I am going to assume that most readers of The Occidental Observer are familiar with the official story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl (aged 13–15) who kept a diary while hiding in a house from Jew-hunting “Nazis” in the Netherlands during World War II. In searching the TOO site for “Anne Frank,” I found no hits, but the Anne Frank story is almost as prevalent and persistent as the holocaust story itself, and surely TOO readers know the basics.

Publisher Clemens & Blair has just released a new book focused on the fraudulence of The Diary of Anne Frank. A number of other works examining the fraudulent Anne Frank diary have been published over the course of many years, most famously “Is the diary of Anne Frank Genuine?,” an article in English in 1982 by Robert Faurisson. But this new book surpasses the old ones in many ways.

Author of the current work, Ikuo Suzuki, a Japanese researcher, reviews a number of these earlier analyses of the diary in his new book, as does editor Thomas Dalton in his Foreword. As assistant editor, I do the same in my Introduction. (Disclaimer: I have a partial financial interest in this book.)

From there, Mr. Suzuki explores new analyses of the diary, including an illuminating graphic depiction of the many changes among the many various publications of the diary over the span of decades. So numerous and detailed are the diary’s entries over 26 months that logical inconsistencies and physical and logistical impossibilities inevitably occur; Suzuki identifies many new ones. He calls some of this “Anne magic,” and indeed only a magical explanation can reconcile some of the diary’s many internal flaws and self-contradictions.

Suzuki’s book is arranged into five main chapters, each having four to nine sections. As an example of inconsistency among various published versions of the diary, Chapter 1 is titled “Absurdity on the Surface,” and one section is titled “The Translation of ‘Cat’ Into ‘Tarantula’.” This Chapter displays pictures and drawings of the “Annex” in which Anne Frank supposedly hid out with seven other Jews, along with examinations of physical and architectural impossibilities.

Suzuki goes on to explore “Absurdities Lurking in the Depths” in Chapter 2, closing with the section “Was Everything a Figment?.” Here we see pictures of diary pages themselves, and careful comparisons among the bewildering number of different versions of the diary published at different times in different languages. Here we find Suzuki’s unique graphic display of the many changes among the versions. For example, Anne Frank is said to have edited her own diaries at a later point in her time in the “hideout.” Edited is not the proper term when we see that one early entry in her Diary as presented in the English publish version is actually a combination of two entries more than a month apart from the original diaries.

Chapter 3, “Annie Ample: A Soft-Core Porn Romantic Life?,” examines the core drama at the heart of the diary: the love (or lust) affair Anne supposedly had with a Jewish boy from another family also confined in the “hideout.” One of the great revelations that Suzuki presents is just how grotesque and sexually perverse the diary truly is, raising doubts on its own whether a young girl could even think such thoughts, much less write them down.

I’ll say here that, in my Postscript, I present the content of five missing pages of the diary that supposedly were found in 1998, and then two more “uncovered” in 2018. The five pages contain a scathing denunciation of Anne’s mother Edith and an oblique critique of her father Otto, but the two “uncovered” pages contain “perhaps the filthiest pornographic smut of the entire diary.” (I will spare readers the details here, though the book will not.)

Chapter 4 explores Anne’s writing career (or lack of it), the “infamous bookshelf door,” and the story of the beginning and end of the “hideout” (which is the chapter title). More pictures of documents and infrastructure assist the inquiry. This chapter engages in a staple of Diary doubters—handwriting analysis, and clarifies some former confusion.  A letter Anne Frank supposedly sent in 1940—before the “hideout”—to a pen pal in the US was found, and when its handwriting is compared to the handwriting of the Diary, even an amateur analyst can see the two are different. It also debunks the absurd story—or stories—of how the diaries were finally found after the “hideout” inhabitants were hauled away by the Gestapo.

Chapter 5, “The Diary Unmasked,” explores the core issue of The Diary of Anne Frank, one that all revisionists have addressed: who really wrote the diary? Many speculate that Anne’s father Otto Frank was the actual author all along, but Suzuki excludes Otto as lacking the character, ability and motivation to forge the diary. He says: “there was at least one person in Otto’s vicinity who definitely possessed those qualities.” Suzuki’s in-depth profile and examination of this one person—Jewish playwright and journalist Meyer Levin—I found compelling. For instance, Levin’s relationship with Otto Frank included Frank appointing Levin his copyright agent in 1952. Levin’s history involved him working in the “Office of War Information” in the US, producing propaganda movies. Thus Levin had the presence and ability to invent the Diary as on-going war propaganda.

Mr. Suzuki closes with a touching Afterword he calls “Annelies Next to You,” in which the focus of our outrage is inverted from the evil “Nazis” to those who would fabricate lies in Anne’s name. This is a virtue of this book; Suzuki never blames Anne for the fraud, but rather points the finger at other Jews. “Not a single word in (the diary) contains her truth. It is merely a prison for Annelies’ soul, covered by a thick wall of falsehood in the name of a legend.” Our compassion should be for the real Annelies (her full name) Frank who has been so brutally used and misrepresented to promote a Jewish victim/”Nazi” perpetrator agenda.

The book closes with my Postscript, where, as stated, the five “missing” and two “uncovered” pages bring us up to date on diary developments. Unfortunately, Revisionists can also generate myths to their discredit, and one of these is the “ball-point pen” story. Hopefully I put to rest the claim that the diary is a fraud merely because it was written in ball-point pen, which was not invented until 1950. (Only two attached notes were written in pen, but nothing in the diary text itself.) The Postscript is framed as “Re-Rebutting the Anne Frank House,” which is the lavishly funded and well-organized foundation administering the “hideout” building itself as a museum, curating the diaries themselves (though not all are displayed), and issuing the on-going education about the iconic Jewish victim of “Nazi” tyranny, Anne Frank. I believe that just about the only point on which the Anne Frank House is correct regarding the diary is its position on the ball point pen issue. Everything else is tendentious and misleading propaganda, or outright deception.

