Rabbi Ovadia Yosef as quoted in Jpost:

“Is it a wonder that soldiers who don’t observe the Torah, don’t pray every day and don’t put on tefilin every day are killed in war? It is no wonder…Soldiers who are believers and who pray, God helps in wars. They are not killed…”

Embarassingly enough, this dark ages bullshit kind of thing is actually ‘news’ in Israel. In any case, no worries Rabbi; according to Arutz Sheva, half of new combat officers are religious. So surely we can look forward to wars of much lower casualties. Right?

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  • It’s only news because Ovadia is the religious leader of a large Haredi party.
    This was also quoted in Ma’ariv, as were many other idiotic remarks of this senile old rabbi…
    Why? I suppose because it’s so upraging. It is not endorsment in any way (save arutz 7).

  • Israel’s security, assured: exempt secular kids from military service and send the haredi.

  • This explains, of course, why nothing bad has ever happened to the jewish people during their long history and why bullets bounce off of Supermans chest.
    Ghost Dancing anyone?

  • Not my kind of rabbi. Nevertheless, I would like to see an entire transcript of exactly what he said. I’ve read too many misunderstood claims in the JPost over the last 2 years.

    On the subject in general, may I suggest reading Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People for a general Jewish point of view on the subject.

  • “This explains, of course, why nothing bad has ever happened to the jewish people during their long history and why bullets bounce off of Supermans chest.
    Ghost Dancing anyone?”

    The bad stuff start happening when Jews forget their Covenant with G-d and start doing things that displeases H-m.

    But when they are observing the Covenant nothing can stand in their way. With G-d’s help they kick butt. They defeat the strongest of foes.

  • Funny, that´s what they say Aceh Indonesia, Lynchburg Virginia, among many other places. But of course THEY have the wrong G-d.

  • jc, are you saying that Hashem doesn’t have a special relationship with Jews? That we mean the same thing to Him as xians and muslims?
    Anyway, it’s unsurprising that jpost take R’ Ovadia shlita out of context. He was quoting a gemara to the effect that all Jews are responsible for one another’s well being. An individual soldier doesn’t die because he doesn’t daven, but he might die because every Jew doesn’t daven enough for his safety. There is nothing shocking or appalling about R’ Ovadia’s comments, only the frankly offensive response. To call this gaon of Torah senile and idiotic is downright sickening.

  • jc. Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 1:03 am
    Funny, that´s what they say Aceh Indonesia, Lynchburg Virginia, among many other places. But of course THEY have the wrong G-d.

    It does not take much to discover that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are incompatible with one another, though there are some various points of common agreement.

    So what else is new?!

    If you don’t believe that the Torah was given by G-d to the people of Israel and/or if you think its contents are false, then we’re all wasting are time in Israel and talking about Judaism. If there’s nothing here for you, then why are you here?

    For those of us that carry on the recollection of the Exodus and the Sinaitic Revelation, with their obligations to obey Hashem and teach our children to follow in our ancestor’s footpaths, we have no such doubts.

  • During the Weimar Republic lots of Jews were acting in sexually perverse ways. They were polluting German culture.

    And look at what happened.

  • Alex, dein faschistoides Gesülle behältst du besser für dich. In Deutschland ist sowas nämlich strafbar.

  • Alex, dein faschistoides Gesülle behältst du besser für dich. In Deutschland ist sowas nämlich strafbar.

  • Sarah, nothing can excuse what the Germans did to the Jews. But I can understand why Jews might have been targeted if Jews were prominent in polluting German society during the Weimar Republic.

    By the way, there is still no good website that translates from German to English.

    I think you said it is illegal to say what I had said in Germany. Thank God I am an American then.

  • Jews were targeted during the Weimar Republic, because the economy was in the pits and people / politicians were looking for scapegoats. The common citizens, raised in the strongly hierarchically society of the Second Reich, were not accustomed to getting poltically involved; the poltical landscape was instable as the electoral system did not favour a two-party system and there was no minimum percentage of votes needed to be gained to enter Parliament, which made for complicated and often deconstructive and ineffective political coalitions. In addition to the overall Great Depression, the new democarcy struggled with paying repairs for damages done during WW1. If anything, Jews at that time enriched the cultural and academic scene of the Weimar Republic. There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that an indivdual’s sexual preferences “polluted German society”. What polluted German society back then was the common mindless acceptance of authoroties.

  • “If anything, Jews at that time enriched the cultural and academic scene of the Weimar Republic.”

    The Culture of the Weimar Republic was a sewer. And those who were famous for promoting such a culture were more often than not Jews. I don’t know why that was, but that is the way it was.

    Again, not a justification for what happened next and most of the Jews who were promoting this culture were able to escape to other parts of Europe and to America, leaving innocent Jews to pay for their sins.

  • Even the much celebrated book Diary of Anne Frank has some sexual perverse thoughts in it. I hope that not all of Jews in Germany were sexual perverts and they certainly didn’t deserve to die like that, but when a certain group pollutes a society there will be a backlash.

    But the way the backlash occurred was unjustifiable. And lots of innocent people died for the sins of hopefully a few. And most of those who were responsible for polluting the Wiemar Republic culture escaped anyway.

  • Alex, what do you base those claims on since you’re not even capable of reading German sources? Percentagewise, the Eastern European Jewish communities suffered bigger losses during the Third Reich than the German Jewish community. To claim that the cultural scene of the Weimar Republic bespeaks your ignorance of the history of art and music, otherwise you would not make such a claim. I don’t know why you’re so ignorant of actual historic events, but that is the way it is.

  • I’ve read the Diary of Anne Frank; alongside the description of the events that occurred in connection with the Holocaust and hence turned her family into refugees, she related the thoughts, dreams and fears of a girl growing up, including contemplations about the changes affecting her body during puberty. To read any perversions into that bespeaks a twisted mind.

  • It would have been a much better book had the part about her “contemplations about the changes affecting her body during puberty” been left out and it just focused on the horrific injustice being done to her.

  • Alex, what more can I say other than that you gross me out?

    Where’s ck for a voice of reason?

  • Sarah,

    I think Alex is referring to Anne Frank’s passages on the beauty of the female body and same-sex desire. It’s in there. No need to pretend it isn’t.

  • And now we are seeing the same poisonous culture that infected the Weimar Republic overrun the culture of Israel. Sure it has also overrun the entire West but the Jews are the chosen people. They depend on G-d not only spiritually but in a real practical way for National Security. They need G-d not only to be on their side but to be an active participant in Israel’s defense or they will be destroyed.

  • By the way I am doing the whole hyphen thing in respect of Judaism as in my religion we feel no need to hyphen G-d. So why isn’t grandmuffti using hyphens when mentioning G-d?

  • Anne’s Diary exists in more than one version, some with, and some without, the very personal stuff. She didn’t know she was writing for publication! It was her personal diary, the most private thing in the world. I am not a real scholar on this, but from what I have read, there is NOTHING perverted, or freaky in any way, in the Diary. Even the personal stuff is standard-issue, garden-variety normal. What all of us women all go through in puberty. She doesn’t even dwell on it much.

    I cannot improve on Post 17.

    Sarah has lived in Germany, and even worked there, and is fluent in their language. She taught – they trusted her with their young people. You’re going to argue with her??

  • I’m not pretending it isn’t in there, but any anthropologist, any psychologist and any neurologist worth his title will tell you that homoerotic fantasies are not uncommon among youths during puberty even if they never act up on them and eventually grow up being straight. Adorno’s research suggested that those most adamantly objecting the concept of homosexuality (as the Nazis did) are usually just afraid of admitting to their own homosexual inclinations (it’s no news that the Waffen-SS predominantly was gay). But to blame the end of the Weimar Republic on random homsexual Jews that may or may not have lived in those parts during that era is not only just way beyond ignorant of history but also bespeaks a mindset that mankind should have foregone sixty years ago the latest.

