Everywhere, diaspora Jews are targets

The opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” opened at the Met. Rightly castigated for its invocation of unpleasant Jewish stereotypes and its apologia for the Palestinian terrorists’ murder of an elderly Jewish tourist in a wheelchair, its staging for the umpteenth time since it was first produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991 has been interpreted by some in the Jewish community as signaling a “normalization” of anti-Semitism.

Indeed, this was the focus of a panel last week, organized by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in New York, in which I was privileged to participate. Inevitably, our exchange wasn’t restricted to the content of “Klinghoffer,” but spanned a range of issues from the perilous situation in the Middle East, presently caught in the pincers of Islamic State atrocities and rising Iranian power, to the explosion of anti-Semitic violence in Europe over the summer.

Reflecting on what was said at the panel, it’s clear to me that the issues which animate our side of the debate are utterly removed from the concerns of the opera’s defenders. Our awareness that the source of the savage attacks on Israel is the same genocidal ideology that has caused such appalling suffering to Christians, Kurds, and Yazidis forces us to confront how anti-Semitism is an integral element of the global assault on human rights. By contrast, for the other side, there’s only one issue that matters, only one obsession that imposes itself on all of us: “Palestine” and the Palestinians.

It’s an obsession that manifests itself far beyond the hallowed halls of the Met Opera.