TextSearch

Shame. That word seems to best define what Orthodox Marxists felt after World War I. “How did the tweedy high-brow men who filled the salons of Berlin, Museum of the Jewish People

Recent publications The Incredible Story of One Stunning Haggadah That is Nearly 700 Years Old The Megile of Itzik Manger: The Mutation of a Yiddish Purim Classic “I Am My Customer”: The Shopping Empire That Lillian Vernon Built With Her Own Two Hands She Treated All of Jerusalem’s Children: Wonder Physician Helena Kagan ‘A Product of Miracles’ : The Jewish Boy Who Hid From the Nazis in a Hole and Became a Huge Inventor Webinar: Hope, Resilience and A New Jewish Narrative Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway Visits ANU – Museum of the Jewish People The Comeback of Yere’im Shelahuni: A Yom Kippur Liturgical Poem Days of Awe: Shai Agnon’s Anthology for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the Days In Between Dawood’s Life Project: The Jew From Iraq Who Introduced the Quran to the West Queen Esther: The Tragic Story of the Female Trailblazer Sister of Bashevis Singer The Girl from Odessa Who Became the Pioneer of Gynecology in Pre-State Israel The Enemy of My Enemy: The Story of Jewish Soldiers in the Finnish Army Who Fought Alongside Nazi Germany ANU Museum of the Jewish People Acquires the Most Influential Book in History – The Codex Sassoon “The Best Place to Grow Up In”: The Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses in New York “The People of Kiev Made Him a Target and Imposed the Suffering on All Jews”: The Beilis Case – The Last Blood Libel The Chinese Saga of the Jewish Physician from Vienna: The Story of Jakob Rosenfeld Maximum Factor: The Jewish Makeup Artist Who Fled From the Tsar Straight to the Greatest Stars of Hollywood “You Can’t Be Beautiful and Hate”: The First Jewish Miss America and Her Battle Against Antisemitism “If I slept for one hour, 30 people would die”: The Jewish Forger Who Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives Recent years 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 Back to the blog page Frankfurt School: The Jewish Intellectuals Who Made the 60’s ushi April 1, 2019 Share Shame. That word seems to best define what Orthodox Marxists felt after World War I. “How did the tweedy high-brow men who filled the salons of Berlin, Vienna, and London screw up our proletarian revolution?” they asked each other. Why was it a Russian nation comprised mainly of illiterate farmers that adopted the collectivist utopia – not the enlightened Germans, Austrians, English, and French? After all, the vision of our founding father Karl Marx maintained that after the profound capitalism that prevailed in early 20th century Europe, the workers of the world would unite in singing a throaty rendition of The Internationale. Just as they were still debating the miserable workers’ dire straits, the maid arrived to serve the cremeschnitte and warm cream. That was their “aha!” moment: There is no choice. Time to update. We have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a sleeker way to convince the masses addicted to the bourgeoisie’s opiates that they are living under false illusions. That is how the Frankfurt School was born. A brief history. In 1930, the German-Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer was appointed to lead the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt founded by the then-young German-Jewish millionaire-with-a-Marxist-worldview Felix Weil. Horkheimer gathered a group of brilliant intellectuals including Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm. All Marxist intellectual Jews who believed themselves to be repairing a world ruled by Karl Halevi – the original Jewish name of Karl Marx. Three decades later, in the 1960s, that group was dubbed the “Frankfurt School,” a term synonymous with a critical-social theory that would become one of the most influential philosophies of the 20th century. Horkheimer (front left), Adorno (front right), and Habermas is in the background, right. Heidelberg, 1964 (Photo: Jeremy J. Shapiro, Creative Commons) The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 exposed the Institute’s members to a dual risk – they were Marxists and circumcised. Some of them managed to flee Germany for the US, where they reestablished their Institute in New York adjacent to Columbia University. The Institute returned to Germany in 1949. But some of its members, including Marcuse and Fromme, remained in America. The Frankfurt School’s central conclusion was that it was impossible in the post-World-War era to rely only on Karl Marx’s economic analysis to explain the eternal class war. That a synthesis of multiple disciplines including sociology, philosophy, psychology, literature, political science, and – but not just – economics was required. They cited the advent of popular culture empowered by mass media (television, radio, music, and film) for the rise of a new more complex and sophisticated form of class war that was hard to discern at first glance. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in the mid-19th century, the gap between the classes was profound. For example, Berlin’s wealthy industrialists attended concerts which the average worker could only dream. Now, claimed the Frankfurt S...

Frankfurt School: The Jewish Intellectuals Who Made the 60's - Museum of the Jewish People