Scoring of Points: David Conway speculates on the real reason for the virtual proscription of Wagner in Israel

Review of Na’ama Sheffi, The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis, tr. Martha Grenzeback and Miriam Talisman (Sussex Academic Press, rev. paperback edn, 2013).

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 92–4.

Slavoj Žižek tells of some Tel Aviv activists of the 1990s who had the bright idea of provoking reaction by showing a full video of Wagner’s Ring cycle at a nightclub. Although they ‘planned the evening as a drinking party with wild dancing’, they were thwarted when ‘more and more old Jews, men and women, dressed in the ridiculously solemn way of pre-Hitler Germany, appeared in the club – for them, a public performance of Wagner was […] a reminder of the good old Weimar Germany where Wagner’s operas were a crucial part of their cultural experience’.

Se non è vero, è ben trovato. This episode, which alas is not recounted in Sheffi’s book, indicates some of the true dimensions of the Wagner ‘debate’ in Israel where the composer’s music, although not officially banned from public performance, has only very rarely been heard.