The Shame of Madoff

It happens regularly, but never on this scale. There will be times when I see someone who's Jewish doing something stupid or bad and I feel this great sense of shame, like the act is on me, on my shoulders.

A friend told me that the act is called a "chillul hashem." In looking it up, the meaning is not 100% what I thought it was, but it's close enough. The way I've been using it is to describe a bad act by someone who can be identified by the public as Jewish. The public sees what he's doing, sees him as a Jew, and as a result associates the negative act with all Jews.

This is also anti-antisemitism, but it's maybe a little more subconscious or subtle than that. People inevitably form judgments of others, based on their actions. If those people belong to particular, identifiable groups, sometimes the judgments are expanded to encompass the entire group that person is a part of. Stereotypes are born, develop, and evolve.

But negative qualities linger in people's minds for longer. The memories are stronger. And the smaller the group, the more likely that the stereotype will be used to identify that group in its entirety.

Jews have it sort of bad when it comes to stereotypes, and Madoff was a real kick in the ass. Here I am, just minding my own business, and this jerk has to go off and embarrass me like this? There was this article in the NY Times today about the communal shame that Jews are feeling about this thing. We all know that Madoff is the perfect target for Jew-haters everywhere to go "you see! That dude is a Jew! And he likes money! And he stole peoples' money because that's what Jews do! And they control the world!"

It's the same tired refrain but it becomes fresh whenever a Jew gets caught doing something bad. I read the news everyday and everyday there's tons of people who go around murdering and stealing and destroying lives. I don't remember most of them. I don't think twice about their names or their backgrounds. But as soon as I see that a Jew has done something reprehensible, I get furious. Sometimes (albeit rarely) you'll see scenes on the news where a guy who looks like a Rabbi - yarmulke and beard - is getting stuffed into a police car with his hands shackled behind his back, head being pressed down so they can squeeze him in, and I wonder, "if this guy is going to go around being a scumbag, why does he have to be so obviously Jewish when he goes to do it?"

As the article says, Jews are human (surprise!), which means they're as prone to doing bad things as anyone else. But for whatever reason, when it's a Jew who's involved in a serious crime, that's something that more people will think about and remember than when it's someone who isn't Jewish. How lucky we are that we now have to deal with Madoff being maybe the greatest investment defrauder of all-time? What an honor! This is exactly what Jews already are to a whole slew of Jew-haters out there, and now they have their articles to point to, their web links to direct traffic to their hate-sites. And the average guy on the street, he's often thinking the same thing, that "oh, here's this Jew who did this crap" and "are you really surprised he was Jewish?"

The part about him stealing a lot of this money from other Jews doesn't really change the story in my head all that much, and it definitely doesn't affect any of the people who are forming opinions about Jews based on this. But it also makes everything that much more personal for me, because not only do I feel the shame of what he has done, but I feel awful for the individuals, groups, and organizations that have to suffer as a result. Like that guy who slashed his wrists in his Madison Ave office the other day, all because he lost $1.5B in this whole thing and his clients were starting to come after him.

Maybe it all comes down to a sense of self-identification, the understanding of who you are and what your people/culture represent and feeling frustrated that this is being undermined by one person. Here I am wanting the world to see the best things about Jews, and instead they're being treated to the worst parts of a greedy man who brings down the rest of us.