By Bill Simons

From adolescence onward, I have experienced feelings of anger, violation and apprehension at the misdeeds of Jewish criminals and miscreants. They give renewed life to antisemitic canards, heightening Jewish American vulnerability. Through my writing, teaching and public lectures, I have attempted to counter negative stereotypes by highlighting the contributions of Jewish Americans while adhering to facts and eschewing hyperbole. 
Although constituting a small minority of the Jewish American population, our reprobates, past and present, damage the security and standing of a group historically stigmatized by malicious misrepresentation. Developing an effective strategy for confronting these deviant outliers elicits conflicting options. Their existence, however, is indisputable, evidenced by a brief, selective litany – slaveholding Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin; murderous mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel; ruthless “fixer” Roy Cohn; spouse-killer Rabbi Fred Neulander; prodigiously corrupt financier Bernard Madoff; and sexually predatory film producer Harvey Weinstein. Perhaps none exceeds the perfidy of Jeffrey Epstein given the vileness of his deeds and their repercussions. 
The scope, range and offenses encompassing Epstein activities have yet to fully unravel. Archives, monographs, congressional hearings, legal proceedings and investigative journalism will inevitably provide a more complete and accurate record of the monstrous damage done by Epstein. Enough is known, however, to state that he engaged in wholesale abuse of women, pedophilia, financial corruption and blackmail. Epstein’s Jewishness stands auxiliary to these tragedies. 
Painful as it is to acknowledge, Epstein was a Jew, his surname announcing ethnic identity. In keeping with tradition, he was given the Jewish name Yudel. Epstein’s grandparents immigrated to America from an imperiled Europe where extended family members would perish in the Holocaust. His parents raised their children in Sea Gate, a comfortable community on the cusp of Brooklyn’s Coney Island populated by Jewish neighbors, institutions and bar mitzvah celebrations. Epstein contributed to Jewish philanthropies and organizations, albeit his motives and amounts invite skepticism. In 1985, he joined a family trip to Israel. 
Beyond heiress Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s intimate and illicit partner, prominent Jews entered the Epstein circle, their relationships variable in duration and type. Former Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard President Larry Summers, celebrity attorney and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, actor and director Woody Allen, hotel mogul Thomas Pritzker, and entertainment and sports agent Casey Wasserman number amongst Epstein’s better known Jewish connections. There were others. 
But make no mistake: the Epstein enterprise was not a Jewish cabal. Most of the actors who entered this netherworld of secrecy, transgression, creature comforts, debased young girls, shared information and validation were not Jewish. Even those who imposed limits on their own immersion must have sensed something amiss upon accepting hospitality set in the 21,000-square-foot Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach waterfront enclave, Little Saint James (“Epstein Island”), Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, and the Boeing 727-100 (“Lolita Express”). From different levels of engagement and culpability, former President Bill Clinton, future President Donald Trump, deposed British Prince Andrew, Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, chief of staff to the British prime minister Morgan McSweeney, 1990s U.S. Senate majority leader George Mitchell, ex-CEO of DP World Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, departed director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab Joichi Ito, and many other non-Jews partook of the entitled hedonism served by Epstein. Pointing to boundaries crossed by iconic Gentiles drawn from American and international enclaves of power in government, finance, education, law and culture, however, does not speak to the specific issues Epstein poses for American Jews. He reinforces the accusation that “Jews are in control.”
Individuals who merit respect caution that writing about Epstein within a Jewish context might provide ammunition to antisemites. Maintaining that thus far media references to Epstein’s Jewishness remain relatively muted, they attribute the ratcheting up of American antisemitism not to Epstein but to perceptions of Israeli actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Iran. However, social media trolls on the far right and the far left are already linking Epstein’s transgressions to his Jewishness, summoning dormant and nefarious prejudices. Writing for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Ron Kampeas finds such theories “proliferating – and going mainstream.”
A trajectory resonates from the venerable blood libel accusing Jews of ritualistically killing Christian children to rumors of girls buried in hidden graves around Epstein’s New Mexico ranch. In Georgia, Populist demagogue Tom Watson foamed about Jewish sexual perversion to incite the 1915 vigilante lynching of Leo Frank, innocent of the heinous murder of young Mary Phagan. And the obscenity of unaccountable privilege that marked the Epstein network gives modern reconfiguration to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forgery depicting a powerful global conspiracy of Jewish oligarchs. Broadcast manipulator Tucker Carlson and his ilk cast Jewish influence as antithetical to true Americanism, inferring the existence of an elite evil cabal.
Given the ubiquity of sentence fragments and ambiguous context in the voluminous Epstein files, antisemites can impose their own pre-existing distortions upon them. The scholar Ofir Dayan writes, “The conspiracy theory that has gained the most traction among certain segments of the public is that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent who committed his serious crimes on Israel’s behalf.” 
At my urging, readers and friends shared strategies for countering the impact of the Epstein scandal, many of the proposals marked by visceral anger toward Epstein. Submissions include: strengthening alliances with Gentile allies; tell the truth: there are bad Jews and good Jews, with the latter greatly outnumbering the former; call out any forms of bigotry; publicly display Jewish pride; and advocate for all exploited people. 
I aspire to match the resolve of my attorney son Joe: “Whether a Jew does something bad or is too successful, antisemites find justification. I aim to focus on doing well, supporting fellow Jews, and being unapologetic in my Jewishness.” Despite pride in Jewish heroes – most recently hockey star Jack Hughes, who scored a dramatic goal to bring Olympic gold to America 101 seconds after high sticking knocked out his two front teeth – we are mindful of our past, a condition intensified by Epstein. As newspaper editor Sam Pollak observes, “As much as we trumpet our Jewish heroes, many of us retain the ghetto mentality that used to fear a pogrom.”
Of Epstein, it needs to be said loudly that his acts represent a defilement of Jewish values and peoplehood. But at column’s end, I feel frustration at not having yet found an adequate response to my 10-year-old grandson Dan’s question: “Grandpa, do you know that there are some people who don’t like Jews?”