“Real life conspiracies pose a certain challenge for political analysis,” wrote Jewish Currents contributors Noah Kulwin and Ari Brostoff in their 2019 piece on Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker, financier, and international rainmaker. As recently reported in a series of articles at Drop Site News, Epstein had close ties to the Israeli intelligence community, and frequently brokered meetings for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, including meetings that resulted in the establishment of security ties with Mongolia and the sale of mass surveillance infrastructure to Cote d’Ivoire’s authoritarian government. What do these revelations tell us about the flows of power and money across the billionaire class? And what do we do with the extent to which Epstein’s story reads like an antisemitic conspiracy come to life? To explore these questions, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel spoke with Kulwin, a co-host of Blowback, a podcast about US empire and interventionism, and Ryan Grim, co-founder of Drop Site News and the co-author of multiple recent reports about Epstein.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Articles and Media Mentioned and Further Reading

Drop Site reporting on “Epstein and Israel” by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussein

“The Right Kind of Continuity,” Ari Brostoff and Noah Kulwin, Jewish Currents

“The worst thing about Davos? The Masters of the Universe think they are do-gooders,” Hamilton Nolan, The Guardian

Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence by James Bamford

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

Doppleganger by Naomi Klein

The art of Marc Lombardi

“Jeffrey Epstein Claimed to Have Meddled in Israel’s Elections,” Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

“JPMorgan Alerted U.S. to Epstein Transfers Involving Wall St. Figures,” Matthew Goldstein, David Enrich, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Steve Eder, The New York Times

“The Book of Epstein,” Chapo Trap House

Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers by Gus Russo