In the words of main author Suzuki: “All other textual information, even the testimonies of friends and relations, is too biased and too fraudulent to be believed.” As he carefully demonstrates, there is so little truth to the diary itself that one can hardly accept any of it as valid.

This is one of those books that in parts of a couple sections presents such exhaustive detail as to make reading tedious, while at the same time my fascination with the revelations drew me onward. Suzuki could not completely resist the temptation to depart from a strict scholarly tone and lapse into humor—but neither could Dalton or I. I suppose this has to be accepted in such revisionist material, as we see all over certain “free speech” social media platforms. The lapses are rare and brief however, and the depth and scope of scholarship prevail. If I have any final critique of Unmasking Anne Frank, it is that it treated the perpetrators of the hoax too lightly, failing to express the appropriate loathing and contempt and even criminal accusations they deserve. Suzuki’s compassion is for Annelies, who was so cruelly used by these criminal fraudsters, but he expresses not enough outrage at those who exploited her posterity. We are all victims of the fraud as well.

Unmasking Anne Frank by Ikuo Suzuki, including the excellent Foreword by editor Thomas Dalton and Introduction and Postscript by myself, achieves the difficult task of summarizing and updating previous diary revision, while presenting new crucial insights. The end effect is to drive a dagger of certainty into the bleeding heart of Diary pathos. Suzuki’s detailed biographical analysis of the person he concludes actually wrote the diary—Meyer Levin—is  the climax of a book filled with stunning insights. This book has much to consider for those new to Diary doubt, and much more to ponder for those already familiar with Anne Frank revisionism. Unmasking Anne Frank is, without doubt, the best such revisionist text ever produced; it is not only a great contribution to diary revision, it may be a culmination.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, lies on the ground at the Jallianwala Bagh memorial. Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images

The recent move by the Canadian government to criminalize “condoning, denying, or downplaying” the Holocaust is not just an infringement of civil liberties supposedly guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  More importantly, it endows a distinctively Jewish political theology with legal protections denied to core Christian beliefs.  The fact that this development has not been opposed either by mainline Protestant or Catholic churches is highly significant.  Still, once upon a time, the Catholic Church did possess a distinctive political theology of its own, one identifying the Jewish people as an actual or, at best, a potential foe.  The Second Vatican Council put an end to that “antisemitic” article of faith.  But in principle, at least, Catholics could return their historic political theology on the Jewish Question.  Things are very different among the Anglo-Protestant people of Canada, in particular, and of the Anglosphere, generally.

Anglo-Protestantism has long since been captured by cosmopolitan humanism, a liberal world-view denying the existential distinction made by realist political theology between friend and foe.  Accordingly, Anglo-Protestants shy away from the traditional Christian belief that the Old Covenant with Israel according to the flesh was superseded by a New Covenant between God and the Church.  Having rejected supersessionism, Anglo-Protestants generally recognize the Jews as elder brothers in the faith whose Covenant with God remains in force.  The Holocaust Mythos, therefore, is widely accepted as the story of a monstrous crime committed against a people of God representative of humanity-at-large.  Mainline Anglo-Protestant churches inhabit a moral universe in which a loving God confronts the “perpetrators” of genocides against innocent “victims” who may or may not receive aid, comfort, or justice from “bystanders”.

The Jewish people, on the other hand, have not been slow to recognize that their world is characterized by a sharp division between their “philosemitic” friends and their “antisemitic” enemies.  During the twentieth century and continuing today, Anglo-Protestants have recognized the Jews as their “friends” and have, accordingly, been willing to combat “enemies” of the Jews whenever and however their governments have commanded.  The Second and Third Reichs in Germany were foremost among those designated by our governments as collective “enemies,” not just of the British peoples, but of humanity itself.

Now that the Palestinian President (while sharing a platform with the German Chancellor) has charged Israel with inflicting “50 Holocausts” upon his people, one might wonder whether the Germans copped a bum rap over the Holocaust 1.0.  To reach any firm conclusion, we should reflect upon the historical development of Anglo-Protestantism and the theological presuppositions that have prevented the church from developing an ethno-religious theology capable of reliably distinguishing “friend” from “foe”.

How Anglicans Escaped “Anglo-Saxon Captivity”

The Church of England created the original model of Anglo-Protestantism during the sixteenth-century Reformation which separated the Anglican church from Roman Catholicism.  The  word “Anglican” is grounded etymologically in the old Anglo-Saxon term “Angelcynn” which meant literally “kin of the Angles.” This poses the obvious question as to whether Anglican political theology retains the capacity to draw any distinction between “friend” and “enemy” now that the Anglican “brand” has been drained of its ancestral, biblically-based, ethno-religious meaning.  In what follows, I will use Angelcynn to denote the broad, but long disunited, body of Anglo-Protestants who could, and in my view, should re-unite in a broad church acting as a medium for the expression of their particular ethno-religious needs and interests.

Nations are rooted in historical myths, symbols, and ethno-religious traditions which, in the case of England, developed over many centuries during the Middle Ages.  Leading authorities in support of that thesis are: Anthony D. Smith on The Ethnic Origins of Nations and Martin Lichtmesz on Ethnopluralismus.  The concept of ethnopluralism must be distinguished from modern secular policies of multiculturalism as defended, for example, by James Tully.  Official multiculturalism in the Anglosphere refuses to recognize the political character of Anglo-Protestant ethno-religious identity.  But the Israeli historian, Azar Gat, in his book on Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism provides support for the proposition that Anglo-Protestant Christians desperately need to recover a political theology anchored in their own distinctive ethno-religious identity.  As things stand, all Protestant denominations, Anglican and dissenting churches alike, have united with the state to deny the legitimacy, indeed even the reality, of any such need.

