cards, compared to 35% of the residents of most Western nations.

The Halachic Organ Donor Society exists to educate Jews and to encourage Jewish organ donation to Jews and non-Jews. They are doing the Lord’s work in several senses of the phrase. Certainly it would be a great pity, and a real damage done, if the sordid example of one disgraced Brooklyn kidney broker dissuaded Jews, or anyone else, from making a decision that could save one life (and save the world entire).

Worldwide Market Fuels Illegal Traffic in Organs [NYT]
Organ Failure [Slate]
Whistle-Blowing Prof Played Key Role in Trafficking Case [JTA]
Previously: Insider Led Agents to Rabbis, Pols

We think it’s telling that the concerns over anti-Semitism are emanating from non-Americans. A different ultra-Orthodox editor told JPost, “After Madoff, now there is this. I’m frankly concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S.” But it’s in the nature of American pluralism that most Americans, who may know that Madoff is Jewish, don’t then implicate other Jews for his actions; and so, too, with these arrests. Besides, Americans know better than to blame all the Jews for something as immutable as Jersey corruption.

‘FBI Sting Was A Case of Anti-Semitism’ [JPost]

In 2007, Zev Chafets wrote about Brooklyn’s tight-knit Syrian Jewish community for The New York Times Magazine. The author of the recently released Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame spoke with Hoffman about this week’s events from his home in New York.

Listen here.

Related: Crisis of Faith

As the chief rabbi of the largest Syrian Jewish synagogue in the United States—referred to during a press conference by Newark’s FBI chief as the “Syrian Jewish Church,” a slip of the tongue that conjured up images of Eastern Orthodoxy and patriarchy—Kassin is the de facto leader of the 75,000 Syrian Jews in New York. As such, his duties include not only governing the spiritual needs of his flock, but overseeing a generous network of communal services, from K-12 parochial schools to recreational facilities and care for the elderly, provided for free through synagogue-affiliated charities to keep members of the tight-knit community close.

But in court documents filed yesterday, federal investigators claimed the charities were financed at least in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cuts Kassin took from supplicants, both locally and in Israel, who used the charities as fronts to launder money they made from illicit business dealings. Investigators portrayed the 87-year-old rabbi, scion of a Jerusalem rabbinic dynasty, as a shrewd operator who acted as a kind of central banker to other rabbis in New York and New Jersey doing the same thing on a smaller scale. It’s an image strikingly at odds with the pictures of Kassin, bearded and somber in his black hat and coat, clutching what looks like a prayer book, captured as he entered the federal courthouse in Newark.

“Rabbi Kassin, within the community establishment, is viewed, I think it’s fair to say, as a venerated figure,” said Zev Chafets, who has written about the Syrian Jewish community. “He’s a symbol of the connection with Syria, and a symbol of continuity and authority.”

Kassin—who goes by his Hebrew name, Shaul—came to the U.S. in 1933 from Jerusalem, where his father, Rabbi Jacob Kassin, was known as a scholar of Talmud and Kabbalah, according to a family history written by Sarina Roffe, an expert in Syrian Jewry. The elder Kassin looked around at the teeming world of New York, full of Ashkenazic Jews and enticements to assimilation, and responded by issuing an Edict, in 1935, threatening the excommunication of any Syrian Jew who dared to intermarry, even—or especially—if the would-be spouse had converted.

Saul Kassin, who Roffe says edited the yearbook during his time at Yeshiva University, took up the defense of his father’s edict when he inherited the position of chief rabbi in 1994; according to Chafets, Kassin even excommunicated his own daughter, Anna, who married a gentile.

“We cut her off,” Kassin’s son, Jakie, told Chafets. But that was the price of holding the community together, especially as it grew fabulously wealthy, largely from cash businesses—real estate, manufacturing, import-export—that flourished over the past decade. Instead of moving away, the Syrians stayed close, turning Gravesend, in deepest Brooklyn, into a kind of millionaire’s paradise, where houses sell at Fifth Avenue prices. (At the height of the real estate boom, in 2006, one tear-down on a double lot went for $11 million.)

According to Roffe, Kassin was also known as an adept mathematician; perhaps his ease with numbers gave him an ease with the world of business his relatives and congregants inhabited that other rabbis wouldn’t necessarily have had. His prominence gave him access to far more money than neighboring synagogues, or rival ones; another accused rabbi, Edmond Nahum, of the Deal Synagogue, estimated Kassin was taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a week “at least,” through an unnamed charity affiliated with his synagogue, Shaare Zion. “Kassin is the best,” Nahum allegedly told the government’s mole in the community, identified as Solomon Dwek, the son of another community rabbi, who was arrested in 2006 on suspicion of trying to perpetrate a $50 million check-kiting scam.

