If you are shomer shabbos and buy a Sweet Million lottery ticket, you can't check to see if you've won on Shabbat, right? Well, no big deal, because the chance of winning that lottery are about as good as an elephant showing up on your doorstep.

Now imagine if your chance of winning 1 Million is 1 out of 5! That's what the Orthodox folks at Friendship Circle are facing. This non-profit that helps special needs kids is in the top five to win the Chase Community Giveaway of 1 Million dollars. Votes are accepted through Friday and the winner will be determined on Shabbat. So imagine what will happen when Chase calls or knocks on the door and no-one answers because everyone is in shull?!

ModernTribe fan Pinny Gniwisch called me to pimp his ridiculous video (in which he stars) to help spread the word about the very wonderful charity Friendship Circle. Instead of the video, I find the Shabbat conflict much more worthy of sharing.

Friendship Circle is a non-profit dedicated to enriching the lives of individuals with special needs through play-therapy based programs that pair teens and special friends together to form a life-changing bond of friendship.

You can help confuse Chase (and tempt the Orthodox) by casting your vote for Friendship Circle through Friday, January 22 at http://votefc.com/

Well, now that it's almost Hanukkah, I'm pretty sure most of us are going through a very similar (and strange) phenomena: you spend all fall lusting after a few choice tchotchkes, and when Hanukkah rolls around, you seem to get the exact opposite of what you lovingly scribbled onto your Holiday wish-lists. Not only that, this feels as if it happens EVERY year! It's like your out-of-touch Bubbe is somehow controlling the currents of gift-giving, and you are trapped in a never ending vortex of scratchy wool sweaters and socks.

Rest easy, because that ends here. Below, I've included 2 very important lists: the top 10 gifts you want, and the top 10 gifts you get instead. Hear that, Bubbe? Take notes.

THE TOP 10 GIFTS YOU WANT:

• 10. Let's start with some Judaica, after all, it is Hanukkah. Check this Menorah Cork, an easy way to turn any bottle of wine into a way to celebrate the season. Order it from ModernTribe for only $14!

 

 

• 9. Don't let the name fool you: Stories for Children by Isaac Bashevis Singer is most definitely not for children. This book of short stories is biting, racy and ghoulish, and I distinctly remember reading it as a child and wondering why my parents would even let me peek at the thing! Sure, there are plenty of Jewish authors releasing new fiction for both adults and children, but why not take the time to familiarize yourself with the real thing? Amazon has it for as low as $6.98.

 

 

• 8. Luxury retailer Proenza Schouler has a new exclusive online store, and somehow, against the laws of nature, the items currently being featured are pretty affordable for a designer shop. I have my eye on this buttery-looking evergreen wallet, priced at a just-OK $165.

 

 

• 7. American designer Steven Alan's "don't go out without a sweater"-sweater is a lot more handsome than what you got from your Aunt Fraide last Hanukkah, and since Alan generally uses rich fabrics, I doubt it'll itch as much either. I especially like this grey chunky knit sweater for men.

 

 

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Lloyd Blankfein is the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. In 1869, a German-Jewish immigrant named Marcus Goldman founded the company. Thirteen years later, the little commercial paper dealer celebrated its bar mitzvah by bringing on Goldman’s son-in-law, Samuel Sachs. Thus was born what Rolling Stone recently called, channeling their late-great Hunter S. Thompson, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Lloyd Blankfein, who with his wide, pursed lips looks for all the world like a Muppet, recently told the Times of London he and the rest of his colleagues at Goldman Sachs are “doing God’s work.”

This is the point when you picture a Muppet in a suit and tie riding atop a giant vampire squid wrapped around our planet. Perhaps the Muppet would be holding a cross, except he’s Jewish. So there would be a Magen David in his hand. Take a moment. Picture it.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Except it’s not. It’s an anti-Semitic wood cut yanked straight from the worst screeds of Henry Ford’s printing press. Some version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion probably features an illustration close to, if not identical, to my little depiction. I would be annoyed by this, even repulsed by the very image, if Blankfein and Goldman Sachs didn’t make it so fucking easy.

This is a company that made $3.2 billion. In profit. In three months. This year. This year when unemployment has soared to 10.2 percent and rising. This year when that figure rises to over seventeen percent when you count the people who’ve stopped looking for work or scrape by on part-time gigs because they can’t land a full-time job with benefits. By benefits, I mean health care. I don’t mean the multi-million dollar stock options or bonus payments that line the pockets of Goldman Sachs employees, where the average pay this year is $700,000.

This is a company that quite literally played both sides of the housing bubble, selling off $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities while secretly betting those mortgages would turn out to be worthless. When the bubble popped, the losses Goldman Sachs would’ve taken were already passed down the line. Instead, they made a killing.

I’m using the word ‘killing’ on purpose.

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I do not have a head for business. I know this for a fact. In college I took one business class to fill a requirement and when it came time to write my final paper, my topic was: "Why I'd Be a Bad Business Owner." I got an A-; apparently, I had an airtight case.

After college, I tried out my own handbag business. It wasn't lucrative by any means. After all was said and done, I had made a few thousand dollars over the course of the year, I had my custom-made handbags in stores in Boston, Brooklyn, and Boulder, but I was definitely not on my way to being the next Kate Spade. I did it more for the love of handbags and sewing, and less for the big dreams of seeing my bags on the arms of celebrities and socialites.

I thought I had abandoned all whimsies of the business world until a friend sent me an article about something I think I'd like to get into...making money off the Christians. Yes, that's right: making money off the Christians. I've piqued your interest, haven't I?

So this company, Eternal Earthbound Pets, is offering the service of "confirmed Atheists" to look after your pet when the Rapture happens. Obviously, when the Second Coming of Jesus rolls around only the Christians (both alive and dead ones) are going to be called on up to Heaven, and sadly, their pets will be left behind.

