The Roger Waters Test Case
A New Article in Quillette
In February 1980, aged fifteen, I found myself at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island watching a spectacular performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I didn’t even know the band. I had to be talked into going by my friend Richie, who had scalped tickets for $75 each, which was an enormous sum for a teenager at the time. I received a brisk education in the venue parking lot, where a stranger we met played us his old Pink Floyd tapes and told us the story of Syd Barrett, the band’s founder whose mental breakdown had inspired The Wall. Later, I would learn that the album was as much about Roger Waters, who was then the band’s frontman, but it hardly mattered. I was hooked.
Over 26 tracks, The Wall tells the story of a musician named Pink, a sensitive young man mocked at school by his teachers, traumatised by an overbearing mother, used by the establishment, and let down by his lovers. It was not my story, but the alienated rage, the haunted isolation, and the flight into the imagination all struck a chord in me. Over the next few years, I’d wallpaper my bedroom with Pink Floyd posters and work my way through their entire back-catalogue, from Animals through Wish You Were Here to the comically strange Ummagumma and their debut LP Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was the band’s only record with Syd Barrett.
Forty-four years later, I’m a different man. Today, I’m a husband and a father, I’m an observant Jew not a Christian, I’m married to an Israeli, and I have developed deep attachments to Judaism and Israel, a country about which I knew next to nothing when I was fifteen. I like to believe that Roger Waters today is also a very different man from the one who authored the soundtrack of my adolescence. This week, Waters appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored and flatly denied that Hamas had raped Israeli women on 7 October. Those who claim otherwise, he told his host, are spreading “filthy, disgusting lies.”
Find the rest of this article in Quillette.
Disgusting that Roger Waters is propagating rape denial when there is brutal video evidence of the atrocities Hamas unleashed on Israelis on 10/7. I refuse to wash the horrid videos of the slaughter of innocents. Did Israel go too far in retaliation? Maybe but what the hell did Hamas think would happen when like 1400 Israelis were slaughtered, raped, tortured, kidnapped, maimed…F you Roger Waters, rape denier
In the novel, Dickens repeatedly refers to Fagan as “the Jew”; and he is hung at the end. It's not like in the musical where Fagin is a charmingly wicked scoundrel. And I can tell you that when I was reading it to my son it was uncomfortable to keep having to say “the Jew,” and a few times I omitted to do so and just said "Fagin" because it was so obviously derogatory. It was obvious, including to my son, that Dickens didn’t like Jews, and he got criticized for that even in his own lifetime. That having said been said there’s clearly a spectrum of Jew hatred, and Dickens was certainly not the worst offender. And regardless, I think he is an important writer and ought to be studied and respected as such. And, yes, there is an active debate about whether Shylock is an antisemitic depiction of a Jew. I actually discuss this in a different Quillette article: https://quillette.com/2023/11/22/they-told-me-so/. But I never said Dickens was "beyond the pale," and neither is Shakespeare. Quite the contrary, they were expressing run-of-the-mill antisemitism for their time.