When Victims Rule (pdf)

WALL STREET, JEWISH / ISRAELI ETHICS, AND THE WORLD OF FUND RAISING
than dealing with technical or substantive problems of production …
[KREFETZ, p. 69]…. If Jews are drawn to the financial side, it is probably due
to the fact that in the last decade or two the financial tail wags the industrial
dog.” [KRAFETZ, p. 69]
“Greed knows no bounds,” said the New York Director of the Securities and
Exchange Commission in 1986, “there’s always someone who makes more than
you do. Investment banking is the new gold mine.” [HOWE, p. 413] In the same
year New York psychiatrist Samuel Klagsbann, who had “a lot of lawyers handling
mergers and acquisitions” as patients, noted that for these people “business
is God.” [HOWE, p. 413]
“In the field of takeovers and mergers the sky is the limit,” said prominent
Jewish financier Felix Rohatyn (later President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to
France), “Not only in size, but the type of large corporation transactions. We
have gone beyond the norms of rational behavior. The tactics used in corporate
takeovers, both on offense and defense, create massive transactions that greatly
benefit lawyers, investment bankers, and arbitrageurs, but often result in weaker
companies and do not treat share holders equally and fairly … In the long
run we in the investment banking business cannot benefit from something that
is harmful to our economic system.” [EHRLICH, p. ]
In 1986, Dennis Levine was the first to be caught, a “dealmaker” at Drexel
Burnham Lambart, for his “insider trading [exploiting confidential company
information] which opened the doors to the greatest scandal in Wall Street history,
a scandal that “caused grave concern within the Jewish community.”
[EHRLICH, p. 17] Not long after, Martin Siegel was also arrested. As the scandal
opened up, it was discovered that these wealthy criminals were overwhelmingly
Jewish, including all its central players. “What was particularly upsetting
from a Jewish perspective,” notes Ehrlich and Rehfeld, “was the fact that the
[criminal] network began, in part, when one member first introduced another
to a third at a United Jewish Appeal function.” [EHRLICH, p. 340]
Connie Bruck, a Jewish journalist, notes that
“Privately, [lawyer Martin] Lipton expressed another concern, one
shared by many of the businessmen and lawyers who were part of the
Jewish establishment in New York, and by some of the Drexel contingent
as well. They feared that the common strain among these nouveau
entrepreneurs and their nouveau banks at Drexel – an overwhelming
majority were Jews – would unleash a backlash of virulent anti-Semitism
… As one Drexel client … put it: ‘It used to be that the Jews would
go [to WASP lenders] and they’d beg for money, and they’d be rejected
while the Gentile would come in and they’d all go to lunch and smoke
cigars. Now it’s a shift of power to the Jews. Drexel is making these huge
sums of money and the banks comparatively little. The problem is, all
the entrepreneurs are Jews with the exception of [T. Boone] Pickens and
[Carl] Lindner – and Lindner, a long time supporter of Israel, is the
most Jewish non-Jew I’ve ever known.” [BRUCK, p. 205] (In 1999,
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