Eternal Earthbound Pets charges the very reasonable rate of $110 per animal per household ($15 for each additional animal per household), and guarantees the safety of your pet for up to ten years of receiving your payment. Yes, this means that if the Rapture goes down 11 years from now, then you're shit out of luck. Like any good business, Eternal Earthbound Pets has a set of terms and conditions, and basically, you're not getting a refund if you lose your faith between now and the end of the world, or if Jesus decides you're not worthy and leaves you behind. Oh well.

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Hollywood is taking an important break from Transformers sequels and the Footloose remake to create possibly the most important film of our era: The Untitled Bernie Madoff Project.

TV tabloid show "The Insider" attended an audition, where filmmakers were casting for the lead role. The part went to Paul Cohen, 64, of Jersey City, NJ. Cohen has never acted before, but he's not about to let his lack of experience hold him back.

Here's some footage from the casting:

Now that they've found their Bernie, who will they hire to play Ruth Madoff? Or Elie Wiesel? I'll take casting suggestions in the comments.

Hell hath no fury like an assistant scorned, and Bernie Madoff’s ex-secretary Eleanor Squillari is pissed. She coauthored a 20,000-word (!) piece in this month’s Vanity Fair about what it was like working for the man who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. Among the highlights:

• The way Madoff handled stress was “by saying something nasty: You look terrible. You’re gaining weight. You’re stupid. I never took anything he said to me personally, because I knew it wasn’t about me, it was about him.”
• Madoff was flirtatious and had a habit of making sexually suggestive remarks: “‘Oh, you know you’re crazy about me,’ he would say to me. Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk, he would still be zipping up his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he would say, ‘Oh, you know it excites you.’ If a pretty young woman came in, he’d say, ‘Do you remember when you used to look like that?’ I’d tell him, ‘Knock it off, Bernie,’ and he’d go, ‘Ah, you still look good.’ Then he’d try to pat me on the ass.”
• Squillari once caught him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine, and he frequently visited massage parlors. “Once, I looked in his address book and found, under M, about a dozen phone numbers for his masseuses. ‘If you ever lose your address book and somebody finds it, they’re going to think you’re a pervert,’ I said.”
• In the days after her husband’s arrest, Ruth Madoff called Squillari multiple times and encouraged the secretary to provide her with certain information without notifying the bankruptcy trustees, which Squillari said she couldn’t do. “Instead, I told the F.B.I. what had just happened. I was working for them now, not for Ruth and Bernie Madoff.”

It continues to get awesomer and more fucked up. Squillari has a video on Vanity Fair’s website where she tells more stories. It’s absolutely worth checking out.

Cross-posted from Save the Assistants.

Given the crisis capitalism is enduring in these times, it should come as no surprise that religious figures of all stripes are advocating a return to the principles of their respective traditions as a solution. Whenever a whole people experiences adversity, many of us can't help but think back to the Bible, which is full of these instances--Israel turns its back on God and is punished until righteousness returns to the hearts of the populace. God doesn't visit misfortune upon us except to test us, thus sayeth our holy men.

All religions with a Holy Book struggle to stay relevant from the moment the book gets written. Scriptures preserve the mores of the day in a sort of amber made of parchment. As time moves on, clerics have to keep extruding relevant advice from ancient texts, stretching and distending the meaning of these old-fashioned hidebound proscriptions and prescriptions like so much saltwater taffy. And the more established (read: older) a religious tradition, the less it has to say about the reality of modern life.

Naturally, you shouldn't be surprised when your religious figureheads try to salvage some kind of meaning from the old books (what else are we paying them to do?) and so there must have been an avalanche of sermons in houses of worship across the board over the past year trying to glean something about the current economy from long-outdated sources. Since the Five Books of Moses alone provide three different (and somewhat contradictory) prohibitions against lending money at interest, it seems natural to try to link these passages to today's credit crisis. Now that there's a problem, we are obliged to pretend we knew all along that the economy collapsed because we had sinned against the precepts of the Bible.

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From Madoff to Enron to Long-Term Capital, the American people have been subjected to some pretty sophisticated scams over the years; but no hoax is more shameful, or potentially destructive, than the presiding myth of wealth's infinite virtuosity.

The myth provided an intoxicating rationale for easy money, lax regulations, and the sort of self-delusion required by the financiers who convinced each other and their clients that they could create brilliant financial mechanisms that would endlessly spin money out of thin air. This, as we now know, led to the unmooring of the financial sector - the driving force of the global economy - and sudden, collective realization that the whole thing was built on the sort of short-lived, rickety edifice we associate with scams.

In this way, Madoff is the perfect embodiment of all the ills and excesses that the myth perpetuated and inflicted on society. Unfortunately there's nothing metaphorical about the pain Madoff inflicted on the Jewish community. And we will be doing our community a massive disservice if we come to understand this story as the work of one, lone financial psychopath. We have done this to ourselves.

What seems from afar an incestuous miasma of machers, millionaires, billionaires and Jewish philanthropic "leaders" is really a very clear picture of the contemporary power structure of the pay-to-play Jewish establishment, where someone like the inspiring Ruth Messinger is a side-show annoyance without keys to the back room and Bernie Madoff is a marionette controlling the bureaucratic puppets who run many of our communal organizations. 

The myth of wealth's virtuosity, and the concomitant values it engendered, has had a disproportionate influence over our community. Partly, it's because we've disproportionately benefited from that myth and those values.

One problem is how we've come to define success. Our children can choose between a banker, lawyer or doctor as their role model. No surprise, then, that their bar mitzvahs are spiritually meaningless affairs whose primary effect is to introduce the children to an aggressively competitive class structure in which, approximating the popular ‘80s bumper sticker regarding toys and death: "He whose party is the most extravagant wins."

