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.

Andrei Lyubegin—“Nationalism 2.0” Activist and Right-Wing Reformer

Andrei Lyubegin is an alumnus of the famous Russian right-wing journal Sputnik and Pogrom and then the lesser known and shorter-lived “Vendee” project. Sputnik and Pogrom was the largest right-wing publication of its kind in Russia and was quite a phenomenon at its time. Vendee was something more akin to the “Neo-Reaction” blogs in the English-speaking blogosphere. Andrei was the head organizer of the largest club of “intellectual nationalists” in St. Petersburg and has made it his personal project to understand and chronicle the history of the post-Soviet nationalist movement in Russia. He runs the “Baza” channel on VK and cooperates with other nationalists online. Full disclosure, I know Andrei quite well and run a podcast with him where we interview other right-wingers and talk about the news of the day, in Russian. Andrei is a somewhat controversial figure in the nationalist scene, mostly because of his frequent criticisms of the leadership. Whether or not Andrei was correct in his views or not, the simple fact is that he has outlived (literally in some cases) most of the people who disagreed with him and is one of the few people who has been left standing in this field from the old days at this point. So, by my reckoning, he must be doing something right and that makes him worth listening to.

Alright Andrei, you know the drill at this point. Who are you and how did you become the nationalist that you are today? 

Right, well, I come from a small town in Russia—Rybinsk. There are several factories there, the typical commieblocks and a nice center from Imperial times and so on. As for how I got here, I like to say that Russian nationalism is all about climbing a ladder of shit, if you will. I started with a group of something akin to skinheads in my little town. I didn’t join them, no. I got my start by critiquing them and pointing out what they were doing wrong. I always knew that there were problems with the right-wing movement in Russia. The kids I grew up with were simple factory boys that quickly got in trouble with the FSB because of their right-wing radicalism. My best friend was beaten by agents, interrogated and incarcerated for being too vocal in his views. My other friend decided to seize the means of production one day, pulled out his revolver and tried to seize the factory that he was an employee at. He was a big fan of The Turner Diaries. In fact, we all were. American right-wing literature was quite popular in Russia among the youth of the 90s and 00s. Needless to say, my friend’s rebellion came to an end quickly. He served his time and then he joined the airborne troops, just like the other friend did, actually. They’re both serving in Ukraine now.

Point being, I didn’t like what we were doing. I figured that we were living on borrowed time and that sooner or later, the FSB would get around to arresting us if we carried on in this way. At about this time, I finished my education, moved to St. Petersburg and the famous journal Sputnik and Pogrom was established, of which I was a big fan. But, even then, I critiqued their work at first. Still, credit where credit is due, they brought new ideas to the right-wing. Instead of sitting around and pining for the long-awaited RaHoWa and planning an armed revolution, we suddenly got exposed to “Intellectual Nationalism” which Russia sorely lacked. We even heard of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique series of books at around this time. We organized lectures on his work at our club.

A different kind of person was attracted to this sort of nationalism. People who were interested in their national culture, people who took an interest in their national history and so on—basically people who were more intelligent suddenly appeared on the scene. Even after the closure of the magazine, the effect that the magazine had on right-wing strategy and ideas cannot be denied. I was an early organizer of what can be called Nationalism 2.0 or “Intellectual Nationalism.” We had clubs that met to hear lectures and so on. This was all during the time of the Russian Spring of 2014 which saw the return of Crimea and an upsurge in patriotic feeling in the country. Our Petrograd Book Club (for fans of Intellectual Nationalism) became the largest nationalist organization of its kind in Russia. At the time, there were people from the National Democrat movement (liberals) and from the Rodina party (socialist-nationalists) all rubbing shoulders with us. This situation struck me as strange, but I will have more to say on this later.

At some point, Egor “Pogrom” Prosvirnin, the founder of the magazine and the biggest name in Russian Nationalism at the time, decided to hire me to rework the format of the club and make it into an active organization involved in political activism. We got together, declared ourselves the leaders of the so-called intellectual nationalist movement and started making headway. The magazine brought new people into the movement and our club organized the people who wanted to get more involved. Our first order of business was to open clubs all over the country and we eventually ended up opening 40 successfully.

Unfortunately, we had to spend a lot of time flushing out provocateurs and self-serving saboteurs. For example, we had a group of people from Ivanov that declared themselves a part of our network. As it turned out, these were actually local Rodina party officials who wanted to cash in our popularity. Rodina, you have to understand, was on its way out. It was a dying organization trying to stay relevant. Furthermore, in Russia, the people don’t trust the political parties because they consider them corrupt—and rightly so. And so, it was important to us that we stay clear of that association.

