When Jeffrey Epstein turned 50 in 2003, his then-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell assembled a 238-page tribute album to mark the occasion. The so-called birthday book, handed over by Epstein’s estate to the House Oversight Committee and made public this week, is lurid and unsettling: filled with crude drawings of women’s bodies, tales of sexual conquest, and notes from powerful friends who seemed to celebrate rather than recoil at his predation.

Amid the misogyny, however, runs another, less examined thread: traces of Epstein’s Jewish identity. The book reveals his Jewish name, Yudel; shows him squeezing an accordion at a bar mitzvah; records a family trip to Israel in 1985; and contains affectionate notes from childhood friends who grew up with him in the Jewish enclave of Sea Gate, Brooklyn

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