Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] MONEY, MADOFF, AND THE JEWS 277
hired had previous clients including “the jailed Sotheby’s Chairman, Alfred
Taubman, and financiers Michael Miliken and Ivan Boesky.” And just in
case you didn’t notice, they are all Members of the Tribe. No sense of
shame . . . no sense of propriety!
People like Tuvia Stern, who picked quite a location for his son’s Bar
Mitzvah . . . no big splash . . . only about sixty people were present; a small,
intimate group. It took place at a prison in New York where Tuvia Stern is
incarcerated, after having fled the country when released on bail, facing
charges of stealing millions in financial scams. When word of the Bar Mitzvah
got out, the warden was criticized, the chaplain was criticized, the person
who “ratted” was criticized. Only Stern wasn’t criticized. No one
seemed to see anything wrong with a child being taken into the adult congregation
of Israel in a prison where his father is a convict!
And it not only when it’s in prison where es past nit. It’s also the
flashy, ostentatious displays at our parties and Bar and Bat Mitzvah receptions,
the way we carry ourselves and conduct ourselves, the way we dress
or undress. In February when Bar Refaeli, an Israeli, was chosen to be the
cover on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, I spoke about it in a sermon.
And I held up this picture of the cover . . . obviously feeling a need to
cover the uncovered parts of her for display in the synagogue. But now
comes July and she is on the cover of Esquire Magazine. And this is the
way I have to show you the cover! You see, now she’s wearing nothing!
That’s what happens! Forgive me for saying it, but that’s what happens to
our daughters . . . and we are allowing it! I see it almost every day of every
week . . . I see the kids in our school in the fourth and fifth grade–nice, cute
kids–and then as they get closer to the Bat Mitzvah the skirts keep getting
higher and higher, and then as they get closer to sweet sixteen, the tops start
getting lower and lower! When are we going to remind ourselves: es past
nit. It is our tradition that teaches, “Blessing is only found upon something
which is hidden from the eye.”
Up until recent times, over the centuries we Jews realized that is was
in the best interest of all concerned not to draw attention to ourselves, not to
cause envy . . . that when it came to flaunting things or being too showy, es
past nit. Daphne Mirkin, sister of Ezra Mirkin, describes the home in which
she and her brother grew up. She writes: “The Mirkin gene for excessive
discretion embraced frugality and disdains visible displays of riches.” She
goes as far as to say that she grew up believing that her father sold chairs on
Wall Street–not shares. But that didn’t stop her brother from needing an
eighteen-room, seven-bedroom, seven-bath apartment at 740 Park Avenue,
where the Bronfmans and the Rockefellers live; a condo dubbed the “most
lusted after address in the world.”
We Jews have changed, there’s no getting away from it! And saying