Madoff's brilliance is how well he understood this class structure and its evolution into adulthood; how he drew such emphatic lines between Us and Them, admitting the chosen to a circle of privilege, a "secret society" in the words of one of Madoff's victims; such admittance conferred on both gentile and the Jewish Mcmanor-born instant status.  They were "winners."

In a vacuum created by institutional decay, poor leadership, and powerless, uninspiring clergy, our Jewish "winners" (bankers et al) stepped in, often honorably, to fill the void. Even our outreach programs began to stress exclusivity, reaching out to only the most successful and influential among us.

And so ours has become a pay-to-play community where those with the most money have the most influence over the organizations, synagogues, charities, and country clubs that make up our communal infrastructure.

In effect, the myth itself became the central organizing conceit of this period - that ambition, financial wherewithal, and social status were the agents of communal progress.

Better to be a macher than a mensch these days.

We made goo-goo eyes over the megabucks high-financiers, with their turbo-capitalism and hyper-consumption, and now we're paying the price. And I'm not talking about the billions lost by the Jewish charities Madoff bilked. I'm talking about the perception created in all those people we've been crying so much about  -- all those unaffiliated Jews who just keep assimilating and intermarrying -who can now feel validated in turning their back on a community not worth turning towards. 

As we have made our bed, so we must lie in it. It's time to get up and change the sheets.

In this continuing drama of ambition, social class, and greed we are confronted daily with the sad victims, loathsome characters and resented symbols of excess marking the rise and fall of our Wall Street-led culture.

Bernie Madoff's victims are only now overcoming their shame to step forward and tell their story or plead for help. This excerpt comes from an email that is making the rounds:

Dear Friends,

Now that it has been a few weeks and time has past, many more of you have heard about Bernie Madoff. The man who created the largest Ponzi scheme ever...$50 billion.



My family was severely affected and now we have to rebuild. Rebuilding requires selling the house in NY, getting rid of cars and personal things, and re-launching my Dad's company for promotional and logo merchandise.

I have been helping other victims as well, via my blog, and I started a Facebook group for families and friends of families. It's our way to keep up to date with the latest news.



We will fight, we will survive and we will rebuild.




The investor euphoria that led to economic bubbles inevitably led to an uptick in fraudulence. In “Manias, Panics, and Crashes,” the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that during bubbles “the supply of corruption increases . . . much like the supply of credit.”

Contrary to the hopes and dreams of antisemites, a historical overview of economic bubbles and the subsequent conmen that arose reveals a scarcity of Jews, especially with any large scale con like Madoff’s. Until now. A con on the scale of Madoff’s can only be done from atop the American power structure, which Jews have only recently occupied.

For far left writers like Philip Weiss, the takeaway here is that Madoff’s Jewishness is secondary to the fact that he’s entrenched in the Establishment elite. Weiss writes:

Like Franken-Coleman in Minnesota, Madoff shows the degree to which Jews are just another component of the Establishment, and Jewishness does not define their presence…Jews are members in good standing in the Establishment, they come and go socially in upper class places. And no one really notices the Jewishness. They're just Jewish…. But as time passes, and the blonde waves of philosemitism crash at the walls, Jewishness in the Establishment will signify less and less difference.

For Weiss, who is chomping at the bit for the American assimilationist machine to bulldoze Jewish ethnocentrism, this is but another sign that we’re just like everyone else. And here we are, one more step towards the breakdown of the American Jewish community as currently constituted.

I agree with Weiss that the community is crumbling, but I’m not happy about it, and I think it’s not because we’re assimilating but because of what and how we’ve chosen to assimilate.

Like any community, were not immune to the best and worst of any moment’s cultural and economic gestalt. But given the small size of our community, and the elevated position within the Establishment our success has granted us (just how entrenched we are in this whole mess), the assimilation of the particular configuration of values and norms that will come to characterize this period will be particularly detrimental to any sense of Peoplehood for American Jews.

We thought it was hard attracting the unaffiliated before all this went down. Think how difficult it will be to attract Jews hungry for meaning and connection when the perception is that established Jewish community is nothing more than a glorified investment club promising networking opportunities.

The backlash is upon us. We're done, at least for the moment, with the urban elite's obsession with the rich and powerful; or more specifically, done with how that obsession was flaunted and insinuated into the forefront of the popular imagination through every conceivable medium. 

Recently, I received a link to a Daily Beast story (more of a wrenching sob-worthy saga, really) penned by Madoff victim Alexandra Penney, a New York artist and former editor of Self magazine, who describes her thoughts after learning she'd lost everything:

I began to think about my options: I'd have to sell the cottage in West Palm Beach immediately. I'd need to lay off Yolanda. I could cancel the newspaper subscriptions and read everything online. I only needed a cell phone. I'd have to stop taking taxis. And who could highlight my hair for almost no money? And how hard was it to give yourself a really good pedicure?

Then there is my jewelry. I've always collected nice watches and pearls. In the back of my mind I'd think, "Buy good stuff because if you're ever a bag lady, you can sell it." It might have been a rationalization then-but here I am now: The nightmare may be coming true.

On an individual, person-by-person level, the only appropriate reaction to such hardship is one of compassion and sympathy. But Penney also talks about how she became involved with Madoff, which brings us to the larger socio-cultural level, which is repugnant.

I suddenly had a lot of money. I was in my late 40s, and I felt that I was just too old to have it in a plain old bank account. But I was a creative person, not a savvy investor, so I asked around and talked to my smartest friends with Harvard and Wharton MBAs. There appeared to be a secret society of Madoff investors. A friend who was older, wealthier, and more established somehow got me in. I've always had good luck, and I thought it was another stroke of good fortune to be invested with the legendary Bernard Madoff.

