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‘Bernard Madoff, enemy of the Jewish people’

[additional-authors]
March 13, 2009

We’ve been down this road before, but Julian Kossoff is write in his analysis for the Telegraph of Bernard Madoff’s treachery:

“The guy was totally respected. He was a heymishe (folksy) Jewish guy. He had sweet old ladies and he let their children in,” said a Manhattan lawyer who invested with Madoff.

Property tycoons and retail kings, big hitters from Hollywood (Stephen Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg), the odd US senator and even a Nobel laureate (Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel) handed over their millions.

Soon gentiles followed Jews, loading up the financial doomsday machine

Then came the biggest schmucks of all. Self-styled investment wizards, claiming monster salaries, waving glossy brochures that purred smugly about due diligence. Billions of dollars of their clients’ money poured into greatest Ponzi scheme of them all.

So far so rich. But Madoff is no anti-capitalist anti-hero.

His villainous treachery was completed with his swindling of Jewish charities out of at least $2 billion, blowing a massive hole in the educational and welfare provision for millions of people. (In fact, some experts suspect that Madoff specifically targeted charitable foundations to keep his scheme going.)

As a result, he has managed to harm contemporary Jewry in ways anti-Semites could only dream about.

Read his blog post, “Bernard Madoff, enemy of the Jewish people,” here. A list of Madoff links from the archives are after the jump:

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