Jewlicious

Where are they nowski?

20 years ago
10 Comments
by ck
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Da!Remember back in the early 90s, after the Berlin Wall had fallen and after Glasnost and Perestroika preceded the collapse of the Soviet Empire? You were probably working at some lame-o job somewhere and the news had somehow filtered down to you that big bucks were to be made in the former Soviet Union? You imagined yourself the big robber baron, descending upon the unsuspecting and unsophisticated Russkis to trade them Western goods like uh… Snickers bars and Crest tootpaste for large swaths of resource rich lands…. anyhow, it never amounted to more than a daydream and instead of living large in Moscow, you stuck with your little-bo peep jobby job in Jersey.

But not everyone lacked the boldness you did. Thus we witnessed the emergence of one of the greediest, most corrupt and rapacious group of men. Known as the Oligarchs, these ubber capitalists basically managed to steal the country. Working in tandem with corrupt politicians at the highest level, a new word was coined to describe the type of governance endured by the Russian people – kleptocracy, rule by thieves.

Chief among these thieves were a number of colorful yids who exacted revenge for countless pogroms, purges and centuries of institutional anti-Semitism from both the right and the left. Their greed knew no bounds and the wealth they accumulated was astounding, but the question is, where are they now? Exile.ru – an awesome English language independent Moscow-based weekly lets us in on the status of the Oligarchs:

Only now, in the increasingly bland, dry, bureaucratic-fascism of the Putin era, do we realize how much we miss the Russian Oligarchy, some of the most colorful, most amoral characters ever assembled. What happened to them? While many praise Putin’s successful bitch-slapping of the oligarch class, few actually stop to wonder where they are — which is too bad, because this story has all the juicy, depressing humor of an E! biop on the cast of Diff’rent Strokes, only on a grander scale.

Read No-ligarchy: The Tragicomic Collapse of Russia’s Former Masters; find out what happenned to Jewlicious Oligarchs Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Smolensky, Vitaly Malkin, Vladimir Gusinksy, et al.

Just because you didn’t become a Russian Oligarch, or work for one of them, doesn’t mean you can’t dress like an Oligarch this Halloween.

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ck

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem with his wife, newborn daughter and toddler son. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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10 Comments

  • It’s kinda like Ali G. and the Throw the Jews Down the Well song. It’s funny in a macabre sort of way, but then you think there are probably people reading it who don’t get it, and that eventually they’ll be selling compilations of these articles in “non-fiction” books in stores throughout world.

  • So OT. The only thing that this brings up that is interesting is that exile.ru reflects that whacked out obsession the underlying Russian society has with Jews. I have Russian friends, relatively recent immigrants, who obviously have nothing per se against Jews and yet pepper their language with off the cuff anti-semitic comments and play drinking games with anti-semitic themes. This anti-semitism is so ingrained that they don’t even notice it. It’s funny – I sit there andI’m like “Do you realize what you just said?” and then they react all startled – because they didn’t realize and in fact meant no harm. That’s what I find pretty funny.

  • I want to repeat this: In terms of sheer anti-Semitism-inspiring power, the New Testament makes Mein Kampf look like The Nanny. I’ve read Mein Kampf, and I gotta tell ya, I was expecting that book to be a lot more evil than it was. Hitler comes off as just a whiny fag; if he were born today, he’d have a Robert Smith hairdo and a stack of Depeche Mode records. The case Hitler makes against the Jews pales in comparison to the case that Jews make against themselves in the New Testament. Hitler would be booed off the stage of a Jewish self-hating convention; he’d get beaned with pomegranates and hooked with a shepherd’s crook in the middle of his act. Hitler whines about the Jews being rich, manipulative backstabbers. Well boo-fucking-hoo, Adolf! You sound like a fucking taxi driver! After a few chapters of Mein Kampf, instead of getting some kind of evil rush, I wanted to say, like Hans and Franz, “Oo, listen to ze little girlie-man Hitler who cahn’t even handle ze juden beekahz zey haff ze mah-nee. Vhat’s za matter, afraid aff a few juden, huh, girlie-man?”

  • From toilet reading:

    As a Jew I went first to a Reform synagogue, then forced my parents to move me to an Orthodox synagogue because I hated all the guitar-strumming hippies in the Reform one

    Funny.