Dwek has been portrayed as the Judas of the story, who apparently agreed to help the government break apart money-laundering operations in the Syrian community. According to the court documents, Dwek approached Nahum and another rabbi, Eliahu Ben Haim, head of Ohel Yaacob, a congregation in Deal, with checks he claimed came from selling counterfeit Prada and Gucci handbags. He told the rabbis he was trying to avoid getting noticed by the authorities; he wanted, he said, “an effective way to get rid of the money.” Nahum and Ben Haim provided the introduction to Kassin, undoubtedly considered the government’s “big fish”; at repeated meetings in Gravesend and Deal, the court documents describe Kassin asking why Dwek needed him at all. At one point, Kassin, who said he was trying to be careful with his accounts, asked Dwek what he was supposed to say should anyone “ever come ask me, ‘what’s this, this money that you’re taking.’” Dwek said the money couldn’t ever be traced to him, and Kassin allegedly went ahead with the deal, taking $2,500 to issue Dwek a check drawn on his charitable accounts that one of the other rabbis agreed to cash.

All told, Kassin allegedly washed $200,000 for Dwek between June 2007 and December 2008—at which point, investigators appear to have decided they had enough evidence against the rabbis, and shifted their focus to New Jersey’s political structure. So far, the community has rallied around him, insisting to television cameras that the rabbi is innocent; Kassin’s attorney, Robert Stahl, who secured the rabbi’s release on $200,000 bail, told reporters yesterday that the rabbi “remains confident that the truth will come out,” and that his name will be cleared.

The arrests, which the FBI characterized as part of a decade-long investigation into political corruption in New Jersey, grew out of what appears to be intense cooperation between investigators and one man: Solomon Dwek, a real-estate developer and scion of a prominent Syrian Jewish family in Monmouth County who was arrested in May 2006 on suspicion of trying to swindle $50 million from PNC Bank in a check-kiting scheme.

Dwek—referred to in court documents as a “cooperating witness”—first led investigators to members of his own community, including Saul Kassin, the 87-year-old head of the tight-knit Syrian community and chief rabbi of Shaare Zion, the largest Syrian congregation, and Eliahu Ben Haim, the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob, in Deal, New Jersey, before moving on to political figures. (A message left with an Ohel Yaacob administrator was not returned; a woman who answered at the Deal Yeshiva, which was also raided, told this reporter “never to call again.”)

According to a criminal complaint, Dwek, working with undercover agents, laundered $3 million through various synagogue-affiliated charities with help from the rabbis, who would accept checks and then would arrange for “clean checks” or cash to be made available, sometimes via wire transfers from Israel, sometimes via a Swiss bank, for cuts of five or 10 percent. At the same time, Dwek led investigators to a source in Brooklyn who allegedly agreed to broker a deal for a kidney from an Israeli, for $160,000.

At that point, with Dwek having proven so useful to investigators targeting the Syrian Jewish community, the FBI and IRS apparently decided to go for broke: rather than stopping with the money laundering claims, they co-opted Dwek into a decade-long probe against New Jersey’s legendarily corrupt political swamp. An official, speaking at today’s press conference, praised Dwek’s efficiency: “One person was able to deal with these people throughout New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York.”

Rabbis Charged with Illegally Laundering $3M [Asbury Park Press]

9 Complaints Alleging Money Laundering Released [Asbury Park Press]
Mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, Several Rabbis Arrested [Bloomberg]
Previously: Rabbis Arrested in N.J. Corruption Probe

At the play’s satiric center is Lily, a married 16-year-old yeshiva dropout. A whiny naif bullied by her sister and husband, Lily hires a maid to clean her spotless white house while she eats candy on the sofa. The maid, Blanche, a black lesbian would-be academic who spouts Roland Barthes and brags of affairs with prominent intellectuals. Under her tutelage, Lily begins fitfully to mature—not least by starting to figure out the baffling contradictions of her community. In one of the play’s funniest scenes, she announces at the dinner table her discovery that Syrian Jews hail from, well, the Middle East. Her sister replies, “We’re not Arabs, ass face.”

Adjmi, 36, spoke with Tablet about his own youthful bafflement and what he understands now about where he grew up.

One thing you captured especially well about the Syrian Jewish community was this combination of traditionalism and trashiness.