Anyway, the Russian Spring turned out to be a false thaw. The enthusiasm waned, and Egor Pogrom, who had ridden the wave of patriotic interest, began lashing out at his own dwindling base of supporters. Egor’s site was then banned by the Roskomnadzor and he refused to fight the ban, even though it was possible to get around it. The articles deteriorated in quality and his drug problems only exacerbated the problem. In the end, Egor ended up killing himself by imbibing drugs and jumping off his balcony in the center of Moscow. But I saw the writing on the wall before that.

The problem that quickly became apparent to me with our movement was that we had these so-called “nationalists” among us who weren’t even conservatives. They were oppositionists, first and foremost. And there was this attitude promoted by the leadership that we ought to be willing to rub shoulders with anyone that was against the government. Discontent continued to grow in the movement because one group of people, especially around Egor himself, was pro-drugs, anti-Orthodox, pro-Feminism, pro-punk rock, etc. Eventually the movement split because it had too many people in it that had absolutely nothing to do with one another. Furthermore, it was clear that we, the nationalists, were being used by other groups who showed up with money, media connections, and friends in the West.

Speaking of the West, you guys were gaining momentum right around the same time as the Alt-Right in America, right?

Yes and the American Alt-Right had a huge effect on us in Russia. Of course, the Alt-Right ended up being a laughingstock and, if anything, the lesson that we got from the Alt-Right was basically to avoid being like the Alt-Right. Still, there were many talented people who were inspired by what the Alt-Right managed to do right. Their enthusiasm, their memes and their way of forcing their way into the public spotlight inspired us. In many ways, we are still using the aesthetics of the Alt-Right in Russia today. The old aesthetic was entirely different—it was basically red flags with hammers and sickles or swastikas. Or the Imperial flag of Russia—the yellow, black and white one. Activism was largely confined to street marches like the infamous “Russian March.” The influence of the Alt-Right cannot be overstated in this sense. We suddenly started using slick designs, vaporware, green frogs and a different rhetoric. We began copying the model of internet activism instead of running people into police batons and spending the night in jail cells. Just like in the West, this new format was appealing to the youth. I count three main influencers who pushed for this new approach—myself, Kirill Nesterov, and Anatoly Karlin (to some extent).

Do we really want to go into detail about these eccentric e-personalities? 

I think it’s worth bringing them up because they were part of a larger problem on the right.

For example, Nesterov got big making videos popularizing Alt-Right ideas in Russia, which got millions of views. Unfortunately, he developed a drug problem because of his association with Egor Pogrom, who was his supplier. He had a public mental breakdown, denounced Russia and all Russians and left the country. He’s in Cyprus last I heard and publicly supports Ukraine on the internet now. Karlin also did drugs with Pogrom (common knowledge in the movement), called Russians “sub-humans” on his Twitter for not masking up during the Corona hoax and seems to have dropped out as well. The point here I’m making is simple: drugs and right-wing politics do not mix. The conservative faction of the movement understood this. You need “conservative nationalism,” not just “oppositionist nationalism,” to avoid these tragedies that are a byproduct of pursuing a Libertine lifestyle. This is why we are still around and they are not. The largest problem that we faced in the nationalist movement in Russia was the problem of old associations with oppositionists. There were always people within the movement that had absolutely nothing to do with the ideas of conservatism or nationalism, but who were only interested in using us as a battering ram against the government.

I noticed this as well and have frequently critiqued Nationalists for allying with Liberals in the FSU as well. 

Yes. Take, for example, Constantin Krylov, who everyone and their mother in the Russian right-wing knows about.

He was a large proponent of this alliance with the Liberal opposition and did more than anyone to normalize the idea and bring it about. And now a few words about Krylov: he was a Zoroastrian, a drug user, a constant criticizer of Russian culture and a man who always dreamed of running away to live in Italy. This man was considered a nationalist. Do you see the problem with this?

How could someone like this be considered a Russian nationalist by any sane person? In America, despite all the problems that the right has there, there is at least some common understanding of what a nationalist ought to be. 

Yes, although you certainly have your strange idiosyncrasies in America as well, as you well know. Such as support for large corporations or Zionism.

But let me provide you with another example—Egor Kholmogorov.

He is on RT now and friends with Margarita Simonyan, despite critiquing her liberalism for years.

The running joke about this man is that even his readers do not read what he writes. This is because he has a style of writing wherein one can’t figure out what he is saying. He appears to be saying everything and anything. From what we can understand of what he says though, he doesn’t actually believe in ethnic Russian nationalism. His is an ideological sort of nationalism. That means that if one follows the right ideology, the right set of ideas—his of course—then one can be counted as Russian. The problem is that no one can understand exactly what his ideology is. Furthermore, he has openly stated that he would be in favor of importing Ethiopians into Russia because they are Orthodox and because they have the so-called “Russian soul.”

