My rebbe says: Perhaps you should go to law school.
You could be the Aussie Jimmy McGill.
I can totally see you representing drug dealers and yeshiva bachurs in trouble.
In fact, that could be your specialty: Jews In Trouble.
Where you explain to the goyim the God-given ways of the Jews and how they can lead to misunderstanding with the goyim.
This time of year causes many misunderstandings, such as when a Jew sells his chometz to a goy, and the goy tries to take advantage by expecting to get paid.
On Saturday, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders held an event at the Apollo Theater in New York, in an effort to reach out to his hometown’s minority communities before next week’s presidential primary. At the close, the organizers announced that there was no more time for questions, only to make an exception and allow one final query. Afterward, they probably wished they hadn’t.
“As you know,” opened the questioner, “the Zionist Jews–and I don’t mean to offend anybody–they run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign.” As this unfolded, Sanders began wagging his finger in dissent, and interjected to deem “Zionist Jews” a “bad phrase.” His interlocutor, pressed to articulate a question, concluded by saying, “What is your affiliation to your Jewish community? That’s all I’m asking.”
“No, no, no, that’s not what you’re asking,” Sanders quickly replied, in a nod to the question’s underlying prejudice. “I am proud to be Jewish,” he declared, to cheers from the audience. But then Sanders did something odd. Rather than using the question as a teaching moment to address and rebuke its anti-Semitic underpinnings, Sanders instead immediately pivoted to his stump speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Talking about Zionism and Israel,” he said, “I am a strong defender of Israel, but I also believe that we have got to pay attention to the needs of the Palestinian people.” He never challenged the actual contents of the question, let alone labeled it anti-Semitic.
Watch the entire exchange below:
Needless to say, Sanders has mustered far more outrage for Wall Street, systemic racism, and Islamophobia, than he did when confronted with anti-Jewish prejudice. His reserved response to the anti-Semitic questioner stands in stark contrast to his powerful rebuke of anti-Islamic prejudice back in October, when he movingly embraced a Muslim student on stage.
There is still plenty of presidential campaign to go, and Sanders may well have other opportunities to address this issue. So here, for the record, is what he should have said, and what he should say in the future:
What you just heard was outlandish and unacceptable, but I am glad that you did, because it gives me an opportunity to utterly repudiate it. The lie that a secret Jewish conspiracy controls this country or others has been used to justify the persecution and murder of Jewish people for centuries, including my own family in the Holocaust. It is an ancient anti-Semitic canard whose bigotry is not lessened by prefacing it with the word “Zionist.”
I completely reject that question and the prejudice behind it, just as I have stood on stages like this one and rejected the systemic racism in our society and the rising tide of Islamophobia in this election. There are those who traffic in hateful stereotypes and seek to pit us against each other–black and white, gay and straight, Jew and non-Jew–and I will always stand against them, and for all of us.
For Yair Rosenberg, “Because Holocaust” is a powerful answer. He thinks that pointing and sputtering is the way to go.
There are only two honorable forms of argument — to challenge facts and logic. Every other attempt is dishonorable.
Much of life is a brutal struggle for scarce resources between competing groups.
Posted inAnti-Semitism, Jews|Comments Off on Tabletmag: BERNIE SANDERS WAS ASKED AN ANTI-SEMITIC QUESTION. HERE’S HOW HE SHOULD HAVE ANSWERED.
There are some eery Jewish themes in here (hustlers, ethnic networking, chutzpah, in-group vs out-group morality). I remember shortly after 9/11, I asked some friends in shul, “How can we as Jews profit from the war on terrorism?”
The story of two Jewish twentysomething arms dealers from Miami will hit the big screen this August in a new comedic drug-thriller called War Dogs, produced by Bradley Cooper (swoon) and directed by Todd Phillips (The Hangover).
Based on Guy Lawson’s 2011 viral Rolling Stone article, “The Stoner Arms Dealers,” and his subsequent book Arms and the Dudes, War Dogs tells true story of Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David “Mordechai” Packouz (Miles Teller), two former Miami yeshiva students-cum-international arms dealers who land a $300 million U.S. Defense Department contract during the Iraq War. Shrouded in clouds of smoke from their bongs, they, along with a web of international associates, peddled aging weapons and ammunition originally from China and the Soviet Union to American allies fighting in Afghanistan. (A third partner from their Orthodox synagogue, Alexander Podrizki, joined their arms dealing scheme when they needed a Russian speaker, but he does not seem to have a significant role in the film.)
