Jews and Inequality

As an old white guy, I’m worried about all of those “other” groups that are becoming prominent in the US, mainly blacks, Hispanics and Jews.  For some reason I don’t worry so much about Asians.  They seem to like America and fit better into American life.  Years ago I was concerned about the huge numbers of Vietnamese that came to the US after the Vietnam War, but I think that they have melded pretty well.  Jews could meld into white America even more easily that Asians, but they don’t want to.  They don’t want to assimilate.  Many will always be Jewish-Americans rather than just Americans.  Of course, because they can blend in so easily, there are probably many people of Jewish ancestry who don’t appear to be Jewish.  Both John Kerry and Madeline Albright were “outed” as Jews after they became Secretary of State.  There are probably many more like them.  But I must admit that I wonder if it really came as a surprise to them; I think they must have known something about their ancestry. 

I worry about the Jews because they appear to be behind the huge and growing income inequality in the US.  They have lots of help, of course, but they are in the center of the action because they dominate Wall Street and the American financial community.  Every chair of the Fed, including Janet Yellen, has been Jewish for over a generation, as well as most Secretaries of the Treasury, including Jack Lew, the current Secretary.  In a recent interview, Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan Chase joked that most people think he is Jewish, when in fact he is Greek.  However, Dimon got where is by attaching himself to a wealthy Jew, Sandy Weill of Citibank and American Express, and Dimon’s wife is Jewish.  Weill and Dimon led the charge to repeal the Glass-Steagall limit on bank investment activities, which led to the greatest financial catastrophe in the US since the Great Depression.  Bill Clinton was the President who helped them repeal Glass-Steagall.  One of Clinton’s last acts as President was to pardon the Jewish financier Mark Rich.  It was as if he performed a fraternity initiation to prove his loyalty to the Jewish financial community so that they would support him and his Clinton Foundation after he left the White House, and they did.  Many of Hillary’s most generous campaign contributors are Jewish.  Chelsea’s husband is Jewish, and her Jewish father-in-law, a corrupt politician, is a convicted felon. 

Watching the movie, “The Woman in Gold,” and reading many articles in the New York Times about priceless paintings owned by Jews in Germany that were taken by the Nazis, I began to wonder how German and Austrian Jews became so fantastically rich in the 1920s and 30s.  In “Woman in Gold” the father owned a Stradivarius cello, and paintings by old masters, as well as the priceless painting that is the title of the movie.  Meanwhile, ordinary Austrians were having difficulty paying for food and other necessities.  This is the extreme inequality that Jews appear to have brought to the United States from Europe.  The callous disregard that Jews had for the Germans and Austrians living around them must have bred some of the animosity that Hitler played on when he rose to power.  You certainly don’t hear about this when Jews talk about the Holocaust.  They say Jews were the most perfect people in the world and there was no basis for any animosity against them.  Jews appear to believe that they are a superior race and that it is perfectly normal for other races – Germans, Austrians, and now Americans – to be subordinate to them.  I believe that Jewish contempt for other races was a factor leading up to the Holocaust.  Of course, it does not justify the Holocaust, but it does help explain why ordinary people were not more outraged about it.  Some ordinary Germans must have seen Jews as oppressors, rich men who would not loan much needed money to ordinary citizens, oppressors who ran businesses that paid low wages, landlords who charged exorbitant rents, etc.  Jewish financiers profited from World War I, and continued to profit from the onerous peace terms that were imposed on Germany when the war ended.  I realize that these sound like typically anti-Semitic comments, and they do track with those kinds of comments on the web, e.g., “The Reasons Historians call WWII a ‘Jewish Creation’” on Rense.com.  However, the US has certainly changed in the last twenty or thirty years.  Part of that is just the march of history, technological change, new generations with new interests and concerns, but it might also be partly due to the massive influx of Jewish refugees before and after WWII, who are now coming into their own politically and financially.