“Never does the Jew become aroused in merely sentimental expression with us. If he ever becomes excited at all, it is on behalf of some special and selfish interest.”
— Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 1850
“I worked for a record label, and it’s funny, because the boss of the record label, we would talk every so often, and he would speak very strongly about his support for Israel. He was treading on that line. And then this list of names came out recently of people trying to stop our mates Kneecap from performing here tonight. Who do I see on that f**king list of names but that bald-headed c**t I used to f**king work for. So, look, we’ve done it all, from working in bars to working for f**king Zionists.”
— Bob Vylan, onstage rant, Glastonbury Festival, 2025
Nearly 200 years separate Richard Wagner, the German composer who revolutionized the opera, from Bob Vylan, a musical duo from the English city of Ipswich presently attempting to revive the spirit of punk rock. You might well wonder what Wagner and Vylan are doing in the same sentence, given the vast distance between them historically and musically, not to mention the horror that would undoubtedly grip Wagner were he to find himself being bracketed with two dreadlocked black men.
I will try to explain.
Wagner, as is widely known, was a committed antisemite.
Adolf Hitler, born in 1889, a few years after Wagner died in 1883, cherished the composer as a “god … I go to his operas as others go to church.” In his 1850 screed “Judaism in Music,” Wagner asserted that Jewish cultural influence was rooted in their financial power rather than artistic merit. According to him, the technically proficient contributions of Jewish composers were offset by the Jews’ status as eternal outsiders, meaning that Jewish music could never achieve the stirring heights of the music composed by artists from “organic” cultures like his native Germany.
Much the same point was made by Pascal Robinson-Foster, Bob Vylan’s singer, when he lacerated the unnamed Jewish boss at an unnamed record company during his onstage rant last weekend at the famed annual Glastonbury Festival in England. Robinson-Foster’s antics—making his largely unknown band world-famous in the space of about an hour—drew attention primarily because he led the crowd in a chant of “Death, Death to the IDF!” This chilling spectacle, reminiscent of a Nazi rally, meant that his expletive-laden comments about “Zionist” influence in the music industry drew comparatively less focus.
Like Wagner, Robinson-Foster regards Jews in the music industry as inherently suspect aliens because their identification with Israel—“The only country I know stolen by ignorant scum, trying to lay claim to a land that ain’t theirs,” he told the Glastonbury crowd—is, in Wagner’s words, a “special and selfish interest.”
Just as Wagner regarded this as a malign influence, so, too, does Robinson-Foster. Just as Wagner indulged in ugly tropes about the appearance and behavior of Jews, so does Robinson-Foster—dangling before a riled-up crowd the image of a pushy, loud-mouthed, follically challenged Jewish boss whose employees are forced to listen to his speeches about Israel in order to keep their jobs. When he growls the words “f**king Zionists,” that is the image he wants us to see in our minds.
For Wagner, Judaism represented, as the great scholar of antisemitism Robert Wistrich wrote, “egoism, Mammon, parasitism and the bloodthirsty urge for domination.” Zionism, the preserve of “ignorant scum,” fulfills the same function for Robinson-Foster.
The subsequent furor around Bob Vylan’s performance generated more heat than light. There was the usual turgid, frustrating debate about whether we were dealing with “antisemitism” or just “criticism of Israel.” The episode raised more questions about the role of the BBC, which shamefully refrained from pulling its livestream, leading some British members of parliament to demand the resignation of their national broadcaster’s director-general. Some larger issues, however, have gone unaddressed.
For example, there’s the simple fact that even though Robinson-Foster’s outburst hit the headlines within minutes, the Glastonbury Festival continued undisturbed. Away from the peripheral stage that hosted Bob Vylan’s performance, Neil Young, Alanis Morissette, Rod Stewart and Olivia Rodrigo all wowed the crowd. In the very location where hours earlier chants urging the killing of Israelis had erupted—and where a speech laced with antisemitic imagery had been received with wild applause—whatever stain that might have registered had been lifted by nightfall.
Then again, why be surprised? If the 1972 Olympics in Munich continued merrily on after 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists, why would it be any different at a music festival where all that occurred was mere antisemitic rabble-rousing? You might retort that all this began with the murder and rape of more than 1,000 Israelis, including more than 300 young people at a music festival, and that their blood is ultimately what stains Glastonbury. Of course, that assertion will be hatefully dismissed by those who believe the Hamas atrocities in Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were an act of noble resistance, followed by a “genocide” waged by Jews.
Then there is the question of the music industry itself. Bob Vylan and their Irish mates, Kneecap, are hardly the first contemporary musicians to have toyed with antisemitism. Compared to Kanye West, their efforts seem paltry. The same goes for former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, whose hatred of Israel long ago descended into the depths of antisemitic conspiracy theories. I could also mention Brian Eno, Lorde and Massive Attack among many others.
The point is that Wagner’s portrayal of Jews as unwelcome interlopers in the creation and appreciation of art—because their mean, narrow-minded, self-centered spirit is antithetical to artistic greatness—is alive and well. Once personified by the “financier,” in this generation, this long-established Jewish hate figure has morphed into the “Zionist.”
There have been tough consequences for the offenders. Forthcoming Bob Vylan concerts in the United Kingdom, Germany and France have been abruptly canceled. Their visas to enter the United States for a 26-date tour in October have been revoked by the U.S. State Department, as have those for Kneecap, who were due to perform in New York City later this year. All this is welcome; both the enforcement of the law and the decisions freely taken by music venues not to host these bigots.
But bans and cancellations won’t deal with the underlying problem. The loathing of Jews has been a feature of artistic life for centuries—not just music, but literature, painting, theater and cinema as well. What’s billed as “anti-Zionism” is just the latest incarnation of this same loathing, providing a soundtrack for the feverish environment in which Diaspora Jews find themselves these days.