  • Anne Frank’s passages same-sex desire is perverted. What kind of society was she living in to make her consider such desires? And what kind of person would print such a private passage of hers after her death.

    I am not saying that all perverted people are Jews and all Jews are perverted. But it does seem that a lot of prominent people in the Wiemar Republic as well as today who are leaders in promoting perversity happen to be Jews. I don’t know why that is is.

  • If Anne had grown up and lived out her days, in a peaceful time, she would have had a bourgeois life, with a marriage, and a writing career. That is the most reasonable prediction, given her background, and abilities. Her family were essentially pretty ordinary people, doing ordinary things.

    She was pretty interested in Peter.

  • I don’t know why that is. But look back at the Wiemar Republic and you will see that of those who were very active in that society in polluting that society with their perversity, I would say that at least 75 percent of them were Jews.

    Again, don’t know the reason that was the case.

  • Alex, I can thing of so many things that were wrong with so many Jews throughout various European countries prior to WWII. Why be so selective?

  • Alex, work on your reading comprehension skills.

    “Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen selbst die Götter vergebens.” (Friedrich Schiller)

  • Alex, thanks for your contributions to scholarship. Until I read your comments, I was unaware that Anne Frank wasn’t Dutch at all, but a citizen of the Weimar Republic whose diary made Hitler possible. Again, dude, thanks.

    btw, I believe the percentage was 59.472 and not 75, but your point’s well-taken, my friend!

  • Anne’s family came from Frankfurt Am Main in Germany. They went to Holland because the increasing hostility they encountered in Germany.

    I still say Post 17 is the real story.

    Alex, we have no anti-sex, or prudish, heritage. Not at the foundation layer of our thinking, anyway, separate wedding seating notwithstanding. Our clergy are not celibate. In fact the Kohen Gadol (High Priest in the ancient Temple) HAD TO BE MARRIED or he could not go into the Holy of Holies.

    To this day, nobody with any sense would take serious life-direction from an unmarried rabbi. Chat and discussion, sure, but not orders. What does he know of life?

    That is not a recipe for fishnet stockings, not at all. We prize modesty and restraint too. But have you really read the “Old Testment” carefully? That’s our foundation.

    We like a happy medium. Warmth, within marriage.

  • Alex, Post 17 explains how economic reasons underlay it all. The other stuff was just PR, the cover story. The Germans could have held onto their morals if they had wanted to. You can always hold onto your morals.

  • Adorno?

    He was one of the problems with the Wiemar Republic.

    I have read the “Old Testament” carefully and it forbids homosexuality.

  • Perhaps Post 17 is part of it. But if you look into the Wiemar Republic you will find that those were indeed times when the Culture was being perverted by Jews.

    As for “holding on to your values” it is pretty hard to hold on to them when everywhere around you there are elements working against them.

    Especially when you have people like Adorno working within academia trying to steer your children away from good values.

    He might have failed in Germany, but he was quite successful indeed later on wasn’t he!

  • If using one’s mind made people problems to the Weimar Republic, democratic-minded people all over the world should cherish those troublemakers of old.

    The OT forbids a man to lie with another man as he lies with his wife. The jury’s still out on that one.

  • “Tom Morrissey Said:

    We can all blame Hitler on Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli.”

    Absolutely.

    Well of course not them but the characters they played in the movie.

    The Cabaret was the center of perversion in the Wiemar Republic.

  • (Yes, it does forbid male homosexuality. Our culture certainly does not endorse female homosexuality, not at all, but female homosexuality is not mentioned at all in the “Old Testament”.

    You are right that our culture is very pro-marriage. There is nothing in it about “do whatever you feel like”.

    We are responsible for each other. If someone is alone, we are supposed to find that person a match among our numerous office, gym and club acquaintance.

  • Alex, Adorno is still cherished in Germany for his role in the Frankfurt School. Please note, Frankfurt am Main is a city in Germany.

  • Adorno won the Cold War. Cultural Marxism won the Cold War. The Frankfurt School has won the Cold War and has become the foundation for the Modern West.

    And, Jewish Mother, it is becoming the new foundation of your country as well. And if that isn’t stopped, Israel will be destroyed.

  • What about all those Jewish dentists, store-keepers, classical violinists and accountants? They didn’t pervert anything.

    Post 17 is the story.

    This had been building since the time of Heinrich Heine, who predicted it, way back in the early 19th century.

    You are, however, speaking to a “light unto the Nations” idea that is indeed part of us.

    So we can’t absolutely strangle Alex with a fishnet stocking. But he should still re-read Post 17.

  • Na gut, Alex, da du ja offenkundig glaubst, ein ausgewiesener Experte im Bezug auf die Soziologie der Weimarer Republik zu sein, muss ich davon ausgehen können, dass deine Deutschkenntnisse zumindest dazu ausreichen, dich mit den Quellen des Frauenhofer Institutes auseinanderzusetzen. Falls dem nicht der Fall sein sollte, würde ich dir eindringlich raten, von weiteren Beiträgen abzusehen; dein Widerkäuen bildungsfreier Gemeinplätze lässt deine Gedankenwelt ohnehin schon zu einer Farce verkomen.

  • To understand modern America it is more important to understand Adorno and the fellow members of the Frankfurt school than to understand Jefferson, Madison, or any of the others who are considered our founders.

    For even though most Americans don’t know their names like they do our founders, the ideology of the Frankfurt school has more to do with how modern America operates than does the ideology of our founders.

    And the Frankfurt School comes from the time of the Weimar Republic. The poisonous influence of the Weimar Republic’s perversions that caused such a evil backlash was never extinguished. It just moved to America and other places in Europe.

    Adorno escaped the wraith of the German people for what he did and innocent Jews suffered instead because of him.

  • “What about all those Jewish dentists, store-keepers, classical violinists and accountants? They didn’t pervert anything.”

    I said that innocent Jews suffered for the sins of a few.

    And actually most of those causing the problems did escape the Concentration Camps.

  • “What about all those Jewish dentists, store-keepers, classical violinists and accountants? They didn’t pervert anything.”

    I said that innocent Jews suffered for the sins of a few.

    And actually most of those causing the problems did escape the Concentration Camps.

  • I don’t know who Adorno is, but I favor a reasonable degree of modesty, faithful marriage, love of fellow Jew, and a whole lot of happiness of the acceptable kind, with lots of food and talk, but with people acting right. This is harder than it sounds.

    Alex has a point. We have to find a way to repair the damage.

    The destruction of the family is far too convenient for Capital. It leads to the disappearance of the unionized worker. What remains is a worker who will go anywhere he is needed, and find temporary amusement in the evening, like a good chap, like a permanent soldier. No roots. No “I have to get home”. No “but my kids are in the middle of the school year and my spouse’s family are all here, so I can’t move”.

    I am for capitalism, but Sabbath Capitalism. Capitalism only six days a week. Not seven.

  • Why is it that the only person here to dismiss the hater is Tom, our resident Catholic?

    This is what Alex said:

    “During the Weimar Republic lots of Jews were acting in sexually perverse ways. They were polluting German culture.

    And look at what happened.”

    And

    The Culture of the Weimar Republic was a sewer. And those who were famous for promoting such a culture were more often than not Jews.

    and then, to make sure we get the point that he is talking about present day US and Israeli Jews

    “…and most of the Jews who were promoting this culture were able to escape to other parts of Europe and to America, leaving innocent Jews to pay for their sins.”

    Then Alex gave us his Anne Frank “pollution” opinion and told us that at least 75 percent of the “polluters” were Jews.

    He went from attacks on Israeli homosexuality to explicit antisemitism and you’re engaging him in conversation about a philosopher because he wants to say that Jews are polluting America and that Israel is itself polluted. Why talk to him at all?

