As the granddaughter of a Jewish orphan who fled Russian pogroms in the early 20th century and lost family in the Holocaust,I’m profoundly disturbed by current events in the Ukraine. But, like many of us, besides donating some cash, I’m having difficulty figuring out how to help.

Last week, writer Palmer Faran presented the following piece to my writers group, “the Write Stuff,” in Lincoln, Mass. She has graciously allowed me to share it, it here.
–Anita M. Harris

ECHOES OF THE PAST: IS ANYONE LISTENING?

Below are 2 quotations that I read years ago and have always remembered.

“They came for my neighbor down the street. I was scared 

and said nothing. They came for my friend next door. Still I

said nothing. Then they came for me.”

“Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.”

I have just finished reading “The Boys in the Boat,” a wonderful book about the United States rowing team that won the gold in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Interspersed with the stories of these remarkable boys, is the story of events in Nazi Germany’s Berlin. As I thought about it, I felt as though I were reading about current events.

The 1936 Olympics were a propaganda opportunity for Hitler’s Nazis. They were good at it. The Jews, the Gypsies, the homosexuals were hustled out of the way. Flower boxes were everywhere, windows repaired, streets swept. The Germans were at their best and it worked. Many who attended the events thought Germany was just fine.

Although Germany took many of the gold medals, it was not a clean sweep. Other countries also won medals. The most prized was the 9 man rowing crew who won the gold for the Americans. The most stunning was the track events in which Jesse Owens, a Black American runner, won 4 gold medals, making a lie of Hitler’s claim of the inferiority of the Black race.

Soon after the Olympics were over, Hitler took over the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone established by the Allies after World War I. He claimed there were Germans there who needed protection. The world stood by.

Sound familiar?

In 1938 Hitler invaded Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, claiming there were Germans there also. The world stood by.

Familiar again?

In 1939 he invaded Czechoslovakia, a claim for a greater Germany. In the Munich agreement, the Allies sacrificed that nation. Later that year Poland fell, then Belgium, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway. The little fires that were contained for a while burst into flames that soon engulfed the whole world.

Is our collective memory so short? Have we learned nothing in the last almost 100 years?

The world was different then, no nuclear bombs, no television. Our excuse was that we didn’t know. (Although many did know.) Now we watch in real time. Buildings crumbling before our eyes, bodies in the street, a child’s shoe in the gutter. This is not a movie. What will be our excuse this time?

The cries of mothers and children, the moans of the wounded and dying echo across the years. Do you hear them in the halls of power in Washington? Are you listening? Is anyone listening?
–Palmer Faran

Palmer Faran is a long-time Massachusetts resident who recently moved to Arizona.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group in Cambridge, Mass.

In early 1933, delegations of rank-and-file workers from all over Germany descended on the headquarters of the German Communist Party in Berlin. They were demanding that their leaders call a general strike to topple the newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. That tactic had worked in Russia, when the Bolsheviks organized a successful general strike to prevent the proto-Fascist general Kornilov from marching on the capital and overthrowing the liberal Kerensky government.

The Bolsheviks did not like Kerensky, but they knew that for them, Kornilov would be so much worse. German workers were familiar with Nazis and their brutality from their neighborhoods and workplaces, so they knew that Hitler in power would also be really bad news. To their amazement and dismay, the delegations met with only derisive dismissal. Hitler was nothing to worry about, their leaders told them. He would last no longer than any of his recent predecessors had. He would fall within weeks.

Hitler did not fall. During his first few months in office, he suspended the constitution, disbanded the parliament, imprisoned his political opponents, and forced all military officers to retake their oaths of office, this time to him personally, rather than to the constitution. The last of these became the primary impediment that prevented generals like Rommel from taking the action that they soon realized would be necessary until it was much too late.

Disgruntled Democrats and love-struck Republicans who still hold out hope that they can make a silk president out of a sow’s Trump are committing the same naïve blunder as those German Communists. They are thinking inside the proverbial box. The Fuhrer did not live inside that box, and neither does The Donald.

Hitler promised to “restore Germany to its proper place of glory among the nations.” He rose to power with the support of the SA, a private army of thugs and hooligans who reveled in the legitimacy they had suddenly acquired by being associated with a major political figure. Then, he bolstered his power with the support of the SS, a private army of disenfranchised young aristocrats who yearned to get back at least a semblance of the former titles and privileges they had lost as a result of Germany’s defeat in World War I.
Trump promises to “make America great again.” He is supported by dozens of armed militias and biker gangs waiting in the wings for their leader to call them to action. The Rolling Stones learned what havoc biker gangs can wreak, when they naively hired the Hell’s Angels to provide “security” for their music festival in 1969.  What they had intended to be the West Coast equivalent of Woodstock was turned instead into a fatal orgy of beating and stabbing. All it would take to deputize these thugs as an official SA/SS-type Presidential Guard, accountable only to Trump, would be an executive order.

