On the subject of The Chasidic Court of Bernard Madoff, here how it’s done by the professionals of the Abuhatzeira family. A hair raising tale in Haaretz - N.Y. Jews accuse Be’er Sheva Kabbalist of massive fraud. All Bernie Madoff promised was the steady 10% and he actually delivered for 40 years! But Elazar Abuhatzeira went on to do what every miracle maker and a Rabbi on the face of the earth has done before him, exchanged superstition for cold cash. And what Elazar Abuhatzeira sold was not the lousy 10% but the very life itself, is there a price one would not pay for that? One might say it’s the fault of this confused man from Brooklyn, but no, he only followed to the letter what the Rabbis told him to believe. And the esteemed Rabbis teach this with the specific purpose so that this very fraud ride continues indefinitely.
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TNR – Washington Diarist: The New Proles:
“Lately, however, I have been observing a high incidence of indecent poverty. Many young writers and journalists I meet are close to penniless. They have almost not a hope of supporting themselves in the pursuit of their calling. A garret is no longer affordable. Jobs are disappearing. Internships are unpaid or barely paid, which has the consequence of corrupting a meritocratic system with the inequities of social class, as the fortunately born become the fortunately hired. And when they publish what they write–well, now we leave the honorable tradition of the struggling young writer for the unprecedented enchantments of the digital revolution.”
The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.
On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:
- Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
- A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
- Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.
Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.
And what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.
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On the subject of Musicblogocide or Beware of Putting all your Eggs in Google Basket. The Swedish founder of the notorious copyright breaker The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde is launching a new micropayments system Flattr. The idea is rather elegant. You pay to Flattr a predetermined fee, say $10 per month or whatever you decide, this fee is divided each time you click a Flattr button on the participating content providers sites. In my opinion this solves only part of the problem. The only way to fix the morass of the current poisonous Internet culture is to have a mandatory micropayments on all creative content embeds. The payment has to be essential not a a volunteer, complimentary charity. A micropayment has to follow usage, i.e. quoting, embeds, sharing instead of being a charity on a pay-wall-less site. But here is the explanation video from Peter Sunde: ►►►read more
There is this peculiar impression that till the enraged voters in Massachusetts sent a Republican to the Senate, no one, except the unemployed, remembered about the devastating structural changes in the economy. I am not talking about the Jews here specifically; perhaps this is a metaphor for any group. But I always wondered how the Holocaust or the Gulag happened in plain view of humanity but more importantly in plain view of the indifferent world Jewry.
First the layoffs, the crushing cleansing, when many firms cut people they would never dare to, if not for the fact that “everyone was doing it”. This is the middle class depression, more than a half of all jobs lost disappeared permanently. Jews are predominantly middles class and it’s natural that the community is hit particularly hard. Add to this the reality that many of the “working orthodox” feed off the economic margins that are now cut to the bone. For many families this is an unimaginable disaster and speaking of Holocaust, virtually no one is talking about this with the required urgency.
My friend tells me that perhaps the economic realm is not longer within the expertise of the communal organizations. But if this true than what is the rationale for a community that doesn’t have a charter for the mutual support? The communal institutions in service of the oligarchy unelected and permanently detached from the rank and file, accountable only to super rich. Occasionally easing their conscience by fundraising drives for the faraway lands from Haiti to Haifa, the further from home, the better.
Anecdotally many of my friends, who find themselves in the financial distress, tell me that if they try to share their misfortune with others there is a quick comeback and cutoff: “everyone is unemployed, everyone is losing a home, etc.” To be sure, not “everyone”, but there is callousness to this response as if no compassion, never mind a real help, is required, as if you are supposed to die in a plague.
Most people I know are traumatized more by the apathy than by the actual economic downfall. We expect and accept the financial risks and stumbles but the complete indifference by the people who claim a kinship is a life long trauma. And just like with the Great Depression there will be a new generation that doesn’t care and doesn’t remember. The life goes on but our connections to the fellow human beings will never be the same.
Guma Aguiar in Rostov, Russia with Moshe Meir Lipszyc of Chabad Fort Lauderdale. Photo by B. Olidort
On the subject of Tom Kaplan: Guma Aguiar is a “Messiah wannabe”. Nobody should be surprised that immediately following his “graves and drones” expedition to Russia, euphemistically described as Exploration of his Chabad’s Russian Roots, Guma Aguiar was forcibly admitted to the “Abarbanel Psychiatric Hospital” in Israel – Jpost quotes Aguiar:
“I told Schalit I hope to see him home already in the next few days. He said he wanted me to tell his family how much he loves them and Israel, and that he hopes it will all be over soon. I have saved thousands of people, not only Gilad Schalit, and I want to be able to save thousands of people every day, and not only Gilad Schalit.”