  • Jewish Mother you better find out who Adorno is because he threatens to destroy Israel (as well as America and that matter the entire West).

    Yes, I know he is dead but his ideology and that of his fellow Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School lives, and indeed is the dominant ideology of the West even though most people don’t even know the names of these people.

    It filtered down from academia and gained strength during the 1960s (after helping to create the backlash in Germany that lead to Hitler). And now it effects us on a daily basis in ways most of us have failed to recognize.

  • The damage of the family was purposeful.

    It is part of the ideology of Cultural Marxism.

  • Is Tom really a Catholic? His “musings” don’t go in line with official Catholic teachings; I’d considered him to be a member of a Protestant denomination of some sort.

    Alex, those causing the problems were the Nazis.
    The Frankfurt School sprang into life in 1930 CE when the Weimar Republic was already lying on its deathbed. It was continued after WW2; notewoorthily, Adorno’s most influential contributions stem from the post-war era.

  • Are you talking about Gramcsi? Or is it spelled Gromshy? That stuff makes me sick, and I don’t know much about it, not in any kind of precise way. I prefer to focus on what we SHOULD do, not what we shouldn’t. I am late-life orthodox and I read good stuff, like Noson Weisz.

    I have no stomach for Foucault and Gide and all those nihilist idiots. They have a stench of phoniness and infertility. I can’t imagine them refusing payment for a lecture, or having children.

    I mean, is that what you are talking about?

    Are you suggesting that a musl.im worker can never unionize, and that that is what is so great about him, and so that is why the Establishment is so nice to him, and sees him as the future?

    I am not clever enough for this discussion. I feel so inferior. I can’t read hard material. I fall asleep.

  • Is Tom really a Catholic? His “musings” don’t go in line with official Catholic teachings; I’d considered him to be a member of a Protestant denomination of some sort.

    Alex, those causing the problems were the Nazis.
    The Frankfurt School sprang into life in 1930 CE when the Weimar Republic was already lying on its deathbed. It was continued after WW2; noteworthily, Adorno’s most influential contributions stem from the post-war era.

    BTW, is anybody else experiencing browser problems when posting a comment?

  • I’ve got a brief summary of the history of blood miracles, ritual murder accusations etc. up on my blog. Seems rather apropos in this context.

    JM, fancy some coffee or tea and homemade cookies?

  • Gramcsi is certainly part of it. But then you had this group of academics in Weimar Republic Germany who expanded upon the work of Gramsci. They became known as the Frankfurt School because that is where they were located.

    As the climate of Germany became hostile to them with the rise of Nazi Germany they all moved away to Europe and the United States.

    Adorno was a member of this group and stayed in America even after the war. There he stayed in academia until he saw his opportunity with the restless Baby Boomers to popularize his work and get his ideology spread to popular culture.

    Another influential member of “the Frankfurt School” is Herbert Marcuse. I recommend looking him up as well to understand what is going on in the modern world.

    http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

  • Sarah the Frankfurt School was started in 1923.

    And indeed Adono was most successful in the 1960s when the baby boomers all hit their teenage years (rebellious years) at the same time overwhelming the general culture of our society.

  • OK, I will google them, but I will probably fall asleep.

    Let me suggest that the Nazis found certain aspects of Jewish tolerance useful, as fuel for the flames their own, pre-Christian, NON-Christian, Wagnerian, Viking, horrible sexual perversions. Then, the Jews, having outlived their usefulness as window dressing, would be destroyed.

    At first, for the Nazis’ program, it was important to destroy the Germans’ honorable, authentic Christianity, (such as it may have been, and I am no scholar). Once that was done, they could do anything they wanted, money underlying it all.

    So, WE WERE — USED and THEY were running things!

    The Blue Angel was not a Jewish person, or a Jewish physical type. We do not have any big, bad, blonde valkieries.

    We have a naivet̩ that is permanent, and it is part of why G-d loves us. We trust Him. We love life. We are not scared Рnot of Him Рwe knew him in high school. Perhaps we should be a little more scared? It is Elul, the month of self-examination, before the High Holidays in September.

    Alex, are we being used again, in your opinion? Is that what you are saying?

  • The force of darkness knows how to use people’s virtue against them.

  • The Nineteen Fifties were a time of very great capitalist strength and expansion in the US. The air crackled with the success of the capitalist system. Not every European depressive could stand to breathe that air. It contradicted everything they believed about capitalism’s weakness and imminent downfall. (After that, the racial horrors were addressed, too. How to complain?)

    Better to retreat to the old world, the war being over, and be addressed as Herr Doktor Professor by the respectful Europeans, than be regarded as a lesser being, a foreigner, and a German too, in the US.

    That might be why he and others went back. It took guts to stay here.

  • Germans on average move twice in their lifetime, US Americans eight times. Germans have a tendency to consider home the place where they were born.

  • That was not for post-war periods, especially after losing. I like my explanation better. The guy wasn’t Jewish, he had something to go back to.

    I maintain the air was unbreathable, for him.

    That is my native air, so I know. I remember.

  • I don’t know in how far Adorno spoke English; it’s always tough for adults of advanced age to settle in a foreign country without the needed language skills particularly if your profession relies on the everday use of language.

  • Einstein, Chagall, so many more did it. He was smart, no?

  • According to a friend of mine whose grandfather was good friends with Einstein, Einstein never achieved a proficiency level in English to say the least. Chagall was born to an Orthodox family in Vitebsk; I’ve seen better results teaching adult Chasidim English than teaching secular youths as those Orthodox guys have a habit of learning that can easily be extended to all kinds of subjects.

  • Hmm. Maybe his politics were too far to the left to make it pleasant for him to remain in the US. In fact, maybe he had to leave.

    Maybe he hated going back, cradle and all. Life was a lot more comfortable here, materially.

    I sure don’t know, and you don’t seem to.

  • I know people that experienced him as a professor of theirs. I’ll try to contact them. I only know from a biography that he was homesick for Germany.

  • OK.

    That is exactly the kind of thing you find in a biography. Didn’t your baloney detector go off? Maybe it needs a new battery?

  • Nah, he left before McCarthy. Since his father was a Jew that converted to Protestantism, he was still categorized as Jewish in Nazi law.

  • (Alex, please re-read posts 21, 31, 63 and 64 several times.)

  • Not sure about TW Adorno’s English proficiency, Sarah, but he is said to have largely written the dialogue between Adrian Leverkuhn and the Devil in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus during their time in the States. The chapter contains a chilling description of hell. Which returns us full circle to Alex– well, never mind….

  • wow. why is everyone indulging this Alex character? he is a moron.

    JM, I take issue with several of your points regarding Anne Frank’s diary. She started the diary for personal use, but at some point during the war heard some dude on the radio calling for people to document their experiences. She wanted her diary to be published. She edited it. I guess in that sense you could argue that there are multiple versions.
    The reason there are multiple published versions is because Otto Frank was embarrassed by his daughter’s sexual frankness and by some of the things she wrote about her mother. I suggest you read the definitive edition. You might find that Anne was quite ambivalent about what you refer to as a “bourgeois” lifestyle.
    “I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people” (251).

    Sure, Anne was interested in Peter, for a time. You’d be interested in him too if he was the only guy under 50 you ever saw during your entire puberty. By the end of her diary, Anne comments on the fact that Peter is much more invested in their relationship than she is and doesn’t “see any effective way of shaking him off and getting him back on his own two feet. I soon realized he could never be a kindred spirit…” (332).

    You also wrote that “we like a happy medium. Warmth, within marriage.” Who is this we? The royal we? The editorial we? You are one. “We” are both Jewish, and we agree on nothing.

    Sarah, I sincerely hope you were not lecturing me about the normalcy of teenage sexual exploration. How utterly condescending. I pointed out what Alex might be alluding to without giving an opinion one way or the other. I don’t feel it necessary to demonstrate why Alex is wrong. It is self-evident. But yes, I am having browser problems. It’s the blog, not my browser. The godforsaken thing refreshes in the middle and I lose my comment. It’s exceedingly annoying.

