Suddenly, as if on cue, who should enter the gallery but Joseph Cohen, chairman of Cowen and Company and for over twenty years one of the luminaries of American finance.

In business, as elsewhere in life, there are people who have the title, and then there are people who are really in charge. The Queen of England does nothing; the Prime Minister is the boss. Similarly, most chairmen of huge companies decide little more than which color to wear when having their photos taken with the color-coordinated chairmen of other large entities. In Joe Cohen’s case, however, as I’d been told by almost everyone at Cowen, this was not the case. Joe Cohen was the boss. What he said went. And apparently on all major decisions, like whom to take public, he had something to say. As the Cowen people were falling over themselves introducing their chairman and trying to say nice things about us in the process, I was determined to make a good impression and seal the deal.

Now, there are two ways in life to make an impression. The first is to conform to the appropriate norms of a given situation: Dress like everyone else, speak deferentially, and show you belong. The second is in some way to break with conformity and establish yourself as a unique individual. This is the more risky path. The trick is to let people know you’re an honest and uniquely independent person who can probably do unusual things and who has to be treated as an equal. At the same time, you have to be earnest, charming, and self-deprecating enough that people’s reaction is to be charmed by your folksiness rather than put on the defensive by your nonconformity. As I said, this is the more risky path. It’s the one I almost always follow and tonight it was going to backfire big-time.

Since I figured that, judging from his name, Joe Cohen was one of the few Jews to actually chair a major Wall Street firm, I decided to try to put him at ease and confront the issue of my own obvious religiosity head-on.

Noting that his name was Cohen and the firm’s name was Cowen, could it be, I suggested, that the name of the firm had been changed to make it more acceptable? “No,” he replied, without smiling. The firm was named after its original founders and had been so called for close to a century. He was unrelated to the founders in any way. As I looked at this perfectly tailored and manicured poster person for American finance, I could tell I had made a major faux pas by playing the ethnic card. In a situation like this a normal person’s reaction would be to politely end this line of conversation and change the topic quickly before he buries himself for good. I clearly have a screw loose, however, and decided to plunge headlong into the abyss I’d just created by telling the most inappropriate ethnic joke one could come up with under the circumstances.

“Well, Mr. Cohen,” I went on. “Your firm’s name reminds me of an old story. A poor Jew in London was, for many years, the shamass [caretaker] of an old synagogue. Every day he’d dutifully fold the tallesim [prayer shawls], put away the siddurim [prayerbooks], and otherwise clean up and look after the place. One day, however, an educated young rabbi determined to reinvigorate the aging congregation with a new ‘modern’ approach, took over from his aging predecessor who had held the position for over half a century. On the job for less than three days, he asked the old shamass to put the books in the library in alphabetical order. On learning that the shamass could not do this because he was illiterate, the young rabbi, ignoring the shamass’s long tenure, fired him on the spot.