Jewish Ethnic Networking

Promoting Israel in the world of literature: A tale of Jewish ethnic networking

/48 Comments/in , /by

I was looking over Brenton Sanderson’s TOO article on Mark Rothko (“Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art“). For Rothko, an artist without any of the skills that are traditionally associated with being a professional artist,  it was all about Jewish networking.

Towards the end of 1943, all of the ethnic networking finally began to bear tangible fruit for Rothko. He befriended Peggy Guggenheim, “the most voracious patroness of American avant-garde art”, who had migrated to New York in 1941. Guggenheim’s artistic consultant, Howard Putzel, “convinced her to show Rothko in her Art of This Century gallery, where she had opened in 1942, during the low point of the war.” In January 1945, Guggenheim decided to put on Rothko’s first one-man exhibition at her gallery. In 1948 Rothko invited a coterie of mainly Jewish friends and acquaintances to view his new ‘multiforms’. The [very influential] art critic and historian Harold Rosenberg “remembers finding these works “fantastic,” and called his experience “the most impressive visit to an artist” in his life.”

This is actually quite remarkable. It would be one thing if Rothko was aspiring to be a leading rabbi or the head honcho at the ADL. But he was aspiring to fame and fortune as an historically important artist in the Western canon. He achieved his goal. One of his paintings recently sold for $87 million.

$87 million Rothko

Read more

Review of Roger Schlafly’s “How Einstein Ruined Physics”

/290 Comments/in , /by

How Einstein Ruined Physics
Roger Schlafly
Dark Buzz, 2011

Was Albert Einstein the smartest man and the greatest scientist who ever lived? Millions believe so.

But Roger Schlafly takes a different view, downgrading the rank of the 20th– century’s most revered scientist. Why? Schlafly presents compelling evidence that other leading physicists and mathematicians before and concurrent with Einstein made equally important breakthroughs in relativity theory and related fields. Further, Schlafly suggests that Einstein may have purloined some of his most famous insights.

What made Einstein so great? The official story goes this way: Albert Einstein, a young clerk in a Swiss patent office, single-handedly transformed physics from a static, three-dimensional science to a four-dimensional, mind-blowing, time-space universe via brilliant and solitary “thought experiments” involving gravity, motion, space and time. Einstein also made unprecedented inroads into understanding the nature of light and energy and was the first to comprehend the equivalence between energy and mass. Einstein’s discoveries not only transformed modern physics but the way we view the universe.

Schlafly disagrees. “It is all a myth.  Einstein did not invent relativity or most of the other things for which he is credited.”  Schlafly makes a very bold and persuasive case. Read more

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 2

/124 Comments/in , , , /by

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 the hard-working rural American population. In the second group were the artists of Social Realism (e.g. Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera), whose work reflected urban life during the Great Depression, and reflected a preoccupation with international socialism.

Neither of these two schools was interested in abstract art. Despite the leftwing view of the social realists, both groups held rather conservative attitudes on figurative representation. Yet, even as these two styles dominated, the artists of the nascent New York School “met frequently at the legendary Cedar Bar, where they discussed their radical theses. They argued endlessly about the problems of art, about how to effect a total break with the art of the past, about the mission of creating an abstract art that no longer had anything to do with conventional techniques and motifs.”[i]

Spring in the Country by Grant Wood (1941)

The Museum of Modern Art did not yet exist; the Metropolitan Museum tended to “look down its WASP patrician nose at modernism”; and the Whitney favoured exactly the kind of American painting young Rothko most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative.[ii] For a Jewish outsider like Rothko, who in 1970 declared that he would never feel entirely at home in a land to which he had been transplanted against his will, urban America was his America.

Read more

Why Mahler? Norman Lebrecht and the Construction of Jewish Genius

/109 Comments/in , , , /by

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 critic Norman Lebrecht entitled: Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World. This book is the latest in a long line of encomiums by Jewish music critics and intellectuals that have transformed Mahler’s image from that of a relatively minor figure in the history of classical music at mid-Twentieth Century, into the cultural icon of today. Lebrecht wants his latest work to ‘address the riddle of why Mahler had risen, from near oblivion, to displace Beethoven as the most popular and influential symphonist of our age.’[1]

Like his previous book about Mahler (Mahler Remembered) the focus here is on alerting us to fact of Mahler’s towering genius, and how this genius was inextricably bound up with his identity as a Jew. Overlaying this, as ever, is the lachrymose vision of Mahler the saintly Jewish victim of gentile injustice. Lebrecht’s new book is another reminder of how Jewish intellectuals have used their privileged status as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture to advance their group interests through the way they conceptualize the respective artistic achievements of Jews and Europeans. Read more

Daniel Bell and Jewish ethnic networking

/73 Comments/in , /by

The death of Daniel Bell is another one of those moments when you get a glimpse of how the world works. Writing in Slate, Jacob Weisberg recalls his fond memories of the great man. It’s a totally Jewish reminiscence. As a student, Weisberg wrote a letter to Bell. Bell responded, inviting Weisberg “for a ”nosh'” — “over lox and bagels” as we later find out. Read more

Did Schumer Shill for Madoff?

/135 Comments/in , , /by

In all the jaw-dropping and outrageous moments of the Madoff fraud saga, nothing surpassed it. But almost no one knew.

Starting about 1 hour 38 minutes 44 seconds into the Senate Banking Committee Hearing on “The SEC’s Failure to Identify the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi Scheme and How to Improve SEC Performance” (September 10, 2009) Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) looks over his glasses at an SEC bureaucrat and intones:

When you read Mr. Kotz’s report (PDF)…it’s just astounding…How the heck did this happen…all you had to have was an IQ of about 100 and even a semi desire to find out what happened…you didn’t have to turn over every stone…most people if they’d just read what happened they’d say there’s got to be fraud…to let Madoff escape….

That is absolutely true.

If the SEC man had been a public servant of suicidal courage he would have squared his shoulders, looked Schumer in the eye, and said

Because, Senator Schumer, you called the SEC during our last and best-informed investigation, questioning our activities. Obviously Mr.Madoff was one of your constituents, and it was easy to find out he was an important contributor of yours. We were afraid. Read more

How Jewish is The Social Network?

/165 Comments/in , , , /by
The Jewish Social Network

The Jewish Social Network

A recent article in The Jewish Chronicle asks, How Jewish is Facebook?

Very.

The basic idea of Facebook, creating a simple and exclusive alternative to MySpace, isn’t Jewish. But the project was hijacked when the gullible Winklevoss twins entrusted Mark Zuckerberg and his accomplice, Eduardo Saverin, to help execute the project. (See also Kevin MacDonald’s review.) The movie adaptation of this true story is a fevered Jewish revenge fantasy against their hapless arch-enemies, the reviled WASP “insiders.” Both the book, by Ben Mezrich,  and the screenplay, by Aaron Sorkin,  wallow in defeating the earnest brothers, heaping these two iconic American Christians with humiliation after humiliation.

The schadenfreud reaches hysterical proportions in this scene where they narrowly lose a rowing competition…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdDeui011iA

And what did these honest and trusting twins do to deserve this antipathy? Better yet, what did White America do to deserve this antipathy? How, when the President of Harvard himself is a powerful Jewish oligarch who laughed the twins out of his office, can Mezrich see himself, his people, or Zuckerberg as the sympathetic underdogs in this context? It’s simple: he’s Jewish and sympathizes with his own. To ask why he hates them is to make the same mistake the Winklevii made: grasping for a universal honor code in a tribal universe.

Mezrich explains why he hates them… Read more