  • Sarah, my apologizes. I got Adorno mixed up with Marcuse. Adorno did indeed return to Germany after the war but Marcuse stayed in America.

    Sorry for the error.

  • Jewish Mother, what I am saying is that you need to look at the Weimar Republic, what was going on during the Weimar Republic. and who was doing it.

    Many Germans blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I, some even claiming that German Jews had betrayed the nation during the war. In addition, at the end of the war a Communist group attempted to carry out a Bolshevik-type revolution in the German state of Bavaria. Most of the leaders of that failed attempt were Jews. As a result, some Germans associated Jews with Bolsheviks and regarded both groups as dangerous enemies of Germany. After the war, a republic known as the Weimar Republic was set up in Germany. Jewish politicians and intellectuals played an important role in German life during the Weimar Republic, and many non-Jews resented their influence.

    The Weimar Republic was known as a time of great perversity within Germany and unfortunately most of the people promoting this perversity in Germany were indeed Jews Berlin, in particular, became something of an international destination for people seeking its wide variety of sexual subcultures.

    The blacklash to this is what caused the popularly of the Nazis.

    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EL09Aa01.html

    Even the moral Jews were for the Nazis until of course the Nazis lumped all the Jews together and indiscriminately persecuted them.

  • Alex stole a paragraph from an encyclopedia, threw out all the other information about historic antisemitism in Germany and the evolution of the Nazis in the 1930s and inserted his own spin – which not so oddly resembles the Nazi spin – about Jewish “immorality.”

    The “great perversity” version is Hitler’s version of this history.

  • Ofri, I sincerely hope you understand that contradicting and contributing additional information are invetiable parts of discourses.

    As for Alex’ credibility, since he does not understand German, he’s incapable of reading any source produced in the Weimar Republic in its original language. Among academics, he’d be considered a farce on grounds of his lack of languge skills alone.

  • Alex, Adorno’s father had converted from Judaism to Protestantism, his mother was Catholic. In Jewish law, Adorno was not considered a Jew; only the Nazis considered him a Jew according to their “Rassengesetze” as he had Jewish ancestors.

  • Are you really saying that the culture of the Weimar Republic wasn’t perverse?

    I don’t need to know German to read English sources to say it was.

  • (Yes, you do.)

    Your original point was essentially religious. Stick to that.

    “The Jews made me do it, Mommy, honest,” is a juvenile and lame excuse.

    It was more like, “The Germans made me do it”. The Germans corrupted the Jews!

  • Ofri, your points are interesting. But we can never know how Anne’s life would have gone. What people muse in their mid- teens is not a life blueprint. Anne was a genius, certainly, and not like other people. But her intellectual power makes us forget just how very, very, very young she was when she wrote all that.

    As for “we” I am referring to mainstream Jewish tradition. You know that involves “warmth, within marriage”. Not everybody wants to be traditional, and that is up to them.

  • It is hard to tell if Alex is sympathetically warning us of future unfair scapegoating, or, if he himself really thinks we ruin things for the honest burghers.

    He warned us to keep a good relationship with G-d because that is the lifeline.

    He is not fun company in the usual sense but this has been interesting.

  • Alex, you need to know German to read original sources. I had to learn Middle English and Middle High German to pursue studies on medieval history – I just as well wouldn’t consider anybody an expert on China who hasn’t at least learnt the basics of Mandarin and / or Cantonese.

  • Doesn’t it worry you quoting Marxist sources Sarah? Adorno was a very evil man.

  • Alex, the only thing that worries me is the paranoia that make some people believe in world conspiracies. Regardless of his political views, Adorno conducted some very important and extensive research on the socio-psychologic characteristics of racists. I should prefer you not to suggest claims to my writing that are not in there; this is not only academically inproper, it’s downright annoying. Evading a proper response by trying to undermine a person’s credentials may fool somebody who does not ‘sapere aude[t]’.

  • Maybe we should pick on Herbert Marcuse instead of this Adorno? I haven’t read him, either. Don’t tell me to. I am old and don’t have to. Nah, nah, nah.

  • JM, you still sound rather youthful to me.

    I was tempted for a brief moment to explain to Alex how the early Christian community (that what Protestant movements are aching to be like) was basically Communist, but then I started polishing my jewellery.

  • But what about Marcuse? You can polish your jewelry some other time.

  • Makes me wonder whether there are words that rhyme with Marcuse (pronounced the French way, that is).

  • Alas, no, according to the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary.

    I was trying to compose a limerick, but got stuck at:
    “A Marxist Sociologist named Marcuse
    When made aware he was one of the Juwse,
    Thought, “What the heck?
    I’ll take that guy from the back,
    As long as it’s perversion I use.”

  • I think that there was only one attempt to ‘give the benefit of the doubt’ to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

    Only two days after the ‘scoop’ was publicized in the Israeli media did we learn that [once again, surpise, suprise], the rabbi’s words were grossly taken out of context and that he was talking about the parsha of the week in which is says that only the true scholars would go to war. If a soldier was not a ‘tzaddik’, then he’d get sent away from the front.

    In a few parts of the torah, we read about am yisrael sending in their yeshiva bochers to wage war (after fasting for a day), not the muscular warriors. This was to prove that God helps us, not our strength.

  • I think somebody might have said, he meant, it’s because not enough of us pray for them. Not because they, themselves, don’t pray enough. Us, not them.

    What language did he say it in? As Sarah says, you have to read stuff in the original language, if it is dicey or controversial. I read his quote in English – so, did he actually say it in English? If not, bets are off.

  • Adorno was a very evil man who designed his research to demonize his political opponents. Ironically the same people who actually fought and so many died to defeat the Nazis. The middle class.

    By the way Jewish Mother, from what you have said so far you are exactly the type of person Adorno would call racist.

  • We would never know if Anne would have become a Lesbian later in life but I do wonder if her thinking about it so much comes from the Weimar culture she grew up in.

    Also, I wonder why such thoughts were ever published. It would have been much better had it been left off as it distracts from the central theme of the book. So I do wonder if there was an agenda behind publishing that part of the book.

  • Herbert Marcuse was evil too. He too was a Marxist (as all the members of the Frankfurt School were).

    Here is a good source about the Frankfurt School.

    http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

    And here is another good source.

    http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essays/

    After the war, Marcuse wrote a key book, ‘Eros and Civilization’, which virtually became the bible of the student movement during the 1960s. In it Marcuse argued that repression of the sexual instincts was the essence of the capitalist order, causing hang-ups and neuroses (an idea borrowed from Freud). The repressive order needs to be destroyed, so that eros, the libido, can be liberated. The human race can then look forward to a future of ‘polymorphous perversity’, in which everybody can ‘do their own thing’. ‘If it feels good, do it’. It was Marcuse who created the phrase, ‘Make love, not war’. He defined ‘liberating tolerance’ as intolerance for anything coming from the Right, and tolerance for anything coming from the Left.

  • Jewish Mother and Sarah, please read this article carefully and all the way through to understand who you’re dealing with.

    Reframing the Enemy

    ‘Cultural Marxism,’ a conspiracy theory with an anti-Semitic twist, is being pushed by much of the American right
    By Bill Berkowitz

    Television commentator Pat Buchanan says it is being used to “de-Christianize” America. Washington heavyweight William Lind [that’s the guy Alex keeps linking to] claims it is turning U.S. college campuses into “ivy-covered North Koreas.” Retired naval commander Gerald Atkinson fears it has invaded the nation’s military academies. Immigration activist John Vinson suggests it aims “to distort and destroy” our country.
    “Cultural Marxism,” described as a conspiratorial attempt to wreck American culture and morality, is the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right. Surprisingly, there are signs that this bizarre theory is catching on in the mainstream.

