Despite a few notable exceptions, Milton Brener's Richard Wagner and the Jews is nearly the only book that deals fairly with the famed opera composer's anti-Semitism; and as such, this book is a welcome corrective to some of the more shrill anti-Wagner screeds of the last few decades. Brener does not intend to excuse Wagner; he merely comes closer than most in explaining him.
Besides being probably the greatest artist who ever lived, Wagner was also a bundle of contradictions. However, this bundle of contradictions never seemed to be able to realize that he was just that. Indeed, Wagner did possess anti-Semitic attitudes, but his anti-Semitism was of a different stripe than that espoused by the Nazis. Wagner called for Jewish assimilation within the German population, which certainly did not conform with later Nazi policy. Like many a 19th-Century anti-Semite, Wagner seems to have seen Jewishness as almost an abstract, metaphysical concept. Of course, that does not excuse him. He did indeed say vile things about Jews, and he needs to be held accountable for those attitudes, but to simply (and wrongly) call him a proto-Nazi is not only intellectually dishonest, it wrongly stains the reputation of an artist who created stupendous, deeply human works-of-art.
As Brener also points out, there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic in any of Wagner's great works of art. Unfortunately, some writers, such as Robert Gutman, seem to have a compulsion to find even the most tenuous, implausible Anti-Semitic connections in Wagner's work. It is simply impossible to find such links. There is not the slightest overt connection to anti-Semitism in any of Wagner's works, and if there are any such covert links, then one would have had to have entered the composer's mind to see them. Wagner's many genuine friendships with Jews complicate Gutman's position even more.
This is simply a fabulous book. And, along with The Darker Side of Genius and The Ring of Myths, it is also the most responsible volume available that deals specifically with Wagner's most famous character flaw.
Also included, as an appendix, is the composer's infamous essay, "Judaism in Music". While the essay is bitter and paranoid, it is helpful for a frame of reference to the preceding 300 pages. Needless to say, I find Wagner's argument that Jews are incapable of generating higher culture to be utterly worthless. Schoenberg & Mahler (and many other Jewish artists) obviously dismantle that argument, and as for Wagner's claim that Jews are incapable of high art because they are "rootless", we only need to look at Aaron Copland, a man of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, who used Appalachian & Mexican melodies and rhythms to create incredible works of art.