Carl Schmitt is generally credited with the invention of the term “political theology”.  What did Schmitt mean by political theology?  German scholar Heinrich Meier suggests that Schmitt was looking for the legitimate foundations of political action.  In European civilization, he found a conflict between political philosophy, ostensibly based in the universal principles of rational discourse, and revelation anchored in particularistic ethno-religions.  To speak of revelation, of course, takes us into the realm of biblical theology.  What is the relationship between biblical revelation and political theology?  Did the historical Jesus preach a political theology?  Did Jesus the Christ and his followers, before and after the Cross, have friends and enemies?  While the historical Jesus seems to have focused on the destiny of his own people, the global Jesus, as worshipped by contemporary Anglo-Protestants, came to save the whole of humanity.

For the ancestors of today’s Anglo-Protestants, political theology, avant la lettre, was a fact of life.  In fact, the theology of the Angelcynn was politicized from the very beginning of their historical ethnogenesis.  The story of the emergence of the English nation, no less than the biblical narrative of ancient Israel, was and remains a process moved by “the lure of God”.  Ethno-religious divisions long defined friends and enemies, thereby shaping the demographic development of the English nation.  Neither the English nor, later, the British state created the English nation.  Instead, the Old English Church nurtured the ethnogenesis of the English people.  An embryonic English ethnos, working in and through the early Angelcynn church and their king, became the prototype of an English “state,” well before the Norman Conquest.

Over the centuries, the identity of those deemed to be enemies of the English changed.  During the reign of Alfred the Great, the Vikings were perceived as the greatest threat.  When William the Conqueror invaded England, the Norman enemy was victorious. The Norman Conquest in combination with the Papal Revolution transformed the ethno-religious culture of England.  One sign of the transformation was the replacement of the Old English used in Angelcynn monasteries by the Latin language employed in the universal Church governed from Rome.  The ecclesiastical regime based on the absolutist papal monarchy survived in England for several centuries.

Following the upheavals of the Reformation and Civil War, the division between Protestants and Catholics largely defined the distinction between friend and enemy for Britons, both domestically and internationally.

With the expansion of England, a Greater Britain emerged in the settler colonies around the world.  From the eighteenth century onwards, the British Empire competed for power and resources with continental rivals such as France and Germany.  Religious differences were no longer central to such conflicts.  Indeed, since then, the process of secularization advanced to the point where historians have pronounced the death of Christian Britain.

In the Empire at large, one might even ask whether Australia, for example, was ever a Christian community on its road to nationhood.  Ever since the Second World War, the declining Anglican confession throughout the Anglosphere has celebrated its escape from “Anglo-Saxon captivity,” to the point where it has been absorbed into a form of global Christianity hostile to any suggestion that the Anglican church should be of, by, and for the white British peoples of the Anglosphere.  “White racism” is now the proclaimed enemy of mainstream Anglican political theology.

Indeed, contemporary Anglican political theology, in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, manifests itself as the kinder, gentler face of post-Christian globalist bioleninism.  In other words, it is difficult to distinguish between the public face of Anglican political theology and the Woke political ideology governing “Our Democracies”.

In the realm of academic theology, however, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations offers a much more sophisticated model of Anglican political theology, but one no less opposed to an ethno-religious understanding of the Anglican tradition.  O’Donovan contends that the point and purpose of every nation’s existence has been determined once and for all in the “Christ event”.  “Membership in Christ,” he declares, “replaced all other political identities by which communities knew themselves”.  Because the church is “catholic” it “leaps over all existing communal boundaries and forbids any part of the human race…to think of the Kingdom of God as confined within its own limits and to lose interest in what lies beyond them”.  Strictly speaking, according to O’Donovan the church is an “eschatological” rather than a political society: it can be “entered only by leaving other, existing societies”.

For O’Donovan, in the modern world, not even those other, “political” societies constituted by governments are based on shared blood, language, and religion.  Instead, the only form of “nationalism” open to modern “nation-states” such as Australia, Canada, or the United Kingdom is a “civic nationalism’’ defined by a common political will.  Nationalism, therefore, is sometimes said to be in trouble.  But, O’Donovan maintains, this is nothing new.  “The truth is,” he remarks, “it has been in trouble ever since Christ rose from the dead”.  In the eschatological society of the church, “no people’s identity as a people can be assumed; community identity is no longer self-evident.  It is called into question by the existence of a new people, drawn from every nation, which by its catholic identity casts doubt on every other”.

In stark contrast, to that “catholic” vision of Christian identity, my thesis will defend the proposition that the Volksgeist of the English nation (and other British-descended peoples) was once, and could be again, an important medium through which God works in this world.  Accordingly, this project rests on a set of presuppositions that differ in certain fundamental respects from those underlying O’Donovan’s approach to political theology.

Any theological schema of civic action requires one or more orienting concepts if it is to achieve its objectives.  Historically potent examples of such orienting concepts, can be found in the lives and works of men such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley.  Calvin’s theology was oriented around the concept of the “majesty or sovereignty of God.”  Luther oriented his theological theory and practice around “justification by faith” while Wesley’s work revolved around the notion of “responsible grace.”  Each of these concepts oriented new approaches to practical theology, each sparking its own theological revolution.  Unfortunately, those revolutions oriented as they were, each in its own way, to personal salvation has run its course.  Evangelical Protestantism is dying on the vine.

An Angelcynn Reformation seeking the collective redemption of British-descended peoples requires a more comprehensive strategy; it must be oriented around not just one but four concepts.  This multi-pronged approach can be grounded in several existing but, as yet, separate streams of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant theology.  The four key theological concepts are: (1) process theism; (2) preterism; (3) kinism; and (4) royalism.  If and when these already intellectually compelling challenges to theological orthodoxy merge into a single popular current of ethno-religious experience, the next Great Awakening in British religious history will be in the offing.

Process Theism

Process theism builds on the historical theology of the nineteenth-century Anglican broad-church movement in rejecting traditional Christian theism.  The early creeds of the Church established an image of God, outside time and space, the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent source of being itself, who created the world out of nothing.

