10
JEWS AND "WHITE SLAVERY"
"[Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion] could hard imagine
that Jewish women would stoop
to crime or prostitution. When
an associate, Meyer Weisgal, who
resembled David Ben-Gurion, once told him humorously that a girl had walked up to him on a London
street and offered her services, overwhelmed by the idea of sleeping
with the 'Israeli prime minister.' Ben-Gurion, clearly troubled,
was interested in only one thing: 'Was she Jewish?'"
--
Dan Kurzman, 1983, p. 39
"I also take a kind of perverse pleasure
in the thought that the most important
and influential book ever written is the product of Jewish thought ... I
call it
'perverse' becaue it is an instance of national pride which I don't want
to feel
and which I fight against constantly ..."I remember once a fellow Jew
remarking
with satisfaction on the high percentage of Nobel Prize winners who were
Jewish.
I said, 'Does that make you feel superior?' 'Of course,' he said. 'What
if I told you
that sixty percent of the pornographers and eighty percent of the crooked
Wall
Street manipulators wre Jewish? He was startled. 'Is
that true?' 'I don't know. I
made up the figures. But what if it were true? Would it make you feel inferior?'
He had to think about that. It's much easier to find reasons to consider
oneself
superior than inferior. But one is just the mirror image of the other.'"
-- Isaac Asimov, 1994, p. 322
'But where do Jews enter the picture?' I asked him.
'Ah!' said Simon [Wiesenthal], slapping his knee. 'I haven't told you something
else. A few years ago, I have a talk with a man who went to school with
Hitler. I ask him what Hitler was like in school and he says, 'Normal. But
maybe this hatred began after got this infection from a Jewish whore.'
'Are you saying that Hitler caught syphillis from a Jewish prostitute?'
I asked increduously.
Wiesenthal laughed and said: 'What's the matter? You think only Jews can
catch diseases from prostitutes?'
'No, but were Jewish prostitutes common in Austria?'
'Why not? Is there a Gentile monopoly on prostitution?'
'I just don't see it as a vocation for a nice Jewish girl.'
'A nice Jewish girl,' Simon mimicked. 'You have those 'nice Jewish girls'
in Israel, too, these days and they had them in Vienna years ago -- when
there were more Jews.'
-- Alan Levy,The Wiesenthal File. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
Grand Rapids, MI, 1993 p. 18
At the end of the 19th and beginning of
the twentieth century, Jews were deeply involved in what was popularly called
"white slavery": international prostitution rings. "White slavery,"
notes scholar Albert Lindemann, "was a concern of Jewish leaders throughout
the world, who recognized it as a special problem." [LINDEMANN, p. 33]
[Jews have also dominated the pornography and commercial sexploitation business,
a trend which continues to this day -- see Mass Media section]
"Between 1880 and 1939," notes
scholar Edward Bristow, "the Jews played a conspicuous role in 'white
slavery,' as the commercial prostitution of that era was dramatically called.
Not only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was historically unprecedented,
geographically widespread, and fraught with collective political dangers."
[BRISTOW, p. 1] "Jewish trafficking," says Bristow, "was anchored
in brothel keeping, women freelanced or kept houses while their husbands procured
... Jewish traffickers also supplied Gentile-run houses." [BRISTOW, p.
56-57]
Rooted largely in Eastern and Central Europe
where they "dominated the international traffic out of the area,"
[BRISTOW, p. 2] Jews were involved in prostitution rings that networked, wrote
Arthur Mora (of London's Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and
Women) in 1903, to "almost all parts of North and South Africa, to India,
China, Japan, Philippine Island, North and South America, and also to many
of the countries of Europe." [BRISTOW, p. 1] Jewish criminals trafficked
women under their control virtually anywhere, also including the major cities
of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Ceylon, Manchuria, South
Africa, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. [BRISTOW, p. 181]
"By 1900," says Bristow, "Jewish
commercial vice was largely incorporated in underworld elements and many of
it participants were predators of the poor." [BRISTOW, p. 89] Jewish
pimps, procurers, and traffickers preyed mostly on non-Jewish women, but even
large numbers of Jewish women were part of their stables.
In 1872, for example, Jewish prostitutes
in Warsaw numbered 17% of the known prostitution population, in Krakow 27%,
and in Vilna 47%. [BRISTOW, p. 23] Within the Jewish community itself, it
was not uncommon for recruiters to marry innocent Jewish young women and "deposit
them in foreign brothels." [BRISTOW, p. 25] Many of the Jewish criminal underworld figures apparently saw no
gap between their day-to-day activities and their religious lives, often maintaining
their religious obligations. A Warsaw thug, Shilem Letzski, organized a small
synagogue for Jewish "prostitutes, madams, pimps, and thieves."
This criminal community even had a rabbinical court "to settle disputes
between pimps." [BRISTOW, p. 60] In Constantinople, prostitutes contributed money to "have their
pimps called to Torah on holidays." [SCHNEIDER, p. 225]
In New York City, "a public school
and a large synagogue were situated right next door to the house of prositution."
