There will be many who rejoice to see the crowds of angry protesters, plenty of Jews among them, against the Metropolitan Opera's production of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer. The opera, as anyone who follows these controversies will know by now, is about the 1985 hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro on which Palestinian terrorists killed the wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer.
Many of those at the protest lines will never have seen or heard the work. I have. As a matter of fact, I went with the editor of this newspaper to see the very same staging when it came to English National Opera. We came out neither fuelled with fury nor even especially indignant, except by the fact that we both had found it a dull opera.
Not everyone agrees with that assessment. And perhaps the fact that I found it, well, just a bit boring, in turn dulled my reaction to its moral flaws. And there are some.
People on both sides of this heated debate tend to be absolutist. It absolutely is antisemitic and romanticises terrorism, or it absolutely doesn't. Neither statement is quite true and to be proportionate it is crucial that we deal with the truth. Is Klinghoffer antisemitic? No question, it is not. But its librettist Alice Goodman turned from Judaism and converted - couldn't she be the proverbial self-hating Jew? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. What we have is the work. And there is nothing in there that objectively attacks Jews.
One could extrapolate a certain sympathy for the Palestinians as anti-Jewish only in the sense that you might believe the Palestinian characters are themselves first and foremost motivated by antisemitism, and that they have pulled the wool over the eyes of some of the other characters, and in a way over Adams and Goodman themselves.
The moral fogginess of the opera is clearly wrong
In a protest programme-note for the Met production, the daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, write that the opera "rationalises, romanticises and legitimises the terrorist murder of our father". While I feel for the immense pain of the family, it doesn't. It is insensitive for Adams to have written the opera knowing the pain that it would cause (although he presumably felt that the positive contribution to the overall situation that he wanted his opera to be, was worth that transgression). But it never romanticises the murder. It only - only! - romanticises terrorism without killing.
That's where I stumble. There is a line after the murder scene where the ship's captain, who up to this point has lent a somewhat sympathetic ear to the lead terrorist, nicknamed "Rambo" storms: "You did not fail until you killed. Yesterday the entire world acknowledged the significance attaching to - let me not mince words -your disruption of this cruise. You awakened their consciences which sleep secure now that they have seen nothing that they might not have known…"
Excuse me? Allow me to paraphrase. Hijacking the ship was fine. Limited terrorism can sometimes be a good awareness-raiser. Killing is wrong.
The moral fogginess of this pivotal moment in the action is wrong-headed, it is naïve and it is dangerous, and Adams clearly got carried away. But it is not antisemitic. And furthermore I'd say that polite society - the people who would go to see this opera - is generally capable of understanding this for itself. There is nothing wrong with protesting - outside. And to be honest, a part of me is proud to see my fellow Jews moved to stand up for themselves on any issue. But there are far more important ones.
One final note. When the Hindus protested against a play in Birmingham, when Palestinian-sympathisers disrupted an Israel Philharmonic prom, and when Christians threw eggs at audience members going into a play in France, they each did damage to themselves in the eyes of the world. They were also wrong in the way they protested. We Jews must not make that kind of mistake. Violence or the disruption of any performances will be unforgivable.
We should strive to be a light unto the nations, not smash the bulb.
