Europe

Wowza! Apparently they buy buildings in Paris too.

Naturally, it's a bunch of burly American I-bankers who made the biggest single-asset deal in European history.

Lehman Brothers has purchased Coeur Defense, a series of five buildings, from Goldman Sachs for 2.11 billion euros, or $2.8 billion U.S. dollars. It's a record for the overseas bunch.

Cushman & Wakefield, which also advised the biggest single-building sale ever in U.S. history at 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, advised Lehman Brothers in this deal.  read more »

Full release after the jump.

- John Koblin

My people came to this country in the ten years either side of 1900. They were afraid of the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, they came from Poland, Bukovina, Bialystok, to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.

Some day someone should make a Schindler's List-like movie of the guy who helped bring us out. It was Jacob Henry Schiff (1847-1920). Schiff was a great Jewish hero, there should be statues to this guy. He was the head of Kuhn, Loeb, and rivaled J.P. Morgan, and Lord Rothschild, and Bleichroder, as the most powerful banker in the world.

I'm reading a great book, To Free a People (1982), by Gary Dean Best, a professor of history emeritus at University of Hawai'i. It's about the efforts by American Jewish leaders to stop the pogroms in Europe and to ease the situation of Jews there. It's about the birth of the Jewish lobby. "In the quarter century between 1890 and 1914 the American Jewish leaders forged the foundation for a strong American Jewish lobby which significantly influenced American foreign policy toward eastern Europe...and served as the basis for the powerful present-day American Jewish lobby," Best writes.

The lobby then comprised Schiff and a few other bankers, who gained access to the president whenever they wanted it, and also Simon Wolf, of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. These bankers were warned early on that it was better to operate "diplomatically," i.e. behind closed doors, than for Jews to have mass meetings—rallies, which would piss off the Russians and Roumanians who were persecuting my ancestors. So that's what they did generally, they had private meetings. (Though rallies would play a role over the years.)

Best shows that while American Jews were able to influence American policy, American statements, they were only moderately successful in actually influencing Russia. Though, yes, they kept up the flow of emigration. At one point, Simon Wolf made the following boast, to a Russian diplomat:

Russia at this juncture needs two important elements to inspire its future prosperity and happiness: money and friends. The Jews of the world, as citizens of their respective countries, control much of the first and would make a magnificent army of the latter. There is no use disguising the fact that in the United States especially the Jews form an important factor in the formation of public opinion and in the control of finances... By virtue of their mercantile and financial standing in this country they are exercising an all potent and powerful influence...

This was not an idle boast. Best says that in the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05, Schiff played a powerful role in defeating the Russian forces by acting to block their access to capital in Europe and America, and meantime floating bond after bond, into the hundreds of millions, for the Japanese.

All because of Russian persecution of Jews. I love this guy.

Obviously I am bringing this up to talk about the present day. Schiff waffled on Zionism, as so many German Jews did. Ultimately he helped out. Today the Israel lobby is devoted not to stopping the persecution of the Jews but to the militarization of the Jewish state and defense of the occupation. Toughdove and other Peace Now Jews are against that lobby, and good for them. They know better than I do the horrors of the occupation, and are trying to end it. Where we differ is that I think the Israel lobby has profoundly influenced American foreign policy, and hurt it. They say that's preposterous, Jews don't have that kind of power. Gary Dean Best, a scholar, says that we do.

Antisemites have scorched the earth for any intellectual discussion of this—that is the belief of the toughdoves. I take their point. I don't want more Jewish persecution to emerge from what Albert Lindemann, another fine scholar, calls the "rise of the Jews." But I'm betting that we can have that conversation in America without persecution, and we need to. Undeceiving ourselves about our rise, undeceiving ourselves about our influence on policy seem to me essential elements of an essential conversation: Why Are We In Iraq?

The Castle in the Forest, by Norman Mailer. Random House, 477 pages, $27.95.    read more »

Cushman & Wakefield, one of the biggest commercial brokerages in New York City, has called a press conference at 10:30 on Tuesday morning at the Rainbow Room. A spokesperson for the brokerage told The Real Estate that "big news" would be announced, possibly involving a merger or acquisition.

Will this press conference have an Italian flavor? Or will last-minute rumors about Vornado buying Cushman pan out?  read more »

UPDATE: The IFIL Group, controlled by the the Agnelli family, will buy a 67.5 percent stake of Cushman & Wakefield for $563 million. The release after the jump and details to follow. - Tom Acitelli & John Koblin

At last week's conference on "Freud's Jewish World" at the Center for Jewish History, two scholars talked about journalism. Freud lived an upper middle class life in Vienna, and until he fled Nazism as a dying man, he read the paper that all professionals read: the Neue Freie Presse (pronounced, Noi-a Fry-a Press-a).