    The phrase refers to a kind of “political correctness” on steroids — a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who are pushing the “cultural Marxism” scenario aren’t merely poking fun at the PC excesses of the “People’s Republic of Berkeley,” or the couple of American cities whose leaders renamed manholes “person-holes” in a bid to root out sexist thought.

    Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of “cultural Marxism” are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.

    In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of “Marxism” that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system.

    The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called “Frankfurt School” of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, “family values,” and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.

    The very term, “cultural Marxism,” is clearly intended to conjure up xenophobic anxieties. But can a theory like this, built on the words of long-dead intellectuals who have little discernible relevance to normal Americans’ lives, really fly? As bizarre as it might sound, there is some evidence that it may. Certainly, those who are pushing the theory seem to believe that it is an important one.

    “Political correctness looms over American society like a colossus,” William Lind, a principal of far-right political strategist Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation (see group description, in Into the Mainstream) and a key popularizer of the idea of cultural Marxism, warned in a 1998 speech. “It has taken over both political parties and is enforced by many laws and government regulations. It almost totally controls the most powerful element in our culture, the entertainment industry. It dominates both public and higher education. … It has even captured the clergy in many Christian churches.”

    It’s the Jews, Stupid
    At the core of the far right’s concept of cultural Marxism are the Jews. Lind made this plain in June 2002, when he gave a speech on the subject to a Washington Holocaust denial conference hosted by the anti-Semitic journal, Barnes Review.
    Although he told his audience that his Free Congress Foundation was “not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred,” he went on to lay out just who the cultural conspirators were: “These guys,” he explained, “were all Jewish.”

    Like Jews in general, the Frankfurt School makes a convenient antagonist — one that is basically seen as antithetical to all things American. The school, says social psychology professor Richard Lichtman of the Berkeley-based Wright Institute, is “a convenient target that very few people really know anything about.

    “By grounding their critique in Marxism and using the Frankfurt School, [cultural conservatives] make it seem like it’s quite foreign to anything American. It takes on a mysterious cast and translates as an incomprehensible, anti-American, foreign movement that is only interested in undermining the U.S.,” he said. “The idea being transmitted is that we are being infected from the outside.”

    Not everyone who uses the cultural Marxism construct sees Jews in general at the center of the plot. But a 1998 book by California State University-Long Beach evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald — one of just two witnesses to testify on behalf of Holocaust denier David Irving in a famous 2000 libel trial — makes plain that Jews in general are implicated in what is seen as an attack on the West.

    In The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Social Movements, MacDonald says that while all Jews are not guilty, the movements he attacks are indeed “Jewishly motivated.”

    In a chapter devoted to the Frankfurt School, MacDonald suggests that Jews criticize non-Jews’ desire to form “cohesive, nationalistic, corporate gentile groups based on conformity to group norms” — with Frankfurt School principals painting this desire as a psychopathology — while they hypocritically pursue cohesiveness in their own group.

    In other words, Jews foist multiculturalism on other people even as they cynically pursue a group strategy that rejects that ideology for themselves.

    The idea, in MacDonald’s construction, is that Jews in general are seeking to weaken anti-Semitism by sabotaging Gentiles’ natural nationalistic instincts.

    Similarly, the Frankfurt School is described as advocating sexual freedom, rebelliousness against family and other radical ideas for Gentiles, even as Jews themselves remain in tightly cohesive families — an idea that is tied tightly to Lind’s view of the Frankfurt School as attempting to undermine Christian America.

    Ultimately, MacDonald suggests that this kind of devious Jewish behavior is at least partly responsible for anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. “National Socialism developed as a cohesive gentile group strategy in opposition to Judaism,” he writes. In a later book, MacDonald suggests that Jewish critiques of Gentile culture are a dangerous strategy that may ultimately produce ethnic conflict in America.

    The Ripple Effect
    Over the years, the idea of cultural Marxism has picked up speed. At an October 2000 campaign stop in Denver, Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan accused Native Americans attempting to block a Columbus Day parade of “cultural Marxism.”
    “America’s history and heroes and Western civilization itself are under relentless attack,” Buchanan told the Rocky Mountain News. “The violence of this political correctness is nothing less than cultural Marxism.”

    The following year, in his book The Death of the West, Buchanan described cultural Marxism as a “regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.”

    At around the same time, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens produced a video — most of it a carbon copy of the FCF video on the same topic — called “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School Story.”

    “Racism, sexism and chauvinism are powerful weapons in the Marxist psychological warfare against traditional American values,” it said. “Political correctness, the product of critical theory, is really treason against the U.S. Constitution and against America.”

    Some “pro-South” hate groups have adapted the theory for their own purposes. Franklin Sanders, writing recently on the League of the South’s Web page, did not use the words “cultural Marxism.” But he did say that “Marxists,” by calling slavery the worst evil known to man, were twisting reality to attack the South. And, Sanders warned darkly, “If the South goes, civilization goes with it.”

    By early 2002, F.C. Blahut, a writer for the anti-Semitic American Free Press, wrote that cultural communists, motivated by a “hatred of the West,” were wrecking Western civilization. They were, he said, “parasitic Freudian Talmudists.”

    John Vinson, leader of the Americans for Immigration Control hate group, doesn’t reference Jews in his own attacks. But he claims that “Marxists” have for a century “promoted large-scale immigration while sabotaging assimilation.”

    Whither Cultural Marxism?
    Will the far right succeed in using the cultural Marxism label to demonize social movements and people whom it opposes? Despite the tone of underlying anti-Semitism, is this a theory that can bring radical ideas into the mainstream?

    There are indications that this is happening already.

    Paul Craig Roberts is a syndicated conservative columnist who is connected to several right-wing think tanks. In a recent review of Buchanan’s The Death of the West, Roberts makes it clear that he has signed on to the idea. “Cultural Marxists,” he says, “assault not only our history but also the family, the chastity of women and Christianity, important pillars of our civilization. Cultural Marxists use education, entertainment and the media to create a new people that shares their values.”

    David Horowitz, the leftist-turned-right-winger who heads the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture (see group description, in Into the Mainstream) and edits FrontPageMagazine.com, adds that the Frankfurt School “believed only in destroying … and if you look at today’s campuses that type of nihilism is really the dominant theme.”

    Jim Kibler, a professor of Southern literature at the University of Georgia, joined in recently. Kibler told a reporter this spring that suggesting that those who support the Confederate flag are racists is the “propagandistic, cultural Marxist approach” that is used by newspapers, business and New South proponents.

    It’s not clear whether this diffusion of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory into the mainstream will continue. Certainly, the anti-Semitism that underlies much of the scenario suggests that it may be repudiated in the coming years. But for now, the spread of this particular theory is a classic case of concepts that originated on the radical right slowly but surely making their way into the American mind.

    This is an article from the prominent anti-racist organization, Southern Poverty Law Center. From their “About Us” page:

    “The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm. Today, SPLC is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups.”

  • Yeah, Southern Poverty Law Center. That’s sure an unbiased source isn’t it.

    It is a tool of the Left just like the ACLU.

  • “if he himself really thinks we ruin things for the honest burghers.”

    Not all Jews. Just the Jewish intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic.

  • No, you slimy antisemite, you wrote:

    “During the Weimar Republic lots of Jews were acting in sexually perverse ways. They were polluting German culture.

    And look at what happened.”

    And

    The Culture of the Weimar Republic was a sewer. And those who were famous for promoting such a culture were more often than not Jews.

    and then, to make sure we get the point that you are talking about present day US and Israeli Jews:

    “…and most of the Jews who were promoting this culture were able to escape to other parts of Europe and to America, leaving innocent Jews to pay for their sins.”

    You’re scum.

