New York Times: “If the main job of a Madoff drama is to get inside the head of a man who could pull off such a brazen scheme for so long, “Madoff” doesn’t find much there besides clichés about striving Jewish immigrants (who tend to make the best salesmen) and overbearing patriarchs.”
Washington Post: “A Jewish club? “Madoff” doesn’t shy away from this angle, nor does it explore it too deeply; but if ever there was a shanda that played to stereotype, it could very well be the Madoff saga.”
For much of the world, the word “Jew” is synonymous with dishonesty in business. Stereotypes are stereotypes because they tend to contain generalizable truths.
Whenever I hear of a big arrest for illicit trading on Wall Street, it’s usually a Jew or an Indian.
The Wolf of Wall Street movie was about the real life Jewish swindler Jordan Belfort.
Jewish Press: Eight years after the scandal, a four-hour ABC mini-series called “Madoff,” starring Richard Dreyfuss as Bernie Madoff and Blythe Danner as his wife, Ruth, will air on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 3 and 4. Dryfuss, 68, told the NY Post he was the natural choice to play the Jewish mega-schemer, and, in fact, when he saw he wasn’t getting the script after the project had been announced, he said he was going to call ABC and tell them, “What’s the matter with your mail? I am the logical person to play the role, I am clearly a New Yorker, I’ve made a career out of playing college-educated, Upper West Side Jewish men. That’s the way I see myself. And that’s why they would be silly to go Joe Yutz.”
The mini-series, according to the NY Times, is well scripted, certainly more lucidly than the 2009 book on which it is based, “The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth,” by Brian Ross, ABC’s chief investigative correspondent. In the opening scene, Dryfuss as Madoff is seen and heard luring a new victim by refusing to take their money, telling them he’s not taking new clients. Then we hear Madoff’s voice-over saying, “You present it as an exclusive thing, an elite club for the chosen few. Nothing on earth makes people want something more than telling them they can’t have it.”
Dryfuss told the post he empathizes with his subject, despite the larceny that earned him 150 years in prison. “When he was a young man, he did the thing that any smart businessman would do: he covered the losses himself,” Dreyfuss said. “And he knew instinctively that he was going to gain the respect and awe of his clients. He didn’t set out to cheat anybody … Did he think of himself as a criminal? He didn’t. Not until he was buying his clothes from London. And buying a house in the South of France. By then he knew he was a criminal.”
Madoff is portrayed in the mini-series as a devoted family man. His sons, brother, niece, and his wife Ruth worked for him, but not for the Ponzi scheme, which was conducted a few floors below Madoff’s main office. They spent a lot of time together. Then his sons turned him in and died tragically, one by suicide, one from cancer, shortly thereafter.
Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi schemer whose story is the subject of a TV miniseries airing this week, is “doing as well as can be expected,” according to his lawyer.
Ira Sorkin, who represented Madoff when he pleaded guilty in 2009 to defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars, said the 77-year-old — who according to another source is a regular at Jewish worship services in prison — has a “little bit of a heart problem,” ABC News reported Tuesday.
Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence at the same North Carolina federal prison from which American Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard was recently released on parole.
Citing Sorkin and other inmates, ABC News said Madoff is upset that none of his family members, including his wife and grandchildren, visit him. His wife, Ruth, stopped visiting “years ago,” according to ABC News. Both his sons died after he was imprisoned: Mark Madoff committed suicide in 2010 at 46; Andrew Madoff died of cancer in 2014 at 48.
Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi schemer whose story is the subject of a TV miniseries airing this week, is “doing as well as can be expected,” according to his lawyer.
Ira Sorkin, who represented Madoff when he pleaded guilty in 2009 to defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars, said the 77-year-old — who according to another source is a regular at Jewish worship services in prison — has a “little bit of a heart problem,” ABC News reported Tuesday.
Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence at the same North Carolina federal prison from which American Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard was recently released on parole.
Citing Sorkin and other inmates, ABC News said Madoff is upset that none of his family members, including his wife and grandchildren, visit him. His wife, Ruth, stopped visiting “years ago,” according to ABC News. Both his sons died after he was imprisoned: Mark Madoff committed suicide in 2010 at 46; Andrew Madoff died of cancer in 2014 at 48.
Madoff has “regret at what he put his family through,” Sorkin told ABC.
John Mancini, a fellow inmate released in 2010, told ABC that the prisoners locked up with Madoff treat him with “great respect” and admire his criminal accomplishments.
Mancini told ABC News that some inmates came to Madoff for financial advice and stock tips, and that Madoff attended Jewish services in the prison chapel.
“He felt pain, a lot of pain,” Mancini said. “I would walk the track with him almost every day and I see tears out of his eyes.”
Madoff’s crime was the largest financial crime in U.S. history. Many of his victims were Jewish and Israel-related philanthropies, as well as individual American Jews.
At the heart of Madoff, ABC’s two-night miniseries about notorious money-managing crook Bernie Madoff, are two fundamental truths. The first is that if something seems too good to be true, it generally is. The second is that people will often ignore that first truth and accept any lie, or set aside any moral principles—be it by committing a crime, or simply by looking the other way—if they stand to benefit from doing so.
