The 'Klinghoffer' kerfuffle

Adams is a leading contemporary composer who likes to deal in controversial public subjects. Thus, he has given us Nixon in China, about the political rapprochement between our slimiest president and the worst dictator of the second half of the 20th century, and Doctor Atomic, about J. Robert Oppenheimer, who shepherded the development of the atomic bomb. Nixon in China had an important Jewish figure, Henry Kissinger, who at one point in the libretto is likened to the Devil; Oppenheimer is of course Jewish, and Leon Klinghoffer, the subject of the opera that bears his name, was a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Jewish retiree who was seized, executed, and thrown overboard from the cruise ship Achille Lauro on which he and his wife were sailing, on October 8, 1985.

Klinghoffer was a private citizen; his assassins were Palestinian terrorists; his crime was being Jewish. Six million of his fellow Jews had been killed for the same offense not long before, and, partly for that reason, his death aroused a strong reaction. Israelis had been targeted by Palestinian fighters before; 11 of Israel’s Olympic athletes had been gunned down at the 1972 Munich games. In fact the Achille Lauro was hijacked in the hope of freeing Palestinians in Israeli custody; when this objective failed, Klinghoffer was slain in retaliation.

Bowing to pressure

The terrorists aboard the ship told Klinghoffer’s wife, Marilyn, that he had been taken to the infirmary. The Palestine Liberation Organization initially tried to place the blame for his death on Marilyn herself, claiming that she had killed her husband for his insurance money. It finally acknowledged responsibility and later paid the Klinghoffers’ daughters Ilsa and Lisa a sum of money (following a court settlement), with which the daughters established a foundation in their father’s name.

The circumstances of Klinghoffer’s death, together with not only his innocence as a victim but also his physical helplessness, engaged the public. The story was televised in dramas starring Karl Malden and Burt Lancaster, and Adams’s opera soon followed. It was first produced in 1991 and has received sporadic productions (and cancellations) since.

What makes this time different? Well, among other things, this is the Met. Lincoln Center has been picketed and performances of the opera interrupted by demonstrators. Under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, the Met’s managing director, Peter Gelb, canceled a lucrative contract to broadcast the production internationally. This cancellation angered those who accused Gelb of bowing to censorship but failed to mollify the protesters who opposed the production altogether.

Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer weighed in as well, saying as they had on previous occasions that they were deeply offended by what they took as the opera’s exploitation of their father’s death, although they had apparently lodged no public objections to the TV drama productions that preceded it. The Met, again under pressure, printed their written statement in the production program.

Anti-Semitic?

Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer have every right to their sentiments, as do other critics who have accused the opera of promoting anti-Semitism. But none of the half dozen operatic groups that commissioned The Death of Klinghoffer repudiated it, and the various professional companies and other groups that have undertaken productions obviously consider it stageworthy. This is an artistic judgment with which one can also disagree. The question is whether anyone’s judgment justifies censorship.

If I see Klinghoffer, I might myself find it offensive. In that case, I might write a negative review. I might not wish to give the piece even that much publicity, in which case I might say nothing. Or I might write a letter to the producers. I might picket. I might, like three people whose views I respect — Edward Rothstein, Richard Taruskin, and Floyd Abrams — denounce the opera as anti-Semitic.

What I would not do is to attempt to cancel a production, or restrict its dissemination, or exert any pressure to censor it. I would not disrupt a performance. I wouldn’t do these things because I have faith in a free society to distinguish works of art, flawed or not, from works of propaganda, and because when society fails to do so it is even more critical to preserve the right of untrammeled free speech so that future correction is possible. This is something that Floyd Abrams, our foremost defender of the First Amendment, seems to have forgotten in the heat of his own passion.

Bad timing?

It’s part of art’s function — of free speech in general — to provoke and disturb. It is all right to cause disturbance and even give offense if the offended party has a right of reply. This is why Klinghoffer needs to be protected even as it is being protested.

It is also why a work such as, say, Jud Suss — the Nazi propaganda film about evil and rapacious Jewry — falls in a different category: not because it’s vicious and meant to incite hatred, but because the possibility to criticize it didn’t exist in Hitler’s Germany. Where criticism is absent, art is propaganda. The right to free speech and the right to offend are thus inseparably bound.

The Met’s Klinghoffer comes at a particularly strained moment: in the aftermath of last summer’s fighting between Israel and Hamas, the dust-up over access to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe. But that’s all the more reason to use the space of art to examine the presuppositions of a deeply rooted conflict and the hatreds they stoke. Whether that is well or badly done, let each of us judge if we wish.

Let Klinghoffer play.

To read a related commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.