  • TM, thanks, I’d read about those positions before. Alex is anti-Semite by any means.

    C’mon, Alex, when will you finally tell us you’re more chosen than the rest of us? BTW, seeing that you consider the changes in a girl’s body during puberty a perversion (which implies you could imagine it as sexually stimulating to some if not yourself), I’d not hesitate a second to contact the police if I were to see you around a girl of such age.

  • You and Adorno are just like Hitler.

    Hitler took what the Jewish intelligentsia was doing in the Weimar Republic and blamed all jews for it.

    You and Adorno take a few middle class people who were racist and blamed all of the middle class.

    You are as evil as Hitler.

  • You are a threat to Israel “the middle”. You are a threat to the whole West.

    You are a evil racist scumbag.

  • By the way, what the Southern Poverty Law center wrote didn’t say that what is being said about Cultural Marxism is wrong.

    It just started Name calling.

    Everything that the Free Congress Foundation has said about Cultural Marxism is correct. But if you can’t attack the facts, start name calling right!

  • How can I be an anti-Semite if I specifically stated there were innocent Jews?

  • You’re not just an antisemite, you’re also homophobic, Alex. You’re the guy who posted as Greg, Kirk and Steve in the other discussion where you stated that homosexuality in Israel will lead to its destruction.

    Let me guess, you have a problem with Gypsies as well…

  • Homosexuality in Israel will lead to its destruction. It’s in your Torah.

  • Alex, everytime somebody pointed factsout at you, you tried to ridicule them by undermining their credibility or evaded a proper response. You’re a pathetic creature. May God / G-d have pity on your soul, cause I for sure don’t.

  • Right back at you.

    I am hoping that you aren’t evil but are just naive regarding the evil people you support like Adorno. Perhaps you really don’t know all the destruction he is responsible for.

    Otherwise – rot in hell.

  • Alex, there’s a little park in Jerusalem, near the center of town, where at night, behind the trees, you will find your heart’s desire. Go there, basement-dweller, and have a little, uh, covenant. Go there and you will discover that little thing that keeps nibbling away inside you when you think of men with other men. Oh, and please fly El Al, they need the customers.

  • Sarah, what “facts” have been pointed out regarding the “Frankfurt School” refuting the destruction it has caused in Western Society?

  • ‘themiddle” the Israeli authorities should really arrest gays having sex in the middle of the night at that park. And in the Holy City no less.

  • Sorry, Alex, I don’t believe in hell. You chose to ignore what you were told. BTW, even if that does not fit your descripion of me, I’ve got more property than one like you could dare dream laying hands on. So much for my Marxism. You should pray though that none of your fellow congregants knows how you feel about their adolescent kids. Go see a therapist, a Jewish one, despite being Bolshevikim, we love the money.

  • “I’ve got more property than one like you could dare dream laying hands on. So much for my Marxism.”

    Actually that is very much like what Marxists really are. Often they are very rich. They are the ultimate hypocrites. And you don’t believe in Hell or G-d. Yeah, you sure sound like a Marxist to me.

  • Oh Alex, look what just came out from AP:

    DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – A county judge struck down Iowa’s decade-old gay marriage ban as unconstitutional Thursday and ordered local officials to process marriage licenses for six gay couples.

    Gay couples from anywhere in Iowa could apply for a marriage license from Polk County under Judge Robert Hanson’s ruling.

    Less than two hours after word of the ruling was publicized, two Des Moines men applied for a license, the first time the county had accepted a same-sex application. The approval process takes three days.

    Gary Allen Seronko, 51, was listed as the groom on the form and David Curtis Rethmeier, 29, the bride.

    “I started to cry because we so badly want to be able to be protected if something happens to one of us,” Rethmeier said.

    Not a Jewish last name in sight. Drats!

    Now, I know you want to go blame Jews for what’s going on in Des Moines, but if I were you, first I’d, uh, finger, Elton John, David Bowie and George Michael. Why blame the Jews when it’s clearly the fault of the British?

  • Alex, the authorities should arrest anyone, gay or straight, who has sex in a public park, a holy one or not. Public parks should be reserved for hippies and Reggae concerts.

    At least that’s what the cops told me when they hauled me and my two gal pals in last week.

  • Oh, TM – you forgot to mention the mens’ restrooms at my hometown airport.

  • Oh, Alex, I’m not a Marxist. I’m an Incubus, I’m here to haunt you in your dreams. Actually, if you read my name from the right to the left, you’ll see the name I go by in the demon world. I’m the master of darkness and will bend you over when you least expect it. I will put cornflakes in your bed. I will put slugs into your slippers. I will sing songs by the Village People to you.

  • “The midldle” I blame the Jewish intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic (specifically the Frankfurt School) for the ideology that has so corrupted the mind of Robert Hanson.

    I have much respect for the Jewish Culture as represented by Jewish Mother, but I am very concerned about other elements of Jewish Culture such as the history of Bolshevism and Perversion you can find in some strains of the Jewish culture and also the whole self-loathing self-destructive thing you find with many Jews.

    =======

    I believe what Israel needs to do to win G-d favor back is to outlaw all public promotion of perversity.

    What someone does in their bedroom is their business but they shouldn’t be allowed to go dancing around the streets of the Holy City about it.

    And they shouldn’t make movies about it either. Or gather in public places looking for sex.

    Also, a don’t ask don’t tell policy for gay people i the military. If they admit to being gay they should be kicked out of the military.

    =======

    Jewish Mother, if you read what characteristics Adorno says a racist/fascist has then you will find out you are indeed one of them (according to him).

    This is not an insult. In fact it is quite the opposite. It shows how wrong Adorno was. He was all about demonizing his enemies.

    =========

    Sarah you have embraced Adorno. That makes you a Cultural Marxist.

  • “And also the whole self-loathing self-destructive thing you find with many Jews.”

    Yes, Alex, we know you learned all about “Jew” from renting out “Annie Hall”. And your “Torah” from watching “The Ten Commandments” every Easter.

    Yet it seems to me that what you really seem to have a hard on for is that damn liberal/Jewish Hollywood establishment. Because that’s where your guy Bill Lind and your gal Linda Kimball (Billinda Kimbill?) told you all the bad Marxists ran off too. All the bad Marxists who were all, every one of them Jewish, to quote your mentor and maybe alter ego Senator Joseph McCarthy… errr… Bill Lind:

    “How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.”

    http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

    Earlier on up there you threw out numbers like all of them or 75% were Jewish but always with the caveat “Don’t know the reason that was the case.”

    The reason you don’t know is because you’re a pawn. A robot so easily programmed because you already came equipped with a built-in hatred/bigotry chip. You are, as TM has pointed out, exactly the person you claim to despise. Cultural Marxist, Cultural fascist… call it any name Pat Buchanan wants you to. Because all it is is your sad, racist, anti-semitic homophobic reflection in the mirror.

    I for, almost hope you keep posting here, just to make the rest of us feel a little better about ourselves.

  • Those traces would be: inferior intelligence, raised by a dominant (often violent) mother and a (verbally) violent father. I don’t see those in JM.

  • Ramon, TM, JM, Tom, fancy any hot drinks while were awaiting another stroke of enlightment from Alex?

  • Alex-what do you *really think about* when you see the Washington Monument?

    Do you dream of it often?

  • I am a shy thing, and stay in the invisible ether. Can you guess why?

  • I didn’t mean YOU, Sarah. Others.

    Alex, don’t use different names.

  • The point was actually initially not the Frankfurt School and its representatives, but what by any academic means well-conducted research found out about the personality of average racists. Attention from that point was purposedly to diverted to convey the true intention of the provocateur.

    Anyhow, a git shabos, yidishe mame.

  • Sarah, Evil Middle Class Traits that need to be done away with (according to Adorno).

    Conventionalism – Jewish Mother seems very conventional.

    Superstition – In Adorno’s language – G-d.

