Been getting messages from readers asking me to revisit a column i wrote last November…” Where are the Jewish gangsters when we need them?”
Writes Marv from Brooklyn: “Yo, Jack. Just finished your book Compulsive. Five stars, man, just like your column on Lansky and company. Are you afraid to run it again because it harms the image of us as nice Jewish boys? Too bad. You once wrote Tough Guys Don’t Dance. So stop dancing and revisit for us an article so timely.”
Okay, here goes, as follows:
Meyer Lansky…. we could use him today at a time in America when Jews are under assault on and off campus.
Sparked by Israel’s war against the brutes of Hamas, the antisemitism is everywhere.
So it was in the 1930s when Lansky was Public Enemy Number 1, a so-called gangster, the main attraction for The Jewish Mob.
He ran the largest gambling operation here and everywhere and he had associates, men with guns and muscles, to see that all debts were paid.
He was the real Bogie.
Around the late 1930s, emboldened by Hitler in Europe, Made in the USA antisemites came out of the woodwork parading with swastikas.
They crowed, “death to the Jews.”
Sound familiar?
Americans… especially Jews…were amazed and horrified that such Jew-hatred existed in the land of the free, home of the brave.
The movie “Gentleman’s Agreement,” would expose that in 1947.
But this was still around 1938, and Jewish leader Judge Nathan Perlman, alarmed at what was taking place, decided that it was time to do something.
But whom to turn to? The Jews then, as today in America, were a studious, law-abiding people.
There was no choice but to go outside the law, and to find a man willing and able to hit back by any means.
He found Meyer Lansky…and other Jews prominent within the National Crime Syndicate, but Lansky was the toughest of the tough.
Would Lansky agree to do some work not quite kosher?
Lansky’s response? I’ll do anything. Just ask.
Most active at that time were the Bund, German American Nazis who rallied everywhere with banners of Hitler and threats to exterminate the Jews.
Sound familiar Harvard, Princeton et al?
The question was…how to disperse these hateful mobs? Don’t worry about it, said Lansky, I’ve got ways.
But Perlman was worried. As conveyed in this book, Perlman wanted no killing. Lansky got the message.
You mean, he said, you don’t want them iced, only marinated.
So it was. Using no guns, but baseball bats, Lansky and his associates marinated them from one rally to the next.
The Made in the USA Nazis ran like chickens until they were no more. They disappeared into their caves.
Now, they are back, and as they rally so smugly with kill the Jews, I think back to when Lansky scattered them after “I cracked a few heads.”
Wouldn’t that be glorious.
Later, Lansky explained: “I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews of Europe who are suffering. They are my brothers.”
A brother like Lansky we can use again today.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.