Naturally, it's a bunch of burly American I-bankers who made the biggest single-asset deal in European history.

Cushman & Wakefield, which also advised the biggest single-building sale ever in U.S. history at 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, advised Lehman Brothers in this deal.  read more »

Some day someone should make a Schindler's List-like movie of the guy who helped bring us out. It was Jacob Henry Schiff (1847-1920). Schiff was a great Jewish hero, there should be statues to this guy. He was the head of Kuhn, Loeb, and rivaled J.P. Morgan, and Lord Rothschild, and Bleichroder, as the most powerful banker in the world.

The lobby then comprised Schiff and a few other bankers, who gained access to the president whenever they wanted it, and also Simon Wolf, of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. These bankers were warned early on that it was better to operate "diplomatically," i.e. behind closed doors, than for Jews to have mass meetings—rallies, which would piss off the Russians and Roumanians who were persecuting my ancestors. So that's what they did generally, they had private meetings. (Though rallies would play a role over the years.)

Russia at this juncture needs two important elements to inspire its future prosperity and happiness: money and friends. The Jews of the world, as citizens of their respective countries, control much of the first and would make a magnificent army of the latter. There is no use disguising the fact that in the United States especially the Jews form an important factor in the formation of public opinion and in the control of finances... By virtue of their mercantile and financial standing in this country they are exercising an all potent and powerful influence...

This was not an idle boast. Best says that in the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05, Schiff played a powerful role in defeating the Russian forces by acting to block their access to capital in Europe and America, and meantime floating bond after bond, into the hundreds of millions, for the Japanese.

Obviously I am bringing this up to talk about the present day. Schiff waffled on Zionism, as so many German Jews did. Ultimately he helped out. Today the Israel lobby is devoted not to stopping the persecution of the Jews but to the militarization of the Jewish state and defense of the occupation. Toughdove and other Peace Now Jews are against that lobby, and good for them. They know better than I do the horrors of the occupation, and are trying to end it. Where we differ is that I think the Israel lobby has profoundly influenced American foreign policy, and hurt it. They say that's preposterous, Jews don't have that kind of power. Gary Dean Best, a scholar, says that we do.

Will this press conference have an Italian flavor? Or will last-minute rumors about Vornado buying Cushman pan out?  read more »

The NFP was the NYT of Europe, said Leo Lensing of Wesleyan. It was the most powerful newspaper in the continent, and maybe the world. Holding up a yellowed copy of what he called "the prayer book of cultured people everywhere," Lensing said that the NFP was written mostly by Jews, and written for Jews, too: the new professional German-speaking class in that great vanished arc of Central Europe, from Berlin to Prague to Vienna to Budapest. Kafka read it, too.

Fredric Morton, the moderator of the panel, said the paper's importance could be gauged by the role it had played in the history of Zionism. Theodor Herzl was the cultural editor of the paper, and "he used his position to gain access to the great personages of his day"—Kaiser Franz Josef, the Sultan of Turkey, Baron de Hirsch, and Lord Rothschild—to push his fantasy of the Jewish state.

A few comments.

—Re: the hidden agenda of the paper's cultural editor. Journalists today would see Herzl's access-seeking conduct as completely unethical. I'd add that if you read Herzl's masterpiece, The Jewish State, it seems somewhat sketchy 110 years on. It is a scheme to end the Jewish problem by ethnically cleansing Europe of Jews—taking care to replace the financial capital Europe would lose, and working with the antisemites to perfect a "colonization" scheme, colonization being one of Herzl's favorite words. The book is glibly written, spends more time considering the problem of wild animals in the territory than it does that of Arabs, in sum is just what you would expect of an important, busy journalist. A vital manifesto for a movement; but not a serious piece of moral or political philosophy. Though of course Theodor Herzl was exalted, tragically, by the Holocaust, which showed him to have great, negative vision.

It's interesting how much the politics have changed. Today Israel is a fact and Jews are broadly included in the power structure; and if you even mention the old Reform Jews' universalist concern that Zionism would cause a confusion of American interests with Israel's, you're labeled an anti-Semite. These days, realist critics of our Middle East policy have managed to put the issue in our discourse, by saying that the Israel lobby is not acting in America's best interest; in their landmark paper, Walt and Mearsheimer used as evidence a statement former NYT editor Max Frankel made in his autobio, when he said that he used the Times editorial pages to bang the drum for Israel.

The U.S. portrait Borat offers is of an ignorant redneck land pulsating with unexamined prejudice. A crowd at a rodeo cheer when Borat gives a speech about killing every woman and child in Iraq. College students who pick him up hitchhiking are pleased to talk about the power of Jews in America. His image of Christians at a revival meeting—crazies. And into this world comes Borat, from a village in eastern Europe, not far from the old Pale of Settlement, talking about Jews and money. When he shows us his village's annual festival of the Running of the Jew, culminating in the destruction of the Jew egg, the Jew baby, the American audience you're sitting with is laughing.

I don't agree with Borat on this. I think America is too liberal, too diverse and too loving of its diversity, to fall for such a thing. But I got a chill alright.

To the Editor:  read more »

"In the Jewish tradition, some memories are very long lasting... Some memories, once functional, become dysfunctional. The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther tell of the queen's soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews' armed enemies but the enemies' wives and children—with a final death toll of seventy-five thousand. These 'memories' provided gratifying revenge fantasies to the Jews of medieval Europe; in the present era of ecumenism these chapters have simply disappeared from Purim commemoration; most American Jews today are probably unaware that they exist."

From the Book of Esther:

[T]he king granted the Jews who were in every city to gather themselves together, and to defend their life, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them, their little ones and women... The other Jews who were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, defended their lives, had rest from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of those who hated them; but they didn't lay their hand on the plunder.