Every month I got detailed statements, and my money looked to be growing around 9 to 11 percent. It didn't seem greedy because I knew people other people who were making 15 or 20 percent. I thought, "This is just a very smart investor."

The reaction to Penney's tell-all has been venomous. And from the passage above, it's not hard to understand why. In two paragraphs, Penney unwittingly serves up a buffet of nearly all the revered iconography of a culture that has thrived for the last twenty years: financiers as the new rock-star heroes, addiction to a pornogaphry of meritocratic emblems and pedigree (Wharton! Harvard!) as a sign of our lust for social power, exclusivity and the promise of "secret societies," and the no-guilt thrill of making more and more money.

The venom Penney is experiencing is nothing compared to people's reaction to Alex Kucynski's December New York Times Magazine story detailing her experience hiring another woman to bear her child. Kucynski's marriage to a hedge-fund billionaire - the totem of this period's bonfire of grotesqueries - provides the appropriate backdrop for the now-infamous photographs that accompanied the story. The powderkeg was an image of Ms. Kuczynski holding her new child surrounded by her black nanny on the lawn of her massive Southampton estate juxtaposed with photographs of the surrogate, barefoot and alone, on the rickety porch of her house in Pennsylvania.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank found Kuczynski's story an example of just how "profoundly ugly" American society's "massive inequality" had become. "At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close," he wrote. "The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them."

The Secret Currency of Love is a fine new book, featuring essays by professional writers on the role money plays in their lives. Unfortunately, its significant value is obscured by a cheap subtitle - "The Unabashed Truth about Women, Money and Relationships" - a confessional tagline that sounds designed to attract the fans of supermarket tabloids.

Worse, it's misleading. It implies the book treats the shocking woes of a gender that's been fiscally undone by love. In fact, the majority of those selected for inclusion by editor Hilary Black - including high-fliers like Pushcart Prize-winning novelist Ann Hood - explore the low wages paid to most writers, and the resulting pressure that that puts on their close relationships.

Every form of love that can be affected by the calculus of poverty and wealth is treated by her contributors. Among them are NPR commentator Lori Gottlieb, who covers the cost of raising a child alone in Los Angeles; financial writer Abby Ellin, whose fiscal freedom was bought for her by her parents; and memoirist Bliss Broyard, who learned how to milk friends and guilt people, all by being poorer than thou.

But for each, it was her career choice - rather than love - that determined her shaky earning power and its consequences. Most of the anthology's contributors are freelance writers, and their difficulties arose, or grew, once they tried to meet the needs of someone beyond themselves.

"Before I had a child, I didn't care about money," admits Gottlieb, a single mother who works on contract. On longing for a second child, she found, "I'd gone from being a person who was indifferent about money to one who was obsessed by it."

Some felt less squeezed because others helped pay the bills. Former New York Times columnist Ellin says that her parents sent her "to camp and college and graduate school," and then bought her a city apartment. "With this kind of financial support," she adds, "I've always been armed with the courage to be adventurous."

Adventurous, or entitled? The latter drove Broyard, the daughter of literary critic Anatole Broyard, to mimic the spending habits of wealthy friends, until she was broke. They ended up buying her meals - then traded up to clothes and vacations. "Part of them admires my choice to live slightly off the grid in order to pursue my artistic ambitions," she writes, adding, "They need someone like me in their lives."

Could be. But the question of how to live, and on whose dime, has less to do with gender than it does with individual choices. Too bad the title of this anthology doesn't reflect that.

Susan Comninos is a freelance writer in New York. This article previously appeared in The Journal Sentinel.

First the banks wanted a bailout, then the American automakers jumped on the bandwagon of government funding. I never thought the porn industry would do it as well. Lo and behold Hustler editor Larry Flynt and Joe Francis (the creator of Girls Gone Wild, of which I am a big fan) have penned a letter to congress requesting $5 billion in government money to help bail out the porn industry.

Sales of adult DVDs were down 22% in the past year causing Francis and Flynt to ask Congress to "rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America" with a bailout. Just last week Lilit Marcus wrote on Jewcy about the closing of the strip club Scores, a Manhattan landmark that couldn't ride out the economic storm.  

Don't get me wrong, I love porn, but I haven't paid for it since I switched to high speed internet. I don't know anyone who pays for porn, with the amount of free porn out there; it's simply absurd to actually pay for it. So the real question to ask the porn industry is: if their downward turn is due to economic concerns forcing folks to buy diapers instead of the latest copy of Barely Legal, or is it the abundance of free porn available for anyone with a computer and a decent internet connection?

Seems to me that its time for the porn industry to come up with something new, rather then use taxpayer dollars to bailout a dying business plan. For instance, Jewish porn (which, according to my countless hours of Google searches with different Jewish phrases combined with any all sorts of pornographic details have turned up fruitless). I am not alone. There are thousands of Jews like myself that would love to see some Seminary Girls Gone Wild videos. Let us not forget those folks whose only reason to attend Shabbat services is to fantasize about ravaging Rabbi Cohen on the bimah as everyone wonders why they are not reading the Torah. When's the last time you stumbled across some hot Rabbi porn? Think of the possibilities!

I don't see any potential for "trickle down effect" in C.C. Sabathia's Contract

Last week my roommate and I finally watched No Country for Old Men. The story revolves around an evil, creepy man pursuing a briefcase containing two million dollars that is found following a drug deal gone wrong by a random passerby. This man is absolutely brutal, shooting anyone who gets in his way with no mercy.

At one point, I asked my roommate, “How much money is in there? Two million?” He nodded. I followed with “Doesn’t A-Rod make that, in, like, one game? It’s pretty sad all these innocent bystanders are losing lives over two million bucks when A-Rod earns about that much per at bat.”

