“I am happy you are back among the ‘free,’” the freshly retired New Republic editor and publisher Marty Peretz emailed Jeffrey Epstein in September 2010, weeks after the end of the house arrest portion of Epstein’s 18-month sentence for procuring a teenage girl for prostitution. Peretz, whose since-acknowledged homosexuality was an open secret at the time, was unlikely to be interested in such services for himself; the purpose of his obsequious message was to entice Epstein to donate a significant sum to YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which Peretz was fundraising for alongside his former student, close friend, and frequent financial backer Bill Ackman. Though it’s unclear whether Peretz made the difference, Epstein did donate $50,000 to YIVO in March 2011 and the same amount again in February 2012; later in 2012 Peretz invited Epstein to a private dinner at Ackman’s the day before a YIVO event, promising the attendance of “star intellectuals.” Peretz’s entreaties typify one common genre of Epstein email among the millions recently released by the Justice Department: a rich, well-connected person currying favor with a convicted sex offender in an attempt to access even more money and a whole network of other rich, well-connected people carefully cultivated by Epstein over many years.
A disproportionate part of that network consisted of Jewish men, typically from Epstein’s generation (Epstein was born in 1953 and was 66 when he died in prison in 2019) or an earlier one—in other words, Jewish men from modest backgrounds who achieved wealth and elite status over the course of the postwar decades. Epstein’s odyssey from being, as Steve Bannon once called him to his face, “a schmuck” from Coney Island, raised by a city-employed groundskeeper and a school aide, to owning a palatial Upper East Side mansion, private jets, and a private island, and maintaining a rolodex of hyper-influential friends, is a paradigmatic story of American Jewish male upward mobility. “Someday over a glass of wine you can tell me how you left the Hot dog contest town and ended up in the Virgin Islands looking at white sandy beaches,” the investment adviser Lou Kreisberg wrote Epstein in 2013; his invocation of Coney Island demonstrates just how much Epstein’s journey had become part of his personal brand.
Peretz elegantly captured the scope of American Jewish generational success in his candid 2023 memoir: “The America we came up in was one of neighborhoods and ethnicities and creeds and unions; the America we helped grow, the one we have now, is one of PhDs and interstate systems and investment portfolios.” By the end of the 20th century, if not earlier, the traditional American elite had embraced its Jewish interlopers and turned them into full-fledged insiders. And certainly Epstein’s associates included plenty of prominent gentiles, among them Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. But his email exchanges with Jewish men who followed a similar trajectory—including Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz, and Leslie Wexner, among many others—give a palpable sense that for all their wealth and privilege, these guys still regarded themselves as provincial ethnics for whom true elite status would always be just out of reach. In a self-mythologizing narrative shared by many American Jews, they are perpetual underdogs, their improbable success the result of their own distinctly Jewish intelligence and grit.
In the many emails between Epstein and his Jewish friends, we see them swap chauvinistic myths about Jewish superiority alongside intimate secrets, corrupt favors, and advice on finding Jewish lawyers to help navigate sexual misconduct allegations. The emails can read like an antisemite’s fever dream, seeming to validate their most sinister fantasies about the financial influence, depravity, and insularity of the Elders of Zion. The fallout has been hard to ignore; one popular social media account has dubbed Epstein “part of the satanic global elite that pull the strings from the shadows,” while the right-wing influencer Candace Owens tweeted that “we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel” and, in case anyone missed the point, added “This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.” For all the moral panic about resurgent antisemitism over the past several years, much of it aimed at Palestine solidarity activists on the left, nothing has encouraged the real thing quite like the Epstein files.
Faced with this old antisemitic trope of a wealthy, sexually perverse Jewish cabal that controls the interlocking worlds of finance, media, academia, and politics, we can bring a corrective clarity by pointing instead to capitalism itself as the conspiracy; we can also locate Epstein within a much broader and not distinctly Jewish elite network that is bound together not by a shared identity but by a deep misogyny and desire to protect powerful men from accountability for sexual misconduct and crimes. What’s less clear, however, is what to make of the many banal markers of Jewish identity that run through the story Epstein and his friends told about themselves. One can recognize a nostalgic, almost kitschy relationship to Jewish identity that plenty of ordinary Jews tend to indulge in. There are plenty of shocking revelations in the Epstein emails, but speaking as an American Jew myself, one of the most unsettling is just how familiar Epstein and his friends sometimes sound. How can we understand the ways that all this Jewish talk seems to have been put in service of Epstein’s pernicious ends?
Epstein joked about and referenced Jewishness compulsively in his correspondences, as did his interlocutors; the word “Jew” appears in hundreds of the emails released thus far, sometimes as an adjective rather than a noun (“I just had to send my plane to bring another lefty friend back from Athens to see a Jew doctor in New York,” he wrote in a 2015 email to Noam Chomsky). Epstein sometimes borrowed his friend Woody Allen’s gag from Annie Hall in which he would render phrases like “Do you?” or “And you?” as “Jew?” for instance in a 2018 email to Larry Summers. Epstein’s humble Coney Island youth also comes up frequently in his inbox. Hot dogs, boardwalks, amusement park rides, and the general markings of a seaside, blue-collar Jewish upbringing were all shared signifiers, and everyone who wrote Epstein seemed to understand that they were part of his whole schtick. So, too, was the distinction between Jews and “goyim,” both of whom were spoken of in stereotypical and derogatory ways. In this rhetorical world, Jews were at once the ultimate in-group and the ultimate outsiders, and Epstein relied on the power of this bond to cultivate friends who at the very least overlooked and covered for his crimes, and in some cases may have partaken themselves.
