Jeffrey Epstein: the ‘White Man’ Marches On
The marginalization of Jewishness in international blackmail and child trafficking.
In the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s exposure as a global architect of sexual exploitation and international blackmail, an unsettling pattern has emerged in academic and public discourses: the systematic marginalisation of Jewishness.
This rhetorical sleight‑of‑hand does more than obscure Epstein’s faith and heritage — it enacts a new modality of anti‑semitism by rendering Jewish identity invisible at precisely the moment it should be named and reckoned with.
A prime example can be found in the opening sentence of Professor of Social Justice Blanche Bong Cook’s 2023 article titled Jeffrey Epstein: Pedophiles, Prosecutors, and Power. She writes:
“Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy, white, billionaire child rapist, ran an international sex trafficking ring.”
She continues:
“The preferential treatment prosecutors conferred upon Epstein demonstrates prosecutors’ active involvement in the social construction of white supremacy, white heteropatriarchy, white innocence, and Black demonry. The failure to prosecute Epstein constructs white male ruling class innocence in the same way that hyperincarceration constructs Black guilt. Both are sides of the same hegemonic coin.”
In Cook’s formulation, the unmarked invocation of white functions as a discursive erasure of Epstein’s Jewishness, subsuming a specific heritage into a bland universal norm.
This move can be read as a form of symbolic annihilation: by designating Epstein simply as white, Cook effaces the historical and material realities of Jewish identity, relegating Jewishness to the margins of political discourse.
Moreover, this discursive legerdemain enacts epistemic violence against Jewish subjectivity. It divorces Epstein from the long‑standing continuum of anti-semitic exclusion: pogroms, conspiratorial tropes, human-skin lampshades and gas chambers.
This form of erasure operates through the very structures that critical race theory has long interrogated: language, narrative framing and the unspoken norms of what counts as the default white subject.
The result is a whitewashed narrative that perpetuates a hermeneutical injustice: readers are left without the conceptual tools to grasp how Jewishness itself manifests in, and interacts with, events in the geopolitical domain.
By de‑centring the term white and insisting on the specificity of Jewish identity, this short summation of the Epstein story aims to recover a fuller understanding of the Jewishness of the scandal. In so doing, it reframes the Epstein case not as a white narrative, but as one marked by the complex positionality of Jewishness within the matrix of US and global politics.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Jewishness is central to his crimes of blackmail and sex trafficking — all done in the service of the Jewish people through the conduit of Israeli intelligence.
Epstein was born in 1953 and grew up in Coney Island, New York. He lived in a private community called Sea Gate which had a Jewish presence for over a century. According to reports, Epstein’s family home was just across the street from the area’s oldest synagogue.
Epstein began working at the Dalton School in New York in September, 1974, aged 21, teaching physics and mathematics despite not having a college degree. He was given his post by Dalton’s Jewish headteacher Donald Barr who was apparently known for his willingness to hire “interesting” but inexperienced individuals. Donald Barr’s son William (Bill) Barr would later serve as US Attorney General under President Donald Trump, during which time Epstein would mysteriously die in prison (August 10th, 2019).
Epstein was dismissed from the Dalton school in 1976 due to “poor performance” and was then hired by the financial firm Bear Stearns. The company’s Jewish CEO Alan Greenberg appointed Epstein despite his having no Wall Street experience.
Epstein enjoyed a miraculous rise at Bear Stearns from low-level floor trader assistant to financial advisor. One of his clients was long-time Jewish philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, who was president of the World Jewish Congress from 1979 to 2007.
After leaving Bear Stearns because of financial irregularities, Epstein set up his own international consulting firm Intercontinental Assets Group in 1981 which helped to recover clients’ investments lost to fraud. It was during this time that Epstein admitted to being an intelligence agent and to having fake documents. A police raid decades later on his New York residency would find a fake Austrian passport. It featured Epstein’s picture and had numerous entrance and exit stamps for France, Spain, the UK and Saudi Arabia. Epstein’s lawyers would later argue that the fake passport was necessary because “as an affluent member of the Jewish faith” he risked being kidnapped while travelling.
In 1987, Epstein was hired as a consultant for Towers Financial Corporation by another Jew Steven Hoffenberg. Epstein was paid $25,000 per month for his work and regularly travelled with Hoffenberg on his private jet. This debt collection company would later be uncovered as a Ponzi scheme and Hoffenberg sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in defrauding investors of nearly $500 million. Hoffenberg later claimed Epstein was the architect of the fraud but Epstein was never charged in connection with it.
In 1988, Epstein established J. Epstein & Company, a supposed financial management firm for extremely wealthy clients. His only known billionaire client was Leslie Wexner, the Jewish chairman and CEO of lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret. Wexner is a philanthropist whose Wexner Foundation has provided millions of dollars to Jewish causes around the world, including Israel.
In 1991, Wexner granted Epstein full power of attorney over his affairs meaning he could fire people, buy and sell properties or borrow money on Wexner’s behalf. Epstein was appointed as director of the Wexner Foundation and president of Wexner’s Property. It was Wexner who gave Epstein the infamous Manhattan townhouse on 9 East 71st Street on the Upper East Side. Although by this time a multi-millionaire, those who knew Epstein remarked that they barely ever saw him work.
In 2004, Epstein and fellow Jewish media tycoon Mort Zuckerman invested $25 million in celebrity and pop culture magazine Radar which had been founded by Iranian Jew Maer Roshan.