How can you not go crazy after a visit to “Chabad of Russia”? Now that Lev Leviev’s honey pot has dried up, the commissars pounce on the fast billions with the well rehearsed formula, the “graves and good deeds treatment”, and pay attention to the forgotten grandma under that stone to the left. This is for a guy who didn’t know he was Jewish a year ago and suddenly came into the possession of a few billion rubles. The sad photos that followed Guma’s tour to Russia, being tightly sandwiched between the familiar and foreign oligarch whores, the Milano-Moscow Berl Lazar and the Kfar Chabad-Dnepropetrovsk Shmuel Kaminetzki. The impetuous Brazilian deserves a full emotional support, not sure his Jerusalem doctor is ready to give him the correct prescription: to stay the heck away from the frummies of all stripes, they don’t care for you as a human being, they want to separate you from the money and they resort to the abusive psychological pressure of the worst kind in the process. People who love Guma should have committed him to a psychiatric ward when he started his conversations with Leib Tropper or the apparatchiks, a dialogue far more dangerous than the brotherly, truly “generous chat” with Gilad Schalit. Even the Rashab would agree. After all the Rebbe Rashab, being an early patient of Dr. Sigmund Freud, could have given Guma a far more sympathetic advice than the finger-pointing commissar.
During the breakdown Guma Aguiar said to the local Jerusalem newspaper Kol Ha’ir:
“He [Gilad Schalit] is at one of my properties. I wanted to prove that I could enter Gaza and come out alive and that Shalit could come out alive as well…”
Stir together Tom Kaplan’s description of his nephew as “Messiah wannabe”, Guma’s catholic upbringing in Brazil, his gas exploration in Texas, his detour into the messianicly driven oligarchicaly oiled oasis of the Russian Chabad and you got yourself an explosive psychic mix-up.
On the subject of Rabbi Reuven Feinstein and Leib Tropper Trope. If someone still wondering why Rabbi Reuven Feinstein will not take a stand on the Leib Tropper scandal, well the introduction to Tom Kaplan was extremely profitable for Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, just in one year his organization received $3 m. Other notable donation from The Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation (in 2008 the foundation donated impressive $26.5m, mostly to the Jewish causes):
- West Bank City of Beth El: $3.2m
- Chabad of Fort Lauderdale: $515K
- Chabad World Headquarters: $500K
- Horizons (Leib Tropper): $4.85m
- Outreach Judaism, Monsey (Probably Tropper): $400K
- Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem (Reuven Feinstein): $3m
- Nefesh b Nefesh: $8m
Note this is only one year and doesn’t include donations directly to the EJF, just Tropper’s outreach organization. It’s hard to tell who are the actual people behind the charities (or their connection to Tropper), for example there is a “Pesach Fund” donation without an address for $150K, not a small change. Also the officers of the The Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation are listed as Guma Aguiar and Ellen Aguiar (I think this is Guma’s mother, Tom Kaplan’s sister). So it is unclear if the donations to Tropper listed here are from Tom Kaplan or Guma Aguiar. And if these donations are subject to the legal fight between Guma Aguiar and Leib Tropper.
Often people who proclaim the departure from the Judaic creed display the internalized values and the logic that personifies the most blatant Judaic cultural imbalances, even when the renegades are compared to the openly observant. Witness XGHs riff on Rabbi Reuven Feinstein. There is a text and it must be dissected, regardless of the historical context, motivations or the character of the author, in other words the most pointless geekery and metal gymnastics. So how did Reuven Feinstein appear on the EJF web site? Do you think after Shabbos he booted up his laptop, read all the blogs, and then carefully wrote the responsa? One of the two things happened:
- Someone called him on the phone and described to him in general, or likely misleading, terms the release and asked Rabbi Reuven Feinstein if it would be OK to use the endorsement (this is how Rabbi Elya Wachtfogel got ensnared).
- Or someone wrote the release and brought it to Reuven Feinstein to approve, perhaps even together with a fat fee.
Now do you think for a moment that after Leib Tropper resigned from the EJF, “the board members” rushed to the bank to unauthorize Tropper from using the EJF funds? So while the blogosphere raged in indignation, Leib Tropper might have spent the precious time delivering money bags to people needed to protect his racket. Luke Ford have been doing a nice job on this tailor made for him story (sex, gerus, jews), he posts:
“Anne emails: You need to look into the role of Menachem Lubinsky in this affair. He is the PR frontman for EJF and Tropper, and he has always stepped in when Tropper has alienated people, which as an aggressive and intemperate pig he has tended to do fairly regularly. Lubinsky is the composer of last Monday’s EJF press release and he wrote all the so called statements by the various protagonists (Wachtfogel has since distanced himself from EJF and denied that he made any statement or accepted the role in EJF). Lubinsky has been working the phones all week trying to get rats to board the sinking ship that EJF has become. And of course the reason EJF can’t fall is because it is the key to obtaining Tom Kaplan’s money.
Who is currently signing EJF checks? If it is still Tropper then the whole resignation is phony – a cosmetic damage limitation exercise, cooked up by Lubinsky while a strategy is prepared – however ridiculous this may seem to you – for Tropper to rejoin the kiruv world, a humbled and repentant figure.”
Which brings us back to Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, it’s not his lack of the moral ground that is appalling, nor the glaring contradictions in the badly written release, not even his family relation to the Tendler kin in Monsey. The words are empty without the financial transparency. Till Reuven Feinstein and the rest of the politburo disclose the favors accrued in the process of pimping the Eternal Jewish Family, the HTML based pashkevilim will not do.
