Jewish Zionist Elites Are Using Big Government to Turn Finance into ‘Philanthropy’
In the past few months, I have reported for the Libertarian Institute on powerful American Jewish Zionists’ campaigns to unseat a sitting Republican congressman; to silence non-violent university protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza; to blunt MAGA’s criticisms of not just Israel but of empire; to use America’s education system to mold a new elite in their image; to create a crony corporatist mecca and military surveillance colony out of New York City; and to gain influence on media and university networks in America and Britain.
The brazenness of their efforts is the most remarkable and unremarked thing about them—unremarked on because to remark on it is to invite accusations of anti-semitism. This is not by accident. The reason elite American Jewish Zionists act like they operate in a rhetorical free fire zone is because they think they do. They think this because they’ve spent thirty years and billions of dollars conflating Zionism with Judaism, so that attacking one means attacking the other. In the process, they’ve furthered the corruption of our Constitution by using big government and its postwar reliance on “big philanthropy” to gain power over the Jewish community. By doing this, they’ve endangered ordinary American Jews who are increasingly exposed to mounting public resentment against the actions of an insulated, elite few.
I have alluded to the efforts behind this play in my past seven reports on Zionist operators’ moves in favor of Israel at the expense of the American body politic. But I have not traced them to the forces that caused them—crime then finance and then, vitally, philanthropy underwritten by Washington DC, all in imitation of earlier projects of domination from British and WASP imperialists and financiers.
Understanding how this process works means beginning with the group of people on whom these forces converged to allow them to forge a carte blanche position in American political life. These operators first appeared in the national consciousness in the mid-1980s bull market, when, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in October, real estate, Wall Street, and retail thrived off an infusion of government-backed support. They include Victoria’s Secret owner Les Wexner and Apollo Global Management’s Leon Black, Jeffrey Epstein’s patrons; and Epstein confidante Marc Rich, also a financier. They also include Charles Bronfman, of the prominent Zionist family tied to Seagram’s; Laurence Tisch, of Leows and CBS; and the hedge fund operator Michael Steinhardt, who was vital in the remaking of the Democratic Party in a pro-finance-and-Zionist-and-interventionist direction in the 1980s and 1990s. Active along with them were Ronald and Laura Lauder, the child and granddaughter-in-law of Estee Lauder. These players were joined, slightly later, by the financiers Michael Milken, Paul Singer, Robert Kraft, and Roger Hertog; and the casino magnates Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. A final major addition was the financier John Paulson, who made his fortune betting against the market in the leadup to the 2008 financial crash.
This world of Zionism and finance and politics was predicated in part on criminality. Bronfman and Steinhardt got their start in the markets thanks to support from their families, who were tied into organized crime. (Steinhardt’s father, in Steinhardt’s own telling, was a jewel fence for Meyer Lansky and funded Steinhardt’s first financial ventures. The Bronfmans were charged by American authorities for bootlegging and tax evasion in the 1930s and the family later sent illegal armaments to Israel.) Epstein left his first trading position amid questions about the legality of his trades, in a case related to purported misdoings connected to Edgar Bronfman Sr. Steinhardt came under investigation for “allegedly attempting to corner the market for short-term Treasury notes in the early 1990s,” for which he paid a penalty as part of a settlement. Marc Rich was charged with tax evasion and then pardoned by President Bill Clinton after intense lobbying from Steinhardt (who had managed money for Rich in the 1980s and 1990s) and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, another confidante of Epstein’s. The Adelsons ran into legally-colored controversy over their casino dealings, and John Paulson over his trades in the leadup to the crash of 2008.
