members offends the dominant society, so a tendency to deny fault and
adopt a public persona of blameless righteousness has its political value.
The Holocaust is the other main issue motivating the posturing of Jewish organizations and their adherents. Because of the enormity of the consequences of relative Jewish passivity in the early stages of Hitler's Final Solution, there is the overwhelming need to be eternally vigilant to any hint of a repetition of this sorriest of all chapters in the history of humanity. Hence a tendency to glorify the use of force in the service of their ideology, and to whitewash the Jewish image in the eyes of the world.
Meyer Lansky was born Majer Suchowlinsky in Grodno in what is now Belarus of Polish Jewish parents (en.wikipedia.org 2005).
His parents moved to New York City in 1911, to the Lower Eastside's Jewish ghetto, where economic and social conditions rivalled those of African American urban slums today. Criminologists often assert that poverty is the prime cause of crime, and that all ethnic and racial groups have a theoretically equal propensity for criminal behavior. Since every individual's fate is largely determined by the circumstances of their upbringing, it is not surprising that the enterprising and ambitious Lansky would test his mettle in the underworld from which he came.
During the years of Prohibition in the 1920s Lansky teamed up with fellow Jewish arch criminal Bugsey Siegal in an enterprise known as the Bug and Meyer Gang, which specialized in hijacking illegal liquor shipments, shakedowns, and extortion (www.carpenoctem.tv/mafia/lansky.html). Through alliances with other Jewish gangsters and the Italian Mafia he was able to vault himself to preemine
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