“I don’t want to limit expression of free speech but…this guy is a Jew. If there’s one resounding theme I yell about on the air it’s that most American Jews are not pro-Israel.”
Walsh’s private conversation reflects the outrage he expresses on the air. “When you get liberal Jews, forget it,” he told me. “They are ambivalent at best or they literally abhor Israel. They feel guilty about Israel. They condemn Israel. So you produce an opera like this, and as a non-Jew, the expression I always think of is ‘self-hating Jews.’ Why are they propagating this message? They’re anti-Israel. They do not [follow] Judaism. They worship liberalism. To me that’s the cancer.”
If the inverse of the self-hating Jew is the Ohev Yisrael, the lover of Jews, then we are fortunate to have the Walshes of the world to counteract the Gelbs and the Barenboims. As the war on Islamic terrorism continues and the threat of anti-Semitism from the traditional sources of Wagnerian bigots persists, we Jews find ourselves in an increasingly precarious position that will take more than protests to remedy. It’s a malignancy that must be confronted without artistic or cultural prevarications and equivocations. And it’s certainly nothing to sing about.