I love baseball. Always have. Always will. But when I heardabout C.C. Sabathia’s $161M contract with the Yankees yesterday, I was finally ready to admit for the first time, that baseball players' salaries are beyond extravagant. They are an insulting slap in the face toward those who are being hit hard by the economy.

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There are two reasons we need to bail out the auto industry.  The first, quite simply, is to buy time. Let's say we agree that the American auto industry is doomed, and that a $25 billion bailout does nothing more than delay the inevitable by three years.  That is a perfect and entirely persuasive argument in favor of a bailout.  Right now, the ripple effects of the loss of a million or two million or three million jobs  (no one is quite sure of the number) would be a nuclear bomb detonated in the middle of a national recovery plan.  It's not just the consequences for unemployment and health care and pension guarantees and consumer credit, it's the complete devastation of the landscape in which the efforts of the new Obama administration will have to take place.  If $25 billion buys us three years for a recovery plan to take effect, that's a bargain.  And there are other reasons to buy time.  It is almost impossible to overstate the short-sightedness and pigheadedness of the management teams at the Big Three automakers.  In the past few years GM executives have repeatedly derided the idea of a business model based on building fuel efficient cars and have pinned much of their hopes on selling luxury vehicles in China.  But there are, finally, signs of improvement, including the development of the Chevy Volt.  And there are a whole series of changes in the terms of employment under UAW contracts that are described below.  But these things will take time to have their positive effects.  

That's the first reason we need a bailout:  it might turn out to be enough to save the industry, and even if it doesn't it buys us desparately needed time.  But there is a second reason for a bailout that has to do with nothing less than the question of the current economic age: was Marx right?

Was Marx right?  The usual answer is "no" with respect to his predictions in the Communist Manifesto. In some ways, to be sure, his arguments seem quite prescient, as in his warnings that capitalism's ever-expanding desire for markets that would lead to the creation of a globalized economy, his predictions that sovereign political systems would come to serve primarily as managing entities for multinational wealth, and his emphasis on the equation of market liberalism with free trade.  On the other hand, the standard wisdom is that he was wrong about the consequences of these developments.  In particular, it simply was not true that industrial capitalism resulted in ever-downward pressure on the living standards of workers, that the cycle of crises of capitalism continued to get worse and worse (after the global depression of the early 1930s), and above all that the middle economic classes disappeared as industrialization and corporate capitalism expanded.  In the U.S. as in all western democracies, some combination of government intervention in the market and/or organization of labor produced counter-pressures that ensured that the immense wealth being created was shared.  As a result, contrary to Marx's prediction of society devolving into two opposing classes, these western nations' economies were marked by the appearance of strong and stable working middle classes, a category Marx did not envision at all.  

But was Marx wrong, or was the creation of a working middle class merely a temporary exception?  It is not news that the American working middle class, especially in the manufacturing sector, has taken a beating over the past two decades, nor that the increase in the gap between rich and poor has been accompanied by a progressive weakening of organized labor.  The Europeans and Asians proved Marx wrong by using political authority to reshape capitalist markets.  In the U.S. we have tried to do the same thing by turning labor into a market participant.  Then we started busting the unions.  Which brings us to current discussions about the auto industry.

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So now we know for sure that consumers are buying less and it seems clear that we are in a recession. Markets all around the world have reacted and massive amounts of wealth have been wiped out as a result. We have already had a bumpy ride this year and it looks like it is going to get much worse before it begins to get better. But where does that lead us, the average consumers on Main Street? Clearly we must all brace ourselves for difficult times ahead.

Here are two tips that come from my book Jewish Wisdom for Business Success that may be of particular help:

Dealing with failure

All of us are going to experience some setbacks over the next twelve months or so—some of us have already had setbacks. The test will be how we deal with these setbacks. Will we be able to see the silver lining inherent within them or will we begin to see ourselves as a failure instead?

The Israelites in the dessert sinned when they served the golden calf and because of that Moses dropped the two tablets and broke them. But according to Jewish tradition, the second set of tablets he received in their place came together with a much deeper understanding to the Divine will than the first set of tablets offered. In this way, the failure of the golden calf ended in a much greater success.

The lesson is clear. Whenever we experience a setback we must realize that it has a silver lining out of which a far greater success will likely flow. We must look around and find the opportunity inherent in all of the negativity that we see around us. Those who are able to see beyond the failure and into the opportunity will be the winners in all of this.

For each person the opportunity will be different. I was just recently reading how Warren Buffet's father, Howard Buffet, was able to prosper during the great depression by starting a stock brokerage that catered to those who still wanted to invest. He saw that all of the other brokerages had closed down and there was therefore an opportunity to make a buck. Just keep your eyes out for the opportunities amongst all the pain, then take advantage of them and you will be alright.

Positive thinking

In these troubled economic times it is easy to get despondent. Yes, it is true that many people will get badly hurt. But there will be some—a minority—who will prosper despite the difficult times. Why shouldn’t we—you and I—be amongst the minority who will prosper? We must not allow ourselves to become negative just because things are bad in the economy in general. Look out for new opportunities, work hard, don’t give up, and remain positive. The power of positive thinking should not be underestimated especially when so few people are practicing it today. As the great Jewish mystics said, “Think good and it will be good.”

Rabbi Levi Brackman, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy with fellow co-author Sam Jaffe. He'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The vultures are gathering. In the midst of the carnage of the financial meltdown, the anti-semites are starting to circle. Everyone's favorite carrion-picker, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced to the U.N. General Assembly that "aggressors" who hide behind their "financial, political and propaganda powers, not only escape punishment but claim righteousness..." are to blame for the problems of today's markets. Hamas soon dug in its claws too when spokesman Fawzi Barhum analyzed the global financial system and blamed the "Jewish lobby that put the banking system in place."

