The Death of Decency: the New York Times and ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’

By: Omri Tubi May 6, 2026

On April 18, 2026, the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo published an article about the controversial opera “The Death of Klinghoffer.” The opera tells the story of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled American Jew, by Palestinian terrorists. Since it was first produced decades ago, the opera came under fire from Klinghoffer’s daughters, Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, and some art critics. Opponents argued it glorifies and rationalizes terrorism, has strong anti-Israel bias, and promotes antisemitism. The controversy led to cancellations of some if its shows in the U.S.

Despite this well-known history, on which the Times itself previously reported, the print version of the April 18 article was titled “Seeing the Good in an Opera About Terrorism.” The online version of the article was given a different title: “Luca Guadagnino Wants a Difficult Opera to Break Free of Polemics.” –Notwithstanding the print version’s title, the main issue with the Times’ coverage is that it casts the opera itself as if it was the casualty in this fraught history.  

The Hijacking

On Oct. 3, 1985, the Italy-based Achille Lauro left Genoa for a 12-day cruise in the Mediterranean, which included a stop in Israel. On board the ship were hundreds of passengers and crew, including Leon Klinghoffer and his wife Marilyn. On Oct. 7, the ship was hijacked by four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Front. The terrorists murdered Klinghoffer the following day and tossed his body into the sea together with his wheelchair.

Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old American Jew from New York, was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a stroke. Aside from the Klinghoffers, nine other Americans were taken hostage. The terrorists threatened to execute them as well as British hostages if their demands were not met. Some of the terrorists were eventually captured and tried while others escaped justice and were tried in absentia.

The Controversy

The opera was composed by John Adams and debuted in 1991. The opera’s current iteration, produced by Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, will debut in Florence, Italy.

The opera became controversial almost immediately after its release. Following criticism, Adams removed a scene in which Jewish characters “exhibited stereotypical behavior.”

In 2014, the opera debuted in New York’s Metropolitan Opera (Met), which led to protests attended by Jewish communal leaders as well as local and national leaders such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Congressman Eliot Engel.

In 2014, Klinghoffer’s daughters and the ADL noted they were concerned because the opera juxtaposes the Palestinians’ plight with the murder of an American Jew, potentially serving to legitimize the murder. CAMERA’s Myron Kaplan wrote: “The opera’s story line can be characterized fairly as ‘Understandably aggrieved Palestinian Arabs wreak vengeance on Jew standing in for all his perfidious co-religionists.’” Both CAMERA and the ADL noted the opera’s strong anti-Israel bias, and the Times of Israel referred to it as “abominable.” CAMERA was instrumental in convincing the Met’s General Manager to cancel plans for simulcasting the opera to large-screen theatres around the world.

The opera also has its defenders, including in the Jewish world. The Forward questioned whether the opera was really antisemitic. A Time reporter claimed that censoring art was anti-democratic and anti-Jewish. And the Times’ John Rockwell countered allegations of antisemitism made by another Times music critic, Edward Rothstein.

The Times’ Recent Article

But the central problem with the Times’ recent article is not how it handles politics, represents characters and groups, or the less-than-ideal title of the print version. The main issue is the fact that the article casts the opera itself as the casualty – instead of the Klinghoffer family, the Israelis and Palestinians impacted by the long conflict of which the attack is part, or other Achille Lauro passengers and crew.  

The opera’s creators talk about the importance of their art, and the Times let them focus on themselves and the challenges the opera encountered. While the controversies surrounding the opera and Klinghoffer’s murder are mentioned, the article reads:

Guadagnino said that what had gotten lost among the furious debates over the opera’s perceived political bias — which Adams and his librettist, Alice Goodman, have always denied — was Adams’s elegiac and mysterious score and the power of Goodman’s poetic and enigmatic words.
“Knowing that the opera was met with more or less controversy is irrelevant,” he said. “For me, what matters is that — from a musical standpoint, from the perspective of the libretto — this is a major work.”
While some “Klinghoffer” productions… have provided specific historical context to the opera, including photographs of Klinghoffer and his wife Marilyn — reasoning, perhaps, that 21st-century audiences may not remember the 1985 incident —  Guadagnino’s telling concentrates more on the work’s eternal themes.
The “poetic and enigmatic words,” the “eternal themes,” and “the musical standpoint” are what is important – not the human story. And it is the art that got lost in “furious debates” but still “withstood the specious controversies that have accompanied it.” Indeed, what matters most in this story is for the “difficult opera” to “break free from polemics.”
One can ask, for example, how these above statements of Guadagnino – who is dismissive of the pain the opera caused and its problematic representations – fit with the opera’s conductor claiming that the opera is about “the humanity of the story behind the controversy”? They do not. In fact, Guadagnino’s comments and the article’s text show that to him, the human story is “irrelevant,” as he said, and the art is historically decontextualized.
This controversial art is not the victim. The elderly, disabled man who was murdered by terrorists and whom the opera itself is named after is the victim. More generally, the victims are Klinghoffer’s family and the passengers who were held hostage during this terror attack that is a part of a long and ever-more-bloody conflict. The subject of Povoledo’s article might be “The Death of Klinghoffer.” But what it actually demonstrates is the death of decency as Guadagnino and The New York Times elevate their own views about art, dismissing the human story as unimportant.

 

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