The NFP was the NYT of Europe, said Leo Lensing of Wesleyan. It was the most powerful newspaper in the continent, and maybe the world. Holding up a yellowed copy of what he called "the prayer book of cultured people everywhere," Lensing said that the NFP was written mostly by Jews, and written for Jews, too: the new professional German-speaking class in that great vanished arc of Central Europe, from Berlin to Prague to Vienna to Budapest. Kafka read it, too.

"Very few of us have any idea how powerful its editor was," Lensing said. Moritz Benedick was thought to be the second most powerful man in Austria after the Kaiser, Franz Josef. Once when the Kaiser couldn't see Bismarck, he fobbed him off to Benedick.

Fredric Morton, the moderator of the panel, said the paper's importance could be gauged by the role it had played in the history of Zionism. Theodor Herzl was the cultural editor of the paper, and "he used his position to gain access to the great personages of his day"—Kaiser Franz Josef, the Sultan of Turkey, Baron de Hirsch, and Lord Rothschild—to push his fantasy of the Jewish state.

Lensing chimed in that Herzl's editor Benedick was so conflicted about Zionism that he "strictly forbade" the mention of it in his newspaper. The word never appeared there. "With one exception," said Morton: in Herzl's obituary in 1904, and then in a late paragraph. Wow.

A few comments.

—On-line encyclopeidas say that the Neue Freie Presse ceased publication, merging with another paper, the same year Freud died, 1939. The most powerful newspaper in the world, out of business. Shows why Jews regard their position as precarious.

—Re: the hidden agenda of the paper's cultural editor. Journalists today would see Herzl's access-seeking conduct as completely unethical. I'd add that if you read Herzl's masterpiece, The Jewish State, it seems somewhat sketchy 110 years on. It is a scheme to end the Jewish problem by ethnically cleansing Europe of Jews—taking care to replace the financial capital Europe would lose, and working with the antisemites to perfect a "colonization" scheme, colonization being one of Herzl's favorite words. The book is glibly written, spends more time considering the problem of wild animals in the territory than it does that of Arabs, in sum is just what you would expect of an important, busy journalist. A vital manifesto for a movement; but not a serious piece of moral or political philosophy. Though of course Theodor Herzl was exalted, tragically, by the Holocaust, which showed him to have great, negative vision.

—The position of the Neue Freie Presse on Jewish questions reminds me of The New York Times. Zionism also made Establishment Reform Jewry in the U.S. uncomfortable; these important men felt, Look, we Jews are not a nation, and we don't want to leave the U.S., we like it here. Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was opposed to Zionism out of fear that Jews would be charged with dual loyalty. Such a concern was surely part of the reason the Times posted only gentile correspondents in Israel, a policy that I believe ended in the 80s. By then the dual loyalty charge had (it was felt) been laid to rest. Louis D. Brandeis had shown that that you could be a good American and a good Zionist, and there was no conflict of interest.

It's interesting how much the politics have changed. Today Israel is a fact and Jews are broadly included in the power structure; and if you even mention the old Reform Jews' universalist concern that Zionism would cause a confusion of American interests with Israel's, you're labeled an anti-Semite. These days, realist critics of our Middle East policy have managed to put the issue in our discourse, by saying that the Israel lobby is not acting in America's best interest; in their landmark paper, Walt and Mearsheimer used as evidence a statement former NYT editor Max Frankel made in his autobio, when he said that he used the Times editorial pages to bang the drum for Israel.

Establishment Jews would seem to feel as conflicted as ever over their place in American life; today the NYT, the most powerful newspaper in the world, basically ignores the issue of the Israel lobby. Not altogether different from the NFP refusing to cover a movement that one of its writers was quietly furthering.

The movie Borat is a lot of things, a comic triumph, mean, weirdly Tocquevillian. It is filled with anti-semitic humor, and I admit I laughed. But there is also something really scary about the film, and that seems to me the takeaway, if you are Jewish (which the maker, Sacha Baron Cohen, is): the feeling that it could happen here, pogroms could happen in the United States in about ten seconds.