    No, according to Adorno, Jewish Mother has an Authoritarian Personality.

    Of course that is what makes him so evil. He demonized good upstanding people.

    ====

    OK, perhaps it was a coincidence that all the Frankfurt School members all had Jewish backgrounds, and perhaps it is a coincidence that most of the powerful Hollywood types are Jews.

    But mind you, these aren’t religious Jews, so then again perhaps this is the result of these people turning away from G-d.

    Like I have said, I have great respect for religous Jews like Jewish Mother, but then you have these other strains. Perhaps once you turn away from G-d you become an Anti-Chosen one and start doing all the damage we see with the Marxists. And, all the self loathing you see within the Jewish community. They are the Jews who have turned away from G-d, and that makes them all the more dangerous.

    I guess the question then is, does Israeli society today reflect more of the culture promoted by Jewish Mother (traditional Judaism) or more the culture of the Frankfurt School (Cultural Marxism)?

  • Alex, the question is, why are you still here?

    We don’t like you.

    You are a slimy antisemite who has been exposed. It is a well known tactic of slimy antisemites to attempt to hold discussions with others where they pretend to be something other than slimy antisemites. You, however, are past that point.

    We don’t give a hoot what you think of “strains” of Jews, about the idiocy of your hyphen in the middle of god, your opinions about Israel or your antisemitic takes on any philosophers, Jewish or otherwise. You are scum.

    You are welcome to give us some parting words, but your agenda is tiresome and we won’t be a mouthpiece for you. You’ve had plenty of opportunity to express your views but after your parting words, you are going to the spam pile.

  • Sarah: you’re on your own, my sweet. Good luck.

    The only thing I’ve managed to come away with from this discussion is, if I stick with Heidegger and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, I’ll avoid giving rise to a homicidal dictator.

    Jewish Mother: tsk, tsk. Your aspersions cast on Germany call out for condign punishment. You should be required to listen to the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ from the Beethoven op. 132 quartet. Further offense will subject you to a Bruckner symphony.

    Alex: You know who was a big-time Adorno reader?

    Lee Harvey Oswald.

    I’m not kidding.

  • Tom, where did you find that out about Oswald? I’m having trouble finding my bowling ball in the closet and you come up with that tidbit?

    TM – Alex isn’t going anywhere. Alex has been around here for epochs, that dark little whisper behind our backs reminding us we’re just one step away from forced conversion or another pogrom or another death camp. Or from a Hollywood Blacklist (and we all know about Roy Cohn) or Frank Weltner. The clothes change maybe but the sound of that dark whispering voice never has and never will. Until, as Jewish Mother believes, we’re nearing the end of Act III, then Alex will be gone.

  • A bit of a fib, I’m afraid, ramon– just trying to induce our friend to switch conspiracies.

  • The funny thing is, I may know who Alex really is and where he lives. The kissing-up strategy to who he considers the most easily-bribed link in the chain, so to speak, as well as the incorrect use or what not of certain commas and the suggesting of positions as definits people have never in any way claimed or admitted to hold are too familiar.

  • I heard that Hitler himself may have some Jewish Blood. Of course he didn’t practice Judiasm. So again, another “Non Jew, Jew” causing evil for the world.

  • “I’ve got more property than one like you could dare dream laying hands on.”

    Sarah, how can you stand yourself?

  • It’s not about being easily bribed. I’m not.

    Hitler was not a Jew, Alex. Get that through your head.

    If there had been not one single Jew in Germany, Alex, I don’t think their nightlife would have been any different. That was what they wanted. The customer is always right.

    Tom Morrissey, I meant the Germany of that time. Maybe I did. But those people have a problem. It goes back to Charlemagne and the Vikings. They have worked on it since, and that can be respected.

    Alex, if you see Adorno, laugh in his face for me, and say, “People who object to authoritarian personalities just want to be in charge THEMSELVES. So they invoke democractic principles, ha ha.”

    Our history is that we spring from twelve tribes, Alex, not one. We have never been a monolithic group, and still are not, and we are used to that.

    There is nothing to do but say “no” to what is bad. But there is always going to be something to say “no” to.

  • Oh, JM, no offence meant. Alex is a familiar character, and he pretty much underestimated you, hence he was trying to kiss up to you.

  • Sorry ladies, but I have an appointment in a well known public men’s bathroom in the fine state of Idaho. I’ll be the one in the third stall from the left wearing the Louis Vuitton dress shoes. Ciao!

  • Alex, your clever reference to the Republican from Idaho took place in a public restroom in the airport in a town called Bloomington, Minnesota. Probably the G concourse where all the cheap flights to D.C. take off from.

    Check Orbitz.

    JM’s point on Germany is neither new nor completely devoid of facts. But does it mean we can’t like Art Deco? Or Einstürzende Neubauten? Or marvel at the cultural resurgence in East Berlin and some of the WWII industrial cities?

  • Well, this who shebang has pretty been off topic.

    Topics, like the Jewish people, are sometimes not monolithic. 🙂

  • Hee hee!

    But the nihilist, anti-individual, anti-marriage, property-is-theft-except-mine, fertility is slavery, oppression-is-everywhere, hair-in-the-wind, cultural Marxists are just going to have to make their own soup, because they are not getting any of mine.

  • Post 148, Tom Morrissey, you make a good point about the destructiveness of this Adorno, whoever he was, formed the thinking of the murderer of a duly elected American president.

  • The cocktail-party skinny on Adorno: he made that remark to the effect that no one could write poetry after Auschwitz (which strikes me as a very German thing to say). Fortunately, it turned out to be untrue.

  • Tom, there actually was a big discussion between philosophers, theologians, authors, literature scholars etc. going on in Central Europe whether it was still tasteful and tactful by any means to produce any snippet of poetry after Auschwitz. Considering that German used to be well-known for its poets and idependent thinkers and Auschwitz could still happen, there was some point to that debate.

  • Construing ‘poetry’ liberally, Sarah, I’m glad that despite that interval of cultural uncertainty, we’ve seen the nightmare visions of Grass, the haunting, allusive novels of WG Sebald, the paintings of Kiefer and Gerhard Richter.

  • If the point is, that when you go to the extreme left, you may end up with the extreme right, then that is something to consider!

    (It has already been experienced the that the extreme left IS the extreme right, in the old FSU.)

    Well-meaning souls end up nihilist, and do not even know that they are. Most of them can’t spell “nihilist” but that is what they are. Even I had not heard of the Frankfurt School.

    Maybe you are having a nice time, but I am very saddened. I had no idea that the vague sillinesses and malaises of our time were the fruit of serious, if awful, concerted thought, planning, writing, action.

    So it’s not so laughable any more. I am disgusted. I hope you will resist these destructive forces. They were and are very tough. You will have to be, too.

  • Hey, JM, I’m with ya – don’t think I have any love for the concepts of Marx, Engels or their followers, who became Stalinist apologists anyways. Even Pete Seeger’s finally come around…

    http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/09/pete-seegers-embrace-of-anti-communism/

    If for anything I’ll hate Marx for being even a drier writer than J.S. Mill. And for criticizing Hegel for being an idealist.

    Most of the people (Jews) that Alex and his predecessors demonize (the “Hollywood” Jews, the “New York Intelligentsia Jews”) were far from Marxist. It’s another form of Lindbergh-like rationalizing and like Roth’s portrayal of Lindbergh, Alex is hoping that his good Jew bad Jew criteria will gain a following for his ideals.

    So while I share your dislike for the obvious hypocrisy of much of today’s far-Left I just won’t abide by the Alex’s, Lind’s Buchanan’s et al who invoke Marx (or Satan, or Rosie O’Donnell) to describe everyone who disagrees with them.

    Wasn’t it the idea of praying on our own terms rather than the Romans’ that gave rise to the Zealots and eventually Christianity? That is the core of this so-called discussion with this gentleman – who that follows another religion is to tell those of our religion how to live, pray and think?