How can these people say such things? Because we let them. By not engaging in a free and honest debate about Jews and money, we are handing the discussion to our enemies on a silver platter. Instead of greeting them vigorously with facts and solidly-based opinions, we offer them silence. All too often, the rest of the world interprets that as agreement.

Nobody has offered me the podium at the U.N.'s General Assembly to reply to the Iranian president. But Jewcy has offered and encouraged me to respond. So here's what I have to say:

Dear Mahmoud,

Yes, it is true that there are a lot of successful Jews on Wall Street. It's also true that the Jews are disproportionately represented amongst scientists, academics, lawyers, artists and musicians. But that has nothing to do with our DNA or a secret group of our leaders pulling everyone else's strings. The secret to our success was seeded in the desert four thousand years ago when Abraham taught us how to be entrepreneurial and later when Moses taught us the finer points of leadership skills. We honed it later in the streets of Europe when we were banished to the mercantile backwater of money-lending. And then it bloomed when we were given an equal footing in America. Whether or not we, as individuals, are religious doesn't matter. The religion itself taught our forefathers the keys to success, positive thinking, how to recover from failure, and many other lessons. We've absorbed it by osmosis whether we, as individuals, are religious or not. We didn't come to this success because we cheated. We were given tools by our tradition that gave us a smidgen of advantage. I'll be glad to share them with you. If you buy my book.

Sincerely,
Sam Jaffe

Sam Jaffe, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy with fellow co-author Rabbi Levi Brackman. He'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Also see: Letters to Ahmadinejad

I've been collecting data regarding Jews and money for the purposes of marketing Oh, the Jews and their money...our book, Jewish Wisdom for Business Success. When talking in the press about Jewish success in business, I want to make sure I stand on firm empirical ground in regards to whether there's statistical evidence that the Jewish community is more successful than the population at large when it comes to making money.

In the course of my reading, I've identified some surprising themes, which I'll summarize here as the five myths of Jews and money. It's a teaser: I'll provide more depth and breadth to the assertions in the weeks ahead. But here are my big five:

*Jews developed the banking industry because they dominated the money-lending industry in the middle ages, thanks to a Church proscription against usury (something which didn't apply to Jews).

*Jews are more successful in business than any other immigrant community in the United States in the last 100 years.

*The Jewish religious tradition views poverty as an emblem of piety.

*Karl Marx's theories were based on traditional Jewish concepts of communal partnership and the sympathy for the victimhood of the lower class.

*The patriarchs of the Torah were penniless wanderers who lived from day to day on the kindness of others.

Anybody who has any thoughts, advice or suggestions for data sources on any of the above assertions, please drop me a note at samjaffe@gmail.com. Likewise, if you think of a more obvious candidate for a myth--something that is commonly accepted in popular culture but is in fact baseless in fact--please make a suggestion.

Cross-posted from Gates of Emporia, personal blog of Sam Jaffe, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success.  He's also guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

There is no doubt that there is a major connection between Jews and money. Even as Jews seek to sweep it under the carpet, it is still the largest elephant in the room, especially in these bad economic times.

Here is an example of this. I contacted a famous young Jewish entrepreneur and asked him to endorse Jewish Wisdom for Business Success. The publisher sent him an advance copy of the book. He looked at it and then said he didn’t like the notion written in the book that Jews are associated with making money. Then he stopped replying to my email. After much persistence on my part, his assistant sent me a message saying he did not have time to read the book and therefore would not endorse it.

Now, whether this particular person likes the notion or not, the notion is out there. From my research talking to people across America, Jews are associated with money in everybody’s mind. And it is not a bad thing. The bad thing is if we allow others to believe that the reason why Jews are good at making money is because they cheat, or because there is some other conspiracy that Jews all share in.

The Israeli Daily Newspaper the Maariv, in an extensive article about Jewish Wisdom for Business Success and the anti-Semitic association between Jews and money, claimed that the book could not have come out at a worse time.

I respectfully and passionately disagree. This is the most important time for this book to come out. At a time when the disgusting anti-Semites are coming out and trying to take charge of the conversation about Jews and money, and as these vile creatures are spreading their hatred and idiotic conspiracy theories all over the internet it is about time that we Jews take charge of the conversation.

This is exactly what my book intends to do. Yes it is a fact that Jews are disproportionally successful in business. We Jews only make up 0.2 percent of the world population (yes less than half of one percent) but we make up more than ten percent of the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in the world. Also forty six percent of Jews in the United States make over 100k a year while only fifteen percent of the rest of the population make that amount. These are facts not stereotypes.

So why are Jews disproportionately successful? Why are so many of them making more money when compared to the general population? This is a legitimate question and it deserves our attention. Just because the vile anti-Semites use these facts for their own nefarious means does not mean that we should avoid or try and ignore them. If we do they will certainly remind us of them and not in a way we enjoy.

Some have tried to answer this question by saying the Jewish success has to do with the fact that in Europe they were forced to only be involved in finance. But if this was the case then why are thirty percent of Noble Prize winners in the sciences Jewish? Some say it has to do with genetics. But I don’t buy that type of racist ideology either.

The real reason for Jewish success in all areas (not just finance) in my opinion has to do with the Torah. There are wisdom teachings found in the Torah that Jews have imbibed for thousands of years. These wisdom teachings feed directly into successful practices not just in finance, but in the sciences as well as in many other fields.

Now some Jews may not know that there outlook comes from the religion of Judaism. However, I have found that Jews who have never even opened a Jewish book still believe in intrinsically Jewish ideas that stem from the Torah. After probing, often they heard these ideas from a Jewish grandmother they were close with or from a great uncle. But in the end they can almost always be traced back to Jewish ideas that come from the Torah.

