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."