    Which is a little more on topic, in many ways. JM and I could talk til we’re blue in the face about Judaism and Israeli politics. But Alex, until you undergo the Mikvah and Ger, the who’s a Jew game ain’t for you.

    So why did Adorno even come up in this?

  • JM, please wake up and understand that Alex is a fucking antisemite who simply wanted to claim that JEWS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO NON-JEWS!!!!!! I realize that you’re observant and you buy into the whole “I had no idea that the vague sillinesses and malaises of our time were the fruit of serious, if awful, concerted thought, planning, writing, action” that Alex wanted you to buy BUT THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL IS A FUCKING RED HERRING INTENDED TO MAKE YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT YOUR JEWISHNESS AND OTHERS TO HOLD JEWS RESPONSIBLE FOR WHATEVER ILLS THEY CAN IMAGINE ABOUT OUR SOCIETY!

    How about we blame the non-Jew Hugh Hefner instead, or the Catholic Socialist Margaret Sanger for the birth control pill, or in your case, think about all the unhappy Israelites blaming other Israelites for destroying God’s world by not keeping his commandments 2000 years before there was a Frankfurt School to create “malaise” and “silliness.” Stop giving the antisemite the victory that he has converted one Jewish person to his point of view, okay? There are and were plenty of trends in this society that led to, you know, bikinis and long hair and suggestive beer ads, that had absolutely nothing to do with, uh, Jews, or philosophers, or Jewish philosophers. Heck, people were having sex outside of marriage as far back as the bible – but in other countries where they didn’t even have the bible. They were even having homosexual sex, if you can believe it – and not a single Frankfurt School philosopher in sight with or without a Jewish mother.

    Go back to post 112 and read it carefully, JM, and then move on to talking about what we always talk about, soup and getting married and all that other stuff. All those hippies that Alex put in your brain are middle and upper middle class yuppies driving around in minivans and paying for their kids’ college tuition today. Okay? Enough already please, Alex the antisemite is laughing at you…and you’re a good person who doesn’t deserve it.

  • Red herring… that’s the word I was trying to remember. Duh, old age…

    Although TM, I’m not sure who’s laughing at whom here. I can’t speak for JM but I’m wondering if people like Alex are so far from her world that it’s almost pointless for her to really care about him. The same reason Adorno should mean nothing to her because his mother was Catholic and like so many Prussian/German/Bavarian Jews like Marx his father converted to Lutheranism to essentially work.

    It’s kind of like when the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t even bother to knock because my last name’s on the door. Neither Alex nor Adorno are leading illegitmate Jewish lives because neither are Jewish. But you TM, Sarah and myself are, and therefore are redeemable. Alex doesn’t have that option. I think JM may just be bored of him. But she can explain for herself if she chooses.

  • I’d introduced Adorno way back up, because he’d conducted the most extensive research about what common traits and backgrounds racists share (regardless of whether they claimed to be leaning to the political right to the political left). A professor in Germany who confuses his political views with his responsibilities towards academia won’t hold his position for too long. Universities in Germany are state-run, and therefore they are not financially dependent on lobbyists of any kind whatsoever. If anyone feels offended by me stating this, I know I’ve touched a weak spot in some cases.
    As for Alex, I purposedly provoked a few of his rants to show his true colours. (Hey Alex, I’ve had family in Hollywood myself!) In literary analysis you talk about round (“individual”) and flat (“stereotypical”) characters; Alex is part of the latter group. It’s funny though that I might really know who that very person Alex is and where he lives. Some people convey their true identity through repeating the same syntax, choice of words and punctuation mistakes even if those stylistic ‘evidences’ had been pointed out to them. Anyhow, I expect to get admonished for this comment yet again, but I’m still waiting for that topless pic of Ramon…

  • Err would a topless pic of Sarko do in a pinch? They were all over the place this summer. I’d love to admonish Sarah, but I’ll have to read a bit more. (Did I mention I don’t have cable, right?)

    Thanks TM for that lovely reminder from the excellent splcenter.org. And goodness knows that old racist Pat Buchanan knew some sly rhetorical tricks. He and his Franco worshiping clan. (It’s in his autobiography).

    And as usual, the only good laugh I’ve had all day is when I read JM’s post #164. (It’s been a long trying day… ). Cheers, ‘VJ’

  • VJ – If that’s the only good laugh you’ve had all day there’s always Flight Of The Conchords clips on Youtube. (For those of us who don’t have HBO. )

    Sarah, I’ll need to go to the folks’ house and get those old baby pictures. Soooo cute… anyways, I’m not offended. Just wondering why Adorno touched such a nerve with a few other folk. Because of his views or his religion?

    Now… let’s talk about what’s really important. Like what’s up with Amy Winehouse? Such a talent… poor bubelah…

  • Post 171, Ramon Marcos, the link you posted was taken down. Can you find the text to post, or, can you summarize what it said, being as accurate as you can remember, about his exact words?

    Not to worry, TM, I am at no risk for being any less proud.

  • Alex, no. The more I look around, the more craziness I see, in the pre and post World War II period. It has its origins in many trends and populations.

    Of course “The Jewish Liberal” is not a fantasy. He / she exists. But there have not been enough of them, numerically, to dictate to the Americans how to think. The Americans think for themselves.

    Even as executives in Hollywood or academia, they could not have done anything that wasn’t essentially all right with the American people, who outnumbered them a hundred to one, and who were paying for movie tickets and paying salaries.

    It’s more complicated than that.

    The miserable state of academic thinking today, and the disgusting Britney Spears culture cannot be laid at the feet of the Jews, it must be laid at many feet.

    The American people are a bottomless well of virtue! Everything is going to be all right.

  • Thanks.

    What he said did not impress me.

    He invokes the “everybody does it” excuse. That does not impress a mother. “MOMMM! Everybody does it!” Grrr.

    So?

    Unbelievable.

    That is very near to saying … it wasn’t a REAL, REAL big deal …

    Don’t you just love the too-easy and essentially silly apologies he is so willing to make, and … the one that hurts, he is not very willing to make. The one that says, Oh no, I was so, so wrong. For so long. To so many.

    Well he does mention gulags. But then he U-turns.

    Sarah has lost interest in asking her acquaintance about their personal contact with this Adorno.

  • Woman has been discontinued, like an orphaned technology nobody uses anymore, like 8 track tape.

    Woman, the creature who had a barrier around her. It may have kept her in, but it also kept others out. She had privacy.

    Now, she must has no value. Her only value, once, apart from her work, was her status as a vessel for children who a man was quite sure were in fact his children.

    Well, that isn’t wanted any more. Not for another fifteen years, at age 35.

    A woman at 20 has to be the life of the party, or she will be scorned.

    College pseudo-marriages can help with this problem, even if they break up after college.

    But what a world.

    Why does she have to amuse the neighborhood? Why isn’t there a one-sex bathroom? What kind of lunatics use a unisex bathroom, even with closed stalls.

    I read a review of Super-Bad, the movie. It’s all true. Marty Beckerman thinks it’s terrible, and he’s right.

    This is all seems so unimportant, when all your children are under 12, or you don’t have any. But they will grow up into this environment.

  • With victories like this, who needs defeats. Gloria Steinem, call your office.

  • Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
    Vladimir: That’s what you think.

  • Tom. Stop it. Isn’t Josh Beckett enough for you?

    JM – I can give you plenty more links that won’t change your opinion about Seeger. If you’d like.

  • Some days JM you play on a riff and you’re channeling Howard Finster. But only in parts. Cheers, ‘VJ’

  • I haven’t lost interest in anything, but the very person I was referring to has got a busy schedule being a university professor and taking care of her family (she frowns upon nannies and summer camps), so I hope to see her by the end of the year.