Martin Scorsese’s sordid, obscene, spiritedly profane, and epically hilarious new film The Wolf of Wall Street is an unflinching depiction of unfettered greed and unrestrained sleaze amongst the ethically challenged and the morally retarded. Yet as comprehensive a catalogue of depravity as the movie is (clocking in at a near three-hour running time), there is a significant piece missing. For one reason or another, Scorsese has rendered protagonist Jordan Belfort’s Jewish identity cryptic at best.

Indeed, the character played by the hardly hymie-looking Leonardo DiCaprio– with his highly goyische sounding surname– registers to the audience as little but a sort of debauched (white) American everyman, living every man’s debauched American dream of nonstop wealth, luxury, booze, drugs and sex, without enduring any intrusions of remorse or pesky pangs of regret. As a brilliant, tenacious, and relentlessly driven stockbroker selling crappy investments to the terminally gullible, Belfort is utterly unprincipled; in fact, he feels nothing but scorn for the poor schmucks he is screwing over; they mean nothing to him as people, but are only a means towards achieving his own ends of obtaining money, status, power, and carnal gratification.

In fact, our wretched protagonist isn’t just indifferent to his victims; rather, he takes a positive pleasure in humiliating them. In one memorable scene, which manages to be both uproariously funny and painfully disturbing, Belfort cracks up his coworkers by flagrantly giving a middle-finger to one poor schlub he has on speakerphone, a man whom Belfort has just conned into giving his life savings away to an utterly worthless entity. Given Jordan’s overall absence of compassion or conscience, such a gesture of contempt does not in the least surprise us, nor is this an isolated manifestation of his unscrupulous malice and boundless spite. At other points throughout the film, Belfort engages in numerous sordid marital infidelities and chemical indulgences—at one point combining each of these peccadillos at once by snorting coke from the buttcrack of a naked hooker—and never seems to feel bad afterwards, not even when caught in flagrante delicto by his own wife during a tryst with a shiksa floozy (later to become his second wife) in the backseat of a limousine. Yet much as we are shown the full extent of his depredations, we never learn how or why Belfort came to be the way that he is.

Explanations of character are never simple. However, it seems that, judging from his own words, the real Belfort felt inspired to “break bad” due to deeply-seated ressentiment against the gentile society from which he felt himself to be an outsider. He even admits as much in plain terms in the autobiography upon which the movie is based. As Rob Eshman at the Jewish Journal observes:

Belfort didn’t grow up poor by any means, he just wasn’t rich enough. The hole in him wasn’t from poverty, but from desire for acceptance. The “blue-blooded WASPs,” Belfort writes, “viewed me as a young Jewish circus attraction.”

Belfort had a chip on his shoulder the size of a polo pony, and so did everyone he recruited. They were, he writes, “the most savage young Jews anywhere on Long Island: the towns of Jericho and Syosset. It was from out of the very marrow of these two upper-middle-class Jewish ghettos that the bulk of my first hundred Strattonites had come….”

Perhaps this “Shyclockian” angle—cunning, vengeful Jew with hatred in his heart against the goyim– was too radioactive a through-line for Scorsese to pursue, or to render explicit?

My criticism on this front is more than tempered by admiration, of course; I speak, to be sure, as a Scorsese fan of the highest order. Over the course of his storied career, the venerable septuagenarian and current elder statesman of American cinema has generally been fearless, never afraid to plumb the depths of his subject matter in a fashion that is quite often shockingly un- PC. But Scorsese the artist has occasionally given way to Scorsese the shrewdly politic and canny self-promoter. Quentin Tarantino complained that Scorsese wimped out by making the repulsive urban pimps in Taxi Driver white rather than black, which they would certainly be in any realistic portrayal of New York city criminal life. In The Wolf of Wall Street, the only hint we have of Belfort’s ethnic identity are his lovable but clueless parents (Rob Reiner and Christine Ebersole) with their unmistakably Jewy appearance and oy vey-ish affectations. While the Taxi Driver affirmative-action casting was egregious, we at least got Harvey Keitel’s virtuoso performance out of the bargain. With Wolf, deleting Jordan’s Jewishness leaves out a critical aspect of understanding his character, as the real Jordan’s own testimony attests.