[RUBINOW, I., 1959, p. 114-115]
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, notes Donna
Guy, the Jewish pimp organization called the Varsovia Society
"ostensibly functioned as a mutual
aid society ... In fact, the Varsovia
consisted of pimps who wanted to maintain
their business and still lead
a religious life ... Varsovia associates
established their own synagogue
on Guemes Street in the midst of the traditional
bordello district."
[GUY, p. 22]
Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes also,
for example, that prominent Jewish American mobster Longy Zwillman "always
remained sensitive to his Jewish upbringings." When a close friend died,
and the funeral was conducted in a church, Zwillman refused to attend. As
he explained it, he was an ancestral member of the Jewish priest caste (the
Cohens) and it was religiously forbidden to him to be with a dead body in
a room. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 30]
Dr. Louis Maretsky, the head of the B'nai
B'rith in Germany, forlornly noted in 1912 that at least 271 of 402 prostitution
traffickers on a Hamburg police list were Jewish; in reviewing similar lists
for Eastern Europe and South Africa at least 374 of 644 were from the Jewish
community. [BRISTOW, p. 56] (No mention
here is made of even higher possible percentages: as explored later, it has
long been a tradition for many Jews in their diaspora to formally change their
identifiable Jewish names). Concerning Galicia, Maretsky wrote that "the
prominence of Jewish traffickers and brothel operators there is no doubt.
From the files of the Austrian and German police there were 111 Jewish traffickers
active in Galicia and the neighboring province of Bukovina for 1904-08 alone."
[BRISTOW, p. 56]
By 1889 Jewish women ran 203 of 289 (70%)
of the licensed brothels in the "Pale of Settlement" (encompassing
over 20 provinces in eastern Poland and western Russia -- an area where Jews
were about 12% of the population). 1122 of 5127 (22%) licensed prostitutes
in this area were Jewish. [BRISTOW, p. 63] The grievous political dangers
for local Jewry in the context of enduring interethnic hostilities, when 78%
of the rest of the women were Gentile, many indentured in Jewish houses, is
obvious.
Further in the West, 16 of 19 licensed brothels
in Warsaw were run by Jewish women, prostitutes in the low-class establishments
were expected to service 40-50 customers a day, up to 60-70 on Holy Days.
(In 1905 the respectable part of the Jewish Warsaw community rioted against
the brothels; 40 whorehouses -- legal and illegal -- were reported destroyed,
8 persons killed, and 100 injured). [BRISTOW, p. 61]
In Minsk, Jews ran all four legitimate houses
of ill repute. In the Russian province of Kherson (which includes the city
of Odessa) 30 of 36 licensed brothels were Jewish-owned. The American Consul
in Odessa wrote in 1908 that the "whole 'business' of prostitution is
almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews." [BRISTOW, p. 56]
Martin Fido notes another genre of Jewish Eastern
European profiteer in the prostitution world, in England:
"Latvian ponces accompanied [prostitutes] to
help them cross borders and find
accomodation
and working premises. These men were despised by police and
by some of the criminal fraternity for 'living off
immoral earnings.' But they were
not pimps ... They were effectively travel agents,
couriers and managers in
strange and unfriendly places. Their arrival
in London ensured that a major
strand of prostitution would be controlled by
organized crime. One of these
Latvians, Max Kassell, was still running a small
stable of hookers in the 1930s,
when he was murdered in Soho ... Jewish dominance
of the East End [of
London] and its crime was reflected in their
Yiddish name, 'spielers' (places
for games). In the Brick Lane neighborhood,
Isaac Bogard, a Jewish villain
whose swarthy complexion and tightly curled
black hair earned him the
nickname 'Darky the Coon,' extended his interests.
He began in the
early years of the 20th century by supplying
muscle for street traders who
wanted to prevent newcomers from moving in,
but he moved on to
managing prostitutes and drinking clubs."
[FIDO, M., 2000, p. 19-20]
Then in London there was Harry 'Little Hubby' Distleman,
"a Jewish club manager, gambler and possibly part-sharer (with his brother)
in a chain of brothels." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 31] Jewish author Chaim
Bermant noted in the Jewish Chronicle in 1993 that "In the same
period (1903-1909), 151 aliens [in Great Britain], most of them Jewish, were
convicted for keeping brothels, and 521 for soliciting ... Rabbi Avigdor Schonfeld
... protested that to draw attention to the existence of Jewish prostitutes
harmed the good name of the Jewish people." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 1-15-1993]
More recently, Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls
that "while performing in England in the late 1950s I had become friendly
with a Jewish song plugger, a man who eventually left the music business to
open a very exclusive whorehouse." [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 293]
A
little later, there was the infamous Colin Levy:
"In 1973, one of the better-known and more
appreciated solo practioners
of that tony [London prostitution] underworld
was Norma Levy (nee Mary
Russell), an Irish-born prostitute in her mid-twenties
whose career 'on the
game' ws being managed by her husband Colin
Levy, a petty crook ...
In 1973, Colin Levy found himself short of money.