Given Trump’s complaints that the election is being rigged against him, his declaration that he can lose only if the election is rigged, and his call to his followers to monitor polling venues in problematic neighborhoods on election day, we can expect to see action from these people even if he loses.

Hitler never received more than 40% of the vote the several times he ran for president, usually much less, but the man who defeated him eventually appointed him chancellor, because there was no one else left, and his storm troopers were causing so much trouble. Benito Mussolini, for whom Trump has expressed some admiration, became prime minister of Italy in a similar way. Even without Trump’s winning the presidency, try to imagine some future president having to appoint Trump secretary of state, defense, or treasury just to shut him up. (By the way, how will Trump’s “observers” know whether someone is “voting five times,” since for them, all of “those people” look alike?)

When reporters asked Al Gore what he intended to do after the Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush, he replied that he would do nothing, because the only recourse in our system to such a decision would be violent revolution, and that sort of thing did not interest him. Trump is not Gore. As he keeps reminding us about himself, “I do not lose.” His suggestion that potential Clinton judicial appointments might be neutralized by “the second amendment people” was not an assassination threat, nor was it sarcastic or a joke. It was a heads-up to his troops.

President Obama’s characterization of Trump as “unfit to do this job” was, characteristically, graciously understated. Trump’s recent behavior, most notably his attack on the Khan family and his claim that Obama was the founder of ISIS, has begun to resemble that of the Roman emperor, Caligula, even more than that of Hitler.

Roman Senate, Wikipedia, Public Domain

Roman emperors were nominally required to seek Senatorial approval for their decisions, but the Senate had long since become a rubber stamp. The U. S. Congress has a similar history of powerlessness in the face of certain kinds of presidential faits accomplis.

Harris S Truman http://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/view.php?id=2267 Credit: Frank Gatteri, United States Army Signal Corps

Harry Truman embarked on a major war entirely on his own, without receiving or even seeking the constitutionally mandated congressional declaration of war. Ronald Reagan violated the constitutional prohibition of granting special status to one religion over others by becoming the first U.S. president to appoint an ambassador to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.

Would any president appoint an ambassador to the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston or the main Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City? In neither Truman’s nor Reagan’s case did anyone in Congress raise even a peep of objection out of fear of alienating important electoral constituencies. Constitutional requirements simply vanished without a whimper, let alone a constitutional amendment. With Trump in the White House, Congressional impotence will be complete, not so much because of electoral constituencies, even assuming that elections will still matter, but because of Trump’s militias.

Trump’s declaration that Hilary Clinton “is the devil” is similarly Caligulesque. Roman emperors typically looked forward to achieving godhood through an apotheosis that they expected to take place at their deaths. Caligula believed that he was already a god during his lifetime. In Trump’s case, if Clinton is the devil, and Trump is her nemesis, then Trump must be –– well, you figure it out.

Outside of the context of a presidential election, it might actually be amusing, in this connection, to take note of the fact that the Jewish Gematria  value for The Donald is 282, the same as the value for Satan (http://www.gematrix.org/), and that the value for Donald J. Trump is 1,189, the same as the value for both The Fool Is The Devil and The Destruction Of The Planet. (Wikipedia defines Gematria as “an  Assyro-Babylonian-Greek system of alphanumeric code/cipher later adopted into Jewish culture that assigns numerical value to a word/name/phrase in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other or …to the number itself as it may apply to Nature, a person’s age, the calendar year, or the like.”)

To be fair, it must also be noted that the Gematria value for Hilary Rodham Clinton is 953, the same as the value for both Multitude Of Sins and Fraudulent Concealment, but it is definitely not the value of The Devil, which is 851. Bernie Sanders, by the way, scores 451, the value of As Dead as a Doornail. This is metaphorically accurate right now, but is likely to become literally true, if Trump gets presidential power.

Believers in reincarnation might find it significant that Trump was born just over a year (June 14, 1946) after Hitler committed the sin of suicide (April 30, 1945). Believers in the Book of Revelation might find this helpful in explaining why Trump has been making himself look increasingly like the most qualified candidate for Antichrist that the world has seen in seventy years.