Inspired by ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross’s book The Madoff Chronicles, Madoff illustrates how those two realities formed the basis for Madoff’s stratospheric rise to the heights of the financial industry, and his vertiginous fall in 2008, when he was arrested for operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme—the largest in American history. It’s a story of rampant greed, stunning incompetence, willful blindness and unthinkable betrayal. And it’s told with enough compelling suspense and detail by director Raymond De Felitta, and led by a sturdy enough headlining turn from Richard Dreyfuss, to mostly make up for the fact that, in the end, it has no great insight to impart about its real-life villain.
That’s not, however, for lack of trying. De Felitta does his best to get up close and personal with Madoff—the embodiment of Wall Street avarice, and the shame of all Jews—who’s front-and-center in the vast majority of this three-hour series’ scenes, and whose interior-monologue narration helps propel the story toward its inevitably enraging conclusion. The man it reveals is a self-made millionaire who, determined to avoid receiving the sort of public pity that was showered upon his failed-businessman father, discovered that the key to long-lasting investment success was to cover clients’ losses with his own—or other clients’—money. In other words: to lie to them and cheat the system.
“Madoff” includes many Jewish-themed references, scenes and some cast members (Lewis Black and Charles Grodin, among them), but was there concern about the ramifications of a Jewish villain? “We were very careful not to portray this as an anti-Semitic story. It’s a global story … a much bigger story,” Berman said.
Dreyfuss pointed out that Madoff scammed Jews because that’s who he knew, and when he discovered there were Christians in the world, he scammed them, too. The actor recalled how he responded when his starring role in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” raised issues of anti-Semitism in 1974. “When they said, ‘You’re washing our dirty linen in public,’ I went out and washed some more dirty linen, as loudly as possible.”
“Madoff” also raises important issues about the workings of the financial industry and how Bernie Madoff was able to get away with his scheme.
“It’s been said that the only way a Ponzi scheme like this could fail is if the world fell apart, and that’s exactly what happened. If it weren’t for the fact that there was a volcanic explosion in the financial world, he could have gone on doing this forever,” Dreyfuss said.
No group only has wonderful qualities.
Irwin Stelzer writes for the Weekly Standard this year:
A sign of what might be called “progress” jogged some memories of battles fought. In reporting Governor Andrew Cuomo’s nomination of a new chief to a state regulatory agency, the New York Times identified the appointee as being a litigator in “the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind,” et al. The reporter seemingly did not know that the designation “white-shoe law firm” was invented to describe firms at the pinnacle of the WASP establishment, no Jews allowed, named apparently for the shoes these WASPs favored in the summer at their restricted country clubs.
In the 1960s, my partners and I were attempting to establish an economic consulting firm that marketed its services to law firms and public utilities. The “white-shoe” firms were off-limits. We identified them by adding up the Roman numerals after partners’ names—I, II, III, etc.—adding to that partners with first and last names that were interchangeable, and dividing by the total number of partners. A high result meant we had no chance.
Then there were cases in which no such arithmetic was needed. A partner in one firm told me at a cocktail party, after his usual consumption of truth-producing alcohol, that he was happy to be living in a New York suburb that did not allow Jews. That firm later merged with another; both went bust. Another pointed out that the new civil rights legislation wasn’t a problem for him because it did not protect Jews, whose upward drive would threaten him and his executives. The general counsel of a public utility invited me to lunch to congratulate me on starting the firm and added what he thought was encouraging news: “If we ever hire a firm with Jews, your firm will be the first.”
We were not the only disadvantaged group. One company CEO told me that he was certain new legislation did not force him to change a company rule that permitted men, but not women, to smoke at their desks. In the early 1960s, women were finding it difficult to procure professional positions, both in law firms and in the consulting field. Our firm took advantage of that market imperfection by hiring the best and the brightest women economics graduates, with emphasis on my mentor’s and my own former students at Cornell. When I was due to testify at an administrative proceeding at a Washington regulatory agency, I brought my assistant along to help check data, refresh my recollection during recesses, find sources, and perform other chores. The hearing officer quietly suggested to me that it was inappropriate to have a woman in the hearing room; I argued that she was entitled to see the fruits of her research and prevailed. It wasn’t easy.
With time and hard work, we managed to build a successful consulting practice. Time, because gradually the law business changed, with the bright young Jewish graduates joining predominantly Jewish firms that prospered, in many instances by accepting cases that the white-shoe firms would not take—contingency fee arrangements, lawsuits against establishment corporations—and prevailing over rivals that had denied themselves access to this portion of the most talented law school output. One WASPy partner in a Pittsburgh firm told me one evening, “We made a mistake discriminating against you guys. We should have hired you instead of giving you an added incentive to beat us.” Discrimination, especially against a group with no recourse to the law and therefore reliant only on its efforts, can be costly.
We were helped, too, by three events. A metropolitan New York utility hired as general counsel a Jewish lawyer who had an offer from a white-shoe firm rescinded a day later when the firm discovered he was Jewish. He was in the market for what we had to sell, especially in cases in which he was up against the Wall Street WASP law establishment. Second, a patrician partner in a southern law firm had no use for discrimination, interviewed several firms to handle a series of matters, and selected us on merit—for a client group led by a Philadelphia patrician who had somehow found his way into a top executive position in the utility industry. Not all WASPs wore white shoes.
