A Dissident Meditation on Jewish Identity: A Review of Gilad Atzmon’s “The Wandering Who?”

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Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zer0 Books, 2011, 202 pp.)

Gilad Atzmon is one of those rarest of all birds—the sort of person who would be called a “self-hating Jew” by Jewish activists. Except that he doesn’t really hate himself and really doesn’t have much of a Jewish identity at all. He is an honest leftist who happens to be of Jewish origin; or perhaps one should label him a liberal devoted to the values of the Enlightenment,  without the typical Jewish blinders. Although he has a few blinders of his own, he sees quite clearly the incompatibility of Zionism with post-Enlightenment Western civilization.

For Atzmon, Zionism is all about Judaism as racial identity politics, ethnic cleansing, and manipulating Western governments via the Israel Lobby. As a child growing up in Israel, “supremacy was brewed into our souls, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (p. 2). He began his journey of embracing the West as a result of immersion in jazz. Eventually, “I somehow already yearned to become a Goy or at least to be surrounded by Goyim” (p. 7).

For Atzmon, the racialism so fundamental to Zionism is an aberration from Judaism the religion. He has no problem with people who “regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.” The problem arises with “those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all other traits” (p. 16). This sort of Jewish essentialism was central to Zionism from the beginning, often with strong racialist overtones. Quoting Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Israeli right:

A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish. Read more

National Suicide: Review of Pat Buchanan’s “Suicide of a Superpower”

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Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2011, 496pp.).

Pat Buchanan takes the gloves off in his new book.

During a question and answer session after his Bradley Lecture on “the State of White America,” author Charles Murray called on Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He prefaced his question with this dictum, “there will always be an America, it just may not be in the United States.”

The sentiment captures the sweeping transformation of American society since the mid-1960s — a society that was largely European (in values, population, culture, and folkways) now is on a demographic trajectory to become a majority-minority cesspool by 2050 with the White population declining to minority status.

An apt description of American society isn’t merely the metaphorical “salad bowl” replacing the “melting pot” — the lettuce is a vanishing ingredient!

The quintessential dilemma that seems to be on the minds of more and more Middle Americans is the question Pat Buchanan poses in the preface of his latest book: “What happened to the country we grew up in?” It is a question weighing heavily on the minds of Midwesterners and other citizens as they see their communities rapidly becoming Third World sinkholes.

The question is one that preoccupies Buchanan in Suicide of a Superpower. It is indisputably his boldest and most passionate assessment of our nation’s fate — an America vanishing before our eyes.

As Buchanan notes, the nation of our forefathers will be unrecognizable to future generations of Americans. It is, as he puts it, a country that lost a nation. Read more

Kyle Kusz on Andre Agassi

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In a previous blog I commented on Kyle Kusz’s cultural Marxist analysis of White males in extreme sports. I can’t resist also commenting on Kusz’s outrageous discussion of another one of those oppressive White athletes, Andre Agassi. After Agassi’s redemption as an athlete (where he turned his career around after a long stretch of not taking tennis seriously), Kusz claims that Agassi’s later image of “white masculinity is implicitly invested in notions of personal responsibility, sovereignty, self-determination and the disavowal of structural privileges of any kind. … His response to his episode of suffering [during the period when he was a tennis underachiever] enabled the fantasy of extraordinary will and limitless energy of white men ” (p. 56).

In other words, Agassi’s personal determination to get his tennis career back on track counts for nothing. His career magically got back on track because he was able to take advantage of structural privileges only accorded to White men. Just being White allows one to overcome all obstacles. Hey Kusz: Know any White guys, even rich White guys, who have failed despite all their structural privileges? Read more

Racial Preferences in the California University System

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LA Times Caption: A student sells baked goods with prices based on a buyer's race, ethnicity and gender. In reality, the Republican club accepted whatever people wanted to pay. Seated at right is former UC Regent Ward Connerly. (Ben Margot / Associated Press / September 27, 2011)

The college Republicans at UC-Berkeley have gotten a lot of attention with their bake sale in which prices are determined by people’s race and gender, with White males paying top dollar. It’s a great gimmick, definitely putting the usual suspects on the defensive.

The event, met with anger by many students, was timed to counteract a phone bank in support of a bill on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk that would allow the UC and Cal State University systems to consider such factors, as long as no preference was given, in admissions.

