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Family caught in Madoff swindle forced to sell Jewish heirlooms – CNN.com.

This just makes me so sick, and horrified, and disappointed in humanity, that it can produce somebody like Madoff. But not to worry. There’s a backhanded Jewish blessing for every occasion.

I hope to god the government seizes his entire estate – wherever it may be hiding – and redistributes it to his victims. There is no justification for what he did. There is no explaining the damage. Many of his victims were philanthropic groups or nonprofit organizations, or were benefactors to such groups. Without those contributions, how many more will suffer?

Frankly I think the government ought to bear some of the responsibility here anyway. They have oversight over situations like this, and they knew something was wrong – but they failed miserably in their investigations, despite multiple warnings that something was amiss. It makes me think of children who die at the hands of abusive parents, and then after the fact we find out that child protection agencies had investigated multiple times and refused to take the child out of the home, or found “no evidence” of abuse.

This is that serious. This man was chairman of the NASDAQ. Investors are not in a position to know whether securities fraud is taking place. This is why we have the SEC. Or at least, so we thought.

Most of all, it pisses me off that this was a Jewish guy swindling so many people, especially so many who were also Jews or Jewish charities. First, I hate to see Jewish people involved in anything so shameful. Just… as a Jew, it pisses me off that he would do that. He should know better. He should be a better person than that. Second, you know that anti-Semites all over the country are going, “Well, it figures. Never let a Jew touch your money.” Because we all know that what one Jew does wrong gets attributed to the whole of us. But third, it kills me because he went beyond mere financial scamming and exploited a familial trust. It’s hard to explain if you’re not Jewish; it’ll just sound like I’m endorsing the Jewish mafia or something. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is… just think about it. So many of his victims were elderly Ashkenazi Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors. These are the people whose parents and grandparents came over here on ships to escape pogroms, died in the Nazi camps, etc. These are the people who stood together at Mount Sinai (or so it goes, in Jewish theology). Point being: we’ve been through so much as a people – why would we do that to each other?

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