What every fan of modernism may not know is that all of these designers were Jewish.
A smart, handsome new exhibition at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum called Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism seeks to remedy this oversight. It’s the first show, as the catalog puts it, to “look at the contribution of Jewish designers, architects, patrons, and merchants in the creation of a distinctly modern domestic landscape.” But Designing Home asks a deeper question as well: Why Jews? What was it about the era—and Jews in particular—that made modernism and Jewishness such a good match?
To find out more, The Daily Beast spoke to curator Donald Albrecht. He explained why Jewish émigrés equated modernism with assimilation; how Hitler helped trigger the modern movement in America; and which major American museum was responsible for making modernism seem less Jewish than it actually was.
Groups only assimilate in the most superficial senses such as adopting the language of their new country and some of its customs. Otherwise, they behave according to their genetics and history.
About 80% of American Jews come from Eastern Europe where their ancestors for centuries hated the goyim and were in turn hated by the goyim. Jews from Western Europe, by contrast, tended to admire and seek to emulate their fellow citizens.
Jeff Goldstein of The Federalist has thrown up an article claiming the Alt Right is a mirror image of the New Left. There is some truth in that. Without the New Left’s full-frontal assault on American culture, history, and identity, the Alt Right would probably not exist. If America were still a White, Christian nation, we would still likely be humming along, ignoring contradictions in our society, and the biggest issue in politics would be the looming Social Security crisis.
Goldstein is worth responding to because he’s written a kind of comprehensive response thoroughly grounded in the “proposition nation” tropes of postmodern conservatism. The problem is, as many readers know, the “proposition nation” is itself completely ahistorical. America was not formed by sending questionnaires ’round the world, inquiring who might believe in the Sacred Propositions (whatever they are, no one has told me), and bringing them here. Nor has dissent from the Sacred Propositions ever been grounds for stripping anyone of his citizenship. The Declaration of Independence is grounded in the English character of the American nation. The Constitution was written for “ourselves and our posterity.” America was formed by Englishmen with a heavy seasoning of Germans and Frenchmen—the former of whom were required to jettison much of their German identity during WW1. The very first immigration laws limited naturalization to “free white men of good character.”
Thus postmodern, deracinated conservatism has a deep fear of history. You can argue until you’re blue in the face that America was founded on universal ideals and therefore will work equally well no matter its racial makeup, but the historical fact is that prior to Hart-Cellar, America was 90% White. Period. There is no actually existing non-White in America in history that “worked.” The attempt to integrate blacks and Whites has completely failed. Every single measure of social rot among blacks is shockingly higher now than it was before we decided to save them. The mass of Hispanic immigrants brought to our country has not assimilated and has fundamentally altered the political and cultural character of every state in which it has settled.
Culture and race are inseparable by geographic reality. For a distinct genetic signature to exist, a group of people must be separated from another for thousands of years. If two groups of people separate for thousands of years, they will develop different laws, customs, religion, language, and morals. The longer they are separated, the more incompatible they become.
The Alt-Right begins with simply stating the obvious: Multiculturalism isn’t working. Then we look a little more closely. Turns out low IQ is genetic. Turns out that a propensity to violence is heritable. Turns out not everyone in the world actually wants liberty. Turns out that “liberty” as we know it evolved out of English common law. Turns out that millions—no, billions—of people around the world would more than happily vote away the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if given the chance, as they prefer Islam, slaughtering rival tribes, or sitting around and doing nothing all day. Turns out that Hispanics aren’t “natural conservatives” at all.
For Goldstein, “conservatism” is conceived only in purely financial terms. At this point, this should surprise nobody, and not because of the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew. As Daily Beast writer Andrew Hermano wrote in How Jews Created American Modernism, Jews have always been separated from Western civilization and feel no sense of belonging to it. The only way they can feel they belong is if they purge those elements they find alien and hostile, what’s left being abstract and deracinated.
Really, Jews are America’s first failed attempt at assimilation. Unlike the nations of Europe, we allowed Jews full participation in our society, even the highest levels of education and government. The “reward” is Christianity banished from the public realm, sexual anarchy, feminism, and “conservative” redefined as conserving only Ronald Reagan’s tax code.
Comments at Radix:
* This is an excellent article that touches the real sore spot for neocons and their idiot dupes: our new elite are not really “American” in the true sense – they are foreigners with an immigrant’s tone-deaf approach to American ideals and traditions. Their entire worldview is trapped in the despotic and medieval world of the shtetl and the Pale of Settlement. This eastern European approach to government, based as it is on a system of feudal license and tax-farming, strikes the true American as the grossest form of tyranny. We hardly know what to call it; is it Communism, Neo-Liberalism, the New World Order? No, it’s just the natural expression of eastern European jewry’s native habits and predilections, as traditional American libertarianism is an expression of the Anglo-Saxon soul.
True American nationalism calls for the return of English Common Law and the old Anglo-Saxon ideals of government. This is the real meaning of the Constitution and our people’s most glorious possession – the Bill of Rights. Not all of the residents of these United States are true members of the historical American nation. However, all of these motley visitors will surely benefit from a return of traditional American laws and customs, save for those who have become accustomed to a life of parasitism and graft.
* We understand that Christianity is a flexible religion. The Bible has many contradictions and does not obviously outline even orthodox Christian theology, so certainly one can be a Nazi, SJW, WN, or whatever while being a Christian.
The point we argue is that Christian teachings have a universalist bent. This is why so many of the Churches you likely have attended are so anti-racist.
* Jewish to Christian convert Laurence Auster said that US Jews should be allowed to participate in political life only to the extent they are supporting the white-led Christian historic American nation, and that seems right to me. Hostile, destructive Jews need to be shunned.
* You know, in an attempt to explain the intellectual origins of the “alrtright” to people I’ve said that there are three main camps that make up the points of a triangle and everyone in the triangle is considered “altright”, the three camps are: The Neoreactionary Movement (Evola, traditionalists, TWP, /pol/, fascists, anything that became popular during the “dark enlightenment”) The European New Right (Alain de Benoist, Guilliaume Faye, Dugin, etc), and the American Alternative Right (Jared Taylor, Samuel Francis, Richard Spencer, Pat Buchanan, basically all the paleocons and uncucked conservatives) obviously a lot of these overlap each other in ideals but people in the altright usually have their ideological base in either one of these camps.
