Edgar Bronfman Sr.: Ethical Slanderer

Deborah Solomon asked questions of Edgar M. Bronfman Sr. and he answered.

Here are some of them and a few comments by me:

Do you think you favor inclusiveness because you yourself have seven children — and their spouses of various faiths — from how many marriages?

Two.

I thought it was more.

Well, I’ve had three wives. I’ve had five weddings.

In your book, you seek to define Judaism as something besides religious belief.

I don’t believe in the God of the Old Testament, but I am happy with my Judaism, without that.

If you take the spiritual element out of Judaism, what is left? Some would say the rest is just archaeology, bones in the desert.

That’s their problem; that’s not my problem. What we have left is our ethics, our morals. It was our people who developed the Ten Commandments, and civilizations all over the world are based on the Ten Commandments. Whoever wrote that - and we assume it was Moses - had a great deal of wisdom.

Why is it important to you that Judaism continues?

There are things we have to do. For instance, Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda. There have been holocausts since our Holocaust. We should be the first people to stand up and say this is unacceptable, but we don’t. We say, “Never again,” just for us. We have to say, No, it’s for everyone, this “Never again.”

Why do you give your money to Jewish causes instead of broader social causes?

There are not that many of us in the Jewish world who understand that we are in crisis. We are not in crisis because of anti-Semitism; we are in crisis because we are disappearing through assimilation.

And now me:

1. Did you notice that he's worried about assimilation? That's why he married he married The Lady Carolyn Townshend? But there were no children, so maybe, like God, it just doesn't count by Edgar?

2. Don't you appreciate an "ethical", er, whatever? If you have no God, why do you need religion?

3. Edgar forgets the mighty Jewish backing for the civil rights movement in America and neglects that for the past 2 centuries, at least, every single notable social movement has had tremendous Jewish support, usually, though, to our detriment, like Communism. He's a slanderer. (And here is an update:
Mathilde Blind, née Cohen, a young German-Jewish writer, committed feminist and agnostic...arrived in England, aged eleven, in 1852 as an asylum seeker, along with her mother, Friederike Cohen, and her (Protestant) stepfather, Karl Blind, a leader of German revolution in 1848. The Blinds’ home near Swiss Cottage became a focus for Continental exiles. Marx had been an early associate, Mazzini a frequent visitor and Mathilde’s special hero. In 1866, Mathilde’s brother, Ferdinand, shot but failed to assassinate Bismarck, killing himself in despair at the police station. Mathilde came from an unconventional European background of rational freethinking and practical action. She had radical credentials.)



4. In sum, I think he still has a problem with his Judaism, with his ethics, with his assimilation. But since he has a lot of money, what does he care about that or about me?

5. Did he really write the book?