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.
