One Bad Apple

Sometimes the actions of few, or even one bad individual can taint an entire race or group of people.
Jews who have spent the last 60 years calling all Germans "krauts" may now get a small taste of their own medicine.
Disgraced investment guru Bernard Madoff is accused of orchestrating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
No, I'm not comparing him to Hitler, I'm just using an extreme example to illustrate my point.
Even though Madoff stole the majority of his money from fellow Jews and ruining several Jewish charities in the process, Madoff enforced some of the worst steretypes about Jews.
While delivering shockingly great returns for his clients, Madoff earned the nickname "The Jewish T-Bill."
But now that Madoff's fund collapsed and all the money is gone those in the community fear this case is fanning vicious stereotypes about Jews that go back to the Middle Ages.
The Anti-Defamation League cites a spike in anti-Semitic comments online after Madoff's Dec. 11 arrest. A columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz lamented the case as "the answer to every Jew-hater's wish list."
And the American Jewish Committee's executive director, David A. Harris, wrote a letter to The New York Times criticizing what he saw as "a striking emphasis" on Madoff's faith in one of the paper's many stories about the scandal.
The case is "fodder for the bigots," Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL's national director, said in an interview this week with The Associated Press. "It's both embarrassing and it's painful."

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It's difficult to describe the case in any detail without mentioning Madoff's religion. The 70-year-old money manager and former Nasdaq stock market chairman donated hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, much of it to Jewish causes. And many of the known victims of his business, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, are big names in Jewish life.
Yeshiva University, one of the nation's foremost Jewish institutions of higher education, lost $110 million; Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, lost $90 million; director Steven Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation acknowledged unspecified losses; and a $15 million foundation established by Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel was wiped out. Jewish federations and hospitals have lost millions and some foundations have had to close.

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Adding to the sense of betrayal in the allegations against Madoff are worries about whether they feed into centuries-old, ugly caricatures of Jews.
Since Jews served as lenders in medieval Europe, where they were barred from many other occupations, they have sometimes been portrayed as miserly, greedy and obsessed with money. In just one example, Shakespeare's Shylock, the Jewish character who demands a pound of flesh in payment for a loan in "The Merchant of Venice," has become synonymous with usury.
Anti-Semitic broadsides have peppered the Internet in the wake of Madoff's arrest, some in highly visible public-comment sections of popular news sites.
Some get removed by the sites' administrators or draw replies noting there are bad apples of all creeds and in all walks of life. Victims also extend to all creeds and walks of life — banks, insurers, pension funds and even the International Olympic Committee are among those who say they've been taken by Madoff.
Still, the scandal has reverberated throughout the Jewish community. This week, representatives of about three dozen Jewish foundations met in New York City to come up with a plan to help Jewish nonprofits that lost money with Madoff, said Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. Solomon said the foundations agreed to contribute to a pool of money that will be distributed to hard-hit organizations.

Normally stereotypes such as the Irish are dunks, or black people like fried chicken are mostly harmless. But the reason this one hurts so much is because this is the exact rationalization Hitler gave to the Germans when explaining the need to exterminate all Jews. And 70 years later our own people are living down to Hitler's opinion of us.