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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Klinghoffer controversy: the changing meaning of free speech in the digital age

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"The Death of Klinghoffer" tells the story of a real murder, the result of a terrorist attack from 1985.

In an era when expressing disapproval of anything -- from a piece in the New York Times, to a “Best Dressed at the VMA’s” list to a friend’s Facebook status -- is as swift and as disconnected as clicking a button and running one’s fingers over a QWERTY keyboard, it is clear that the modern protest movement has shifted. The change is most sharply felt by creatives in the digital age. Artists are constantly under pressure to do one of two things: get as many "likes" as possible, or stir as much of a firestorm in angry comments as a server can handle. So what does the protest movement mean for the art world in the 21st century? Everything.

Over the past several weeks, U.S. audiences have taken command of the distribution of artistic work, with a license that they may or may not deserve but still wield unyieldingly. There have been two major events: First, loaded with controversy and protest is “The Death of Klinghoffer”(1991), currently being performed at the New York City Metropolitan Opera as part of their 2014 to 2015 season. The opera has now buckled under so much pressure that its general manager, Peter Gelb, pulled the show from public live streaming and broader accessibility, though the show will still be running on stage. Secondly, protesters at the University of California (UC), Berkeley petitioned to rescind the invitation of Bill Maher, host of the HBO news/talkshow “Real Time with Bill Maher” (2003 - present), as commencement speaker, after he made controversial remarks about Islam. The university ultimately stood by its decision to invite Maher and he incorporated the failed protest into a segment in his show. 

Why should U.S. audiences care about the debate over these two incidents of controversial art and expression? Because this debate indicates a shift from openness to over-censorship. It represents people's abuse of power of the internet's freedom to give opinions on people and segments that we have yet to view.

“The Death of Klinghoffer” is an opera written by American composer John Adams, with libretto by Alice Goodman. It follows the true life events of the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship -- the Achille Lauro -- in the Mediterranean by a Palestinian terrorist group. Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound American Jewish man is ultimately killed by the terrorists as they use him to send a message to the world media about their beliefs. The show alternates between arias from the Palestinians and the captive Americans, contrasting texts entitled “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” and “Chorus of Exiled Jews.” Re-introducing the opera, which originally premiered in 1991, to audiences still reeling from the summer’s media storm coverage of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was bound to incite enough buzz to create backlash. The content of "Klinghoffer" has left people upset: is the opera anti-Semitic? Anti-Israel? Or just baldly insensitive? Like opponents of the original 1991 production, protesters outside of the Met held (and continue to hold) signs with statements like “The Met Opera glorifies terrorism,” screaming at opera-goers who dared to go inside to see the "Klinghoffer."Ironically, many of the protesters themselves had never seen the production.

Whether or not the show glorifies terrorism is up to the viewer to decide, but that is entirely the point. The viewer cannot decide unless the work is viewed. Modern audiences are inundated with online web information and a surplus of trailers to judge a movie's quality before it has been released. And it seems as though the unlimited access has changed the American audience’s viewpoint to a “judge first, consume later” mentality when it comes to modern art. But how can we use art to create a narrative discourse if audiences are not willing to hear the conversation? If American art has become a platform for monologues and a forbidden space for dialogue, and what does this mean for important conversations on contemporary issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which shows no signs of slowing down?

Frank Lehman, a noted music theorist and Assistant Professor of Music at Tufts, weighed in on these questions.

"'Klinghoffer' has always been controversial, even among academics. After Sept. 11, the [Boston Symphony Orchestra] cancelled a scheduled performance of its choruses. The preeminent musicologist Richard Taruskin editorialized in favor of this move in a prominent forum, and this created quite a stir," Lehman told the Daily in an email. "My sense of the scholarly pulse now is that we're still working through its problems, but few are interested in rejecting the work outright. And fewer still are in favor of self-censorship, or believe the more incendiary mis-characterizations that are going around. Mostly, the sentiment is: judge it by first actually attending it.”

But the scholarly set are not generally the people who are out in the streets condemning the show and its audiences.

“There is an uncomfortable irony here," Lehman continued. "The fact that some are reflexively willing to condemn 'Klinghoffer' for suspected offensive content while more venerable works with more demonstrably troubling politics and ideology routinely make it onto the Met's slate -- consider the insidious, historically damaging content of Wagner's music dramas, for example. Well, that shows that the controversy may be about more than 'Klinghoffer' on its own terms.”

Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, Neubauer executive director of Tufts Hillel and research professor in the Department of Music at Tufts, has not seen the opera but does remember the actual events on which the opera is based, and recalled that the experience of seeing the events of the hijacking unfold on the news was “very emotional” in the community.

“The question is not do you tell the story but do you glorify the terrorists?” Summit said. “Art should be able to tell the story and go deeper into human motives ... art shouldn’t be censored for exploring a story like this.”

Summit added, however, that the way in which the story is told will have a lasting impact on those who experienced the events.

The opera itself is not supported by the real Klinghoffer’s two adult daughters, who wrote a commentary that originally ran in The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and is now included in the actual program of the opera. But there is a marked point that the Klinghoffers are exercising the same freedom of expression, the same right to create a dialogue, as the opera is doing onstage.

Bill Maher uses this same freedom of expression to defend his remarks about Islam -- for which he received heavy criticism --  made on a Sept. 26 show with guests including Ben Affleck and Sam Harris. His debate with Affleck got heated and became news fodder for the rest of the following week. The debate intensified when two UC Berkeley students collected more than 5,000 signatures to try to get Maher’s commencement speaker invitation revoked on the grounds that the Muslim Student Association would not support having a “bigot” speak at campus.

If the point of inviting a multitude of commencement speakers with drastically different viewpoints to speak over the years is an effort to spark student conversation, censoring those speakers undoubtedly defeats the purpose. Tufts University hosted famed U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in September 2013 and an avalanche of opinion editorials -- in support and against his viewpoints -- poured into the Daily’s Opinions section, as well as other campus publications. Speakers at Tufts from previous commencement addresses include Michael Bloomberg (2007), Deval Patrick (2009), Bill Cosby (2000) and Claude M. Steele (2013). A university cannot possibly represent itself and its views entirely with one speaker, so it invites guests who offer a variety of opinions. And when those viewpoints are drastically in conflict with those held by Tufts', or any of the university’s students, the dialogue it encourages has a far greater impact than a neutral representative of middle-of-the-road policies.

FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), a free speech group aimed at university campuses and their students’ rights, stated in an article to the Wall Street Journal that there have been 95 protests since 2009 to un-invite a variety of commencement speakers from coming to their formerly welcoming universities. In his Nov. 1 show, Maher pointed out that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement.

“I guess they don’t teach irony in college anymore,” he said.

While the Free Speech Movement marked a shift from passive acceptance of mass media to a challenge to regain control over on-air content, it seems as though the original aims of the protests may be out of reach. As stated in an article on The Calisphere, UC Berkeley’s website, “The Free Speech Movement began in 1964, when students at the University of California, Berkeley protested a ban on on-campus political activities. The protest was led by several students, who also demanded their right to free speech and academic freedom.”

But while students of the 1960s were protesting Vietnam, people today are protesting entertainers making provocative (albeit potentially offensive) comments on their own programs, and productions that they have not viewed. Everything is offensive, everyone is offended, but no one is actually talking.

How can students protest while still staying engaged and open? How can artists create without fear of over-censorship? Rabbi Summit feels the answer is to push boundaries without being offensive.

"[We must] be able to tell people’s narratives, and to really tell narratives from the inside and convey narratives from the inside,” he said.

The key, of course, is that everyone must be willing to listen.