The beauty of this theory is that these ideas that feed into successful practices do not have to remain exclusively with the Jews. If we are magnanimous we can share them with others. This is what Sam Jaffe and I have done with our book Jewish Wisdom for Business Success. Now, by reading the book, anyone—even anti-Semites—can learn the secret of Jewish success.

Jewish Wisdom for the difficult economic times:

In the Torah we find Abraham negotiating with G-d. Here is an idea that can help you in the current financial times. Like Abraham don’t always just negotiate over the bottom line. Sometimes other things might be more important and you will win through them. For example keeping your current job may be more important than seeking a raise. If you hear that your company is going to cut jobs you may even suggest to your boss that you will be willing to take less money in order to keep your job in these troubled economic times. In all negotiations in these troubled times where capital is scarce look beyond the dollar signs and try and negotiate on other things (the terms and conditions) that are also very important to you. (Learn how to negotiate in Chapter 5 of the book).

Rabbi Levi Brackman, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy with fellow co-author Sam Jaffe. He'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

It is great to be blogging on Jewcy.com. My blog posts this week will be about my recent experiences with the media and the reactions to my book: Jewish Wisdom for Business Success. Some Jews were not impressed by the title. 

They don’t realize that the title I originally wanted was “Become Rich Like the Jews: A How-to Guide” but the publisher refused to go with it claiming that is was too antisemitic, so we settled on the less explosive title we currently have.

OK OK… Before the ADL's Abe Foxman (who the Maariv Newspaper says won't endorse my book) lynches me, let me say—for those without a sense of humor—that I am joking. Of course I am not trying to use a nasty stereotype to sell books.

Israeli Daily Newspaper The Maariv says ADL's Abe Foxman wont endorse Jewish Wisdom for Business SuccessThe point “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success” makes is that there is profound wisdom within Judaism's ancient teachings and holy books that instruct successful financial and business practices. This wisdom is needed now—when the current financial crisis is hitting many of us in our pocket books— more than ever.

Here are a few tips from Jewish wisdom that will help you through.

1. Do not let fear motivate your financial decisions. (Chapter 1 of the book).
2. Don’t allow yourself to be pulled into a cycle of negative thinking. Remember that many will get hurt but some will prosper as well. Why should you not end up being one of those that will prosper? (Chapter 8 of the book)
3. When you need to purchase something, know that it is now a buyer’s market and you can negotiate better terms and conditions for yourself on large item purchases. (Lern how to negotiate in Chapter 5 of the book)
4. Remember that failure is a state of mind not a state of being. So if things do not go well for you there might be a lesson there for you to learn from. (Chapter 6 of the book)
5. Don’t allow the bad economy to take you off your path towards your ultimate goals. (Chapter 2 of the book)
6. Be involved with your finances; don’t completely rely on others. (Chapter 4 of the book)

Each day this week, at the end of my blog posts, I will elaborate on one of the above-mentioned tips, so look out for them.

Rabbi Levi Brackman, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

No more rules.  Rules suck.  Rules are for the weak. 

Tlkeajtughajer;eqwujgahhkgjadlsgfdasr;ra;. 

That's what a sentence looks like without rules.

The money experts have fucked up.  And now we're rescuing them.  And it's comical to think that the person applying for the loan is being blamed.  It's akin to a doctor taking out your pancreas instead of your appendix and then blaming the patient.  If your business is to loan money, then do your homework, don't be greedy and don't loan it to people who might not be able to pay it back.  A bank isn't a pizza place.  You don't need to say "yes" to everyone.  

A new home for bankersSo what can we do so this never happens again? 

Many child molesters have to wear electronic monitors so we know his/her whereabouts at all times.  I think all bailed out bankers need to wear shock collars around their necks and every time they try to loan out money they get 350 volts launched into their carotid arteries.  Maybe then they'd be careful.  And since we are going to bail out the banks - which with this spineless bunch of Congressional pussies was a foregone conclusion even before it was a foregone conclusion - we need to make sure that none of these people who were responsible for our economic meltdown are allowed to ever work in the banking industry again.  You get one chance to bilk people out of their life-savings and retirement dough.  For crying out loud, we don't even allow individuals to file for bankruptcy in this country anymore because that would inconvenience the predatory credit card companies (hello, Capital One!  Thanks for the 23.5% offer but I can get a better deal from my bookie) and the health care industry.

Accountability is the only cure for this catastrophe. However, just as in the Enron disaster, the fat cats will exit the building with fat pockets.  The hell with that.  Liquidate their assets and property until they're as poor as the poorest person they screwed over. 

Although there is another option. 

Let's give the $840 billion to the people and have the banks apply to us for money.  Something tells me we'll be a lot more careful with it than the assholes were.

Brian Frazer, author of Hyperchondriac, spent the last week guest blogging on Jewcy.  Want more?  Buy his book!

Having your steak and eating it too: Would it taste as good if you know it was bought with--gasp--ladymoney?The most heartening part of this weekend’s New York Times Style section article on women who make more money than their boyfriends and the low-earners who love them:

Michael R. Cunningham, a psychologist who teaches in the communication department at the University of Louisville, conducted a survey of college women to see if, upon graduation, they would prefer to settle down with a high school teacher who has short workdays, summers off and spare energy to help raise children, or with a surgeon who earns eight times as much but works brutal hours. Three-quarters of the women said they would choose the teacher.

The point, Professor Cunningham said, was that young professionally oriented women have no problem dating down if the man is secure, motivated in his own field and emotionally supportive.