There was also a military-intelligence angle to the criminality underway. Many of the early criminal players—especially via Meyer Lansky, a close associate of the Bronfmans—had close connections to the CIA. The connections between Zionists and intelligence services continued through the Seventies and Eighties, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in August, especially at the hands of Ronald Reagan’s CIA director William J. Casey. For journalist Whitney Webb, who has written the definitive books on these connections, they represent “an important part of a network…composed of transgenerational organized crime interests…and major factions within both American and Israeli intelligence.” As part of her reporting, Webb has made a telling parenthetical argument: that the descendants of “the remnant of the Jewish mob” took their actions a step beyond their fathers by “promot[ing]… ethnically-focused philanthropy” for the purposes of power. It was this philanthropy that became the rhetorical cover for connected Jewish Zionists to exercise un-contested influence in American government and policy—to the detriment of Americans, Middle Eastern Muslims and Christians, and ordinary Jews.
This transition from criminality to finance to philanthropic communal control was not as difficult as it might seem. Philanthropy is often slotted as a question of private individuals doing what the government cannot—but philanthropy at the level practiced by connected Jewish Zionists beginning in the 1980s was based on government. Indeed, “big philanthropy” has functioned since the postwar period, when it was pioneered by WASPs, as part of a liberal shell game to conceal just how much investment the government has been prepared to make abroad and at home. It is a kind of CIA of the welfare world that allows government to grant special favors to specific civilian groups to test spending plans without political blowback, or, rather, with “plausible deniability.” According to the scholar of philanthropy Lila Corwin Berman, writing about the development of this trend:
“So long as state agents believed they could use philanthropy as a tool to achieve public ends, it appeared a perfect enactment of the liberal ideal and, thus, a worthy recipient of state support through tax exemptions, direct grants, and legal permissiveness…The American government could hedge its risk by encouraging a private foundation to conduct an experimental policy in India or inner-city Philadelphia, while it could also glean information about how to expand its global development or urban-renewal efforts. With few visible resources on the line, the state nonetheless tested out new ideas that might eventually be incorporated into official policies.”
This reliance increased in the late 1980s and 1990s. During that decade, “neoliberals” of the Democratic Party were trying to redirect government resources toward connected financial firms, making them too-big-to-fail, while justifying their play, falsely, in the name of cutting government. In this context, philanthropy became an even more important tool to conceal the depth of government investment “neoliberals” claimed they were paring back.
This was the pump that American Jewish Zionist financiers began to prime in the 1980s and made into a practice in the 1990s thanks to the generosity of their friends in the Clinton administration. This priming amounted to what Berman, as well as critics like Jewish Currents’ Ari M. Brostoff and Nathan Kulwin, call “a small number of Jewish community megadonors, billionaires” who used special government favors to “provide an outsize and growing proportion of funding for communal organizations and to a large extent determine what those organizations look like.” They “realigned Jewish institutions with a set of priorities never agreed upon by the wider community” and “disconnected from many of the Jews [they claim] to represent.”
The disconnect was a long way from Jewish American communities that these players had come up in during the 1940s and 1950s. These communities were largely predicated on small businesses and labor and educational organizations of an astonishing religious variety and ideological diversity, both non-Zionist and Zionist. The financial philanthropy of the 1980s and after, by contrast, was predicated on connections to New York finance and Washington politics. Its ideology was narrow and crude: the reproduction and continuity of what Jewish Currents calls “ardently pro-Israel children of two Jewish parents.” In other words, the new Jewish philanthropists were concerned with remaking the Jewish community so that it functioned as an expression of their values—and, crucially, as a justification for their public endeavors. In Berman’s academic description of the power play at work in her book The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, these operators:
“…believed their position provided them with a platform to influence state policy, especially related to Israel. In the name of asserting and preserving a consensus-based Jewish identity, they leveraged the financial and political consolidation they had achieved and [identified] as Jewish spokespeople more visibly than ever before.”
The first site of this obsession with pushing a specific heritage on Jewish communal life was the Study Group of the 1990s. The group’s founders were Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman, whose members included Michael Steinhardt and Lawrence Tisch. Its purpose was to use financial fortunes via philanthropy to ensure the “right kind of continuity” for American Jews. The Study Group appears to have been part of what led Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt to found Taglit Birthright—an organization that Berman says “perfectly represented…the American Jewish philanthropic complex by the end of the twentieth century.” It represented this in three ways.
To read the second half of this article, go to The Libertarian Institute.