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo cannot be found in either the Old or the New Testament.  It appeared suddenly in the latter half of the second century B.C.   Its appearance “can best be explained as a defence of the most controversial part of the Christian kerygma, the resurrection of the dead”.  Only a God who created the world out of nothing could accomplish the bodily resurrection of the dead.  Oliver O’Donovan’s vision of the universal church as an eschatological society preserves that creedal linkage between God’s created order and the bodily resurrection of believers in the new creation.

By contrast, process theism denies that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo can be grounded in Genesis One.  Instead, creation is conceived as an ongoing process within which God remains actively involved with all forms of conscious life.  Biologist Bruce G. Charlton suggests that process theism can provide his discipline with the metaphysical framework it desperately needs to solve fundamental problems such as group selection.  Natural selection is comparatively easy to explain at the level of individual organisms.  But “true group selection…entails a purposive mechanism that can predict, can ‘look ahead’ several generations, and infer what is likely to be good for the survival and reproduction of the species.”  The theory of natural selection “lacks teleology—a goal, direction or purpose.”

If the idea of purpose demands an organizing entity or deity then “evolution across history is best explained as a directional process of development” at both the individual (ontogeny) and group (phylogeny) level.  The comparative evolutionary success of ethnic groups is probably affected, therefore, by the nature and intensity of their religious connection to the theistic organizing entity.

God is not omnipotent, however.  Hence the evils of the world cannot be charged exclusively to his account; moreover, he is affected by his interactions with us and the wrongs we do unto others and ourselves.  Robert Gnuse demonstrates that the Old Testament provides a revealing account of the processes of communication between the Israelites and the divine.  Perhaps white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, too, could and should create a national bible recording our own communication—or lack thereof—with the divine.

Indeed, process theism provides grounds for doubting that the “Christ-event” (i.e., the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus) happened, once and for all, in the history of only one nation in the ancient Near East on planet Earth.  Jesus the Christ made a unique appearance in Israel according to the flesh but who knows whether or not other singular incarnations for other unique nations or even other worlds are excluded.  There is only one historical Jesus, but there may be other Christ-events in some other “holy nation.”

In Part Two, we will discuss the contribution that preterism, kinism, and royalism can make to the emergence of an Anglo-Protestant political theology capable of distinguishing friend from foe.

Go to Part Two.

The 10-story Kinkabool tower at 34 Hanlan Street in Gold Coast

Go to Part I.
Go to Part II.

From South Coast to Miami Beach.

Further afield from Sydney and Melbourne where the majority of Jews reside, Jewish property developers are also notable on the Gold Coast, performing a now familiar role. It was here that property developers Stanley Korman (encountered previously in Melbourne) and Eddie Kornhauser made a name for themselves, not just as pioneers of high-rise living, but of the Gold Coast as a city itself. Once little more than a beachside town in an area called South Coast, these early investments laid the groundwork for the 1980s tourist boom, when the city became awash with Japanese money and holiday travelers, and the skyline grew ever taller with a sheer wall of apartment towers now settled along the beachfront. It was Stanley Korman, the “father of the Gold Coast,” who was among the first to see the potential of the area, developing the 10-story Kinkabool tower at 34 Hanlan Street in 1960, the first apartment tower on the Gold Coast, which at the time towered above mere beachside shacks. Korman, inspired by a holiday in the USA,[1] began his pioneering beachside venture in the late 1950s with an American-style holiday resort (the Chevron Hotel) as well as the Chevron and Paradise Islands housing precincts, leading the way in establishing Surfers Paradise as a popular holiday destination:

He [Korman] was soon generating much of the impetus for the phenomenal development of the locality from ‘just another tourist resort’ to an internationally recognised location.[2]

Born in Poland, the Korman brothers Stanley and Paul arrived in Australia in 1932 and set up a hosiery business, migrating into property development after the war; they transferred their focus to the Gold Coast after developing Stanhill and other American-style hotels in Melbourne. Stanley Korman’s brash style and sprawling network of companies would ultimately attract the attention of the government, and he was charged and sentenced to six months prison for issuing a false shareholder prospectus, later leaving Australia for the USA in 1967.

Arriving somewhat later on the scene was another prominent Jewish developer on the Gold Coast, Eddie Kornhauser. Also born in Poland and fleeing to Melbourne in 1939, Kornhauser purchased the historic Surfers Paradise hotel from Korman with an aim to cater to the growing number of Jewish holidaymakers from Melbourne and Sydney. In 1975, under the vehicle of HSP Developments, he developed the site into two early apartment towers, Allungah and Ballah, and built the Paradise Centre shopping mall, now the urban focal point of Surfers Paradise. Kornhauser persisted with Gold Coast high-rise apartments until the early 2000s, the 40-story Pivotal Point tower at 50 Marine Parade in Southport a final contribution. Disrepute also followed Kornhauser, who was implicated in the scandals of the Bjelke-Petersen Government. He was charged and later acquitted on three counts of corruption charges relating to bribery,[3] and he remained a close friend with Abe Saffron from his time developing hotels in Sydney. Kornhauser donated to Yesihva schools throughout his life, established the Bob Hawke Forest in Israel (named for his friend the former Prime Minister) and Israel’s Haifa University made him an honorary Doctor of Philosophy and Governor of the University.

Other developers surveyed elsewhere, notably Meriton and Dainford Holdings, also made their mark on the Gold Coast at a later date. However deeper Jewish influences on development are found far beyond Australia’s borders. To architect Robin Boyd, the Gold Coast amounted to the best example of “Austericanism,” a term he coined to critique the then nascent propensity for Australians to imitate American ideas. Boyd infamously labelled the Gold Coast the capital of this new “Austerica” in his book The Australian Ugliness (1960), describing it as the “fibro-cement paradise under a rainbow of plastic paint.”[4] Similar to Boyd’s analysis of the “American influence” of Hollywood on the Australian mind,[5] this Austericanism on the Gold Coast turns out to be rather more Jewish than Boyd would let his readers know.