Epstein’s ability to charm his way into the ranks of the Jewish elite is evident from the earliest stages of his meteoric career in finance. According to a 2025 New York Times investigation detailing how Epstein acquired his wealth, his first big break came in 1976, when he was put in touch, via a parent at the elite Dalton School where he taught math, with Ace Greenberg, a top executive at Bear Stearns. Unlike the firms run by Ivy-educated blue bloods that historically dominated Wall Street and discriminated against Jews, Bear Steans was founded and led by Jews. Its leaders prided themselves on seeking scrappy young hires with modest pedigrees, and so Greenberg and another top executive, Michael Tennenbaum, offered the “bushy-haired” Epstein a job. Within a year, they discovered that Epstein had lied on his resume about having graduated college. When Tennenbaum asked him why he did it, Epstein said that without a degree, he knew no one would have given him a chance. Tennenbaum then recognized Epstein as a kindred spirit, a fellow ambitious outsider who deserved a shot at getting rich.
Though the Times story never explicitly mentions it, nearly every other key figure it identifies as instrumental in Epstein’s rise—including the Bear Stearns executives Jimmy Cayne and Clark Schubach; the British media baron Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine); Alan Dershowitz; the telecommunications executive Lynn Forester de Rothschild and her politician husband Andrew Stein; Les Wexner and his insurance executive friend Robert Meister; the former federal prosecutor Bob Gold; the stockbroker Kenneth Lipper; the private equity investor Leon Black; the journalist Edward Jay Epstein (no relation); and the debt collector and Ponzi schemer Steven Hoffenberg—is or was Jewish. The Times assiduously charts how Epstein relied on his talents as a networker and schmoozer to win over one person, who in turn he would convince to introduce him to the next, working his way higher and higher into a particular segment of the ruling class.
Like the late Bernie Madoff, the disgraced asset manager who stole around $65 billion from his overwhelmingly Jewish clients through “affinity fraud”—in which someone abuses the trust of people who share their cultural background—Epstein relied on his familiarity and legibility to Jewish elites. But whereas Madoff’s victims were those very same wealthy Jews he charmed, Epstein’s victims were untold numbers of teenage girls. While we don’t know the extent to which any given associate understood the full scope of the systematic violent exploitation Epstein oversaw, anyone emailing him after 2010 should have been aware that he had pleaded guilty to soliciting sex with a minor, and no one seems to have been very troubled by it. On the contrary, we see Epstein’s correspondents helping to protect him—as when, in between exchanging dick jokes, Chomsky counsels him on how to handle bad press—or even enlisting him as an adviser on manipulating women, as when Summers asks for advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship with his Harvard mentee.
But more than anything else, what the emails have put on display is Jewish clannishness—networks of friendship and favor-trading spanning decades and marking an ethnic community that experienced a dizzying rise over the course of a generation or two, all while relying on relationships with people of similar background and temperament to navigate the once-hostile corridors of power. Clannishness is not specific to Jews, of course; similar tendencies can be found in any ethnic group that has experienced discrimination. What is distinct is the sheer social distance so many American Jews traveled in the second half of the 20th century and how that mobility might be seen as bolstering a particular conspiracy theory about a secret Jewish clique that runs the world.
Epstein and his social circles were no less fascinated by that social ascent than any antisemite, and they had their own explanations, ranging from semi-serious folk wisdom to more elaborate and self-flattering theories about genetics. They were proud of how far they had made it and the wide-ranging forms of influence available to them; the creation of their own elite milieu was in some ways the point. Epstein, for instance, sat on the board of his friend Les Wexner’s foundation, which funded fellowships to train countless rabbis and Jewish professionals over decades. As Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of American Jewish history at NYU and a former Wexner fellow, told Jewish Currents last week, “The Wexner fellowship itself was about trying to create an elite class . . . [a] separate group that had access to networks, that had access to power, and could therefore do things that others couldn’t do.” That pretty well describes how Epstein and his many friends saw themselves.
Though the vast majority of American Jews bear no complicity in Epstein’s monstrous crimes, and we must resist any antisemitic insinuations to the contrary, it is worth interrogating how our own communal institutions and the culture of proud separateness that sustains them may have facilitated his rise. As Rep. Robert Garcia said after the Wexner’s deposition on Epstein, “There would be no Epstein Island, no Epstein plane, and no money to traffic women and girls without the wealth of Les Wexner.” Epstein wasn’t a global sex trafficker because he was a Jew, but a certain brand of Jewishness was the currency he used to make his crimes possible. There’s a thin line between affinity and conspiracy, and one of Epstein’s sordid legacies is to blur it.