Aware that one of
Norma's patrons was the celebrated Lord Lambton,
he decided to solve
his problem with a bit of blackmail. Camera in hand,
he lay in wait outside
Norma's bedroom during Lambton's next vist to
her flat. At the appropriate
time, at a signal from Norma, he burst into
the room. With flashlights
popping in his face, the stunned Lambton was
frozen on film, in
flagrante delicto, for posterity." [Levy's
blackmail failed, but there was
a resultant scandal, including the ethics of
newspaper (where Levy tried
to sell his photos] that published accounts
of the story] [KIERNAN, T.,
1986, p. 162]
In Vienna, authorities knew of about 50
Jewish prostitution traffickers based in Czernowitz, "and they were a
very inbred lot extending over two generations." [BRISTOW, p. 74] The
most publicized 'white slavery' trial occurred in 1892, in Lemberg (once also
called Lvov, then a Polish provincial capital, today called Lviv in Ukraine),
where 27 traffickers -- all Jews -- were prosecuted for ensnaring women to
go to Constantinople, Egypt, and India. Some of the women recruits understood
their tasks, but others "were maids, others fieldworkers, one a butcher's
helper, all apparently promised honest jobs." [BRISTOW, p. 74] (Lemberg, "a cradle of Zionism from the
1880s onward," also had anti-Jewish riots in 1918. [KRAJEWSKI, S., p.
340] )
There was a tradition of Yiddish folk songs
about Jewish criminal behavior, like this:
"I am Salve, the thief,
Four brothers are we;
One is hungry, the other well fed,
But thieves all four are we.
One is a pickpocket,
The second a pimp, a handsome fellow;
One is a hijacker on the lookout for
packages,
And I am a house thief.
A pimp is common,
As all agree:
From his own wife,
He gets the disease
To be a hijacker is bitter:
You can rupture your lung,
It's hard to earn something with some of
the packages,
The best thing is to be a house thief."
[RUBIN, R., 1979]
"In an age of pandemic anti-Semitism,"
says Bristow, "a Jewish pimp was a political as well as a social force,"
[BRISTOW, p. 4] very emotionally reinforcing anti-Jewish sentiments of the
day. Jews were already blamed in central Europe for a financial crash in 1873
and economic competition between Jews and non-Jews was heightening.
A young and enraged Adolf Hitler paid particular
attention to the highly visible phenomenon of Jewish street hustling and prostitution
rings in Vienna, and was incensed that many non-Jewish women were coerced
into the largely Jewish-run trade. "In no other city of Western Europe,"
he wrote in Mein Kampf, "could the relationship between Jewry
and prostitution, and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better
than in Vienna ... an icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first
time the Jew as an evil, shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking
vice, the outcome of the scum of the big city." [BRISTOW, p. 84]
The Jewish prostitution business extended
from Europe across the world, where it sometimes overlapped with French, Italian,
Chinese, and other rings. In the Punjabi (Indian) capital of Lahore, "Jewish
pimps were in the habit of leaving their women penniless only to reappear
after workers had accumulated some money." [BRISTOW, p. 195] In Rio de
Janeiro Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania were so
much identified with prostitution in the late 1800's that "the kaftan,
a Jew's traditional long gown, became synonymous with pimp." [BRISTOW,
p. 113]
Thirty-nine Jews were expelled from Brazil
in 1879 for soliciting women for prostitution and running illegal whorehouses.
[BRISTOW, p. 114] Of 199 licensed
whorehouses in Buenos Aires in 1909, 102 were run by Jews and more than half
the prostitutes were Jewish. [FRIED, p. 71] 4,248 Jewish women were registered for licensed brothels in Buenos
Aires between 1880-1913, and those represented only the licensed ones. Edward
Bristow estimates that 9,000 Jewish women immigrants came to Brazil in a 25-year
span in that era as prostitutes (many were no doubt highly transient), when
the total Jewish population of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay
combined amounted to less than 60,000 people
in 1910. [BRISTOW, p. 119]
(Brian Viner, a columnist at England's
Jewish Chronicle, underscores these figures from Argentina in this
manner: "That I know all this is thanks largely to my estimable
cousin Ben, a fount of information on Jewish gangster matters. I phoned him
the other night and he told me, just as I might tell someone that Arensal
are top the league by a point, that of 60,000 Jews living in Argentina by
the 1920s, 9,000 were involved in prostitution rackets. You have to admit
it's a conversation stopper.") [VINER, B., 11-29-02, p. 37]
In 1889, the Buenos Aires Bulletin Continental
reported that 200 German/Austrian women were held against their will by Jewish
pimps from Poland. [GUY, p. 5] "Jewish procurers," says Donna Guy,
"... became an organized ring in
major cities all over the world.
They were particularly powerful in the
Argentine port cities of
Buenos Aires and Rosario ... [GUY, p.
10] ... Turn-of-the-century
reports by the Hamburg B'nai B'rith [a
Jewish fraternal organization]
concluded that most prostitutes in Buenos
Aires were Jewish and that
traffickers 'dress with ostentatious
elegance, wear large diamonds, go
to the theatre or opera daily; they have
their own clubs and
organizations where wares are sorted,
auctioned, and sold ... They
have their own secret wireless code,
are well organized, and-- heavens!
