Another FB conversation I want to save

M. R.: It’s part of a complex conversation that will never end. Whatever the historical twists and turns, the music of Wagner causes emotional and psychological distress to many people in Israel and elsewhere. That pain should be acknowledged and honored. I, for one, will probably never sort out my feelings about the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound that I enjoyed and admired long before I knew of their anti-semitism. Some things even touch my way of seeing the world. What about those “Petals on a wet, black bough”?And lord knows, the entire canon of American lit. is shot through with casually vicious racist references to and descriptions of blacks, Asians, Native Americans, etc. And yet it’s part of the intellectual and cultural house in which I live.