Trump is correct, contra Clinton, that this country “is going to Hell.”

Who would be better to make that determination than Gematria 282? On the other hand, this is not the fault of immigrants, legal or illegal, but is more a result of the persistent efforts of people like Trump to avoid paying appropriate taxes. The seven billion dollars that Trump’s family alone would save from Trump’s proposed elimination of the estate tax would make a good down payment on his wall, or, lest we forget, toward rebuilding schools, hospitals, highways and bridges. These are, after all the aspects of the country that are indeed “going to Hell.”

Despite scoffers, Trump will certainly be able to build his wall, and he will be able to make Mexico pay for it. At least, he will start. All it will take is an executive order seizing all Mexican assets in the United States for what the president will have decided is an essential governmental purpose.

Trump has a history of getting away with invoking eminent domain for personal gain, and he has made it clear that he will run his political empire exactly as he has run his financial one.

Like Trump University, the wall will likely never be finished, because the money will run out, as a result of budget overruns and kickbacks for Trump-connected construction companies and Trump-appointed inspectors. Mexico will be no more able to prevent this seizure than Austria (or more recently Crimea) was to prevent the Anschluss. Any Supreme Court that would declare Trump’s action unconstitutional will likely have ceased to exist by the time it gets to hear the case. The United Nations might wring its hands and express its outrage, but it will be as helpless to do anything meaningful as the League of Nations was when Mussolini took Ethiopia.

By Goldwater for President 1964 – https://campaignrhetoric.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/goldwater.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50332089

Trump has been compared to Barry Goldwater, and there is some truth to that. Goldwater embraced the far-right John Birch Society, while Trump has accepted support from the Ku Klux Klan and recently appointed a modern-day equivalent of Joseph Goebbels as the CEO for his campaign. Hearing the head of The Trump Organization call the Clinton State Department “a criminal organization of pay to play,” just because she might have been overly gracious in thanking people for donating to a charity, would have brought an admiring smile of approval to the lips of the Nazi propaganda minister. It’s like Al Capone calling Eliot Ness a gangster, just because he might have inadvertently conducted a couple of wiretaps without a warrant.

On the other hand, Goldwater had a coherent political ideology that he remained more or less loyal to throughout his political career. Hitler also had a consistent lifelong ideology, but without the deep commitment to constitutionality that Goldwater professed, replacing it with “the will of the leader” as the source of legal legitimacy. Trump has shown no ideological consistency whatsoever, as shown by his recent apparent about-face-(but-not-really) on immigration just because his poll numbers were down, and he has expressed his contempt for any kind of “tradition” in favor of his own narcissistic notion of what he calls “common sense” as his sole guiding principle. In other words, Trump is loyal to nothing but Trump. As the proverbial twentieth-century General Motors executive might say now, “What’s good for Trump is good for Trump. Forget the USA.”

Putin on a bike

Consider Trump’s alleged on-again off-again “relationship” with Vladimir Putin. Trump was confidently asserting that Clinton’s emails had been hacked well before it was officially revealed that they had indeed been hacked by the Russians. How could he have known? Bush said that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul. John McCain said that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen three letters, K-G-B. When Trump looks into Putin’s eyes, or anyone else’s, he sees only dollar signs.  It would not be beyond the limits of a Trump-type deal to trade U. S. membership in NATO for a string of Trump golf courses across Russia. Business is business. Trump’s daughter recently vacationed in Croatia with Putin’s girlfriend. Perhaps, it was just a social visit.

Nobody took Hitler seriously when he wrote in Mein Kampf that he would like to gas thousands of Jews. How could this have been anything but rhetoric? Trump shrugs and smiles when his supporters yell out at rallies or tell interviewers that Clinton and other current government officials should be imprisoned or killed. He says he wants to keep Muslims and Mexicans out of the country, and that those who are already here are criminals and terrorists. What does one do when one has large populations of criminals and terrorists, too many to deport,  a mostly built wall that can help to keep them from leaving voluntarily, and a “deportation force” of armed hooligans eager to kick butt?

Trump says he will reinstate water boarding and worse, because “torture works.” His recently former top campaign aide lobbied for foreign torturers for decades, most notably the pro-Putin former president of Ukraine. And then there is the admiration that Trump has expressed toward the mafia. Like torturers, “They get things done.” Based on his professed values and his actual business practices, in fact, Trump has shown himself to be not a businessman, but a gangster, Whitey Bulger in a suit. Bulger would have sent his thugs after the Khans. Trump is polished just enough to have realized that at least for now, he had to settle for insults and insinuations. Trump is what Bulger would have become, if he had inherited $40 million.

