Edana
07-12-2004, 02:59 AM
SAVED!
Jews in Russia had overwhelmingly welcomed the 1917 revolution at the outset. The overthrow of the hated, murderous regime of the Romanov czars was cause for worldwide Jewish rejoicing. The revolution initially gave Russian Jews a freedom they had never known. Throughout the 1920s, there was an explosion of Yiddish publishing, theatre, and film; of Jewish literature and scholarship in both Yiddish and Russian; and of Jewish political activity. The Soviet government even sponsered Jewish agricultural colonies, with help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.143
In short order, Maslow's chief deputy, the brilliant and irascible Leo Pfieffer, opened up a second front: developing the legal strategy for a direct Jewish legal assault on state-supported religion. At the time, most public as well as private schools nationwide had compulsory daily prayers. Many public schools also provided "released" class time for children to learn the Bible and religion, on or off campus.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.122
The effort began piecemeal. One Jewish organization sued a discriminatory employer, defending a returning GI. Another agency lobbied for immigration reform, to rescue the stranded victims of Hitler's death camps.
Slowly, taking one issue at a time, the major Jewish organizations began to work together. Committees were created to forge joint strategies, now among the Jewish organizations, now between these and the black organizations that were waging much the same fight. Eventually the Jewish community forged coalitions with trade unions, liberal churchs, and other groups, each around a distinct issue. Over two decades, they managed to reform America's race-based immigration laws and ban racial and religious discrimination in housing, schools, and the workplace. And finally, they helped to make Jews equal citizens by truly separating church and state: removing religious symbols from public spaces and making American civic culture a neutral zone where all could approach on the same footing.
In short order, the campaign for equality became a popular Jewish crusade. It started with a few Jewish organizations but soon involved hundreds of thousands of ordinary individual Jews. They poured en masse into the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, and other liberal causes from the 1950s through the 1970s.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, pp.119-120
Soviet Jewry forced its way onto the agenda of U.S.-Soviet relations, disrupting Richard Nixon's efforts at detente. The final result was the 1973 passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The rights of Jews in the Soviet Union had become the precondition for U.S.-Soviet economic dealings.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, pp.119-120
Their role in American economic, social, and political institutions has enabled Jews to wield considerable influence in the nation's public life. The most obvious indicator of this influence is the $3 billion in direct military and economic aid provided to Israel by the United States each year and, for that matter, the like amount given to Egypt since it agreed to maintain peaceful relations with Israel. That fully three-fourths of America's foreign aid budget is devoted to Israel's security interests is a tribute in considerable measure to the Jewish community in American politics.
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago, 1993), pp.1-2
At least until recently, another mark of Jewish influence was the virtual disappearance of anti-Semitic rhetoric from mainstream public discourse in the United States. As a general rule, what can and cannot be said in public reflects the distribution of political power in society; as Jews gained political power, politicians who indulged in anti-Semitic tactics were labeled extremists and exiled to the margins of American politics. Similarly, religious symbols and forms of expression that Jews find threatening have almost been completely eliminated from schools and other public institutions. Suits brought by the ACLU, an organizations whose leadership and membership are predominantly Jewish, secured federal court decisions banning officially sanctioned prayers in the public schools and creches and other religious displays in parks and public buildings.
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago, 1993), pp.1-2
During the 1950s and 1960s, Jews and African Americans were closely allied in the civil rights movement, and, indeed, Jews played a prominant role in the leadership of most, if not all of the major civil rights organizations. As noted earlier, Stanley Levinson, a Jewish attorney, was Dr. Martin Luther King's chief advisor. Kivie Kaplan, a retired Jewish businessman from Boston, served as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was, as well, one of Dr. King's major fund-raisers and financial contributors. Marvin Rich, another Jewish attorney, was the chief fund-raiser and key speech writer for James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rich was later succeeded by yet another Jewish attorney, Alan Gartner. Attorney Jack Greenberg headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after former Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, was named to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Lyndon Johnson.
