"Death of Klinghoffer" Is Immoral, but Not an Endorsement of Terrorism

Oct. 22 2014

There is nothing inherently wrong with making an opera about a terrorist attack, argues Walter Russell Mead in his review of the Met’s production of The Death of Klinghoffer. The opera does not defend the terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer, even if its attempts at moral sophistication fall flat. Nor is the problem the music, although it frequently calls to mind words “like boring, cliché, and predictable,” or the libretto, “a self-conscious and not particularly successful effort to achieve a high poetic tone [that] often comes across as awkward and long.” The opera’s real failing lies elsewhere, writes Mead:

If I were [Met Director] Peter Gelb, I would have declined to put the opera on, but not on political grounds. I would not have wanted to associate myself with what amounts to psychological rape, and I would not have staged it against the wishes of the murdered man’s family. Dehumanizing Leon Klinghoffer, turning him from a human being into a symbol in their political theater, is what the terrorists did on the Achille Lauro; John Adams and Alice Goodman echo this violation by trampling on the family’s privacy and wishes, stripping the Klinghoffers of their rights and dignity and using them as props.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Death of Klinghoffer, Metropolitan Opera, Opera, Terrorism

The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Grip on Jews

Since the 1930s, Jews have been one of America’s most solidly Democratic ethnic groups. Although, true to form, a majority again voted for Kamala Harris, something clearly has shifted. John Podhoretz writes:

Over the course of the past thirteen months, Jews in America have been harassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler-colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.

And Jews have acted.

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall.

Read more at Commentary

More about: 2024 Election, American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Democrats, U.S. Politics