Proposition 209, passed by voters in 1996, banned affirmative action in public university admissions. The current bill would not violate that ban. Instead it would permit schools to consider things such as ethnicity, much as they do extracurricular activities, when weighing candidates. “Frosted by Berkeley ‘diversity’ bake sale“; LA Times, Sept. 28, 2011)

But of course that means that being Black will be counted like being captain of the debate team: Very positive. And being White will being like having a few run-ins with your guidance counselor on your high school record—definitely a negative. Read more

Extreme Sports as a Context of Implicit Whiteness

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A reader sent along this video of Jeb Corliss, an extreme athlete, flying through the Alps.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k

Here’s extreme surfer Laird Hamilton surfing waves so big that he has to be towed into the path of the wave.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYQQtxb8wv0&feature=related

Corliss and Hamilton are White, and being White seems to be part of a pattern for extreme athletes. The reader also sent a link for Revolt of the White Athlete: Race, Media, and the Emergence of  Extreme Athletes in Amerca (2007), an academic book on the phenomenon which is predictably bogged down with words like ‘interrogate’ (as in “interrogating the racial, gender, and nationalistic aspects of Generation X discourse) and using ‘privilege’ as a verb (as in a complaint about a scholar who [Gasp!] “implicitly privileged the contributions, perspectives and interests of white men over and against all others”).

The author is Kyle Kusz who was rewarded for his efforts by being nominated for the Multicultural Center Diversity Award at the University of Rhode Island where he teaches. Kusz notes that he was inspired to enter the field of cultural aspects of sports by taking a sport sociology class taught by Dr. Stephen Mosher at Ithaca college.

What we have here is a clear case of implicit Whiteness, but of course Kusz takes a typical cultural Marxist attitude towards his subject.

Extreme athletics is where “white everymen perform supra-normal athletic feats in high-risk sporting activities like BASE jumping and sky surfing. Extreme sports are also portrayed as sporting activities which have revived a sense of traditional American masculine values and pursuits: rugged individualism, conquering new frontiers, and achieving individual progress” (p. 63). Predictably, for Kusz, engaging in such sports by Whites is the politics of backlash and resentment that “attempt to deny the racialized privileges of whites while masking (and thus ensuring the reproduction of) asymmetrical relations of power in the present. [They are also an attempt] to reverse the minimal gains made by historically marginalized groups since the 1960s” (p. 69).

BASE jumper jumping off a building

Read more

The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic, Pt. 2

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Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way – Emanuel Leutze

“The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.”

Ezra Pound, from The Spirit of Romance

The Bardic Dynamic focuses on the magnetic relationship between a speaker and an audience and the communication of a fundamental series of ideas. Traditional examples of this can be found in the great epic poems of Western Civilization. Ezra Pound believed that before about 1750 or so, the quintessence of Western man could only be found in poetry (Pound, 31). The context of these older texts is often an address made by one who remembers to those who may have forgotten. The bard or poet was the “keeper of memories.” This is a very different conception than that which has developed in contemporary times with the hip-hop rapper and his thousand miles a minute ebonicspeak, backed with heavy bass beats or the coffee-house Ginsberg wanna-be railing against, well, against G.I. Joe Whitey, of course. Who else? Read more

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 3

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Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of Critique

Abstract Expressionism was disproportionately a Jewish cultural phenomenon. It was a movement populated by legions of Jewish artists, intellectuals and critics. Prominent non-Jewish artists within the movement like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell married Jewish women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler). Willem de Kooning defied the trend, although he generally had to ingratiate himself with the overwhelmingly Jewish intellectual and cultural elite focused around the journal Partisan Review which was ‘dominated by editors and contributors with a Jewish ethnic identity and a deep alienation from American cultural and political institutions.’[i]

It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists and intellectuals, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity based on Keynesian foundations had prevented the coming of socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who had “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.”[ii] Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the post-war artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:

As full employment returned, New Deal programs were terminated — including federal support for the arts — the reformist spirit that had flourished in the 1930s dissipated. Corporate liberalism triumphed: together, big government and big business forged a planned economy and engineered a new social contract based on free market expansion… With New Deal dreams of reform in ruins, and the better “tomorrow” prophesied at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair having seemingly led only to the carnage of World War II, it is not surprising that post-war artists largely abandoned the art styles and political cultures associated with the Great Depression.[iii]

The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art … which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous ‘acts’ of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears [especially of communism] that permeated the post-war era.”[iv] Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend Barnett Newman remarked that if people only read his paintings properly “it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”[v] Read more