This is good news! This is the kind of thing that should get headlines! It looks like our nation’s female college students, the ones people like Laura Sessions Stepp are always fretting over, actually have pretty decent priorities when it comes to long-term mates. They’d rather shack up with someone who likes his job and contributes to the household than a frantic, tooth-grinding success-whore. It’s almost as if the same people who want to have drunken hook-ups at the age of 19 realize that in the long run Mr. Budweiser McSixpack will not make a suitable life-partner. Almost as if an entire generation is ultimately looking for a healthy, equitable relationship with someone who likes them more than he likes his bank account.

The Times, however, saw this differently:

At least, that’s what their responses are in surveys. Talk about the subject with women a bit older — those who have been out of college long enough to be more hardened — and what you hear is ambivalence, if not downright hostility, about the income disparity.

Jade Wannell, 25, a producer at a Chicago ad agency who lives in a high-rise apartment building, started dating a 29-year-old administrator at a trucking company last year. “He was really sweet,” she said. But “he didn’t work many hours and ended up hanging out at home a lot. I was bored and didn’t feel challenged. He would finish work at 3 and want to go to the bar. The college way of life is still in them at that age. All they want to do is drink with the boys on Saturday. I was like ‘Let’s go to an art gallery’ and all he wanted to do was go to the bars.”

Nothing about these complaints necessarily indicates the level of Wannell's ex’s income. “All they want to do is drink with the boys on Saturday” certainly describes half of Wall Street, Saturday being the brief sliver of time when bankers don’t have to be at the office. What she’s saying, instead, is that she didn’t like her ex’s lack of ambition and thought he was boring. In fact, based entirely on this quote, one might assume that Wannell would be better off dating a museum assistant who worked 14 hours a day and spent his free time at openings, or (heavens) a painter who spent 14 hours a day perfecting his craft—and you know that guy wouldn’t be able to match her ad agent earnings.

It's a little scary, from my lefty Quaker standpoint, that this article completely refuses to acknowledge that there's a difference between working hard and making money, as if any guy who's passionate about what he does will surely be healthily compensated for, you know, pursuing his dreams (and thereby that any guy who's unsuitably broke is clearly a slacker who just isn't trying hard enough.) It's especially disturbing when you realize that Wannell literally told the writer: “It wasn’t the job, it was the passion.” But ultimately the forced conclusions of this kind of trend piece don’t really matter. Women’s salaries are going to continue increasing relative to men’s, and everyone is going to have to deal with it. Better to accept the horrible misfortune of making a lot of money—or having to let your woman buy you dinner—and be an early adopter as well as a rich—or well-fed—bastard.

 

The high holidays are a time for new beginnings—a kind of reset button on whatever you’ve gotten wrong in the past year. Services take care of your spiritual crimes, allowing you to wash all the grime off your metaphysical windows and start over fresh. But what about the more literal, practical, day-to-day mistakes you’d like to erase? Kol Nidre can release you from any number of vows, but not the one you made to your credit card company to pay back that $1500.

Hence Jewcy’s guide to starting over. We’ll tell you how to clean up past messes and prep for future successes in six categories:

Sex, love and dating | Health | Friendships | Family | Money | Work

Consulting myriad websites, books, and experts, we've pulled together 26 separate ways to start the year squeaky clean. Click the links above to get to each section, and remember: If Madonna can reinvent herself every few years, so can you.

Via the blog of the Adam Smith Institute, here are three questions you can use to evaluate pretty much any government program, no matter how big or small:

1. At what cost?

2. Compared to what?

3. How do you know?

Beautiful.

Tape This to Your Ceiling: And watch the money roll in.Last year I did some work for a Hollywood stylist who never paid me. This has really been irking me the past few weeks, the fact that I am the sort of person someone else deems stiffable. And also I need the money. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough not to forget about.

I’ve been sending this deadbeat fashionista one pathetic email per week, tone carefully calibrated so that he’ll know I am serious, but not so abrasive as to make him mad at me. No threats or anything.

As you know, The Secret doesn’t tolerate negative thinking. The Secret People would probably say I wasn’t getting my money because I was thinking about not getting it, sending out a poor-me vibration instead of an I-am-rich vibration. One Secret Person, Jack Canfield (half the brainpower behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series), says that taping a homemade $100,000 bill to the ceiling above his bed changed his life. He was just barely getting by, but instead of trying to make ends meet, he set what seemed like an unachievable goal (in today’s terms, just enough, after taxes, to pay the rent on a two-bedroom NYC apartment)—he wanted to make $100,000 per year.

He had no idea how he would do it, he just taped that bill to the ceiling and started to visualize. He explains:

So the first thing in the morning I’d look up and there it was, and it would remind me that this was my intention. Then I would close my eyes and visualize having this hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year lifestyle.

I figured, why shouldn’t I try approaching this debt the same way? I won’t think about this guy owing me—I won’t picture his shifty eyes or the gold chains cascading over his skintight wifebeaters—I’ll think about him paying what he owes me. Each night last week as I fell asleep—my twilight time has become visualization hour—I pictured opening my mailbox and seeing his check. (This mailbox visualization technique is espoused by another Secret Person, Lisa Nichols, co-author of Chicken Soup for the African American soul. She claims it can erase debt completely.)

For the first few nights, nothing happened. Then I got my tax return back from my accountant. And lo and behold, my refund from New York State matched the amount this guy owed me. Do you have the chills?

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ISRAELIS KEEP OUT: A sign posted at a guesthouse in ThailandIn Nyaung Shwe, a tiny town in the middle of Myanmar, my native guide Chris is dropping jokes over pitchers of Mandalay beer. “Why does Israelis”—he’s already laughing—“Why do they have such big noses?” I beat him to the punch line: “Because air is free.” Amazement, then a laugh from my new friend. “So you hate them too?”