More than half the white lawyers who made their services available to civil rights demonstrators in the South were Jews. Between half and three-quarters of the contributors to civil rights organizations - including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), CORE, and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) - were Jews. More than half the white freedom riders were Jews. Almost two-thirds of the whites who went into the South duringn the Freedom Summer of 1964 were Jews including, of course, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who, along with their black colleague James Chaney, were murdered by racist thugs in Mississippi.
Jewish intellectuals and journals of opinion that they controlled, including Commentary, spoke out forcefully on issues of civil rights. Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League provided financial, legal, and organizational support for civil rights groups.
In the civil rights struggle, Jewish morality and Jewish interests pointed in the same direction. Morality dictated that Jews support the efforts of African Americans to free themselves from the apartheid system. To a generation of liberal Jews this was a supreme moral imperative. At the same time, however, many Jews and Jewish organizations, in particular, also recognized that they had an interest in supporting the civil rights movement. First, the goal of a society in which discrimination based on race was outlawed served the interests of Jews as much as - perhaps even more than - blacks. In the area of discriminatory legislation and practice in such areas as education and employment, Jews had every reason to believe that they could compete successfully and rise to the very top of American society. By supporting African Americans in the cause of civil rights, Jews were eliminating the barrieers that stood in their own way as well.
Morever, the political forces that the civil rights movement was attacking were the forces in American society that were also enemies of the Jews. Jews were aligned with the liberal, New Deal wing of the Democratic Party, and the civil rights movement attacked and sought to discredit the conservative Southern wing of the party - a group that had been associated with the anti-Communist and anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1950s. Through participation in the civil rights movement, Jews were striking a blow against their own foes in the Democratic coalition as much as against the enemies of blacks.
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago, 1993), pp.145-47
Jews are not just liberal; they are essential to American liberalism, and have been for a century. The first president of the American Federation of Labor was a Jew, immigrant cigar-maker Samuel Gompers. The first president of the National Organization for Women was a Jew, author-activist Betty Friedan. The first socialists ever elected to Congress were Jews, Milwaukee journalist Victor Berger and New York attorney Meyer London. (So is the only self-declared Socialist in today's Congress, Vermont independent Bernard Sanders.) Close to half the young whites who went South as civil rights workers duing the 1960s were Jews, by most estimates. Two of the most influential liberal activist groups of the post-Vietnam War era were founded by Jews, Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Watch, founded by New York publisher Robert Bernstein, and People for the American Way, founded by Los Angeles television producer Norman Lear.
Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took shape in the home of a Jew, retired Columbia University literature professor Joel Spingarn, who hosted the organization's pivotal 1915 Amenia Conference at his estate outside New York City. An NAACP leader since its founding in 1909, head of its militant faction, and the main ally of black theorist W.E.B. DuBois, Spingarn was elected NAACP board chairman in 1915, then served as president from 1929 until his death in 1939. He was succeded by his brother Arthur, who was in turn succeeded in 1966 by Boston businessman Kivie Kaplan, who served until 1975, when the NAACP elected its first black president.
The careers of individual Jewish liberals tell only part of the story. For at least a half-century, the organized Jewish community has played a decisive role in advancing America's evolving liberal agenda of tolerance and fair play. A formal alliance of Jewish and black organizations orchestrated the post-Second World War civil rights campaign that led to equal-rights laws in dozens of states, and finally to the federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the mid-1960s. The major Jewish organizations spearheaded the long campaign for immigration reform, ending with the abolition of racial quotas in 1965. Jewish organizations, working with a wide coalition of civic groups and Christian churches, did much to create the current legal consensus on religious freedom and church-state separation.
Finally, in a nation where political campaigns are privately funded, an estimated one fourth to one half of all Democratic Party campaign funds are donated or raised by Jews.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, pp.23-24
Most Americans define Judaism as a religion and Jews as its believers. However, religion is only part of the answer. Jews usually consider themselves members of a worldwide ethnic group, usually called "the Jewish people," though it has been called a nation, a tribe, and even a race. They are bound together by common ancestry, a shared history, and a common cultural heritage, along with religion.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.58
Another survey, conducted in 1988 by the Los Angeles Times, asked a national sample of American Jews to name "the quality most important to their Jewish identity." Half chose "a commitment to social equality." The other half were divided evenly among Israel, religion, and "other."
