Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer, daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, who was killed by Palestinian terrorists in October 1985, contributed an op-ed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency protesting the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to stage the opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which opens tonight. The controversial opera is centered on the hijacking of the ship cruise ship Achille Lauro by terrorists, who murdered Klinghoffer and then tossed him overboard in his wheelchair.
We have always been strong supporters of the arts, and believe they can play an important role in examining and understanding significant world events. “Klinghoffer” does no such thing. It presents false moral equivalencies without context and offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew. The opera rationalizes, romanticizes and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father. …
He was on a cruise with our mother, celebrating their 36th anniversary with a group of lifelong friends who summered together on the Jersey shore, when terrorists took over the ship, announced a hijacking in progress, and separated the Jewish passengers from those on board.
The terrorist thugs who murdered Leon Klinghoffer didn’t care about the good, sweet man our father was. To them he was just a Jew — an American in a wheelchair whose life they considered worthless.
In a critique of the opera during its initial staging in 1991, Edward Rothstein, then-music critic of The New York Times, contrasted the opera’s treatment of the Palestinians as “suffused with historical consciousness, with ‘complex’ feelings and claims” while the “Jewish victims of the terrorist attack have a narrow vision of the world.”
Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer, along with their late mother, founded The Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer Memorial Foundation, which is now affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League, to help fight terrorism.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Klinghoffer’s op-ed will be published in the playbill of the opera.
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