While a self-confessed lover of Richard Wagner’s operas, Eric Nelson stresses the need to come to grips with his anti-Semitism. Nelson takes as his point of departure the late philosopher Roger Scruton’s posthumously published study of the composer:

Scruton recognizes that “in his mature operas” Wagner meant to reject the bourgeois, liberal “world of deals and transactions”—a world characterized, as Wagner saw it, by the perverse “‘commodification’ of human relations,” rather than the longed-for “dissolving of the self in the experience of community.” This is indeed a central ideological preoccupation of The Ring of the Niebelung. Scruton misses only the crucial fact that, for Wagner, this pathological world of bargains was essentially “Jewish.” Wagner’s anti-Semitism was therefore inextricably bound up with his critique of bourgeois liberalism. And since this distinctive style of Jew-hatred has recently returned to prominence on the political left, getting to grips with its character is, alas, no longer an imperative for deranged Wagnerians alone.

Nelson goes on to argue, through careful reading, that this brand of anti-Semitism is manifest in the plot of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Through this analysis, Nelson suggests similarities between Wagner’s view of the Jews and that of his former friend, Karl Marx:

Marx argued . . . that Judaism and liberalism were in fact a perfect match. Liberalism, on his account, is simply an expression of Judaism. . . . The pathological focus of liberal citizens on their private, isolated needs estranges them from their fellows, whom they encounter as mere “means” to the advancement of their own interests. The result is the distinctive commodification of human life that Marx associates with the bourgeois, liberal order.

Judaism, for Marx, takes the “bargain” as its paradigmatic form of encounter between agents, both divine and human. . . . “The bill of exchange,” as Marx puts it, “is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” The liberal contractarian tradition is, in turn, merely the application of this Jewish “bargain” mentality to the relationship between citizens; each approaches the other as an “egoist” trying to extract the best possible terms from his fellows.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].