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.71
To many minds, American Jewish advocacy reached the pinnacle of its success on Thursday morning, April 22, 1993, when President Bill Clinton dedicated the United States Holocaust Museum. Built by congressional mandate on federal land - though paid for with $168 million in private donations - it was America's four-story "living memorial" to the European Jews massacared by Nazi Germany.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.195
Phillip M. Stern, author of the 1987 muckracker The Best Congress Money Can Buy and its 1992 sequel Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy, reports that during the 1990 election campaign some fifty pro-Isrel PACs gave a total of just over $4 million to federal candidates. That, he notes, compares to $914,000 contributed by PACs opposed to gun control and a total of $747,000 from PACs "on both sides of the abortion issue." Moreover, he notes, the $4 million figure underestimates the magnitude of pro-Israel PACs' influence, since another $3.5 million was given directly to candidates by individual donors who had given to the pro-Israel PACs "and could fairly, therefore, be assumed to have pro-Israel sympathies."
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.276
"Another barometer of the extent to which Jews had become part of the American economic establishment was the increasing number of American Jews with immense fortunes. Money, it is true, is not an infallible indicator of status and power: the president of a major bank has for more status and power than a much wealthier entrepreneur. But it is also a mistake to deny that money has no relationship to status and power. Beginning in the early 1980s, Forbes magazine published an annual compilation of the four hundred richest Americans. Strictly based on their percentage of the general population, there should have been about twelve Jews on this list. Instead, there were over one hundred. Jews, who constituted less than 3 percent of the American people, made up over one-quarter of the richest Americans. They were overrepresented by a factor of nine.
By contrast, ethnic groups that greatly outnumbered Jews - Italians, Hispanics, Blacks, and eastern Europeans - had few representatives on the list. The higher the category of assets listed by Forbes, the greater the percentage of Jews. Over 30 percent of American billionaires were Jewish. The same phenomenon was also found in Canada, where the three most prominent business families were all Jewish - the Belzbergs of Vancouver, the Bronfmans of Montreal, and the Reichmanns of Toronto. It was possible that many of them had become wealthy in real estate, the most difficult of fields to gauge assets and the easiest in which to hide wealth.
An even more impressive list appeared in the 22 July 1986 issue of Financial World. It numbered one hundred Wall Street Executives - investment bankers, money managers, arbitragers, buyout specialists, speculators, commodities traders, and brokers - who had earned at least $3 million in 1985. The list began with Ivan Boesky, who supposedly made $100 million. This was more than two and a half times the annual salaries of all senators and congressmen, but as Financial World explained, Boesky had a better year than Congress. "Ivan is one of the cleverst people in the business," a vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert declared. "He's deeply charitable and socially conscious. If you don't like Ivan, you don't like Pete Rose. It's just another sport."
Boesky would spend a couple years in prison for financial chicanery, including insider trading. In 1989, his fellow sportsman Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on baseball games, and the next year he was sentanced to five months in prison for income tax evasion. Boesky's earnings were dwarfed by the $500 million Michael Milken earned in a following year. Milken was also hotly pursued by the government because of a variety of purported civil and criminal offenses. Milken and Boesky were Jewish, as were half of the people mentioned by the Financial World. Wall Street's Jewish heavy hitters included George Soros ($93.5 million), Asher Edelman ($25 million), Morton Davis ($25 million), and Michael Steinhardt ($20 million).
Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp.116-117
"This history of American Jewry after 1945 has two broad themes. One is the rapid social and economic mobility of American Jews. By the 1980s, American Jewry was the nation's only major ethnic group without a significant working class component. This embourgeoisment began prior to World War II and quickly accelerated after the war's end, encouraged by a booming economy and the decline of anti-Semitism."
