The cherry blossoms are in bloom in Washington, D.C., and I am especially cheery because the March/April issue of Moment Magazine is out on newsstands. There is a lot of good stuff in this one, and I hope that you will check it out.
First, we tackle the whole Bernand Madoff mess. The former NASDAQ chairman had pled guilty shortly after the magazine went to print, but the details of how he pulled off what was perhaps history’s largest Ponzi scheme remain a mystery. Rabbis representing the spectrum of Jewish belief reflect on what ethical lessons can be learned from the scandal. I interview Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend and professor of journalism at Boston University, about why Madoff targeted charities. As Zuckoff puts it:
It hasn’t been proven yet, but I strongly suspect that Madoff saw charities, foundations and endowments as the perfect solution to a big problem. A Ponzi schemer worries that there will be a sudden outflow of money. If that happens, it’s like a run on the bank—the money isn’t there. But if you attract investors who can be counted on to leave their money or most of their money in perpetuity, you reduce the risk of ever having that run on the bank. Charities, foundations and endowments usually take out a little bit of money every year, somewhere around five percent, especially foundations. They are required to take that amount by federal law. That means all Madoff had to do to keep a Ponzi scheme rolling was replace five percent of the principal—not impossible by any means. If this proves correct, it’s really going to reveal just how little conscience he had—using people this way and using charities and foundations for personal purposes, ignoring the good that they do. That borders on psychopathy.
Writer Ilan Stavans, the grandchild of East European immigrants to Mexico City and himself an immigrant to the United States returns to the city of his youth. Stavans, a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College, compares the comfortable and self-contained world in which he grew up in with the tougher but more integrated existence of his grandparents’ generation. This is a beautifully written piece about one of the world’s most remarkable capitals:
I am as familiar with Mexico City as I am with myself. Yet somehow as an adult, I had neglected to visit the site where my Jewish family life began before I was born, the capital’s Centro Histórico. Built on the ruins of the ancient capital of the Aztec Empire, the Centro Histórico encompasses nine square kilometers, including the grand Zócalo, a vast square with the magisterial Catedral Metropolitana, the largest in the Americas, on one side. Some 1,500 historical buildings still stand, including the neoclassical Palacio de Bellas Artes, the country’s premier opera house. Its interior showcases murals by the legendary muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros….
The tendency among the newly arrived Jewish immigrants was to sell portable, easy-to-handle items: razor blades, ties, shoelaces. My paternal grandfather, Zrulek Stavchansky, was among those who eked out a precarious living as a peddler. With the merchandise hanging on their shoulders, they would walk from Calle Corregidora to Tacuba and onward to Jesus María. When they discovered an over-abundance of aboneros in the city, a handful opted to take their goods to the states of Guerrero, Hidalgo and Morelos, among others. When they finally came back to the capital, it was to open big stores downtown. Some remain to this day, including La Esmeralda, in itself a symbol of Mexico’s prosperity and immigrant courage.
Former Wall Street Journal foreign affairs reporter Robert S. Greenberger profiles Eric Cantor, the new minority whip and the only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives:
Photographs of the conservative congressman from Virginia were splashed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers in February after he helped keep all 178 House GOP members from voting for President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package. That feat, as rare as pitching a no-hitter, won the grudging admiration of the acerbic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote that “somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor.
Since entering the House in 2001, Cantor has been the consummate party insider. His climb—he was appointed chief deputy whip at the end of his first term and last November was elected whip, a position recently held by the likes of Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay—has been meteoric. While his detractors complain that he is a partisan divider, his supporters hope that Cantor, who occupies the highest position of any Jewish Republican in the history of the House, is the Moses who will lead the GOP back to the Promised Land.
We also have stories on Chautauqua, the nation’s intellectual playground, an interview with Middle East expert Aaron David Miller and a countdown of the greatest Seder films!