What’s worse, he actually seems to believe this and isn’t saying it to avoid getting into trouble or to advance his career. These people have no place in nationalism, but, in Russia, there is no quality control at all.

This is a common theme at this point—lack of internal policing on the right and some sort of ideological schizophrenia, no?

Yes! And while we’re on the topic we really should spare a few words about Mikhail Svetov. He was the leader of the Libertarians of Russia—an opposition group that held street protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In Russia, we can’t help but notice that Libertarians seem to have a hard time understanding the concept of age-of-consent laws. Svetov, for example, was quite open about his gore-and-torture fetish and his preference for pre-pubescent girls on his infamous blog. He was eventually arrested, released and then fled the country. His movement, which tried so hard to take over the Russian nationalist scene, crumbled soon after as the rest of his people also got in trouble with the law—most for their similar Libertine proclivities. These people were all comrades, members of the Russian nationalist movement at some point. No quality control. No common platform.

But I think I’ve made my point.

Instead of focusing on the negative, what about something positive that you or the movement has achieved. Is there anything that you’re proud of?

Well, the survivors of the Sputnik and Pogrom shipwreck got together and formed the Vendee magazine. For the first time, we began to delve into the ideas that actual Russian nationalists in the past had written about. If, before, we were simply copying the West, we suddenly started discovering our own intellectual tradition. We continued to publish nationalist ideas, but the thing that I am most proud of are the alumni of the magazine that went on to do their own successful projects after Vendee closed down as well. They went on to start their own groups and projects on Telegram and [social networking site] VK. Our movement decentralized and new people joined of their own accord and then started working on their own projects on their own.

This is where you come into the story, Rolo.

You joined our podcast, “Russians Forward,” and then we transitioned to “Culture of Discussion.” We were pioneers in the podcast format in the Russian right-wing. There were no podcasts or even interest in podcasts before this. In America, everyone has a podcast from what I can tell. But, this new format is still in its nascent stages in Russia.

Our group started appropriating the idea of “cancel culture” and putting it to good use online. We harassed many personalities and companies for promoting homosexuality or making anti-Russian statements and exerted pressure on them through the use of internet mob tactics. This method is now being used by larger, mainstream conservatives in Russia now. I consider us pioneers in this field. We had to fight against literally everyone to prove that this method was both necessary and effective. Just like in America, our right-wingers were largely toothless and obsessed with playing by the rules, even though our opponents didn’t. Now, they all act like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I am proud of the effect that we had working with our small internet guerrilla outfit. For the first time in living memory, the Russian right is on the offensive against the Liberals. We are cancelling them, they are not canceling us.

Things have changed quite a bit in Russia haven’t they?

The entire political landscape in Russia has changed in recent months.

Everything has shifted to the right, and what was once considered fringe and extreme is now mainstream. The aforementioned Egor Kholmogorov, who once wanted to import Ethiopians, now talks about the Russian ethnos, something that he used to deny even existed a few months ago. Alexander Dugin, who is famous in the West for being a Russian nationalist, also used to refuse to acknowledge the biological reality of race. Now though, he claims that the Russian ethnos is even more important than the Russian government or any nation-state structure—that the Russian people exist as a distinct entity and that their interests have to trump all others!

From the side of the government, the word ‘Russian’ has been recently added to the constitution. The constitutional court declared that the Russian people are the “state-forming” ethnos of Russia. That is, Russia has other ethnicities sure, but that the Russians created Russia. This was done before the special operation, mind you. Then, the infamous 282 hate speech law was drastically softened years ago and no one except Islamic terrorists gets in trouble over it. Judging by everything that the government is doing, we are seeing a serious turn to the right. The government is also leaning heavily into Orthodoxy. Funny enough, Liberals used to accuse the Orthodox of being Russia’s Taliban. Nowadays, I think they may be more right than wrong—and that’s a good thing!

Readovka, the patriotic media site, believes that the government will no longer be able to ignore or repress nationalists going forward. This is just speculation at this point, but it makes sense to me when the situation is taken into context. Readovka has some alumni journalists from Sputnik and Pogrom and Vendee working for it, by the way. They get millions of views.

But the main problem, despite all our recent efforts to rectify this, is that we do not have a true nationalist school of thought yet in Russia. The Poles, the Germans, and many other nations do have this intellectual tradition, even if they do not use it. We need to work out our own model of nationalism using our own historical context, our internal and external situation, and so on. Our people do what they can, but we need an anti-university (antiversitet) that does the work of explaining our ideas and building a working model. The closest we have is the work of Alexander Dugin, but this is simply not enough. We need an internal and external program. We need to explain our ideas. We need to stop borrowing our thinking from the West and trying to graft it onto our own society. Because we were repressed for so many years, we have a problem with culture and content-production. But I think this will change soon.

Right-wing culture is on the upswing.