Edward S. Shapiro, A Time For Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins Univiersity Press, 1992), p.xv
Jews in Russia had overwhelmingly welcomed the 1917 revolution at the outset. The overthrow of the hated, murderous regime of the Romanov czars was cause for worldwide Jewish rejoicing. The revolution initially gave Russian Jews a freedom they had never known. Throughout the 1920s, there was an explosion of Yiddish publishing, theatre, and film; of Jewish literature and scholarship in both Yiddish and Russian; and of Jewish political activity. The Soviet government even sponsered Jewish agricultural colonies, with help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.143
In short order, Maslow's chief deputy, the brilliant and irascible Leo Pfieffer, opened up a second front: developing the legal strategy for a direct Jewish legal assault on state-supported religion. At the time, most public as well as private schools nationwide had compulsory daily prayers. Many public schools also provided "released" class time for children to learn the Bible and religion, on or off campus.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.122
The effort began piecemeal. One Jewish organization sued a discriminatory employer, defending a returning GI. Another agency lobbied for immigration reform, to rescue the stranded victims of Hitler's death camps.
Slowly, taking one issue at a time, the major Jewish organizations began to work together. Committees were created to forge joint strategies, now among the Jewish organizations, now between these and the black organizations that were waging much the same fight. Eventually the Jewish community forged coalitions with trade unions, liberal churchs, and other groups, each around a distinct issue. Over two decades, they managed to reform America's race-based immigration laws and ban racial and religious discrimination in housing, schools, and the workplace. And finally, they helped to make Jews equal citizens by truly separating church and state: removing religious symbols from public spaces and making American civic culture a neutral zone where all could approach on the same footing.
In short order, the campaign for equality became a popular Jewish crusade. It started with a few Jewish organizations but soon involved hundreds of thousands of ordinary individual Jews. They poured en masse into the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, and other liberal causes from the 1950s through the 1970s.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, pp.119-120
Soviet Jewry forced its way onto the agenda of U.S.-Soviet relations, disrupting Richard Nixon's efforts at detente. The final result was the 1973 passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The rights of Jews in the Soviet Union had become the precondition for U.S.-Soviet economic dealings.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, pp.119-120
Their role in American economic, social, and political institutions has enabled Jews to wield considerable influence in the nation's public life. The most obvious indicator of this influence is the $3 billion in direct military and economic aid provided to Israel by the United States each year and, for that matter, the like amount given to Egypt since it agreed to maintain peaceful relations with Israel. That fully three-fourths of America's foreign aid budget is devoted to Israel's security interests is a tribute in considerable measure to the Jewish community in American politics.
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago, 1993), pp.1-2
At least until recently, another mark of Jewish influence was the virtual disappearance of anti-Semitic rhetoric from mainstream public discourse in the United States. As a general rule, what can and cannot be said in public reflects the distribution of political power in society; as Jews gained political power, politicians who indulged in anti-Semitic tactics were labeled extremists and exiled to the margins of American politics. Similarly, religious symbols and forms of expression that Jews find threatening have almost been completely eliminated from schools and other public institutions. Suits brought by the ACLU, an organizations whose leadership and membership are predominantly Jewish, secured federal court decisions banning officially sanctioned prayers in the public schools and creches and other religious displays in parks and public buildings.
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago, 1993), pp.1-2
During the 1950s and 1960s, Jews and African Americans were closely allied in the civil rights movement, and, indeed, Jews played a prominant role in the leadership of most, if not all of the major civil rights organizations. As noted earlier, Stanley Levinson, a Jewish attorney, was Dr. Martin Luther King's chief advisor. Kivie Kaplan, a retired Jewish businessman from Boston, served as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was, as well, one of Dr. King's major fund-raisers and financial contributors. Marvin Rich, another Jewish attorney, was the chief fund-raiser and key speech writer for James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rich was later succeeded by yet another Jewish attorney, Alan Gartner. Attorney Jack Greenberg headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after former Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, was named to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Lyndon Johnson.