Yeah. And elegance, too. It’s nouveau riche. It’s totally a common phenomenon.

How do those elements interact within the community? Is there any conflict between them?

I was just incredibly confused growing up. And that was right at the nexus of it…. When my parents got married, they moved to Nashville, and they had three kids. They were, like, southern Jews, very assimilated, they developed their southern accents and stuff. They moved back to Brooklyn when their kids were of marriageable age. And then, I was born—and I was basically, like, the designated Jew. They sent me to the Yeshiva of Flatbush but they weren’t quite religious themselves. At school there were Sephardic Jews and also very religious kids, children of rabbis and stuff like that. And my parents didn’t explain to me what I was doing there. So it felt like a kind of theater to me. And I thought, well, I’ll just mimic what everyone else is doing and figure it out, but I couldn’t figure it out because the values felt so much in contradiction. I thought you were supposed to follow this carapace of coolness: nice clothes, money, and all that stuff, and then pay a kind of … token attention to religiosity. I kept trying to figure out what the logic was to the rules. And I never could figure it out. And then after a while I got very cynical.

Another seeming contradiction that the play highlighted was that Lily and her cohorts barely seem to know they’re Middle Eastern. My understanding was that, within the Syrian community, you were strictly ordered to marry another Syrian Jew.

Lily’s me. I never thought of myself as Middle Eastern, even though I knew I was. I guess it’s really that I never thought of myself as an Other. I was raised to believe that I was in the center and that my identity would be based on exclusion. So I knew I was Syrian but it felt like that was code for “really awesome.” It didn’t mean Middle Eastern, like, from the Middle East. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see someone Middle Eastern, I just saw, white…. No one really discussed where people were from. The other funny thing is, Syrian is kind of like a catchall for Middle Eastern Jews—Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. We’re mutts.

My reading of Blanche was that she represented another layer of satire, a parody of the kind of people who read literary theory. How much were the books she read supposed to be empty signifiers, and how much they were actually representing themselves as texts?

Are you saying, am I parodying intellectualism and intellectuals? Absolutely. I went to Sarah Lawrence and I did study all this stuff. On the one hand I think it was just an imprimateur and this cache that you had, again this exclusionary way of forming an identity. [For Blanche], I think the performance of it is one thing—it’s all about, “I’m going to put on a show, I’m going to perform an identity.” But it’s not just that. That’s not her only discourse. I think she’s trying [with these books] to master the signifiers. All these people are trying to master the codes and the signifiers.

How was race handled in Midwood?

I’m not going to lie to you—there was an enormous amount of racism in my immediate family, and at school. There was one girl who was African American in the yeshiva … she didn’t last very long. If you were Sephardic you thought you were better, you had nicer clothes and pleats in your pants or whatever. If you were Ashkenazic you came from a more solid family, you were going to college, you weren’t hip in that way, maybe, but you didn’t need it, you were more grounded. I started out in the Honors classes and by the time I left I was in the dumb class. It was all Sephardic Jews. It was sort of horrible. And eventually I just left, I dropped out of school my junior year.

Were you out to anyone there?

God, no. It was incredibly homophobic. It’s really hard when there are no models for it. The only gay Sephardic Jew was I guess Isaac Mizrahi, he’s a Syrian Jew who also went to Yeshiva of Flatbush. And he dropped out. But I don’t even know if he was famous yet when I was there. And that was it. I remember when I was in high school I thought, I can just like fix it; I was seeing a therapist who was like, “You can fix yourself.” So I was like, okay, I’ll just do it, I’ll move to Ocean Parkway, I’ll work in an electronics shop, I’ll have kids and somehow just make it work. Until eventually it was like, it’s not going to happen…. I always felt so invisible and just not part of a discourse.

There’s kind of a lack of discourse, or at least a lack of popular representations, of Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants in general.

I didn’t want it to look like a Neil Simon play or a Woody Allen movie. The look of it is much more European. My aunt and uncle were like, “Why don’t you write about me?” And I was like, “God, I’ll never write about you, we’ve seen it.” I want people to be alienated from their experience of Judaism, or of Brooklyn Jews.

Sephardic Jews are trying to fulfill the American Dream—they want to go out and make a lot of money. It’s not an anomaly. It’s not so weird, ultimately. There’s something very innocent and transparent about it. You look at the houses in Midwood—now they all have to be Spanish-style villas. I think there’s something beautiful about it, and something tender. You can point to the Syrian community and say, “Uch, they’re all kind of vulgar and crude.” Well, we’re all kind of vulgar and crude, sometimes.