Clinton, of course, is everything the pre-endorsement Sanders said she is. A Clinton presidency would indeed be business as usual, with emphasis on both business and, in contrast to Trump, as usual. However, she is no more hypocritical than, say, McCain, who owns six mansions, but despite his war-hero status, refuses, like Trump, to pay his fair share of taxes to fund a war that he vehemently promotes. It is to Clinton’s credit, and it is not insignificant in this election, that she has never encouraged anyone to call her The Hilary.

Forget about Clinton’s emails, which would have been just as insecure on a government server as on her own, since anything on the network can be hacked, and just for the moment, put Benghazi aside as well. Of course, she lied.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas

So did Republican president and war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he assured the American people on national television in 1959 that the United States did not send spy planes over the Soviet Union. That was exposed as a lie the very next day, when the Soviets showed captured American spy plane pilot Gary Francis Powers on their national television, thereby setting the stage for the anti-“establishment” cynicism of the 1960s. The idea that a president would lie to the public was still shocking to many people in those pre-Ellsberg, pre-Nixon days, but surely not today.

Rare indeed is the politician (or businessman, or parent, or spouse) who can get through life without ever telling a lie. However, most politicians are not pathological liars and compulsive career conmen who cannot distinguish true from false or right from wrong, the legal definition of insanity. In regard to credibility and trustworthiness, does a presidential candidate who refuses to release his tax forms, even though the IRS has said it would be okay, have the right to cast a stone?

The general strike that didn’t happen was the last chance the world had to prevent World War II, the Holocaust, and the need to invent nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The last chance the world will have to stop Trump and his consequences, if he wins the election, will be the moment after Mike Pence is sworn in as vice-president.

What a wonder it would be to behold, the entire United States Supreme Court going on strike, because they cannot in good conscience administer the oath of office to a lunatic. The justices are sworn, after all, to protect the constitution against its enemies, foreign and domestic, in whatever form they might appear. No one else is empowered to administer the presidential oath. Technically, Obama might still be president, but temperamentally, like Gore, he would be unlikely to press that claim in such a circumstance, nor is anyone who matters likely to take him seriously, if he did. Conservatives would actually get one of their own as president, and everyone else could breathe a sigh of relief that for at least another four years, there would be no mushroom cloud. The ongoing need to deal with Trump’s storm troopers would perhaps be one thing the two parties can agree on, and that would at least be a start.

Of course, all of the pieces would have to fall into place for this scenario to work out. A simpler and less risky path for Republicans, as some seem to have begun to realize,  would be simply to let or even help Clinton win and then work to control her from Congress, as they have been doing more or less successfully with Obama. Taking everything into account, they will never be able to do that with Trump.

Given his enormous wealth, the demonstrated competence of his friend Putin’s hackers, and the apparent persistent willingness of top Republican leaders to put up with anything from Trump as long as he promises them tax cuts, Trump can actually win this election, regardless of what the polls might tell us. If he does win, and if he actually gets to hold office, hold on to your hat. The rollercoaster will be out of control and, “Believe me,” as in 1933, things will begin happening “fast.”

Trump recently told a largely white audience, aiming his question at the few black people there, that “58% of your youth are unemployed. And asked, “What do you have to lose?” The obvious answer, of course, is “the other 42%.”

Sure, you can’t trust Clinton to tell you the truth about everything she does. Of course, not.  However, in contrast to Trump, you definitely can trust her not to fly off the handle  and launch nuclear missiles in a fit of pique, just because some two-bit mini-Trump in some other country has made some offhand remark that she’s decided to consider insulting.

If you are one of those people who are still considering joining the ranks of those German Communists in repeating a world-historical blunder that you might not live long enough to know you should regret, then ask yourself three questions. Would you entrust Bernie Madoff with the password to your bank account? Would you entrust Bill Clinton with the keys to your teen-age daughter’s bedroom? Do you really want to entrust the likes of Donald Trump with the keys to the nation’s nuclear codes? Then, in Trump’s words, let “common sense” prevail, and as Ted Cruz said at the Republican convention, vote your conscience.