-- in South America everything is possible."
[GUY, p. 19]
"Pooling their financial resources
in a kind of guild," notes another Jewish scholar, Howard Sachar,
"the [Polish Jewish] newcomers [to
Argentina] in 1909 controlled
slightly more than half the nearly two hundred
licensed brothels in
Buenos Aires. Jewish women served as their
madams, and Jewish
immigrant girls often were recruited and
lured into their hands as
prostitutes." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p.
283]
In Cuba, Jews "became engaged in the
'White Slave Trade,'" says Robert Levine, "importing prostitutes
-- some Jewish -- from Poland ... Many women recruited to the business had
been trapped in the Russian and Polish Pale and throughout the Hapsburg Empire
by force or fraud, and the human dilemma was great." [LEVINE, p. 66]
Incredibly, even in
Germany, where Jews have such a horrible history, such Jewish-related problems
still bubble beneath the surface. In 1994 a US News and World Report
reporter noted the observations of a Frankfort policeman patrolling Precinct
4:
"'It's all owned by Jews,' [Bernd]
Gayk says of the train station's red light
district. 'Practically everything in this
area is owned by German Jews.
There is a single cabaret here owned by
a German, but the rest belongs
to the Jews.'" [MARKS, J., p. 42,
44]
Shockingly, even shortly after the Holocaust
when there were only a few thousand Jews left in Germany, they remained
prominent in the prostitution business there. In 1961 Rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein
interviewed Dean Heinrich Gruber of the Evangelical Church of East and West
Berlin. Rubenstein notes that Gruber nearly himself perished in a Nazi concentration
camp, and he "had a long and heroic record of opposition to the Nazis
on Christian grounds as well as friendship and succor for Nazism's chief
victims [Jews]." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 5] "The problem in Germany is
that the Jews haven't learned anything from what happened to them,"
the Dean told a startled Rubenstein, "I always tell my Jewish friends
that they shouldn't put a hindrance in the way our fight against anti-Semitism."
[RUBENSTEIN, p. 7] Gruber then complained that "many of the brothels
and risqué night clubs, for example, were in Jewish hands, especially those
in close proximity to army camps." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 7] And Rubenstein's
response to the clergyman? "Look," the rabbi said,
"I don't understand why you are so
troubled about a pitifully small
number of Jews in shady positions or interested
in making money
rather than following more edifying pursuits.
It seems to me that
every person pays a price for the kind of
life he or she leads. Why
should Germany be upset about a few such
Jews unless they are
overly involved in other peoples' lives?
Must every Jew make himself
so pale, so inconspicuous, even invisible,
that he will give no offense
to Germans? ... After what happened [the
Holocaust], why should
any Jew remain and worry about German approval?"
[RUBENSTEIN,
p. 7-8]
Marvin Wolf, a Jewish captain in the U.S.
army serving in Germany, recalls that in 1971
"Rabbi David, the Jewish chaplain in Frankfort
am Main -- and the husband of
my mother's second cousin -- told me that
he knew several Jewish millionaires
at whose homes I would be welcome -- but,
'I'm not crazy about any of them,'
he said. 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'After
the war, '45, '46, Germany was in
ruins,' he explained. 'Terrible times. Nobody
had money except the Occupation
forces and a handful of Jews who had survived
the camps and got a monthly
pension -- government reparations. In Frankfort,
a few of these Jews recruited
starving, desperate German girls and opened
brothels. Got their revenge, and
got rich, too. They're in other businesses
now, but do you really want to spend
Pesach [Passover] with such people?"
[WOLF, M. J., 1998]
In 1909 one Jewish observer, Marcus Braun,
estimated there to be 50,000 Jewish immigrant prostitutes in America and 10,000
pimps. (Edward Bristow considers these figures grossly inflated, but notes
that one of Braun's colleagues, echoing at least public feelings about the
problem, thought there were up to 100,000 American Jewish women of ill repute.)
In any case, the Jewish pimps of New York City (who owned many of the "so-called
French" bordellos in the Tenderloin district and "sought to fill
them with French prostitutes from abroad") [BRISTOL, p. 165] had their
own official organization: "The New York Independent Benevolent Association."
Frances Kellar, a respected social worker, wrote in 1907 that "the
two nationalities who may be said to be central to the disorderly house business
in New York [are] French and Jewish ... French houses ... are not ... to be
so much feared as the Jewish ... [which are] thoroughly vicious and bad."
[BRISTOL, p. 165] By the turn of the century, "hundreds and hundreds"
of Jewish women walked the Lower East Side of New York City as prostitutes.
[FRIED, p. 8] Benjamin Altman described the whores he saw on Allen Street:
"A hundred women on every ... corner. Tall women, short women. Fair women.
