The only surprising element of this astonishing scandal is that Shmarya Rosenberg managed an entire post without the quotation marks and the scraping. The anomaly probably due to the fact that the article was edited by the Jewish Week in a familiar formula – Shmarya supplies the dirt, the paper complements the dirt with the English.
Anyway, here ends my futile attempt to stay out of the ditch. A friend asked me how did Leib Tropper manage to sign up all the gdoilim? Well, he followed the well-known business plan. Find an oligarch investor, then approach that oligarch with a well rehearsed pitch: “You have your needs, and I have my needs”. Perhaps a blond needs to be made into an honest wife, or whatever. After the Angel round of financing, time to issue the preferred stock and assemble an impressive board of directors (enter gdolim). Now you are a Wal-Mart ready to crash mom and pop stores. The power is aligned along the vertical axis of evil and the peripheral bottom up voices are deliberately marginalized. In practical terms this means that you can’t be helped by a local clergy while on the precipitous verge of the most momentous decision in your life, instead you need to deal with the City Hall bureaucracy and be prepared to bribe the inevitable pimp in charge (can you imagine the bribes required for the carnally challenged?)
If you think this is an isolated phenomenon, think again. How did Berl Lazar manage to silence every fledgling pluralistic voice in the mother Russia? Indeed, you find an oligarch, etc. This unholy alliance between the snake oil salesmen and the oligarchy is a miniature model of every hareidy institution on the face of the earth. But then again, some pimps got bigger cojones.
A note about the Internet moment. The energy is out of the bottle and it can’t be contained, no matter how many pshkevilim they plaster on the old walls. In the past this scandal would have been shoved under the carpet because the MSM would not report on it and the Rabbis would cover up for it. And to be sure there have been technically worse scandals, after all we are just dealing with the consenting adults here. But the vividness of the audio, the unbelievable divergence between the public rhetoric and the private reality is so astonishing. The fact that the man was endorsed by the entire politburo. The fact that the man who built a staggering startup to monopolized the entrance tolls on the road to the hospitable Abraham’s tent is just an alleged pimp is unimaginable. And the unfortunate BTs initiated into the world of lies by a conman. This is so much worse thab Bernie Madoff, at least as Slavoj Zizik put it, “he took the system to its logical conclusion, followed where the system pushes you”. But in this scandal the con is so brazen. The remaining (not yet authenticated recordings) might also identify the Jonhs, are any of them from the politburo?
Leib Tropper and Attorney Nathan Lewin at the EJF conference in Boston (don’t copy the photo without permission)
Leib Tropper with unidentified man