Diverlo and Packouz accomplished all this, naturally, from the comfort of their Miami apartment. “They call guys like us war dogs: bottom-feeders who make money off of war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield,” Teller’s voice says in the trailer. “It was meant to be derogatory, but we kind of liked it.”
Here’s a snippet from Lawson’s piece, which chronicles Diveroli and Packouz’s Jewish heritage:
Packouz and Diveroli met at Beth Israel Congregation, the largest Orthodox synagogue in Miami Beach. Packouz was older by four years, a skinny kid who wore a yarmulke and left his white dress shirts untucked. Diveroli was the class clown, an overweight kid with a big mouth and no sense of fear. After school, the pair would hang out at the beach with their friends, smoking weed, playing guitar, sneaking in to swim in the pools at five-star hotels. When Packouz graduated, his parents were so concerned about his heavy pot use that they sent him to a school in Israel that specialized in handling kids with drug problems. It turned out to be a great place to get high. “I took acid by the Dead Sea,” Packouz says. “I had a transcendental experience.”
The trailer, however, doesn’t seem to note Diveroli or Packouz’s Jewish background much head-on, but there are glimpses. In one scene, Hill’s character Diveroli appears to be wearing a yarmulke (1:00) as he high-fives Teller; in another, a jumpsuit-clad Hill muscles his way through an airport crowd with a gold “chai” dangling around his neck (1:12).
This film is clearly in the new sub-genre of American Hustle or The Wolf of Wall Street of white guys making tons of money in a reprehensible manner and living hedonistic lifestyles, as some kind of post-recession message about the men we love to hate for near-sociopathically exploiting others for their own material gain. And when these men are Jewish, it just makes it that much more embarrassing.
Still, the story is an undeniably wacky one, involving Eastern European mobsters, gun runners, and major political figures, and it’s sure to make a sensational movie. (I won’t spoil what happens to the two Yeshiva friends.) But fun as the story (and trailer) may be, Packouz and Diveroli are no heroes, and neither Diveroli’s rabbi nor his mother thought so at the time of his trial.
“Efraim needs to go to jail,” a local rabbi told the judge. Even Diveroli’s mother concurred. “I know you hate me for saying this,” she said, addressing her son directly, “but you need to go to jail.” Diveroli’s shoulders slumped.
…Efraim Diveroli, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted to be: an arms dealer. It was the family business. His father brokered Kevlar jackets and other weapons-related paraphernalia to local police forces, and his uncle B.K. sold Glocks, Colts and Sig Sauers to law enforcement. Kicked out of school in the ninth grade, Diveroli was sent to Los Angeles to work for his uncle. As an apprentice arms dealer, he proved to be a quick study. By the time he was 16, he was traveling the country selling weapons. He loved guns with a passion — selling them, shooting them, talking about them — and he loved the arms industry’s intrigue and ruthless amorality. At 18, after a dispute with his uncle over money, Diveroli returned to Miami to set up his own operation, taking over a shell company his father had incorporated called AEY Inc….
His business plan was simple but brilliant. Most companies grow by attracting more customers. Diveroli realized he could succeed by selling to one customer: the U.S. military. No government agency buys and sells more stuff than the Defense Department — everything from F-16s to paper clips and front-end loaders. By law, every Pentagon purchase order is required to be open to public bidding. And under the Bush administration, small businesses like AEY were guaranteed a share of the arms deals. Diveroli didn’t have to actually make any of the products to bid on the contracts. He could just broker the deals, finding the cheapest prices and underbidding the competition. All he had to do was win even a minuscule fraction of the billions the Pentagon spends on arms every year and he would be a millionaire. But Diveroli wanted more than that: His ambition was to be the biggest arms dealer in the world — a young Adnan Khashoggi, a teenage Victor Bout…
One evening, Diveroli picked Packouz up in his Mercedes, and the two headed to a party at a local rabbi’s house, lured by the promise of free booze and pretty girls. Diveroli was excited about a deal he had just completed, a $15 million contract to sell old Russian-manufactured rifles to the Pentagon to supply the Iraqi army. He regaled Packouz with the tale of how he had won the contract, how much money he was making and how much more there was to be made.