The U.S. portrait Borat offers is of an ignorant redneck land pulsating with unexamined prejudice. A crowd at a rodeo cheer when Borat gives a speech about killing every woman and child in Iraq. College students who pick him up hitchhiking are pleased to talk about the power of Jews in America. His image of Christians at a revival meeting—crazies. And into this world comes Borat, from a village in eastern Europe, not far from the old Pale of Settlement, talking about Jews and money. When he shows us his village's annual festival of the Running of the Jew, culminating in the destruction of the Jew egg, the Jew baby, the American audience you're sitting with is laughing.

It felt to me like a test. Borat was saying, Watch, I will bring virulent anti-Semitism from eastern Europe to the liberal utopia, and people here will eat it up. These ignorant people too can turn into cossacks under the right circumstances.

I don't agree with Borat on this. I think America is too liberal, too diverse and too loving of its diversity, to fall for such a thing. But I got a chill alright.

Who’s responsible for mounting the superb exhibition devoted to the paintings, drawings, print  read more »

Goading Galbraith

To the Editor:  read more »

It’s always seemed to me that groups that have suffered from discrimination—Jews, women,  read more »

From The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick (1999):

"In the Jewish tradition, some memories are very long lasting... Some memories, once functional, become dysfunctional. The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther tell of the queen's soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews' armed enemies but the enemies' wives and children—with a final death toll of seventy-five thousand. These 'memories' provided gratifying revenge fantasies to the Jews of medieval Europe; in the present era of ecumenism these chapters have simply disappeared from Purim commemoration; most American Jews today are probably unaware that they exist."

I was unaware. I used to wind my noisemaker around everytime the hated name Haman was said, Haman who plotted to kill all the Jews throughout the Persian kingdom, from Ethiopia to India...

From the Book of Esther:

[T]he king granted the Jews who were in every city to gather themselves together, and to defend their life, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them, their little ones and women... The other Jews who were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, defended their lives, had rest from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of those who hated them; but they didn't lay their hand on the plunder.

You’ve got to hand it to an artist who could even conceive of an erotic burrito, and then must  read more »

Throughout his elegant and compact sequence of espionage novels set in the Europe of the 1930’  read more »

Throughout his elegant and compact sequence of espionage novels set in the Europe of the 1930’s an  read more »

I went to a friend's son's bar mitzvah on Saturday and in some part because of my blog, and its discussion of Jewish politics, felt a little alienated. I forgot to get a yarmulke, then I ran to get one. I wondered who if anyone there had seen my ideas. Later, at the reception, I got into a discussion about these issues with an old friend, who was joined by a friend of his.

My friend said he was a secular Jew and asked me how I define myself. An assimilating Jew, I said. Shortly after that, his friend said, I don't know what an assimilating Jew is, and walked away.  read more »

She's called Dusseldorf! And we're lucky to have the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia as our sister city.

Soon, a newly-minted New York-Dusseldorf marketing partnership will mean ads on bus shelters and on the Staten Island Ferry. We're doing some shit over there, too. It'll be easy since all of the major ad firms in Europe have hubs there.

"Dusseldorf is continuously getting more popular. More and more, US citizens are recognizing the attractiveness of Dusseldorf. I'm sure that with this cooperation, we will tempt even more New Yorkers to Dusseldorf", was the quote from Dusseldorf's Lord Mayor Joachim Erwin at a meeting with Mayor Bloomberg in City Hall.

Wikipedia says:

Dusseldorf is not only widely known as a stronghold of the German advertising and fashion industry. In the last few years the city on the Rhine has become a top telecommunications center in Germany. It is commonly referred to as the world's best city.

(Umm, Lord Mayor Erwin: Did you write that?)  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

"If you had told me we would have had this many people for a friggin' mortgage company opening--give me a break," said Donald Trump, speaking to several hundred people crammed into a lower level space at Trump Tower.

It's not typical that an 11 a.m. mortgage company launch could turn into a media circus.

"When Don [Trump, Jr.] and I struck the deal, we said, 'We'll have a new conference," continued Mr. Trump. "What we didn't expect was Extra!, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, and some of the other folks up here. Take a look Lois--my friend Lois [Weiss] from the New York Post."

Mr. Trump was joined by E.J. Ridings , the new company's President and CEO, and his son, who is also involved in the project. Sadly, Ivanka--who was scheduled to attend--didn't show up.

"The business they're doing is unbelievable," said Mr. Trump in typically, grandiose fashion. "Literally, we signed the lease a few months ago, they are going to take an additional floor."

And to appease the audience that was packed together (and the tourists riding up and down the escalator overhead, snapping photos on cell phones), Mr. Trump uttered the famous phrase. He told Mr. Ridings that the company needs to keep up with the current pace, or else....

