"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight." - Phyllis Diller

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"The problem, in essence, is one of bringing nonmusical, extra-aesthetic considerations to bear on an issue that is generally supposed to be purely aesthetic, namely, the selection of works for a concert program...

To these arguments the supporters would reply that there are many Jewhaters among composers, writers, and artists and that we would impoverish our spiritual life immensely if we would boycott all art created by anti- Semites. They would add that since Wagner died six years before Hitler was born, any attempt to link the two directly falsifies history. They would even question the opponents' claim that Wagner's works were the most frequently played music in concentration camps because, according to reliable reports, melodies by other composers were more often heard than music by Wagner. Finally, they might suggest that the association between Wagner and the camps is perhaps much stronger in the victims' imagination than it was in their persecutors' minds.

A very important point in the supporters' rebuttal is the assertion that banning art for nonaesthetic reasons would reduce us to the level of our worst enemies, for the Nazi ideology "distinguished" itself by boycotting art and burning books for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality and subjects of these works. These supporters would add that having achieved independence and statehood, we should finally be ready to rise above persecution complexes and narrow-mindedness and select the goals for and content of our cultural and spiritual life exclusively on the basis of objective, inherent merit and quality...

We should not allow ourselves to become slaves to symbols. If we did, then tomorrow we might subscribe to the idea that Richard Strauss is also a symbol for cooperation with the Nazis and that his music should therefore not be played. Likewise, Bach's "Matthauspassion" and Leonardo's Last Supper would become liable to being viewed as symbols for anti-Jewish motives in the story of Jesus Christ's suffering and for the persecution of the Jews by the Church for nearly twenty centuries.

The subject of symbols and the avoidance of objectionable symbols is problematic and fraught with dangers. It can lead to absurd situations, like the effort made at one time by religious schools in Israel to introduce a new plus sign, a "half-cross" sign, in arithmetic lessons because the internationally accepted sign (+) reminded the proponents of this change of the cross and persecution.

Perhaps another observation might be added. It is a well-known fact that Wagner's Ring was hardly ever performed during World War 11. On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany's surrender to the Allied Forces, the radio station of the new German government accompanied its news broadcast of the total collapse of Hitler's Reich with music from the Gotterdammerung. It may be suggested that perhaps for the Nazis, but more obviously for their immediate successor, Wagner's music-at least the Ring of the Nibelung-had already become a symbol not of supremacy and triumph but of pessimism, despair, the end of the world, and the "Twilight of the Gods.""

--- Wagner in Israel: A Conflict among Aesthetic, Historical, Psychological, and Social Considerations / Hanan Bruen, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Spring, 1993)