Ugly women." [FRIED, p. 12]
Between November 15, 1908 and March 15,
1909, almost three-quarters of 2,093 prostitute cases before the New York
City courts were "native-born" women, "a preponderance,"
noted Albert Fried, "who were presumably Jewish." (Ethnic categories
included "Russian" and "Polish," but not Jewish). [FRIED,
p. 8] Of "foreign-born" prostitutes in court, 225 were Jewish, 154
French, 64 German, 31 Italian, 29 Irish, and 10 Polish. [FRIED, p. 8]
"The Jewish pimp," says Albert
Fried, "freely used marriage brokers and unemployment agencies to snare
his victims -- the young, the lonely, the innocent, the weak, the alienated,
the oppressed." [FRIED, p. 14] Starting out with one whore in 1890, for
example, by 1912 Motche Greenberg had a "controlling interest in eight
whorehouses and 114 women and was earning $4,000 a month, an incalculable
amount by today's standards." [FRIED, p. 18]
In Chicago, by 1907 Rabbi Emil Hirsch declared
that 75% of the "white slavery" in his city was controlled by Jews.
[BRISTOW, p. 177] The Jewish periodical the Forward forlornly reported
that "the facts that were uncovered at the trial [for corruption] of
[police] inspector McCann are horrifying. 75% of the white slave trade in
Chicago is in Jewish hands. The owners of most of the immoral resorts on the
West Side are Jews. Even in Gentile neighborhoods Jews stand out prominently
in the nefarious business." [FRIED, p. 70]
(Even
in 2001, as a result of an undercover police investigation, Joel Gordon
(a cantor, i.e., the man who sings liturgical songs and leads prayer in
a synagogue) and his wife Alison Greenberg were tried in Chicago for running
a brothel. Ginsberg was also charged with acts of prostitution. "We
now realize," said Howard Peritz, a member of Gordon's synagogue, "that
in starting a congregation around a man [Gordon], we were canonizing him."
[JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY, 1-5-01]
The same year, a synagogue room (Finchley Synagogue's Kinloss Suite) in
Great Britain made the news when it hosted a "stag party with three
strippers performing 'sexually explicit acts.'" Some of the money raised
was supposed to go to a Jewish charity.)
[ZERDIN, J., 29-01]
In 1987, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox group bought a
slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, and began hiring illegal non-Jewish aliens
from Eastern Europe to do the menial jobs at their company. Despite the
fact that only Jews dominated the upper eschelons of the firm, and Jewish
author Stephen Bloom's underscores Jewish exploitation and condemnation
of the entire non-Jewish community in his book called Postville,
he frames the following in cautiously distancing, apologetic form:
"[A woman in her mid-twenties said:]
'The managers are incredibly rude. One
manager fired me because I wouldn't go to
bed with him.' The translator used the
word 'manager,' but the woman was most likely
speaking of one of her
supervisors, who would have been a Christian.
'If the manager wants to sleep
with you and you do, you get a raise. If you
don't, he makes your life
miserable. Girls have no choice.' No one [of
a group of fellow workers] disputed
what the woman said." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p.
138]
In 1932, a few Polish-American officials of
the city of Hamtramck (within Detroit) were charged by a grand jury with
the "familiar charge of collusion with vice interests for gratuities."
The central player among those convicted was Jewish, Jacob Kaplan, "head
of a vice syndicate" who collected $2,000 a month from disorderly houses
in the Syndicate." [WOOD, 1955, p. 53-54] In 1941, the Detroit Free
Press listed the names of those involved in another exposed vice ring
in the area of Hamtramck, a ring that drew city officials and administrators
into its web with bribes and payoffs. The racketeers included "Sam
(the Jap) Gross, Hamtramck area brothel operator;" Charles Berman,
"charged with operating a vice resort;" Irene Kaplan, "defendant
in accusations as brothel keeper;" Ike (Forty Grand) Levy, "vice
resort operator;" Kitty (Big Nose) Silverman, "reputed vice resort
keeper;" and Jack (alias Jack Jesus) Silverman, "husband of Kitty."
[WOOD, A., 1955, p. 84, 86]
Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes the dimensions
of Detroit's all-Jewish Prohibition-era Purple Gang:
"Detroit's Canadian border and existence
of Jewish-owned Canadian distilleries,
such as those of Sam and Harry Bronfman [Jewish
founders of Seagram], offered
opportunities
to Detroit's Jewish gangsters that rivaled bootlegging operations in
Chicago and New York. Instead of transporting
the liquor themselves, the Purples
arranged
for the Jewish-dominated 'Little Jewish Navy' to bring it across the river
for them ... The Gang's dealings also extended
to the sale of stolen diamonds,
narcotics and
prostitution in Canada." [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113]
In New York City, among many other Jewish
madams, was "Polly Adler, the Polish-born madam of New York's most
famous bordello of the 1920s and 1930s." [MCDOUGAL, p. 92]
Jewish
comic and eventual TV superstar Milton Berle recalls Adler's brothel:
"When
I had a night off from the Paradise, John Garfield [the actor, born Julius
Garfinkle], who was a good friend, and I went over to Polly Adler's for
dinner. Sure, the world knew Polly as a [brothel] madam, but her friends
knew her as an intelligent woman, fun to be with, and a good cook. After
dinner, Polly excused herself because she had to make some telephone calls
to arrange for girls for her clients. John and I were talking when I said,
'I don't know about you, Julie (his real name was Jules), but I feel sort
of horny.' John thought he might feel the same way, so we spoke to Polly
about it, and she said she could get us two of her $100 girls -- Polly
handled only the best -- and send them around to wherever we said. John
and I went our separate ways to await our deliveries. When the doorbell
rang at my place, there was Carole [a woman Berle had been dating and
already having an affair with]." [BERLE, M., 1974, p 186]
A little earlier, "the most famous madam
in turn-of-the century New York was Rosie Hertz. Saving enough from her
own prostitution, she and her husband, Jacob, opened several brothels
on the Lower East Side during the 1880s ... The epitome of the 'white
slaver,' Hertz was called by one judge the 'godmother for prostitutes.'
