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Revisionist Zionism's Italian Model

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  In the wake of 2023’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s subsequent genocidal actions against the people of Gaza, many anti-Zionist activists – largely drawing on the work of Trotskyist historian Lenni Brenner – doubled down on the talking point that the ideology of the Jewish state is essentially identical to that of Fascist Italy or National Socialist Germany. While these well-meaning commentators exaggerate the relationship and mischaracterize the nature of the totalitarian governments of the twenties, thirties, and forties in doing so, the affinity of the Revisionist Zionists in particular for Mussolini’s Italy was real. In the early twentieth century, Jewry was widely synonymous with crime, revolution, and regicide, and Zionist leaders were at pains to distinguish themselves from the bad Jews – the Bolsheviks. At Versailles, consequently, “Zionism offered itself to the assembled capitalist powers as an anti-revolutionary movement,” Brenner writes in Zionism in the Age o...
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Strait to Hell: Remembering Gay Trailblazer Guy Strait

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  In his 1977 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Guy Strait recalled, “I wrote in 1953, I believe it was, I published a small book called The Right to Go to Hell , wherein I said that I believe a man has the right to go to hell or heaven, whichever he chooses, at whatever speed he wishes, so long as he does not take anybody with him by force.” [1] The ironically named Strait would go on to make his mark in the publishing world, albeit not in the field of theology. Strait, who was born in Texas in 1920 and died in San Francisco in 1987 – thereafter, presumably, departed for Hell – “was the tenth of 11 brothers and sisters and was about fifteen years old when he obtained his first camera,” relates Clifford Linedecker in his out-of-print and scarce 1981 true crime study Children in Chains : Almost immediately, the young man began shooting photographs of flowers, plant buds – and nudes. He was eighteen when he walke...
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A Polish-American Polemic

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  Francis Casimir Kajencki (1918-2008) A puzzling circumstance of the Second World War is that it reached the status of a global conflict when the British and French empires, ostensibly out of concern for Polish sovereignty, declared war on Germany in the wake of its September 1939 invasion of Poland, but that these same powers not only did not declare war on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland that month, but joined forces with Stalin’s government in an alliance to defeat the Axis. Allied “victory” in Europe, moreover, resulted not in the restoration of Polish independence, but Soviet occupation of Poland along with the rest of Eastern Europe. A little-known book, American Betrayal: Franklin Roosevelt Casts Poland into Communist Captivity , grapples with this problematic legacy of the war. Self-published by Francis Casimir Kajencki in 2007, the year before he died, the book is a patriotic Polish-American’s pained assessment of his country’s treacherous treatment of its b...
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Connie Francis and the Flag

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  Blessed with one of the most gorgeous voices of the twentieth century, Connie Francis was emblematic of the optimism and ostensible health of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era and personified the immigrant family success story. Funny and personable, saucy without being salacious, the sultriness of her delivery never diminished the essential innocence of her America’s sweetheart persona, and hits like “Who’s Sorry Now?”, “Stupid Cupid”, and “Where the Boys Are” made her the best-selling female vocalist in the history of the recording industry during the period of her greatest popularity [1]. Connie abandoned her real name, Concetta Franconero, at the suggestion of Arthur Godfrey, whose Talent Scouts show boosted her profile when she was still an adolescent [2], but the singer’s Italian-Americanness was hardly a secret. Her musical roots reach back to the toe of Italy’s boot and Reggio di Calabria, from which her paternal grandfather emigrated in 1905, bringing “an old broken down conc...
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