"If it's not, E.J., You're fired!"

After Mr. Trump's short speech, the motley crew of reporters--ranging from Life & Style to National Mortgage News--pushed up to the stage where the developer was fielding questions.  read more »

So it’s not really on the beat, but I can’t help noting, with Belarus in the headlines for the first time in years, that its dictator had impeccable timing last time he rigged an election.

I was covering the Eastern European country, known as "Europe’s last dictatorship," back in September 2001. The autocrat, Alexander Lukashenko, "won" reelection on September 9, 2001, to wide international criticism. It was a depressing scene, as I wrote at the time. But the U.S. and Europe were starting to talk about ramping up the pressure on him.

Two days later came 9/11, and tinpot Eastern European dictators were the the least of anybody’s worries.

Anyway, for the two people who are interested, here’s a Belarus blog with some links.

“Bergman said the worst thing would be to die on a sunny day,” said Woody Allen on Dec.  read more »

A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage.  read more »

A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage.  read more »

Americans should not take unseemly unsatisfaction from the spectacle of France’s riots.  read more »

It’s easy to forget that in the early 1960’s, when the Beatles and their Brit-pop clones  read more »

In April 2004, gallery owner Barbara Gladstone signed a contract at Richard Meier's latest residential project, 165 Charles Street, as reported a few months later by New York magazine. Well, the deal finally closed earlier this month for $4.75 million, according to deed transfer records. (Ms. Gladstone is in Europe and could not be reached for comment.

After the success of Mr. Meier's two Perry Street condominiums, the 16-story glass and white metal tower under construction near the Hudson River has been watched closely in both real-estate and art world circles. The latter can be attributed to the sleek design, and possibly because the building included its own curator, Lehman Maupin Gallery. Larry Gagosian even dropped by a reception in one of the sample apartments, as Artforum reported.  read more »

Ms. Gladstone is not the first art world big shot to grab a pre-construction deal. Magazine publisher Louise T. Blouin MacBain reportedly signed a contract for the $20 million duplex penthouse. Incidentally, that's over $4,500 per square-foot. Formerly head of Phillips, de Pury and Company, Ms. MacBain owns industry standards, including Art & Auction, Modern Painters, and Gallery Guide.

-Michael Calderone

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous. Metropolitan, 261 pages, $23.  read more »

Until I Find You: A Novel, by John Irving.  read more »

Until I Find You: A Novel, by John Irving. Random House, 824 pages, $27.95  read more »

Three weeks ago, on a Thursday, shortly after lunch service at Oceana, the elegant seafood restauran  read more »

Lou Dobbs, who has his own somewhat idiopathic show on CNN, hovers somewhere between avuncular and g  read more »

Harvard president Lawrence H.  read more »

"But you don't look American." "Where are you really from?" "Where were your parents born?" I've hea  read more »

Some artists are destined to endure the hazards of "interesting times," and Max Ernst (1891-1976) wa  read more »

A few years ago, I asked Sir Peter Jonas, the longtime head of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich,  read more »

The current exhibition at Achim Moeller Fine Art- Lyonel Feininger/Mark Tobey: Years of Friendship,  read more »

August on Bleecker Street:Summery Mediterranean Fare  read more »

As the country buckles down under repeated government warnings of terrorist attacks from Al Qaeda an  read more »

We thought it was finished.  read more »

Italian Futurism-the Futurism now on display in the Guggenheim's oddly organized Boccioni's Materia:  read more »

Why is the disease threatening our health and our economy called "mad cow"?  read more »

Back in the 1950's, when the Paris art world was rudely awakened to the existence of the Abstract Ex  read more »

Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, by Eric Hobsbawm.  read more »

Platform, by Michel Houellebecq. Alfred A.  read more »

A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World , by Will Hutton. W.W.  read more »

I was having lunch with an earnest socialist who is right as rain on the terror war.  read more »

"For now it is not Iraq, a minor Middle Eastern power, that is in potential defiance of the U.N.  read more »

It wasn't only in London, Paris and Berlin that hundreds of thousands took to the streets on Saturda  read more »

Our delightful friends, the Saudi Arabians, are making plans to disinvite our troops from their soil  read more »

Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order , by Robert Kagan. Alfred A.  read more »

On a recent afternoon, the telephone rang in Oriana Fallaci's Manhattan townhouse.  read more »

Twelve years ago, as bombers were softening up the Iraqi Republican Guard and American generals were  read more »

Almost all the obituaries of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn called him "far-right." Fortuyn was a prof  read more »