Two dramatic presentations being staged this week will be delivering a powerful message with serious negative implications for the Jewish people.
Two dramatic presentations being staged this week, in venues thousands of miles apart on two different continents, will be delivering a powerful message with serious negative implications for the Jewish people. One is the opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which will make its New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, October 20, and the second is the musical Cukurs.
Herberts Cukurs, currently on a nationwide tour in Latvia.
On the surface, there does not appear to be any ostensible connection between an opera about the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and a musical about the life of aviator Herberts Cukurs, a national hero in the 1930s in his native Latvia, but a closer look at the presentations clearly indicates their highly problematic content.
In the case of The Death of Klinghoffer, the main issue is its portrayal of the Palestinian Liberation Front terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a handicapped American Jewish tourist who was a passenger on the boat, and then threw his body and wheelchair overboard. In the words of the victim’s daughters Lisa and Ilsa, the opera “rationalizes, romanticizes and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.”
