This artistic atrocity aroused the ire of Antwerp’s Jewish community, but when one Jew expressed his outrage and fear that the production would stir up anti-Semitism to the general director of the opera, he reportedly was told “that if the situation for Jews were really so precarious here, they should leave.”
Interestingly, New York Times critic and columnist Michael Kimmelman reacted to this invitation for the Jews to leave Europe with dismay about the bad taste of the comment but not to the slander against the State of Israel and its supporters.
“Rage,” Kimmelman wrote about the incident, “is a perfectly sane response to the Israeli occupation. And all art is political in the end.”
One can argue in response that had the Palestinians been even marginally interested in sharing the country and living in peace with the Jews, they might have accepted any number of peace offers over the course of the last century. Even more to the point, Gaza, the setting of the final scene of the opera, is currently occupied by Hamas, not Israel.
The inversion by which the Islamist murderers of Hamas bent on annihilation of Israel become the soulful Jewish sufferers in “Samson” is more than just another play on the familiar David-becoming-Goliath theme that has gained traction ever since the Jews started winning wars of self-defense rather than being slaughtered en masse.
Put in the context of an opera whose point is the triumph of faith over violence and sex, it is a way by which contemporary Jews can be stripped of any connection to their homeland and their heritage. The fact that one of the persons responsible for this is an Israeli Jew does not make it any less misleading. That is especially true when this sort of work gives a boost to the revival of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Kimmelman thinks this sort of a “Samson” could not have been produced in New York where presumably the Jews are not ready to be told to flee. As it happens, the production of the piece performed at the Metropolitan Opera since 1998 does take the opposite point of view.
That version, created by English Jew Elijah Moshinsky, has the effrontery to portray the Jews in “Samson” as, well, Jews. Though no uniformed Nazis are seen onstage, Moshinsky’s direction evokes the Holocaust with Jews in religious garb being oppressed by an enemy whose prime characteristic is a primitive and violent paganism.
This, too, may be a case, as Kimmelman says, that proves that all art is political. The difference is that one director’s vision is based on the truth and the other on a lie. The trouble is, in an intellectual milieu in which those concepts no longer exist, it is all too easy to imagine a world in which Israel and the Jews can be eliminated too.