Tabletmag: ‘WHY GANGSTERS WHO BROKE EVERY LAW STILL WENT TO SERVICES ON YOM KIPPUR’

Because for most Jews, Judaism is a tribal identity whose moral code can be boiled down to what is good for Jews. That’s how tribes work. Jews no more or less than the average in that department.

So there’s no contradiction between working as a hitman and living as an Orthodox Jew. Orthodox Jews, by and large, are the most tribal of Jews.

Tabletmag: On Yom Kippur in 1929, Louis Fleisher, Harry Fleisher, and Henry Shorr attended services at Orthodox Congregation B’nai David in Northwest Detroit. The three men—all sterling members of the Purple Gang, Detroit’s mostly Jewish mob—had plenty to atone for: The Purple Gang controlled the city’s illegal gambling, smuggled liquor during Prohibition, and had a hand in most of Detroit’s underworld vice. The gang didn’t hesitate to resort to violence—arson, bombings, and murder—when its operations were threatened. They were reputedly more ruthless than Chicago’s Capone gang.

The three gangsters didn’t notice three other men sitting in the back of the synagogue: G-men disguised in black Hasidic garb who hoped to arrest the three hoodlums after the service. But when the non-Jewish G-men lit up cigarettes during the intermission, not knowing that striking a match or lighting a fire is forbidden on Yom Kippur, their cover was blown and the gangsters got away.

The men of the Purple Gang weren’t the only Jewish mobsters who observed Jewish rituals, even as they committed crimes that broke all of the Ten Commandments, as I discovered while doing research for my book on Jewish mobsters, But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters. When examining FBI files and interviewing old-time Jewish criminals and their relatives, I found that plenty of Jewish mobsters prayed in synagogue on Shabbat, observed Jewish holidays, maintained religious rituals, fasted on Yom Kippur, and attended Passover Seders.

Sam “Red” Levine provides a singular illustration of this. Levine was New York City gangster Charley “Lucky” Luciano’s favorite contract killer. According to Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer’s 1975 book The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Lucky called Red “the best driver and hitman I had.” Red also had another persona: He was an Orthodox Jew. He always wore a kipah under his hat, ate only kosher food, and conscientiously observed the Sabbath. Levine never planned to murder anyone from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. But, according to Gosch and Hammer, if Levine had no choice and had to make the hit on Shabbat, he would first put on a tallit, say his prayers, and then go and do the job.

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Nothing

A woman just said to me: “Does nothing ever offend you because you are dead inside or because I just don’t matter to you?”

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Making Babies

Chaim Amalek writes: “Shouldn’t you be making babies? Blogging is no substitute for procreation, and all this blogging by White bachelors is a form of genetic treason against your people no less so than the genuflecting by NFL owners is a form of political treason against country.”

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Sporting News: Why didn’t TV networks show angry, booing NFL fans Sunday or Monday?

Sometimes I feel like the whole system is rigged against us.

Sporting News:

With President Donald Trump’s attacks against protesting NFL players still reverberating, the league’s TV partners decided to air live coverage of the national anthem before Week 3 games. Those partners left out a key element of the coverage: crowd shots of angry fans.

Networks typically do not televise the national anthem except for the Super Bowl and other special occasions, but they recognized there would be intense viewer interest this past weekend.

Some fans, if they reacted at all, happily clapped and cheered during protests, but others did not, and they angrily let their home teams know it. The audio mics picked up the boos. Yet the TV networks mostly avoided crowd shots Sunday, so there was never a chance for viewers to see fans jeering players.

One behind-the-scenes TV staffer at another stadium told Sporting News that camera operators were ordered to avoid crowd shots in case they showed fans counterprotesting the protests…

If crowd shots were indeed purposely avoided, it was a wise business decision by the networks not to bite the hand that feeds them their most popular programming, but a weak move from a journalistic standpoint. By covering one of the most significant days in NFL history with rose-colored glasses, the networks cheated viewers. We got an incomplete picture of what really happened in stadiums on Sunday and Monday.

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Undercover With The Alt Right

Homosexual Patrik Hermansson went undercover with the Alt Right for a year to aid the group Hope Not Hate and all his research so far has apparently revealed nothing we didn’t already know. He’s made no contribution.

It’s not as though I think that critics of the Alt Right have nothing to say. On the contrary, another homosexual wrote a penetrating critique of the Alt Right for Slate recently (Donna Minkowitz writes for Slate June 5, 2017). But Patrik Hermansson has so far proved to be unimpressive. He’s a bit of a drama queen and a shallow thinker.

Here are excerpts from his recent dialogue at NYTimes.com:

Robert Bruce: Fundamentally, all the alt-right stands for is the idea that ethnic Europeans have the same moral entitlement as every other people on earth: namely, a land of their own. They ask why it is that ethnic Europeans, uniquely, face a moral obligation to turn themselves into ethnic minorities and hope it all works out for their descendants. And, so far, no one has been able to answer that question.

PH: I’m afraid I fundamentally reject the premise of this question on several fronts. First, it’s based on the premise that ethnic groups have an “entitlement” to certain pieces of land. Ethnic groups have moved around the globe for millenniums so when exactly did this become static and certain ethnic groups became “entitled” to certain bits of the planet? Second, you state that Europeans “face a moral obligation to turn themselves into ethnic minorities.” Where is this the case? This is the sort of spurious demographic nonsense the alt-right uses all the time.

Norman: Why was it necessary to go undercover? Elle Reeve from Vice identified herself as a reporter to cover the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and produced a dramatic documentary in which the alt-right participants were just as candid as they were with you.

PH: This is an important question and one that many have asked. The reason that Hope Not Hate uses undercover research and asks people like me to spend long periods inside far-right movements is not to just catch racist people saying racist things. Of course, in some cases far-right people and organizations cloak their true extremism and portray a more moderate image to the world to try to avoid criticism and gain new supporters. Going undercover allows us to expose this.

However, more important is understanding how a far-right movement operates, organizes and functions. This is invaluable for finding the most effective strategies for opposing and undermining them. I spent hundreds of hours with these people and came away with a real understanding of what drives their activism, the tactics they seek to use, and what they were planning to do. This allows Hope Not Hate to always be one step ahead, and to plan responses and opposition earlier than anyone else.

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