Steven Cushing

Guest author Steven Cushing is an internationally respected writer, consultant and educator on language, logic, and communication. His many publications include Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes, “Critique of Puerile Reason: A Pragmatic Look at J. P. Moreland’s The Creation Hypothesis,” and How You and Your Computer Think Alike–and Don’t: An Exploration into the Nature of Mind. Like Bernie Sanders, he is a veteran of many of the progressive struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s, and he has also contributed to numerous government-sponsored projects involving most notably civil defense, aviation safety, computer security, and cryptography. He currently teaches in Cambridge, MA and can be reached most readily at stevencushing@alum.mit.edu. 

His views do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.

An Open Secret

The documentary movie “An Open Secret” does a wonderful job of exposing the sexual abuse of children in Hollywood. But you’ll probably never see it– not because of the difficult subject matter, but because almost no commercial theaters are willing to screen the film.

Written by  Amy Berg, Lorien Hayes and Billy McMillin and directed by Berg, the 2014 film shows that abuse of child actors is pervasive in Hollywood and that most people in the industry know about it. Either they’ve been personally touched by it (pun intended) or know someone who has been. Many powerful people in Hollywood who could ruin the careers of anyone who pushes for justice on this issue are involved.

I applaud the subjects who were willing to share their painful stories and especially the teenager who actually went to court against his agent/abuser. The abuser got only six months in jail and is still in the industry despite solid proof of the exploitation.

Questions:
It’s a big story, so why isn’t anyone willing to distribute the film? Why has it been pulled from film festivals?  Why after seeing the film have network executives refused to have the film on their networks? Why did the Screen Actor’s Guild unsuccessfully sue the filmmakers after seeing the film in which the head of their Young Performers Committee was implicated in the scandal?

Answer:

The topic is too hot to handle and hits too close to home.

Who can speak out for the innocent victims? In “Spotlight”, Hollywood is happy to pay homage to the reporters who uncovered sex abuse in the Catholic Church a number of years ago, but unwilling to acknowledge it in their midst.

In the past, I’ve attributed problems of child actors to their inability to handle fame and fortune and an acquired sense of entitlement. Now I wonder whether their spiraling out of control has far more nefarious roots.

I thank the Boston Globe for sponsoring the screening of this movie in its documentary series along with a Q&A session with the producer. I wish that others had the courage to take on this difficult topic and not bow to the powerful perpetrators, but who’s to take up the mantle? Newspapers are too financially strapped to take on such financially powerful interests so others such as documentary filmmakers or even comedians (like those who exposed Bill Cosby) need to raise our awareness and lead us to take action.

See the movie if you can and be outraged by the subject matter (child sexual abuse) and by the story behind the story (the unwillingness to deal with the “open secret”).

–-Sheila Green

In an interview with Lisa Mullins on “Here and Now” a daily program of National Public Radio,  author Anita Harris reflected on how her college years shaped her career path.  The interview, which aired June 11, focused on Harris’s book, Ithaca Diaries, a memoir and social history of her years at Cornell University in the 1960s.

Those years “gave me courage to start a newspaper and become a journalist,” said Harris about her time at Cornell.  “They gave me the courage to fight for social change through my work and my writing.  They have me the courage to work with students and help them understand better their own place in the world.”

Harris attended Cornell University during a time of racism and world turmoil.  In Ithaca Diaries, she writes about heavy topics such as the tearing up and burning of draft cards by students opposed to the Vietnam war and demonstrations for civil rights.

“There were all kinds of demonstrations and eventually all hell broke loose,”said Harris.  “At the university, nationally, and internationally students were demonstrating and even rioting all over the world.”

While Harris tried to focus on her studies and stay “sane,”  she also explored and wrote about Cornell’s dating scene, which was filled with “boys, and frats and football games,” she told Mullins.

Harris used her journals, letters to her parents, and Cornell’s independent student newspaper, the Daily Sun, to help tell her story, which takes readers on a coming-of-age journey from Harris’ arrival on campus  in 1966 with her pink suitcase to her graduation day, when she led a demonstration against the military.

“One reason I wanted to write the book was to understand what had happened and how it still affects me today,” said Harris.  “To this day, I think back to the events of that time.”

“Ithaca Diaries” can be purchased on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Ithaca-Diaries-Coming-Age-1960s/dp/0692294988.

Harris’ “Here and Now” interview  is available at http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/06/11/ithaca-diaries-anita-harris.

— Morgan Brittney Austin
Morgan Brittney Austin is a 2015 graduate of LaSalle College, near Boston.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Last winter, New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced a 2014-15 season that would include its first production of a John Adams’ 1991 work, The Death of Klinghoffer.   The opera portrays the October, 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, by members of the Palestine Liberation Front who were seeking the release of 50 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.   A vacationing American Jew, the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, was shot by the hijackers.  His body was thrown overboard.