Much of the inspiration for the development for the Gold Coast as a gaudy beachside resort, in the tower-by-the-beach style of development that defines the city (also evident to a lesser degree on the waterfront streets of St Kilda in Melbourne), was in fact Miami Beach in Florida. Both Stanley Korman and Bruce Small visited Miami Beach during the 1950s and were impressed by the scale of development in the hotel and resort precinct. Seizing the chance to replicate this in Australia, Korman and Small soon capitalized with the pioneering Edgewater and Kinkabool towers respectively. Beachside suburbs of the Gold Coast like Palm Beach and Miami bear this Florida heritage, and while it is unclear if he visited the area, the influence of Miami Beach on Nathan Beller is also likely. His 10-story block at 189 Beaconsfield Parade was given the name Miami Towers, and the St Kilda City Council of the 1970s hoped the beachside boulevard could replicate the success of the Gold Coast.[6] The strong Jewish presence in property development in Miami Beach, an area with 15 Jewish Mayors to date, is underscored by the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, who state that:

The skyline of Miami Beach has changed from the day the first skyscraper went up in 1940. It continues to change, as some buildings come down and new higher ones go up. Jews have been involved in every aspect of these developments, as architects, developers, and contractors. Through their contributions to the physical appearance of Miami Beach, their roles in building the Beach are apparent and perpetual.[7]

Described as the “gayest, richest Jewish city in the world” by the early 1950s,[8] Miami Beach has long since been immensely popular with Jewish tourists and retirees from the northern states of the USA. American Jews such as Asher Grossinger, Morris Lapidus, Samuel Jacobs, and Stephen Muss heavily contributed to this post-war development of Miami Beach as a Jewish resort, and the example they set to Korman, Beller and Small reflects yet another degree of Jewish influence on the emergent high-rise property scene in Australia.

The Krantz Legacy.

On the other side of the country, Jews also played an influential role in early flat and apartment development in the city of Perth, Western Australia. Born in Perth to Russian-Jewish parents, architect Abraham Harold Krantz began designing and promoting flats in the 1930s, with his contribution to the city now earning him a legacy as an architect who “almost singlehandedly created the apartment industry in the western capital.”[9] A relative of Isaac Steinberg, promoter of the Kimberley Scheme (a settlement program for Jewish refugees in northwest Australia in the 1930s), Krantz’s firm Krantz & Sheldon is alleged to have been responsible for the design and construction of over 90 percent of flats in Perth between the years 1930 and 1960[10] and again largely supplanted the existing architectural style of Perth’s early flats with modernism. His partner in the firm, Robert Sheldon (born Schlaefrig), was another Jewish refugee from Austria. The Lawson Flats at 2 Sherwood Court were the tallest archetype of the early style of flats built in Perth. Developed in 1937, the building was built in the Spanish Mission style, and the flats were, like counterparts in NSW and Victoria, occupied by Perth’s elite.

Krantz’s success with smaller flat developments in the 1930s led to offers of investment and he soon had a budding reputation as Perth’s know-how man for flats, and set up investor syndicates for his growing clientele that made larger developments financially viable. Krantz and Sheldon were also responsible for most of the taller high-rise towers built immediately after strata title reform in Western Australia—the Strata Title Act 1966—with a string of towers in South Perth. The tallest, the 21-story Windsor Towers—a local behemoth when completed in 1968—evokes the arrogant positioning of Seidler’s Blues Point Tower in Sydney and once dominated views of the Swan River.

An opponent of suburbia, arguably Krantz’s most controversial projects were the Wandana Flats designed for the State Housing Commission. They were not only the first public high-rise flats in Western Australia and predictably aroused mass anger from local residents, but built in 1956, they pioneered the International Style in Australia. In an article for The Western Mail in 1937 entitled “MODERN FLAT DEVELOPMENTS. An Architect Explains His Work,” Krantz defended the flat typology against criticisms of iniquity, depravity and of being destructive of home life, arguing that “it provides a home in the true sense of the word” and was necessary due to affordability crises and changing lifestyle patterns.[11] Krantz’s son David was also employed at the firm and designed the 16-story Mt Eliza Apartments at 71 Mount Street (built in 1964), at the time Perth’s tallest residential building, and arguably the first true high-rise apartment tower in the city. 

Wandana Apartments, Perth

Conclusion

“In moving to a flat rather than a house, however, … European Jewish families were subtly subverting Australian norms. Rather than conforming to the social and cultural values of the host population, they were in fact helping to transform them.”[12]

The role of the Jewish migrant community, as a vanguard element in leading the mass uptake of flat and apartment living by taking advantage of new property title laws around the country, is crucial in comprehending the changes that came about in Australia’s urban form in the post-war era. Looking for opportunities for financial success in a new society and hostile to the existing political and cultural norms of Australians, preferring instead to replicate the apartment style living of the lives they fled in Europe, Jews ultimately led the process of re-shaping the fabric of Australian cities and breaking down one of the most deeply held norms of their new host society.          This essay has focused on the role of Jewish architects and developers, but their role as residents in the flat trend is also worth broaching, for without the choice being made to pursue flat living over suburban housing, much of the demand for flats—and thus the impetus for developers to build and architects to design—would never have materialised. Emphasising the Jewish and broader migrant role, O’Hanlon contends that

were it not for the arrival of these people it is highly unlikely that flats and flat living, which in many quarters were considered alien to the Australian urban experience, would have become a significant component of city life here.[13]

Fleeing from the cities of Central and Eastern Europe, flats and multi-family buildings were familiar and detached houses were foreign, and as noted by O’Hanlon, the clustering of post-war flats and early high-rise towers in areas of Sydney and Melbourne with high Jewish populations is simply not a coincidence. The popularity of flats as a housing choice within this new Jewish community is evident in the pages of the Australian Jewish Times during the era, where advisements for purchasing or renting flats are noticeably common. Robin Boyd, although misidentifying the Ostjuden culprits as “Central Europeans,” diagnosed the anti-assimilationism at the heart of these flat developments:

Many New Australians, especially those from central Europe, are used to high-density city living, and prefer and seek it here. … The more successful European migrant … created a demand for flat buildings near the city. … Thus cheap walk-up blocks of eavesless flats, made of yellow or orange bricks, according to region, were built in great quantity in areas which tolerate them such as St Kilda. … In block after block they replaced all the old single houses and the trees and created another separate zone of their own, isolated and insulated from the old Australian suburbia.[14]

Sheltered within the flat, with friends and relatives occupying multiple dwellings within the building, Jews designed and developed the perfect mechanism to recoup from their European wartime experiences. In many ways flats operated as a defensive bulwark against the assimilationist mechanism of the suburb, shielding the Jewish community from the potential of losing communal identity and “Jewishness” in the gentile individualism of detached suburban housing. From these experiences would also grow the desire to promote pluralism and multiculturalism, to politically outlaw the assimilation they feared would occur outside the safety of the flat. This was foreshadowed by the successor of flat developer Nathan Beller as president of the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies, a man by the name of Walter Lippmann.

Changing Demographics.

Looking abroad to America, a country that also experienced a significant intake of European Jewish migrants, though at an earlier date than Australia, we find a similar phenomenon to that uncovered so far in Australia. Lasner’s book High Life—Condo Living in the Suburban Century (2012) explores the history of multi-family buildings in the USA. The American “co-op” or co-operative is roughly equivalent to the Australian flat in the era of company title and the “condo” or condominium to the later strata-titled flats. Lasner regularly identifies a Jewish character to the changing demographics involved in the growing proportion of co-op and condo residents (in particular in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami Beach), and Jewish names are common throughout his vignettes of early and landmark developments that bucked existing housing norms, or in the prominent figures and activists involved with the alternatives to detached dwellings. The shifts in attitude towards multi-family housing evident in Sydney and Melbourne occurred to a similar degree in New York City, where Jews were at a vanguard of new housing tenures that diverged from the existing private and individualistic style of co-ops primarily sought and developed by rich WASPs. Lasner further notes that, in the post-war co-ops, as a counter trend from the push towards suburbanization, “In New York, at least, most of the homeowners were Jewish and most were quite liberal.”[15] Some of these post-war co-ops are also significant for their progressive views on race in housing, supporting racial integration within their developments at a time when racial exclusion in housing, though technically illegal, was still socially and cultural enforced elsewhere. Lasner cites the example of a majority Jewish co-op literally applauding the first Black families to arrive at their complex in 1948.[16]

Through all this, Lasner emphasises demand over other structural changes as the driving component of the growth of co-ops and condos in the USA during the suburban century. “Changing demographics” he writes, was “one of the leading reasons for the condo counter trend…the condo emerged because it appealed to different, in some ways paradoxical, aspects of the human experience”[17]  and “finding community was an important by-product of, and often an impetus to, co-ownership [ownership of a unit in a multi-family building].”[18] Other than Jewish or other migrant demand, demand for flats in Australia was also supplemented by the changing demographics that resulted from the breakdown of the traditional family structure. The era of the flat boom coincided with lowering marriage rates, rising divorce rates, increasing female economic independence, a declining fertility rate from an increased number of childless individuals and an overall shift to a more “cosmopolitan” way of life.

In searching for the source behind the rise of these non-traditional choices and lifestyles, one can make the case that many of the causal factors are ultimately grounded in and resulting from changes that can be drawn back to Jewish social and political activism in Feminism and the Sexual Revolution, and their precedents in Freudianism and the Frankfurt School. Similarly, much of the modern demand for high-rise living, which comes primarily from Asian migrants, would simply not exist had not the White Australia Policy been abandoned and multiculturalism been enshrined, both acts being steeped in Jewish activism in Australia and broader Jewish ideological trends from abroad, as outlined by Brenton Sanderson.[19] Regardless of the degree of the Jewish role in the deeper demographic and political currents in the West that spurred the mass introduction of the flat and the apartment into Australian cities, it was nevertheless Jews that took up the vanguard role in bringing these changes to fruition.

The Jewish Vanguard.

Moving on from residents, the overrepresentation of Jewish developers and architects explored in this essay leads to the inevitable question of how and why it was that such a tiny minority came to exercise such an enormous role.  Jews have gone far beyond what would be expected of their involvement in the property development industry based on a simple statistical percentage of the Jewish community. They are enormously overrepresented even when compared to other migrant groups such as the Italians and Greeks, who would also prosper in the flat and high-rise property industry at a later date and had a similar sense of cultural chauvinism and a hostility to assimilation that is endemic amongst Jews. Jews account for 7 of the 23 Inductees into the Australian Property Hall of Fame, distinguished primarily by their high-rise property credentials (or shopping centers).[20] Brothers Bruno and Rino Grollo of Grocon are the only Italians inducted into the list, their representation of eight percent is thus roughly in line with the 4.3 percent of people in Australia with Italian ancestry, compared with the 30 percent representation of a group that makes up scarcely 0.1 percent of Australia’s population.[21]

The answer to this question offered by Jewish scholars is predictably uncritical and myopic, attributing this Jewish success in property development and their over-representation exclusively to such factors as hard work, imagination, and “collaboration” (better identified as ethnic networking).[22] While these undoubtedly contributed, these suggestions miss the most crucial factor that the high-rise apartment industry was quite simply ripe for the taking; it was a new industry with nothing in the way of institutional barriers erected to prevent their entry. Jews entered into a disreputable market segment that was avoided by the majority of local entrepreneurs, landowners and property developers of the time, who saw the typology as subversive, foreign and unpopular for most White Australians and contrary to their ideals; they shunned capitalizing even on the evident migrant demand. This argument is borne out by the fact that the Jewish property developers surveyed in this essay can be directly contrasted with native property development powerhouses of the post-war era such as Albert Victor “AV” Jennings. Considered a champion of the Australian Dream, AV Jennings’ property empire focused on developing detached suburban housing on the rapidly expanding urban fringes, playing little to no role in the flat and high-rise apartment industry. Where smaller gentile developers during the post-war era are identified, their endeavors are consistently characterized as one-off projects, likely resulting from surplus land being offloaded, that did not lead to further developments or a long-term involvement in the industry. Other large Australian property corporations from the era almost exclusively funded and developed commercial buildings instead, and the same circumstance of a strong Jewish and weak native presence among the architects of flats and early apartment towers has also been explored, attributable to much of the same aversion.

