Congratulations to Stewart Ain on a first-rate story providing much-needed context and analysis about the Metropolitan Opera’s cancellation of its simulcast of the “Klinghoffer” opera (“High Drama Over ‘Klinghoffer’ Opera,” June 27).
Mainstream media eliminated or glossed over important details that you reported, such as the news that Abe Foxman of ADL and ADL staff had carefully examined the libretto although they did not attend a performance.
Also, Eve Epstein’s comparison of the effect of the Klinghoffer opera to an “operatic rendering of The Beheading of Daniel Pearl” recast the controversy in sharp contemporary focus, along with the Klinghoffer daughters’ questioning how we would feel today if a “work of art” were to give voice to all sides of the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy.
I wish readers of mainstream accounts of this controversy had had the benefit of your reporting before leaping to a simplistic judgment, heard from many quarters, that the controversy was simply a matter of “censorship” vs. hurt feelings.
Manhattan
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