More than half the white lawyers who made their services available to civil rights demonstrators in the South were Jews. Between half and three-quarters of the contributors to civil rights organizations - including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), CORE, and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) - were Jews. More than half the white freedom riders were Jews. Almost two-thirds of the whites who went into the South duringn the Freedom Summer of 1964 were Jews including, of course, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who, along with their black colleague James Chaney, were murdered by racist thugs in Mississippi.
Jewish intellectuals and journals of opinion that they controlled, including Commentary, spoke out forcefully on issues of civil rights. Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League provided financial, legal, and organizational support for civil rights groups.
In the civil rights struggle, Jewish morality and Jewish interests pointed in the same direction. Morality dictated that Jews support the efforts of African Americans to free themselves from the apartheid system. To a generation of liberal Jews this was a supreme moral imperative. At the same time, however, many Jews and Jewish organizations, in particular, also recognized that they had an interest in supporting the civil rights movement. First, the goal of a society in which discrimination based on race was outlawed served the interests of Jews as much as - perhaps even more than - blacks. In the area of discriminatory legislation and practice in such areas as education and employment, Jews had every reason to believe that they could compete successfully and rise to the very top of American society. By supporting African Americans in the cause of civil rights, Jews were eliminating the barrieers that stood in their own way as well.
Morever, the political forces that the civil rights movement was attacking were the forces in American society that were also enemies of the Jews. Jews were aligned with the liberal, New Deal wing of the Democratic Party, and the civil rights movement attacked and sought to discredit the conservative Southern wing of the party - a group that had been associated with the anti-Communist and anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1950s. Through participation in the civil rights movement, Jews were striking a blow against their own foes in the Democratic coalition as much as against the enemies of blacks.
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago, 1993), pp.145-47
Jews are not just liberal; they are essential to American liberalism, and have been for a century. The first president of the American Federation of Labor was a Jew, immigrant cigar-maker Samuel Gompers. The first president of the National Organization for Women was a Jew, author-activist Betty Friedan. The first socialists ever elected to Congress were Jews, Milwaukee journalist Victor Berger and New York attorney Meyer London. (So is the only self-declared Socialist in today's Congress, Vermont independent Bernard Sanders.) Close to half the young whites who went South as civil rights workers duing the 1960s were Jews, by most estimates. Two of the most influential liberal activist groups of the post-Vietnam War era were founded by Jews, Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Watch, founded by New York publisher Robert Bernstein, and People for the American Way, founded by Los Angeles television producer Norman Lear.
Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took shape in the home of a Jew, retired Columbia University literature professor Joel Spingarn, who hosted the organization's pivotal 1915 Amenia Conference at his estate outside New York City. An NAACP leader since its founding in 1909, head of its militant faction, and the main ally of black theorist W.E.B. DuBois, Spingarn was elected NAACP board chairman in 1915, then served as president from 1929 until his death in 1939. He was succeded by his brother Arthur, who was in turn succeeded in 1966 by Boston businessman Kivie Kaplan, who served until 1975, when the NAACP elected its first black president.
The careers of individual Jewish liberals tell only part of the story. For at least a half-century, the organized Jewish community has played a decisive role in advancing America's evolving liberal agenda of tolerance and fair play. A formal alliance of Jewish and black organizations orchestrated the post-Second World War civil rights campaign that led to equal-rights laws in dozens of states, and finally to the federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the mid-1960s. The major Jewish organizations spearheaded the long campaign for immigration reform, ending with the abolition of racial quotas in 1965. Jewish organizations, working with a wide coalition of civic groups and Christian churches, did much to create the current legal consensus on religious freedom and church-state separation.
Finally, in a nation where political campaigns are privately funded, an estimated one fourth to one half of all Democratic Party campaign funds are donated or raised by Jews.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, pp.23-24
Most Americans define Judaism as a religion and Jews as its believers. However, religion is only part of the answer. Jews usually consider themselves members of a worldwide ethnic group, usually called "the Jewish people," though it has been called a nation, a tribe, and even a race. They are bound together by common ancestry, a shared history, and a common cultural heritage, along with religion.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.58
Another survey, conducted in 1988 by the Los Angeles Times, asked a national sample of American Jews to name "the quality most important to their Jewish identity." Half chose "a commitment to social equality." The other half were divided evenly among Israel, religion, and "other."