Controversy and protests began almost immediately after the season announcement.   The opera’s libretto, by Alice Goodman, is the source of much complaint and has been cherry-picked for lines deemed offensive and anti-Semitic.   Goodman’s text — poetic, often obscure, and perhaps ambivalent in its meaning — begins with alternating choruses that express the feelings of “Exiled Palestinians” and then “Exiled Jews.”   Besides the Klinghoffers, the other four named roles are those of the hijackers.  (Other characters have generic names, e.g., The Captain.)   By identifying the Palestinians and giving them voice, the charges go, Goodman humanizes and elevates them, while placing their politics at center stage.   Protesters even objected to the title of the opera, asking why it was called The Death of Klinghoffer and not The Murder of Klinghoffer.

These objections were accompanied by repeated calls for cancellation, as well as for a general boycott of the Met.  By spring, General Manager Peter Gelb had acquiesced to at least one demand, calling off a high-definition transmission that would have played in movie theaters around the world.    The summer’s Gaza incursion (by Israel) raised the temperature even higher:  the protesters were certain that the eight scheduled performances of Klinghoffer would provoke further incidents of anti-Semitism, in addition to those that had been reported in Europe throughout those fraught months.

In late September, opening night of the Met season featured fancy dress inside and demonstrations outside.   New York synagogue bulletins urged members to express their displeasure by writing to Mr. Gelb.  The New York Times reported that some individuals had gone further, actually finding ways to reach the performers themselves through threatening messages to their managers.  On October 20, the night of the production opening, protesters sat in a row of wheelchairs positioned opposite Lincoln Center Plaza.

Art, specifically opera, suddenly mattered.  It had become the center of a nasty, noisy, public debate.  Some music journalists reveled in the attention and in the moment of relevance for a 400-year-old form.  I, however, was incensed by the assault, and embarrassed by the willful ignorance of those who ranted while freely admitting that they had never seen the work in question.

That I love opera is often difficult to explain to those who don’t care for the sound of trained classical singing, let alone those who find it a ridiculous mode of expression.  It is improbable, but also compelling and, on the best nights, transporting.

Well-meaning friends, good people who don’t care about opera or opera-going, suddenly wanted my personal take on the argument, a ruling on the allegations of inherent anti-Semitism in Klinghoffer.   I was frustrated by their questions and by my inability to respond.   Were I to answer, I am sure that I would confound their expectations and might even offend my questioners.

I have been looking forward to seeing Klinghoffer for months now.    I’m no fan of Minimalism in music; I actively dislike the monotonous work of Philip Glass.    Although I haven’t studied the music in depth, I find that Adams offers greater texture and variety — more to intrigue the ear.  A few years ago, his Nixon in China made a deep and lasting impression on me.   Why wouldn’t I be curious to hear the next work in the line, an opera that many deem even more successful as music-drama?

Again, my friends don’t care about this.  Most aren’t really even concerned with the politics of art, only with the question of possible anti-Semitism which, in this case, is probably closer to insufficient focus on Jewish characters or inadequately expressed sympathy for their point of view.

I am not apolitical in the least, but my politics are my own, my taste in music is my own, and the terms of my Jewish identity are my own, too.   I am often inclined to choose art over strict tribal allegiance.   Richard Wagner was, by all accounts, a reprehensible man who wrote glorious music.  Many other arguably great composers were probable or certain anti-Semites.  Of this, there is nothing to be said, no dilemmas or choices to weigh.  These were the commonly-held opinions of the day.  Over time, the art has outshone and overshadowed the failings of the artists, patrons, and societies.

I doubt that The Death of Klinghoffer is “anti-Semitic,” if such a thing can be said of music itself.  It may dramatize conflicting points of view, which is usually desirable in the context of theater.    I haven’t seen the opera yet but, once I have, there might be more to say.  (Check this space in a few weeks.)   For now, I hope to be moved:  to me, that is an essential part of watching live performance.   I may feel inclined to anger, not because I expect to find the representation to be unfair, but because the acts themselves were cruel and senseless, and because music and drama can heighten emotion.    But whatever my response, I will have seen and judged Klinghoffer for its success as a work of lyric theater – my own passion – and not as an affirmation of anyone else’s politics.

Rachel Yurman ©2014

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, based in Cambridge, MA.