(no subject)

The New York Times has an article from this past week about an opera controversy in Antwerp, Belgium. The Flanders Opera Company staged a version of Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalila with a twist. The twist is that Samson and the Israelites are dressed as Palestinians and the Delilah and the Philistines are dressed as Jews. Which is just lovely.

I got into a conversation about this with a Rabbi today. I pointed out to him that Samson is sort of a mixed legacy, a great hero of Israel but a deeply flawed man who ultimately ended his life in tragedy and failure. I suggested that if the director's goal in creating this opera was to paint the Palestinians as noble victims of Israeli oppression, it had to potential to backfire. Not everyone is sure that Samson is truly a hero, and not everyone is convinced that Samson's act of kamikaze suicide, analogized to suicide bombing in the opera, was a courageous end.

Which is not to defend this production. The image of the Israeli soldier as oppressor is unfortunately becoming a trope in European art, and it is deeply unfair. The Times's description of the Philistine bacchanalian dance, performed here by Israeli soldiers with rifles, sounds positively ghoulish.

It's horrendous that an opera company could think this production might be a good idea, if unsurprising. A few years ago I stumbled across a Viennese production of Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron that set the opera's action in a concentration camp. I cannot imagine what they were thinking. I couldn't watch more than two minutes before closing the video in utter horror. Something about the way the European imagination views the Jew has serious problems.

Just thinking about it makes me angry.