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Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 2
Part 2: Jewish Responses to Wagner’s Ideas Basically ignoring whether Wagner’s views on Jewish influence on German art and culture had any validity, a long line of Jewish music writers and intellectuals have furiously attacked the composer for having expressed them. In his essay “Know Thyself” Wagner writes of the fierce backlash that followed his [...]
Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 1
PART 1 In the 2010 feature-length documentary Wagner and Me the British celebrity Stephen Fry explored his love affair with the music of Richard Wagner. Fry, who is Jewish, homosexual, and bipolar, enjoys a multi-pronged “victim” status that has made his identity politics credentials the aesthetic equivalent of a nuclear warhead. The inevitable consequence of [...]
Jews and Race: A Pre-Boasian Perspective, Part 2
PRE-BOASIAN JEWISH DISCOURSE ON INTERMARRIAGE The Zionist Elias Auerbach viewed Jewish intermarriage as not necessarily a problem providing the endogamous Jewish racial core population remained unpolluted by the taint of non-Jewish blood. The offspring of mixed marriages (Mischlinges) are, he noted, overwhelmingly lost to the Jewish community — leaving the “sacred chain” of Jewish heredity [...]
Jews and Race: A Pre-Boasian Perspective, Part 1
PART 1 Whether the Jews comprise a religion, a nation, an ethnic group, or a race (or a combination of these) has always been central to the Jewish Question. The recently published Jews & Race — Writings on Identity and Difference 1880–1940 (edited by Mitchell B. Hart) is an anthology of Jewish writing which offers [...]
Ian Morris on Why the West Rules…For Now
Ian Morris is professor of classics and history at Stanford University. His latest book entitled Why the West Rules — For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future was published in 2010. The British-born Morris attempts in his book to explain why “the West” has exercised global dominance without parallel [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish roots of Dada, Part 4
The destructive legacy of Dada Dada’s destructive intellectual and cultural influence has proved to be seminal and long-lasting in at least three ways. First, as Dempsey points out, Dada’s notion that “The presentation of art as idea, its assertion that art could be made from anything and its questioning of societal and artistic mores, irrevocably [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 3
Dada in New York According to Marcel Duchamp’s own account, in late 1916 or early 1917 he and Francis Picabia received a book sent by an unknown author, one Tristan Tzara. The book was called The First Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine and had just been published in Zurich. In this work Tzara declared Dada to [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 2
Other Jews involved with Zurich Dada Among the other Jewish artists and intellectuals who joined Tzara in neutral Switzerland to escape involvement in the war was the painter and sculptor Marcel Janco (1895–1984), his brothers Jules and George, the painter and experimental film-maker Hans Richter (1888–1976), the essayist Walter Serner (1889–1942), and the painter and [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 1
The twentieth century saw a proliferation of art inspired by the culture of critique. The exposure and promotion of this art grew alongside the ever-expanding Jewish control of the media, and Jewish penetration and eventual capture of the Western art establishment. Jewish writers, painters and composers sought to rewrite the rules of artistic expression — [...]
Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 3
Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of Critique Abstract Expressionism was disproportionately a Jewish cultural phenomenon. It was a movement populated by legions of Jewish artists, intellectuals and critics. Prominent non-Jewish artists within the movement like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell married Jewish women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler). Willem de Kooning defied the trend, although [...]
Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 2
Creating a new “American” Art Before the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the American art scene after World War I was defined by two main currents. The first were what one might call the Regionalists (e.g. Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry) who used their own signature styles to portray the virtues of [...]
Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 1
The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes discussed at The Occidental Observer. Central to Rothko’s story is the political radicalism of eastern European Jewish migrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of these migrants and their [...]
Why Mahler? Norman Lebrecht and the Construction of Jewish Genius
2011 marks the centenary of the death of Gustav Mahler. This follows last year’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s birth. In addition to an upsurge in performances of Mahler’s works by orchestras around the world, last year also saw the release of a second book about Mahler by the journalist and music [...]
Benzion Netanyahu: Jewish Activist and Intellectual Apologist
Keep the Beltane Fires Burning!
Synagogue of Satan? The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Part 2
Synagogue of Satan? The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Part 1
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