This new generation of Jewish migrants, by way of their chauvinism, post-holocaust insecurity and ethnic insularity, cared little for assimilating and fitting in with Australian cultural mores, and saw no reason to continue the suppression of flats in Australian cities if it offered them financial return, cultural protection, or a familiar living style. In turn, they were seemingly unconcerned by local opposition or outright supportive of the socially and culturally subversive nature of their endeavors. Local opposition to flats and apartment living was, according to academics like O’Hanlon, equivalent to proto-fascism and “at best xenophobic, at worst anti-Semitic.”[23] This opinion is likely to have been shared by Jews at the time, potentially seeing their early involvement in flat and high-rise development as an opportunity to, quite literally, build a more tolerant and less homogenous Australia and thus counter the xenophobic prejudices they believed to be ingrained in the opposition to flats. That gentile developers involved in the flat and high-rise industry during and after the boom years of the 1960s were also overwhelmingly recent migrants, of non-British and non-European background, reflecting a similar unfamiliarity or hostility to Australian culture, as well as a tendency to resist assimilation, further solidifies this apparent local avoidance of high-rise development. Jewish overrepresentation in flat and apartment development and the promotion of high-rise living thus speaks far more to an aversion to the typology by White Australia than Jewish success in outcompeting gentiles.

State governments, forced to provide quick and financially viable housing solutions for the poor, were the only proponents drawn from traditional Australian society involved in the high-rise dwelling typology in any significant way during this period, building the large housing commission towers, some up to 40 stories, that now pockmark the suburbs of Australian cities. Lacking the wartime destruction of cities that made large plots of land easy for the governments of Europe to acquire, flats held the advantage of economy and space over detached dwellings, but even then only a fifth of the total output of the Housing Commission in NSW was for flats.[24] The scale of these housing projects reached their peak in the late 1960s, driven by a housing crisis, but the fad of housing the poor in towering Le Corbusier-style blocks disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived, forced out by community protest, and now universally considered by governments to be bad policy that only intensified crime, social dislocation and delinquency.

In the absence of a Jewish vanguard driving the flat and apartment living typology to a critical mass, high-rise living may well have arrived on the scene only much later, and on a scale and form far more sympathetic to Australian cultural mores. The cities of Brisbane and Perth, both larger than the Gold Coast, saw only a muted high-rise apartment trend in the 1960s and 1970s compared to the rapid growth elsewhere, and up until recently their central business districts remained almost entirely comprised of office towers. The lack of a significant Jewish element to catalyse a high-rise tower boom in Brisbane, a city that possessed only a minuscule Jewish population, cannot be gainsaid as one of the causes for the different path in urban form the city took until Jews finally arrived on the scene. Few apartment towers showed up after early novelty specimens like Torbrek and Glenfalloch, the latter developed by Stanley Korman. Apartment towers taller than Torbreck (built in 1960) only began to emerge by the 1990s when opposition had withered away and apartment living was becoming a property norm. Soon thereafter Harry Triguboff devoured the city skyline in the late 2000s, as Meriton towers became Brisbane’s tallest buildings. In Perth, the Krantz group’s high-rise role was a relatively solitary one, and Adelaide, another city with a tiny Jewish population, remained almost devoid of residential towers until the explosion of development in the years of what may be identified as the “Asian Property Boom.”

The Asian Property Boom

Once the stigma and resistance to flats and high-rise living had been all but broken down by Jews, the floodgates opened in this new boom period from 2010 to 2019 that corresponded with the highest ever annual migrant intakes in Australian history. More migrants and real-estate investment from Asia flowed into the Australian property market than ever before and ever taller apartment towers arose in all of Australia’s capital cities. Hidden behind these events, ostensibly the work of Asian capital, one discovers the final piece in the puzzle: a financial industry of non-bank lenders dominated by Jews, dedicated to providing funds for apartment developments via loans for land and construction facilities.

Most prominently among these capital flows is Brae Sokolski and Wayne Lasky’s MaxCap group, Australia’s largest real-estate lender, which backed many of the tallest apartment buildings developed since 2010. Other major Jewish lenders to the property industry include the Schwartz family’s investment bank Qualitas; Wingate Group, founded by Farrel Meltzer in 2004, with a clique of prominent Jewish families involved; Monark Property Partners, based in Melbourne and co-founded by Michael Kark and Adam Slade-Jacobsen; and CVS Lane Capital Partners based in Sydney, a venture of the Liberman family. Smaller players such as Adrian Redlich’s Merricks Capital and Joseph Gersh’s Gersh Finance Fund also have apartment towers to their name, and Jews are present in the leading roles of Australia’s traditional banking institutions, namely Ian Narev (Narewczewitz), the former CEO of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank, whose stewardship from 2011 to 2019 paralleled the Asian Property Boom.

Whither White Australia?

 The culmination of this revolution in urban form has had dire consequences for the Australian people. The apartment development industry is now entrenched as a pivotal player in the destruction of White Australia through demographic replacement, via the largest per-capita migrant intake program in the West prior to COVID-19. Far from simply providing investment sources for foreigners and homes for the influx of non-White migrants, who are overwhelmingly the developers, purchasers and occupants of these apartments, the strong GDP growth as well as the associated jobs and tax revenue created by the industry have become a major justification for keeping Australia’s extraordinarily high immigration rate going, valuable in papering over economic deficiencies since de-industrialization and the fall in native-born birth rates below replacement levels. Around 20 and 12 percent of people in Sydney and Melbourne respectively now live as part of a flat building or within apartments,[25] a percentage expected to continue rising with further planned mass immigration and an unwillingness to allow urban sprawl. Current government reports project Australia is set to add 13.1 million people over the next 40 years, the equivalent of adding the population of Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane to the country—a figure in fact downgraded from even higher projections prior to 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.[26] With no political will for the establishment of entirely new cities and little migrant interest in locating to the rural fringes of the country, the clear expectation is for these migrants to be housed in the existing population centres.

