I believe we must read "Yiddery" with the flexibility that Pound intended;
i.e. it is a figure for the Jew, which in turn is a figure for a
political, economic, cultural, ethical standing that Pound found dangerous
enough to want to resist, even if only through language.

I'm surprised that we can't all agree on what seems to me to be a very
reasonable middle ground: whether Pound, like most Europeans, knew of the
Nazi genocide is unknowable, but evidence of the possibility of the
systematic destruction of the European Jews was there for him to
disbelieve or ignore--it's right there in his own rhetoric!

If we could agree on that, then perhaps we might begin to talk about
how a poet for whom precise terminology was everything could be or become
such an abuser of his mother tongue, at least in this period.

My belief is that (bear with me...) representation was for Pound somehow
"Jewish," hence his destructive and self-destructive tendencies at the
typewriter and microphone.

Jonathan Gill
Columbia University