Another critic considered her 'as much a public feature of the lower East
Side ... as the Brooklyn Bridge." [GILFOYLE, T., 1992, p. 295]
Dallas, Texas? When Jack Ruby (Rubenstein)
murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, he owned the Carousel, a local strip
tease joint. As Gerald Posner notes, "Ruby's main competition was from
the Theatre and Colony Clubs, owned by two brothers, Abe and Barney Weinstein.
In 1961, they had introduced amateur strip-tease dancing." [POSNER,
p. 362] Atlanta, Georgia? By 1999, owner Steve Kaplan's Gold Club "nude
dancing" business had been "indicted on federal racketeering charges
that included prostitution, credit card fraud, money laundering, police
corruption and ties to the Gambino organized crime family." His lawyer,
Alan Begner, was also Jewish. "Since 1982," noted the Atlanta
Journal and Constitution, "Begner has carved a lucrative niche
as a lawyer of adult entertainment establishments," representing about
half of the 45 in metropolitan Atlanta. "I knock out laws," he
explained to the newspaper. Begner's interest in strip joints began when
another Jewish owner (Emmanual Isaacs of the "She Club") asked
him to represent him. [RANKIN, B., 12-5-99, p. 2D]
The Associated Press further
noted in 2001 that Gold Club owner Steven Kaplan (club manager: Norbert
Calder) was
"accused of building a $50 million fortune
in part by providing prostitutes
for celebrities. Atlanta's Gold Club is one
of the most profitable nude clubs
in the country, popular among convention-goers
and visiting celebrities.
Federal investigators say it is also a high-priced
brothel that pumps cash into
the Gambino crime family ... [The Federal
indictment against Kaplan] says
Kaplan ordered more than 20 beatings of people
who did not repay loans
at high rates of interest." [COURT TV,
4-2001]
The most famous "sex club" in history
(prospering in the 1970s and 1980s before the AIDS epidemic) is probably
Plato's Retreat, based in New York City. Its owner was also Jewish: Larry
Levenson. As Jewish scholar David Allyn describes it:
"First of all, you have to picture the
Ansonia Hotel, which is a late 19th century
wedding-cake of a building in the heart of
the upper west side in New York. In
the basement of the Ansonia was Plato's Retreat,
then the world's most famous
sex club. Men and women would stroll about
the Ansonia lobby in nothing but
towels. In the club, they would have sex with
possibly a dozen or so people
in a single night. Plato's Retreat represented
the commercial version of what was
happening in people's apartments and living
rooms across the country."
[BOOKMARK, 2000]
Green Bay, Wisconsin?
George Tane, also Jewish, "was a bootlegger who controlled Green Bay,
Wisconsin. After Prohibition, he owned all the houses of prostitution in the
city." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 214] Atlanta, Georgia?
In 2001, Steven Kaplan, owner of the nude "Gold Club," faced a Federal
indictment on counts of "loan sharking, money laundering and bribing
police officers." He was also accused "of building a $50 million
fortune in part by providing prostitutes for celebrities ... Atlanta's Gold
Club is one of the most profitable nude clubs in the country." [COURT
TV, 4-30-2001] [See also evidence in this volume -- Mass
Media 2 Chapter -- about prostitution rackets controlled by today's "Russian"
mafia, which is largely Jewish in organization; Heidi Fleiss (the much-publicized,
high-priced Jewish prostitution "madam" to Hollywood stars), famed
Jewish prostitute Xaviera Hollander ("The Happy Hooker"), and details
of enormous Jewish influence in the worlds of "smut" and pornography]
With the American public beginning to note
the high Jewish representation in the prostitution trade; some journalists
implied wider corruption. In the June 1909 issue of McClure's magazine,
for instance, George Kibbe Turner wrote:
"Out of the Bowery and Red Light districts
have come the new
development in New York politics -- the
great voting power of the
organized criminals. It was a notable development
not only for New
York, but for the country at large. And
no part of it was more
noteworthy than the appearance of the Jewish
dealer in women, a
product of New York politics, who has vitiated
more than any other
single agency the moral life of the great
cities of America in the past ten
years." [BELL, p. 187]
"It is an absolute fact," wrote
Ernest Bell in his 1911 book about white slavery, "that corrupt Jews
are now the backbone of the loathsome traffic in New York and Chicago. The
good Jews know this and feel keenly the unspeakable shame of it." [BELL,
p. 188] "The criminal instincts that are so often found naturally in
the Russian and Polish Jew," wrote Frank Moss in a popular volume called
American Metropolis (1897), "come to the surface in such ways
as to warrant the opinion that these people are the worst element in the entire
make-up of New York City ... A large proportion of the people of New Israel
are addicted to vice." [FRIED, p. 55-56]
"Vice and crime did pervade the Lower
East Side," remarks Albert Fried, "and no one knew it more keenly
than its residents. The better part of wisdom, so far as they were concerned,
was to keep the disgrace quiet, to avoid publicizing it." [FRIED, p.
