3 - Unmasking Counterhistory: An Introductory Exploration of Criminality and the Jewish Question

Summary

Although the death knell of “the Jewish gangster” and “Jewish crime” has sounded repeatedly, in the beginning of the twenty-first century “Jewish crooks,” or more loosely, Jews involved with the underworld or suspected of criminal activity in “legitimate” business, have not vanished. Popular and elite culture has no shortage of Jewish cops and robbers, and occasionally, killers. In academic and media circles, Marlow's “Jew of Malta,” Shakespeare's Shylock, and Dickens's Fagin continue to arouse debate. Jewish crooks also inhabit American classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway; these characters raise few hackles but offer bones of contention to academics. The Sopranos, a critically acclaimed television series that premiered in 1999, includes both old and new style Jewish crooks, cooperating and competing with the suburban New Jersey Mafiosi. John Updike's fictional creation, the “moderately famous” Jewish writer Henry Beck, in the twilight of his life, has turned to murdering his critics. Through the exposes of Robert Friedman, and the fiction of humorist Laurence Shames and thriller-writer Reggie Nadelson, the Russian-Jewish mafia has become a fixture of crime reporting and the ever popular mystery genre. Interestingly, Jews also take the lead, in fact as well as fiction, in subduing the newest Jewish thugs.