“Dude, I’ve got so much work I need a partner,” Diveroli said. “It’s a great business, but I need a guy to come on board and make money with me.”
Packouz was intrigued. He was doing some online business himself, buying sheets from textile companies in Pakistan and reselling them to distributors that supplied nursing homes in Miami. The sums he made were tiny — a thousand or two at a time — but the experience made him hungry for more.
“How much money are you making, dude?” Packouz asked.
“Serious money,” Diveroli said.
“How much?”
“This is confidential information,” Diveroli said.
“Dude, if you had to leave the country tomorrow, how much would you be able to take?”
“In cash?”
“Cold, hard cash.”
Diveroli pulled the car over and turned to look at Packouz. “Dude, I’m going to tell you,” he said. “But only to inspire you. Not because I’m bragging.” Diveroli paused, as if he were about to disclose his most precious secret. “I have $1.8 million in cash.”
…The Pentagon’s buyers were soldiers with little or no business experience, and Diveroli knew how to win them over with a mixture of charm, patriotism and a keen sense of how to play to the military culture; he could yes sir and no sir with the best of them. To get the inside dirt on a deal, he would call the official in charge of the contract and pretend to be a colonel or even a general. “He would be toasted, but you would never know it,” says Packouz. “When he was trying to get a deal, he was totally convincing. But if he was about to lose a deal, his voice would start shaking. He would say that he was running a very small business, even though he had millions in the bank. He said that if the deal fell through he was going to be ruined. He was going to lose his house. His wife and kids were going to go hungry. He would literally cry. I didn’t know if it was psychosis or acting, but he absolutely believed what he was saying.”
…Above all, Diveroli cared about the bottom line. “Efraim was a Republican because they started more wars,” Packouz says. “When the United States invaded Iraq, he was thrilled. He said to me, ‘Do I think George Bush did the right thing for the country by invading Iraq? No. But am I happy about it? Absofuckinglutely.’ He hoped we would invade more countries because it was good for business.”
…Diveroli’s aunt — a strong-willed and outspoken woman who fought constantly with her nephew — joined the two friends to provide administrative support. She didn’t approve of their drug use, and she talked openly about them on the phone, as if they weren’t present.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders
I find myself reading more stories in the Washington Post these days than in the New York Times (and far more than in the Los Angeles Times).
Washington Post: Racist messages were written alongside campaign slogans for presidential candidate Donald Trump on sidewalks at the University of California at San Diego, as a wave of pro-Trump chalk messages has been spreading on campuses across the country.
After some students at Emory University said they felt unsafe when they saw Trump’s name chalked all over campus, an outcry erupted over whether Trump’s remarks about illegal immigrants, Muslims and other groups make support for him offensive, or whether political correctness has gone so far on college campuses, in particular, that even political speech is endangered and a candidate’s very name can be off-limits.
While some students have countered speech with speech, writing slogans for other candidates and ideas, a backlash against the idea of sheltered, too-easily-offended liberal students is spreading on social media, with Trump supporters and some free-speech advocates urging “chalkening” college campuses.
It’s not just about Trump: The tensions over free speech have boiled over at many colleges this past year, as student protests over race and bias issues in places such as Yale and the University of Missouri have led to heated debates about the First Amendment and what crosses the line into hate speech.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on WP: Pro-Trump, anti-Mexican messages chalked on California campus as ‘chalkening’ movement spreads
It’s a proposal that could satisfy the fringiest, angriest, most fervent Trumpkins, as well as the most hardheaded, technocratic policy wonks. It would revolutionize the U.S. political economy and pop culture simultaneously.
We should make Donald Trump the king of America.
Now hear me out.
I don’t mean “king” like the all-powerful kind they have in, say, Saudi Arabia. I mean more like the arrangement in Britain.
That is, a largely symbolic political leader, someone who serves as a sort of a soigné celebrity-in-chief, and upon whom the public can project its grandest fantasies and delusions.
This fancy figurehead and his extended royal family would serve primarily to boost national morale; commit gaffes and foibles that would make the public feel better about themselves but would be unlikely to start a nuclear war; host big, glamorous weddings and sail around on big, glamorous yachts; consort with celebrities; provide tabloid fodder; and otherwise absorb the American public’s desire for a political figure who entertains rather than sets policy.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on The case for making Donald Trump king of America
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
