Yesterday’s newsletter mentioned the play The Lehman Trilogy, based on the story of the founders of the Lehman Brothers banking firm, and cited a review calling attention to its thinly veiled anti-Semitism and serious departures from the truth. For the actual story of some of America’s great Jewish financiers and the roles they played as leaders of U.S. Jewry, one might turn to The Money Kings, by Daniel Schulman. In his review, Allan Arkush focuses on one in particular: Jacob Schiff, who in his day was one of the foremost Jewish philanthropists:

In tandem with his efforts to help migrants, Schiff sought to alleviate the conditions that motivated them to leave the tsarist Empire for the United States in the first place. Already in 1891, he was meeting with President Benjamin Harrison (together with Oscar Straus and Joseph Seligman’s brother Jesse) to seek his administration’s support for Russian Jewry. Twelve years later, in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, he unsuccessfully badgered Theodore Roosevelt to take punitive commercial action against Russia if it didn’t cease to discriminate against American Jews traveling in its territory.

Soon thereafter, during the Russo-Japanese War, Schiff played “a decisive financial role” by taking up half of a Japanese bond issue at a time when other financiers were unwilling to do so. He spent $25 million (the equivalent of almost a billion dollars today). Schiff took this action at least in part to punish Russia for its treatment of its Jews and received from the Japanese emperor the “Second Order of the Sacred Treasure” for his investment.

Schiff continued to hammer away at the regime he loathed and eventually enjoyed a limited measure of success. In 1911, after failing to convince President William Howard Taft to break the U.S. commercial treaty with Russia, he launched a public campaign through the American Jewish Committee “to mobilize public opinion behind a legislative effort to invalidate the treaty.” It worked. Congress voted overwhelmingly to do so, and the president’s hand was forced. On January 1, 1912, he pulled the U.S. out of the treaty.

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.