If you remember in the beginning of the first tape Leib Tropper mentions “Alpert from Far Rockaway”. He was actually in the middle of arranging the August 19th wedding of his son Pesach to the Alpert family. There was the list of Rabbis who attended the wedding, published on his now defunct blog, but the list is still in the “cash”:
“We who work with Rabbi Tropper’s blog share in his simcha tonight. Maran Hagaon Harav Chaim P. Sheinberg was Mesader Kiddushin at the Alpert -Tropper Chasuna. In attendance:
- Rosh Yeshivas Ponoviz, Hagaon Harav Berel Povarsky
- Rosh Yeshivas Kaminetz, Hagaon Rav Yitzchok Scheiner
- Hagaon Rav Dovid Feinstein
- Hagaon Rav Reuven Feinstein
- Hagaon Rav Shmuel Eliezer Stern
- Hagaon Rav Moshe Shapiro
- Hagaon Rav E.B. Wachtfogel
- Hagaon Harav Moshe D. Wilhelm, Rosh Yeshivas Boston
- Hagaon Harav Shimon Alster, Rosh Yeshivas Cliffwood
- Hagaon Rav Aaron Schechter
- Hagaon Harav Eliyahu Mann
- Harav Asher Bergman (grandson of Rav Shach)
- Hagaon Harav M. Altusky
Letters of Brocho were received from Hagaonim:
- Rav Shaul Alter
- Rav Chaim Kanyevsky
- Harav M.Y. Lefkowitz
- Harav Shmuel Auerbach
- Maran Harav Eliyashuv
- Maran Harav A.L. Steinman
Special Guests: Tom & Dafna Kaplan, Mr. & Mrs. M. Honlein, Mr. & Mrs. M. Lubinsky and Mr. & Mrs. Deniss Rapps.”
It’s hard to go wrong with so much “genius” around… Fortunately it’s just a Tropper, not another Holocaust.
How about the insistence that Leib Tropper and the multiple recent scandals are the perversions of the Jewish religious legacy? Someone said: “I want my Judaism back”. And what Judaism would that be, as it exists in the imagination and books or as it lived in real life? This is like saying that the glossy presentations to the BTs and the goyim at the fancy retreats (from reality) is the truth but the way Tropper conducted himself with the whores, the oligarchs and the gdolim is a lie. This is like saying that communism that was practiced in the good old CCCP was the perversion, but the communism that exists in Rabeynu Carl Marx’s books is the reality.
Leib Tropper articulates the Judaic culture rather perfectly; he takes it to the ultimate conclusion. Chassidim are not the ceramic dancing tchotchkes, nor are they Buber bobe mayses, the Chasidic conquest was fueled by the collusion between the Rebbes and the rising merchant class. The currency of money and communal stature are interchangeable and trade-able. And this in nutshell was Tropper’s game, the game as old as this world.
If you strip Tropper from the lurid predilections, the mechanics are no different from that of all the “outreach professionals”. What they all do is sell the Jewish nostalgia back to rich Jews who are one or two generations removed from the abominable reality of the Jewish communal life, long enough to forget the bad and but not too long to still remember some good. What the benefactors can’t readily understand is that people who fall in the sphere of influence of the “leaders” are treated like pawns or props, they are deprived of humanity or even abused. The victim and the pawn on the tapes can’t realize that she is dealing with the law abiding citizen, it’s in his interest to delay the actual conversion indefinitely, so she can continue to be used for the “treatments”, in full compliance with the holy Torah. Notice how the man says on the second tape: “I can love anybody”. This is the code word for the exactly the opposite and just few sentences later; he inevitably evokes the rape.
The comparison of Leib Tropper to Tiger Woods is plain wrong. Tiger in his texts is still looking for the elusive meaningful connection. He didn’t pimp his women and he actually made his money through the hard work and the incredible talent. But you can comrade Leib Tropper to Bernie Madoff (although Bernie was a legit star trader at some point). Bernie sold the perceptions and the myth, his Ponzi Scheme was basically the same as Tropper’s. Stir imagination, trap the investors, the false reports, buy influence and hope to have a genuine business one day. Leib Tropper is Bernie Madoff plus the pimping (see The Chasidic Court of Bernard Madoff).
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
I was listening to Charles Krauthammer the other day when he said: “We shouldn’t pressure the banks to lend, because the risky lending got the economy in trouble in the first place”. What Charles omits or perhaps doesn’t understand is that the Feds reduced the borrowing rate to ZERO. You can’t go wrong with free money, their are global brands that can give you and nice interest on your zero costs. Or as Henry Blodget explains in the linked post you can even do an end run on the US Treasuries. This also means that it technically doesn’t matter what American economy or even the American consumer does, because their money could be “outsourced” to the global marker, leaping over the good old USA. This pretty much explains the boom in the financial sector while the economy is still in terrible shape. Henry Blodget outlines the 11 steps to make a billion – How To Make The World’s Easiest $1 Billion.