What now of the Australian Dream? While there can be no doubt it still exists among White Australians, it is increasingly becoming a fantasy from a bygone era, as younger generations are priced out of the detached housing market in all but the outer fringes of the city, where cramped lots with tiny garden spaces offer room for little more than a few paltry shrubs. Sentiments around flats and high-rise living in the cultural strongholds of White Australia do remain largely negative, but they are unfocused with no mainstream political outlet, and are too timid to address the underlying demographic issues at play (let along the Jewish roles played in this). Political forces such as the “Save Our Suburbs” campaigns, founded during the revival of high-rise living in the 1990s, now struggle to find traction in opposing the development onslaught. The erosion of what was once considered the Australian way of life is taken as a given by Australia’s political and technocratic leaders and little attempt is made to stem these changes. Opponents who deride apartment living as un-Australian or who call for an end to mass immigration (as a solution to the trifecta of housing unaffordability, urban sprawl and tower overdevelopment) and to cease the relentless growth of the property industry are despised anachronisms whose voices are destined to be silenced as “racists” or drowned out by the money of property developers. The horse has certainly bolted when one looks back to the concerns once raised that flats would foster sexual immorality or cosmopolitan radicalism and lead to a decline in native Australian birth rates—worries that now seem quaint in the face of the non-White influx and attempts to deconstruct Western Civilisation as a whole.

To speak of Australian Jewry today as “controlling” the apartment development industry is an overstatement. The Jewish vanguard has long since passed, and while still playing a vastly overrepresented role in this industry, in particular in financing, it is the “New Australians” and the non-White demographics that have picked up the baton. But without Jews taking up this vanguard role, Australian cities may have embarked on a very different urban as well as cultural and demographic path, one perhaps more consistent with the desires of Australia’s White majority. Lest any reader think the Jewish community is not cognizant of this fact, one must only consider the words of Australia’s most prominent Jewish historian, Susan Rutland, who upon surveying the achievements of the Jewish community in architecture and the property development realm, concludes:

The full acceptance and the freedom which Australia offered them has enabled them [Jews] to make substantial contributions in many different fields, and particularly in the areas of architecture and property development, changing the face of Sydney from a small, isolated, and insular backwater to a vibrant city.[27]

That Australians so often resisted these assaults on their cities, their cultural aspirations, and the Australian way of life, and never particularly consented to the sort of “vibrancy” brought by the post-war Jewish migrants is of no concern to those who celebrate the Jewish role, in yet another area of Australian society, in delivering the country from a “mono-cultural, anglo-backwater.”[28]

1] P. Spearritt & J. Young 2007, ‘Korman, Stanley (1904-1988)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, retrieved from https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/korman-stanley-12755

[2] K. Moore 2005, ‘Embracing the Make-believe—The Making of Surfers Paradise’, Australian Studies, 18(1), p.187-210, p.195.

[3] M. Massey, ‘HINZE CORRUPTION CHARGES LINK BUSINESSMEN’ Australian Financial Review, 15 December 1989, retrieved from https://www.afr.com/politics/hinze-corruption-charges-link-businessmen-19891215-k3qez

[4] R. Boyd 1960, The Australian Ugliness, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, p.87.

[5] Ibid., p.82

[6] Longmire 1989, op. cit., p.230

[7] M. J. Zerivitz, Miami’s Jewish History – A Brief History of the Jewish Community of Greater Miami, retrieved from: https://jewishmiami.org/about/federation/miami_jewish_history/

[8] M. G. Lasner 2012, High Life—Condo Living in the Suburban Century, Yale University Press, NY USA, p.164

[9] Butler-Bowden & Pickett 2007, op. cit., p.87.

[10] Museum of Perth, The Krantz Legacy—Syndicates, retrieved from https://www.thekrantzlegacy.com/syndicates

[11] Full article on https://www.thekrantzlegacy.com/.

[12] O’Hanlon 2014, op. cit. p.118.

[13] O’Hanlon 2014, op. cit., p.133.

[14] I. McKay, R. Boyd, H Stretton & J. Mant 1971 Living and Partly Living—Housing in Australia, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, p.37.

[15] M. G. Lasner 2012, High Life—Condo Living in the Suburban Century, Yale University Press, New York USA, p.152

[16] Ibid., p.249

[17] Ibid., p.8

[18]Ibid., p.14

[19] See B Sanderson 2018, ‘The War on White Australia—A Case Study in the Culture of Critique (Parts 1-5)’, The Occidental Observer, retrieved from https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/

[20] The Australian Property Hall of Fame, Inductees 2012-2022, retrieved from https://propertyhalloffame.propertycouncil.com.au/inductees

[21] Data on ancestry sourced from the 2016 Australian Census – https://profile.id.com.au/australia/ancestry

[22] S. Rutland 2008, ‘Postwar Jewish Migration and Sydney’s City-scape’, Literature & Aesthetics, 18(2), p.138-155, p.141-142.

[23] O’Hanlon 2009, op. cit., p.239.

[24] Butler-Bowden & Pickett 2007, op. cit., p.131.

[25] Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2071.0 – Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia – Stories from the Census 2016—Apartment Living, retrieved from https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Apartment%20Living~20

[26] Commonwealth of Australia, 2021 Intergenerational Report, retrieved from https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-06/p2021-182464.pdf

[27] Rutland 2008, op. cit., p.153.

[28] Ibid., p.139.