59] Meanwhile, in the early 1900's the National Council of Jewish Women even
had Yiddish-speaking volunteers working to keep new female immigrants at Ellis
Island "out of the clutches of men (often Jewish) who would try to entice
them into prostitution." [SCHNEIDER, p. 224]
By the early years of the twentieth century,
large urban department stores had reputations "as breeding grounds for
prostitution." In New York City, for example, Macy's fell under suspicion
to some, in part for its proximity to a former red light district. In 1913,
Percy Strauss, the Vice President of Macy's, hosted a "vice vigilante"
group to investigate his store. "Strauss," notes William Leach,
"no dour Puritan, had a personal interest in leading a campaign against
vice. For one thing, as a German Jew and spokesman for the Jewish community,
he had to disprove the charge -- widely made -- that immigrant Jewish women
(and many of his own employees, therefore) were more likely than other women
to be prostitutes." [LEACH, p. 117] By 1915 the Committee Against Vice
(of which Strauss had conveniently become chairman) published a report that
affirmed that Macy's was "normal." "On the other hand,"
says William Leach, "testimony in the 'secret reports' told a different
tale. Saleswomen, it was revealed,
passed around pornographic cards and poems about themselves, talked openly
about 'sex' and 'sex desire,' and 'gossiped about fairies,' as one investigator
put it. Private accounts by other investigative reformers echoed this view,
that things at Macy's and in other department stores were hardly 'normal'
or 'decent.' 'The strongest temptation of girls in department stores,' warned
one reformer, 'is not poverty but luxury and money.'" [LEACH, p. 118]
Although Jewish poverty was -- and is --
often argued as a major reason for their high international representation
in such a vice, a 1914 League of Nations survey of 25 Jewish prostitutes in
Buenos Aires showed that only 4 of them claimed to be poor before their new
trade. Nine, however, stated that their family lives had been "immoral
or abusive in some way." [BRISTOW, p. 95] (As Robert Rockaway notes
about the dozens of members in Detroit's all-Jewish criminal Purple Gang,
which was involved in everything from murder to prostitution: "[Purple
Gang members] were not products of crushing poverty, broken homes, or widespread
economic despair. Most of them had been raised in lower middle class households
where the father had a steady, if not well-paying, job.") [ROCKAWAY,
R., 2001, p. 113-]
And what, in complete dismissal of the
facts of history, is the common Jewish perspective about the unabashed prominence
of Jews in the "white slave trade?" This, in 1998, from Jewish scholar
Gary Tobin in a popular Jewish newspaper:
"For those with a knowledge of history
of 19th century anti-Semitic
propaganda, the idea that Jews are running
"the white slave trade" is
nothing new. Cartoon like stereotypes
of loathsome Jewish villains
trading on the lost virtue of non-Jewish
maidens was standard material
for the Nazis and their precursors ...
It took a sick mind to imagine that
Jews were running the world's oldest profession."
[TOBIN,
Distinguished, p. 51]
Tobin was responding to a very disturbing
article in the New York Times (January 11, 1998) which described the
horrible situation that Slavic Gentile prostitutes face
today, trapped in Israel. As the Times notes, with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and a resulting economic chaos, literally hundreds
of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian women have been dispersed throughout
the world, most entrapped in an international prostitution trade run by the
"Russian mafia." (Although it is certainly inferred, what the Times
article does not overtly mention is that a significant part of the Russian
mafia is Jewish. See later chapter). Glenn Frankel, however, a Washington
Post correspondent in Jerusalem, took the perspective in 1994 that "there
was much talk about the Russian mafia muscling in [to Israel], although the
police and most crime experts agreed that the brothels were almost entirely
under the control of the Israeli mafia and that the Russians worked mostly
as low-level managers or hookers." [FRANKEL, p. 175]
"Israel has become a routine destination
for the global trafficking of women," noted Leonard Fein in a 1998 Jewish
Bulletin,
"women coerced into prostitution.
The thousand such women
brought into Israel annually derive principally
from the countries
of the former Soviet Union, and the way
they get to Israel is that
they are 'purchased,' each one costing
between $10,000 and $20,000.