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.71
To many minds, American Jewish advocacy reached the pinnacle of its success on Thursday morning, April 22, 1993, when President Bill Clinton dedicated the United States Holocaust Museum. Built by congressional mandate on federal land - though paid for with $168 million in private donations - it was America's four-story "living memorial" to the European Jews massacared by Nazi Germany.
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.195
Phillip M. Stern, author of the 1987 muckracker The Best Congress Money Can Buy and its 1992 sequel Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy, reports that during the 1990 election campaign some fifty pro-Isrel PACs gave a total of just over $4 million to federal candidates. That, he notes, compares to $914,000 contributed by PACs opposed to gun control and a total of $747,000 from PACs "on both sides of the abortion issue." Moreover, he notes, the $4 million figure underestimates the magnitude of pro-Israel PACs' influence, since another $3.5 million was given directly to candidates by individual donors who had given to the pro-Israel PACs "and could fairly, therefore, be assumed to have pro-Israel sympathies."
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, p.276
"Another barometer of the extent to which Jews had become part of the American economic establishment was the increasing number of American Jews with immense fortunes. Money, it is true, is not an infallible indicator of status and power: the president of a major bank has for more status and power than a much wealthier entrepreneur. But it is also a mistake to deny that money has no relationship to status and power. Beginning in the early 1980s, Forbes magazine published an annual compilation of the four hundred richest Americans. Strictly based on their percentage of the general population, there should have been about twelve Jews on this list. Instead, there were over one hundred. Jews, who constituted less than 3 percent of the American people, made up over one-quarter of the richest Americans. They were overrepresented by a factor of nine.
By contrast, ethnic groups that greatly outnumbered Jews - Italians, Hispanics, Blacks, and eastern Europeans - had few representatives on the list. The higher the category of assets listed by Forbes, the greater the percentage of Jews. Over 30 percent of American billionaires were Jewish. The same phenomenon was also found in Canada, where the three most prominent business families were all Jewish - the Belzbergs of Vancouver, the Bronfmans of Montreal, and the Reichmanns of Toronto. It was possible that many of them had become wealthy in real estate, the most difficult of fields to gauge assets and the easiest in which to hide wealth.
An even more impressive list appeared in the 22 July 1986 issue of Financial World. It numbered one hundred Wall Street Executives - investment bankers, money managers, arbitragers, buyout specialists, speculators, commodities traders, and brokers - who had earned at least $3 million in 1985. The list began with Ivan Boesky, who supposedly made $100 million. This was more than two and a half times the annual salaries of all senators and congressmen, but as Financial World explained, Boesky had a better year than Congress. "Ivan is one of the cleverst people in the business," a vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert declared. "He's deeply charitable and socially conscious. If you don't like Ivan, you don't like Pete Rose. It's just another sport."
Boesky would spend a couple years in prison for financial chicanery, including insider trading. In 1989, his fellow sportsman Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on baseball games, and the next year he was sentanced to five months in prison for income tax evasion. Boesky's earnings were dwarfed by the $500 million Michael Milken earned in a following year. Milken was also hotly pursued by the government because of a variety of purported civil and criminal offenses. Milken and Boesky were Jewish, as were half of the people mentioned by the Financial World. Wall Street's Jewish heavy hitters included George Soros ($93.5 million), Asher Edelman ($25 million), Morton Davis ($25 million), and Michael Steinhardt ($20 million).
Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp.116-117
"This history of American Jewry after 1945 has two broad themes. One is the rapid social and economic mobility of American Jews. By the 1980s, American Jewry was the nation's only major ethnic group without a significant working class component. This embourgeoisment began prior to World War II and quickly accelerated after the war's end, encouraged by a booming economy and the decline of anti-Semitism."
Edward S. Shapiro, A Time For Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins Univiersity Press, 1992), p.xv