What makes this move more puzzling is the fact that Jonah Hill, who plays Belford’s best friend and partner-in-crime Donnie Azoff, is so garishly Jewish—and personally repulsive and physically ugly, to boot– that he’s veritable anti-Defamation League bait. Maybe it’s less problematic to have a loathsome sidekick who happens to be a Jew than to have an anti-hero who’s very anti-heroism is in some way rooted in his Jewish identity and heritage? Oy, the humanity.

Andy Nowicki, co-editor of Alternative Right, is the author of six books, including Lost Violent Souls, Heart Killer and The Columbine Pilgrim. He occasionally updates his blog (www.andynowicki.blogspot.com) when the spirit moves him to do so.

Behind the gleaming black-glass facade of the sprawling office building, on a sales floor almost the size of a football pitch, a pretty young woman sat on a wooden stool, wearing only a bikini as she faced the collective scrutiny of hundreds of her colleagues.

Outnumbering the women by ten to one, the men stood baying in their sharp suits and crisp shirts as they relished this latest in a long line of tasteless spectacles that punctuated their working lives.

Today this semi-clad office junior was having her long blonde hair shaved off in return for the cash she needed for a breast enlargement operation.

Previous depravities had included a dwarf-tossing contest, and betting on whether a senior manager would dare to gulp down a live goldfish. Unfortunately for the fish, that manager did go through with it.

But then, at the corrupt American stockbroking firm of Stratton Oakmont, there was no telling what each day might bring.

This was a workplace where the staff were encouraged to snort cocaine, consort with prostitutes who worked the underground car park, and have sex with each other in the company’s glass-walled lift.

Anything went as long as it kept the hungry young sales staff selling the dodgy investments which made millions of dollars each day for their boss Jordan Belfort, himself only in his early 30s.

In 1999, Belfort would be found guilty of swindling investors out of $200 million (£120 million) and sentenced to 22 months in prison, but until then he indulged in a life of astonishing excess.

Confessing that he had taken enough drugs ‘to sedate Guatemala’, he once insisted on an ill-advised sailing trip while high and wrote off both his 167ft yacht and personal helicopter in one afternoon.

He boasted of having made love to his wife on a ‘mattress’ of $3 million, made up of stacks of $100 notes, and slept with hundreds of call-girls in luxury hotel suites across the world.

Some were so ‘high-class’ that they took only credit cards but what they charged didn’t matter to Belfort, a man who was raking in the dollar equivalent of £30 million a year by his late 20s and once made £7 million in just three minutes.

Now, inevitably, Hollywood has taken up his story.

Taking the nickname in which he rejoiced as its title, the new Martin Scorsese film The Wolf Of Wall Street sees Belfort played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has likened his character’s penchant for humiliating public spectacle and debauchery to that of Ancient Rome’s most dissolute Emperor.

‘He was like a modern-day Caligula,’ DiCaprio said. ‘He held nothing back. He was unapologetic about his lust for wealth and his mad consumption.’

In one scene, crumpled-up $100 bills are tossed into rubbish bins in an extravagant parody of basketball.

In another, a bikini-clad woman has great wads of cash taped around her body, ready to be covered up by her clothes so that she can smuggle it out of the country and into Swiss bank accounts.

But even so, the film may struggle to capture the true scale of Belfort’s fast living.

As Belfort admits in the memoirs which inspired the movie, much of that consumption was a playing out of his adolescent fantasies.

Upon making his first million, he bought a white Ferrari Testarossa, the exact make and colour of car he had seen Don Johnson drive in Miami Vice, his favourite TV show when he was growing up in a tough working-class neighbourhood in Queens, New York.

Born in 1962, the son of two accountants, he hawked ice-creams on the beach as a teenager and then sold meat and seafood door-to-door before finding far more profitable outlets for his salesmanship on Wall Street.

In May 1987, he joined the investment banking firm of L. F. Rothschild, cold-calling companies to find potential clients for its brokers.

On his first day, he was taken to lunch in Rothschild’s penthouse restaurant by his boss, who brazenly snorted cocaine at the table and recommended it as a means of making Belfort ‘dial faster’.

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