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When Music Hurts! Playing Wagner in Israel…
December 14, 2025 @ 10:30 am
Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami presents
WHEN MUSIC HURTS! PLAYING WAGNER IN ISRAEL – PRO AND CON CAN ART TRANSCEND PREJUDICE?
MODERATED WITH JASON CALLOWAY, CELLIST WITH AMERNET
Dates: Sunday, December 14th, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM
Location: Temple Beth Am, Adults Reading Room (The Hub Library)
Address: 5950 SW 88th St, Pinecrest, FL 33156
The controversy over performing Wagner’s music in Israel—a nation profoundly marked by the Holocaust—raises deep ethical and aesthetic questions. Can music so closely associated with such a painful history be separated from its creator’s prejudice? Or should art always be considered inseparable from the moral character of its maker?
While our discussion will focus on Wagner’s legacy, these questions extend far beyond one composer. They challenge us to consider how we respond to artists and artworks that reflect bias, intolerance, or moral contradiction in our own time.
Following last month’s screening of the documentary Wagner’s Jews, we invite you to join a discussion exploring the following:
Art has long been regarded as a universal language—one that speaks across cultural, historical, and ideological boundaries. Yet history reminds us that art does not exist in a vacuum; it is inevitably shaped by the moral and political contexts in which it is created and received.
This tension becomes especially poignant in the case of Richard Wagner, one of the most influential composers of the 19th century and also a notorious anti-Semite whose writings later resonated with Nazi ideology.
RSVP to Etta Gold, egold@tbam.org
ADULT READING ROOM REMINDER
Reminder to visit our own libraries here on campus where you can enjoy award-winning books and so much more. ~ We welcome you all to our extraordinary library collection, which is now divided into three locations, all enhance the mission of the Temple Beth Am Congregational Library – “to provide materials of education, entertainment and enrichment for congregation and community.” Our Fiction books are in Meeting Room 2, where you can find detailed instructions for borrowing whatever you like. On that same floor, in the Clergy Satellite Library, are the religious study books, i.e. Torah, Talmud, observance, education, and languages. Our Hub location, the Adult Reading Room, contains an enormous variety of literature, community, history, geography, all Judaic.
We look forward to greeting you there.