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July 30, 2009
Un giornale lo ha già ribattezzato “Kosher Nostra”: in New Jersey, nella terra dei Sopranos, una quarantina tra politici italo-americani, faccendieri e rabbini sono finiti in manette per corruzione, riciclaggio e perfino traffico di organi.
— L’Unione Sarda
Sardinia, Italy
I don’t read or speak Italian, but I consider it a bad sign as a Jew and a New Jerseyan that I can understand every word of this lead paragraph from an Italian newspaper. When you live in terra dei Sopranos, and your rabinni are charged with corruzione, riciclaggio, and perfino traffico di organi, you get the message, whatever language it is written in.
Like every other Jew in the state, I spent the past few days scouring the coverage of the corruption probe, looking for signs of bias. Did the papers get the right balance between the Jewish angle and the general one? Did they demonstrate that the accused rabbis were aberrational? And what exactly did they mean when referring to the Syrian-Jewish community as “close-knit” and “wealthy”? What’s next — “hook-nosed” and “money-grubbing”?
And then there was the occasional dispatch from the Web crazies — by which I mean the BBC, whose initial headline was “US rabbis arrested in crime probe,” thus ignoring the mayors, state legislators, and other public officials caught up in the federal sting. It’s like describing Watergate as a break-in at a luxury hotel.
But from what I could tell, the bulk of the coverage seems to have gotten it right. As for “close-knit” and “wealthy” — those aren’t stereotypes, but accurate descriptions of the Syrian-Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Deal. (My friend Brad Hirschfield begs to differ)
That didn’t alleviate the embarrassment many of us felt over the episode, both as residents of a state whose politicians tend to spend as much time on perp walks as they do at ribbon-cuttings, and as folks who feel implicated whenever the words “Jew” and “scandal” appear in the same sentence.
Which unfortunately seems more and more common, from the shande at the Agriprocessors kosher plant to the monumental thievery of Bernie Madoff to the arrest of Spinka Hasidic leaders on money-laundering charges.
And with each fresh scandal involving prominent or highly identified Jews, we brace for the “inevitable” backlash. Milken, Boesky, Pollard, Madoff, Spinka, Deal: We’re convinced the media will overplay the Jewish angle, and anti-Semitism will infect the mainstream.
And yet, the “inevitable” never seems to come. The media do their job, the White Power websites do theirs, but the rest of the country seems to absorb the scandalous news as a case of a few bad apples, the bunch untainted. That’s a testament to our neighbors, and to the vast majority of us who remain law-abiding and no more scandal-prone (albeit slightly more neurotic) than the rest of America.
But while we’re waiting for a backlash, we avoid asking the difficult questions scandals should arouse — such as, what communal practices and norms allowed the scandal to blossom in the first place?
In this case, however, the door to introspection has not only cracked open, but swung wide. Maybe it’s the accumulation of recent scandals, the reach of this one, or the maturation of Jewish web commentary, but I don’t remember any other scandal inspiring so many Jewish writers to ask “What’s wrong with us?”
Yossi Klein Halevi tells Time that some haredim, or fervently Orthodox Jews, have a “mentality” that too often “slides into rationalizations for acts that cannot be rationalized.” Mark Charendoff of the Jewish Funders Network urges Orthodox leaders to examine the behavior that “creates fertile ground for this type of fraud.”
That sounds like “Orthodox-bashing,” but it isn’t. Klein Halevi and Charendoff happen to be observant, and well-informed.
But just like some communities are tight-knit and wealthy, some communities foster groupthink that is often indistinguishable from contempt for the Other. Look at how writer Helene Stapinski describes one such community: “Everybody knows everybody. Lots of people are related to each other. It’s an isolated place, in many ways, so that the [people] who live there really don’t feel connected to the larger world. They feel they operate in a sort of vacuum, where no one will really notice what they do.”
She’s not talking about the Orthodox or any other religious group, although she could be. She’s talking about politicians in Hudson County, where two mayors facing corruption charges join a storied tradition of political skeeviness.
Some non-Orthodox Jews love advertising evidence of Orthodox wrongdoing. Maybe they feel it justifies decisions they have made, or confirms their disdain for religion in general, or is payback for the disrespect they feel from the Orthodox in charge of Israel’s religious institutions. Whatever the reason, it isn’t pretty.
The Jewish challenge going forward is this: We need to be honest about the behaviors that bring out the worst in us, whether “us” means the Orthodox, or the big givers, or the communal professionals, or the political partisans. We need to examine the ways we — all of us — leave ourselves open to fraud or exploitation, or turn a blind eye to the schemers and crooks among us.
And then we can go back to bashing the media.
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