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.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.