And they are, of course, expected to repay
the cost to their masters
through what amounts to indentured servitude
-- or, if you prefer the
simpler and more straightforward, slavery
... Some [are] as young
as 15, and even 12 ... Each woman earns
between $50,000 and
$100,000 for her pimp. The turnover of
the prostitution trade in
Israel comes to some $450 million a year."
[FEIN, 1998, p. 21]
In a country of six million people, this
averages about $75 a year paid to a pimp for every man, woman, and child in
Israel. There are today 150 brothels and sex shops in Tel Aviv alone.
[SILVER, E., 8-25-2000, p. 32]
In an interview with Marina, a Russian
prostitute, the (Jewish) Forward noted in 1995 that there were nine
or ten "Russian" prostitution rings in Israel. "Girls are regularly
beaten to keep them obedient," Marina told the Forward, "...
[The Israeli police are] regularly paid off with free visits to our girls.
A reporter like you thinks you're picking up a stone from the road, but you
might find you're digging into a mountain." [SHILLING, p. 5] As a report by Israel's Women's Network noted
in 1997:
"Every year, hundreds of women from
the former Soviet Union
are lured to Israel, gaining entry by posing
as immigrants, on
the promise of finding lucrative jobs, and
then are lured into
prostitution by abusive pimps." [GROSS,
N., 1997, p. 16]
In 1998, Hungary's Consul in Tel Aviv, Andrea
Horvath complained that four Hungarian women "had allegedly met their
Israeli employer in a Budapest discotheque. They were hired as dancers but
were later forced to provide sexual services as well." [MTI, 3-20-98]
In 2000, Robert Friedman, in talking about his book about the "Russian
Mafia," noted Seimon Mogilevich, head of a major Jewish mobster network,
noting him as "one of the world's biggest traffickers in women, Eurasian
women." [PENKLAVA, M., 5-3-2000]
"Women are sold into the sex business
in Israel for between $5,000 and $15,000," reported the Jerusalem
Post in 1998, "while the pimps who buy them can earn between $10,000
and $50,000 a year per woman ... 2,000 women are brought to Israel from the
CIS and forced by pimps to work as prostitutes. Many are brought here on false
pretenses and held against their will."
As Ira Omait, head of the Haifa Emergency Shelter for Women told the
Post, "We are fast heading in the direction of trade in minors
for prostitution and slavery." [COLLINS, L., 12-15-98, p. 5] Incredibly, as noted in a Jerusalem Post editorial in 1998,
"According to the Women's Lobby [a women's group in Israel], part of
the [prostitution] problem is that there is no law against slavery in Israel."
[JERUSALEM POST, 1-13-98, p. 10]
"Poor Women of Ex-Soviet Union Lured Into Sex Slavery"
headlined a 1998 Associated Press story. Women forced into prostitution
in Israel, noted the article, were locked in rooms and provided only food
and condoms. And Israeli law on the subject? In 1996 150 men were arrested
for pimping or running brothels. Merely 21 cases went to trial, and no one
was ever convicted of a crime. [LINZER, D., 6-13-98]
In 1998 an Israeli judge even ordered an insurance company to pay for
a client's prostitution addiction:
"An Israeli insurance company has been
ordered to pay 300,000
shekels ($80,000) to fund the prostitution
habit of a man injured
in a car accident." [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR,
4-22-98]
The man claimed that since a 1993 car crash
he couldn't form relationships with women and relied on the prostitution world.
The 1998 New York Times article noted
that more than 1,500 Slavic prostitutes -- mostly from the Ukraine -- have
been deported from Israel for residence infractions in the past three years.
(Israeli oppression knows no end: "Unlike many countries, Israel does
not pay airfare for deportees." [LINZER, D., 6-13-98]) Prostitution is not illegal in Israel and clients
include foreign workers, "Israeli soldiers with rifles on their shoulders,"
business executives, and tourists. The Times noted that
"The networks trafficking women run
east to Japan and Thailand, where
thousands of young Slavic women now work
against their will as
prostitutes, and west to the Adriatic Coast
and beyond ... The routes
are controlled by Russian gangs based in
Moscow ... In Ukraine alone ...
as many as 400,000 women under 30 have
gone in the past decade ...
Israel is a fairly typical destination
... Police officials [in Israel] estimate
that there are 25,000 paid sexual transactions
every day. [This in a
country with a population of 6 million].
Brothels are ubiquitous ... Once
they cross the border [into Israel] their
passports will be confiscated
[by pimps], their freedoms curtailed and what little money they
have
taken from them at once ... The Tropicana,
in Tel Aviv's bustling
business district, is one of the busiest
bordellos. The women who work
there, like nearly all prostitutes in Israel
today, are Russian. Their bosses,
however, are not. 'Israelis love Russian
girls,' said Jacob Golan, who
owns this and two other clubs, '.... They
are blonde and good looking
and different than us ... And they are
desperate. They are ready to do
anything for money." [SPECTER, p.
1]
"The situation," wrote Jewish
author David Weinberg in an 1998 article about prostitution in Israel entitled
Not So Holy Land, "is enough to make you cry in despair, or vomit
from shame." [WEINBERG, D., 1-18-1998, p. 8]