Between 2005 and 2008, Epstein was heavily involved in high-risk investments through various hedge funds. As federal investigations over his involvement with underage girls were opened against him, Epstein invested $57 million in the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund which traded in mortgage-backed collateralised debt obligations. It was this type of activity that would lead to the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008 and the subsequent global financial crisis.
It is reported that in 2015, Epstein invested in startup Reporty Homeland Security which was connected to the Israeli defence industry. The company was led by former Israeli Prime Minister, Defence Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak who would stay with Epstein at his Manhattan apartment when in New York. The company’s CEO Amir Elihai and director Pinchas Bukhris were both involved in Israeli military and intelligence agencies. Epstein was known to have close ties with Israel’s military and research sector and visited military bases there in 2008. His Jewish publicist Peggy Siegal is quoted as having said that Epstein’s “two big charitable causes are science and Israel.”
Barak would visit Epstein dozens of times even after his conviction for child abuse. Epstein and Barak reportedly met every month for 11 consecutive months beginning in December 2015. It is alleged that at least one girl was coerced into having sex with Barak.
Barak was one of many prominent Jews whose names featured on a private calendar owned by Epstein. Others included the filmmaker Woody Allen, linguist Noam Chomsky and Bard College president Leon Botstein who also met with Epstein following his abuse convictions. Epstein also had dozens of meetings with Ariane de Rothschild of the Jewish banking family.
Epstein relied on the help of a number of Jewish lawyers during his numerous state and federal cases, most famously Alan Dershowitz who negotiated Epstein’s 2007 plea deal. This deal was agreed to by then US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta, who later said that he had signed off on it because Epstein “belonged to intelligence”.
Questions over exactly what Epstein himself, or his businesses, actually did followed him throughout his “career”. The Jewish journalist and gossip columnist Michael Wolff described a visit to Epstein’s Villard House offices in Madison Avenue, New York:
“It’s an incredibly strange place. It has no corporate affect at all. It’s almost European. It’s old—old-fashioned, unrehabbed in its way…the trading floor is filled with guys in yarmulkes. Who they are, I have no idea. They’re like a throwback, a bunch of guys from the fifties. So here is Jeffrey in this incredibly beautiful office, with pieces of art and a view of the courtyard, and he seems like the most relaxed guy in the world. You want to say ‘What’s going on here?’ and he gives you that Cheshire smile.”
The legitimacy of Epstein’s status as a businessman or financier is highly questionable. It is alleged that Epstein was funded by the Mega Group, a coterie of Jewish money men including Leslie Wexner, Charles Bronfman, Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson (d. 2021), Paul Singer and Ronald Lauder. The inspiration for the Mega group is considered to be Sam Bronfman — father of Charles and Edgar — a 1930s liquor magnate who had close ties with Jewish gangster Meyer Lanksy. Sam Bronfman was implicated in the illegal shipping of arms to Jewish terrorists in Palestine prior to the founding of Israel in 1948.
In 1986, Ronald Lauder (whose parents established the Estee Lauder cosmetics giant) was appointed as the US ambassador to Austria, the country from which Epstein’s fake passport was issued. Lauder is a long-time financial benefactor of the Israeli university IDC Herzliya which has close ties to Israeli intelligence.
Mega group member Max Fisher founded the pro-Israel neoconservative lobbying group the Republican Jewish Coalition. Two of its biggest donors — Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus — also provided significant financial support for Donald Trump.
Criminal cases against Epstein for child sex ran from 2005 until his supposed death in 2019. A central figure in his sex trafficking and abuse operations was Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of media baron and Israeli spy Robert Maxwell, a Jew born in Czechoslovakia who made his fortune in the UK. Maxwell (originally called Jan Ludvick Hoch) was buried on the Mount of Olives in Israel following his mysterious death in 1991. It was later discovered that Maxwell had stolen £460 million from the pension funds attached to his companies, leaving thousands of employees without retirement payments. Ghislaine Maxwell has herself identified as being Jewish and is reported to be receiving support from Jewish organisations in prison.
It is claimed that Ghislaine Maxwell was Epstein’s pimp whose main job it was to procure girls for the blackmail operation. It is also alleged that Maxwell herself engaged in the rape of some of the girls. In 2021 she was tried and found guilty of five of six counts of sex trafficking of a minor, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and three related counts of conspiracy. The judge in the trial, Jewish lesbian Alison Nathan, agreed to keep certain details of the case a secret because they were too “sensational and impure” for public consumption.
One of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s victims Maria Farmer spoke in an interview of their Jewish supremacy and that of others in their orbit. She said:
“I wasn’t allowed to go get food. When I called Ghislaine and asked why I couldn’t eat there she said, ‘It’s a Jewish country club. You’re not Jewish, they’re not going to serve you.’ This is how this woman spoke to me. This is how these people think…they honest-to-God think their DNA is better than everybody else’s… It was a theme all the time with them, with Eileen Guggenheim, with Jeffrey Epstein, with Ghislaine — it was a theme… They could cut you down and it was so morally devastating… you just felt useless as a human being.”
The erasure of Jewishness from dominant narratives surrounding Epstein and his network is not a neutral omission but a discursive subterfuge. Just as critical race theory compels us to foreground the racialised operations of power, it likewise necessitates attention to how Jewish identity functions within intersecting regimes of politics and privilege.
By refusing the flattening gestures of universal whiteness, we begin to surface the occluded vectors of complicity, agency and affiliation that buttress Jewish power.
https://therighttodissent.substack.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-the-white-man-marches