Yesterday, I wrote about a church burning in Rochester, NY
that could not derail a faith community or the steady progress of integration.
I was glad to have that in mind when I opened Phyllis Chesler’s excellent
critique of the Metropolitan Opera in New York’s performance of Death of Klinghoffer.
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| The real life victim of the Achille Lauro violence was an old, wheelchair-bound retiree who grew up on the Lower East Side of New York. |
It’s been argued that the production is not anti-Semitic,
but the very timing of its revival argues otherwise. In August of this year, the Guardian
reported:
In the space of just
one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France's Jewish
organisations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of
Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and
pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd's chants and banners included
"Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats". That same
weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters
burned Israeli flags: "Israhell", read one banner.
In Germany last
month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal
– previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail,
called on Allah to "destroy the Zionist Jews … Count them and kill them,
to the very last one." Bottles were thrown through the window of an
antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a
pro-Israel rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the
face in Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared
Israel's actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: "Jew,
coward pig, come out and fight alone," and "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to
the gas."
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| Nazi propaganda poster of the Jew as warmonger. Remind you of anything? |
“The former mayor [Rudolph Giuliani] had a history of
challenging cultural institutions when he disagreed with their contents – I
don’t think that’s the American way. I think the American way is to respect
freedom of speech, it’s as simple as that,” said
current New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, repeating a canard that’s gotten amazing
traction in this debate.
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| Marilyn Klinghoffer being escorted from the MS Achille Lauro after the murder of her husband. Actual suffering isn't nearly as romantic as its staged version. |
This is not a free speech issue. Nobody has ever suggested
governmental censorship. It’s a matter of abdicating artistic responsibility.
The Met has been suffering from declining attendance. They
have a rising, multimillion-dollar deficit and labor problems. This is their
version of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, a desperate bid
for attention. But we've had fifty years
of pop stars being increasingly outrageous to get us to notice them. There’s very
little civility left under our culture.
It’s a purely modern problem. Even in the dark days of the
1930s (when the Nazis had supporters throughout the west) this opera wouldn’t
have been mounted in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, let along New York, which is home to the
second-largest Jewish population in the world.
But despite it being very much our zeitgeist,
serious artists ought to eschew outrage marketing.
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| The real-life murderers of Leon Klinghoffer. |
“Would the Metropolitan Opera offer a work called ‘The Death
of Martin Luther King Jr.’ with racist views in support of the assassination?”
asked the Wall Street Journal. How about an opera that glorified the killers of
Matthew Shepard? No, because even wardrobe malfunctions have their limits.
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