The New York Times and CNN have published short profiles of the victims of the recent terrorist attacks in France, including the four Jewish men killed on Friday at Hyper Cacher, a kosher grocery store in Porte de Vincennes, Paris:

Yoav Hattab, 21, originally from Tunisia, was living and studying in Paris. He was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Tunis.

Yohan Cohen, 22, was an employee of the supermarket and a student. His grandfather, a famous Jewish-Tunisian singer, died in December.

Philippe Braham, 45, worked as an IT consultant. His children are students at a Jewish school close to the supermarket where he was killed, and his brother is a rabbi in Paris.

François-Michel Saada, 63, was a former executive. He was born in Tunis and married to Laurence Saada for over 30 years. He has two adult children who live in Israel.

May their memories be a blessing.

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So, one of the terrorists in the recent New York run of the suuuuuper-controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer was played by—who else?—a Jew.

If this is your first time on the internet and you’re unfamiliar with the Klinghoffer fracas (greetings!), I suggest you familiarize yourself here and here. (tl;dr version: a Jewish American named Leon Klinghoffer was murdered aboard a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1985, someone made an opera about it, a lot of people find the opera deeply offensive, others think it’s OK/not that big of a deal/really good.)

Anyway, dancer Jesse Kovarsky has published a very interesting essay on Gawker about his experience playing Omar, the hijacker who shoots Klinghoffer in the opera. Key to landing the role was his “ample facial hair” and “ethnically ambiguous” look—and of course, talent:

I must admit it was a strange phone call to my parents (not opera fans) to let them know I had gotten a leading role in a controversial contemporary opera playing the part of a Palestinian terrorist. As a liberal Jew from the northern suburbs of Chicago, I never imagined those words would come out of my mouth. I also realized I knew very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In order to preserve my humble naivety, I entered the rehearsal process seeking to gather as much information as I could.

Kovarsky did a lot of reading during rehearsals: Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Palestine by Joe Sacco, The History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, and The Achille Lauro Hijacking by Micahel K. Bohn. “We were viewing the subject matter from as many angles as we could,” he writes. “As there are not two sides to Israel-Palestine, there are not two sides to Klinghoffer.”

So, does Kovarsky sympathize with Omar? Yes and no. On the one hand, he explains, it’s impossible to fully insert yourself into the mind of a terrorist when you’re a secular millennial who doesn’t have any “extreme beliefs.” But on the other hand, having a massive weapon around your neck can certainly help you situate yourself in a zealous, fanatical mindset:

In order for me to gain access to that frame of mind, it ultimately came down to the last five minutes I had to myself before going on stage. That’s when I put my AK-47 around my neck. I felt its weight, its power, and its significance, and I begin to convince myself that everything I did from that point on was for a higher cause.

Full piece is here.

(Image: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

Related: The Death of Klinghoffer: “Art for Art’s Sake” or Anti-Semitism?

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The Mark Chagall murals and crystal chandeliers hanging in the Metropolitan Opera were visible from the barricades on Columbus Avenue and 65th Street, where hundreds of protesters gathered yesterday to denounce the season premiere of John Adams’ controversial opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. The protest drew a varied crowd, ranging from young children accompanied by their families, to college students, to the elderly. Some had arrived as early as noon.

Signs that read “Cancel racist opera, insult to arts” and “Gelb, are you taking terror $$$” were held high during the demonstration. Long after the start of the premiere, cries of “shame, shame, shame”—often led by some of the guest speakers—boomed across Lincoln Center. Notable attendees included former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Congressman Peter King, who both addressed the crowd. “If you listen,” said Giuliani, “you will see that the emotional context of the opera truly romanticizes the terrorists.”

The Death of Klinghoffer, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Alice Goodman, has incited fury since the Met decided added it to its performance schedule in February. The opera is based on the assassination of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew who was shot and thrown overboard an Italian cruise ship by PLF terrorists in 1985.

Reactions to the opera tend to fall into two opposing camps: those who defend free speech and ‘art for art’s sake,’ and those who claim that the libretto perpetuates anti-Semitism and glorifies terrorists. Most of the people interviewed had not seen the opera or read the entire libretto.

“It’s a chance for us to physically voice our opinions and show our unhappiness—and disappointment—with the Metropolitan opera,” said 19-year-old Rosie Lenoff, who studies psychology at Stern College. “They are saying it’s freedom of expression, freedom of speech, but if it [the opera] was about any other group of people, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it.”

Approximately thirty students aged 14-17 from Rambam Mesivta, located in Lawrence, N.Y., arrived at the rally on a private bus. Students from the school had attended the September 22nd rally as well. “The Met is putting on an opera that they call art, but it’s really glorifying terrorism,” said senior Gabe Motechin, who helped to organize the delegation.

“The problem is that in this historical event there was no conflict—it was a one-sided thing,” said 14-year-old Gidon Kaminer, a student the Heschel School in Manhattan, who was with a group that included his mother and a friend. “A man was shot in the head for no reason and pushed off a boat, so that wouldn’t make for a very interesting opera. In order to create this interesting opera, they have to draw a parallel—they have to create a conflict—they have to humanize them [the terrorists].”

Klinghoffer’s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, aided by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), requested that the opera not be simulcast or broadcast on the radio as was previously planned. In a statement which will be included in the Met’s playbills, they wrote: “It presents false moral equivalencies without context and offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew. It rationalizes, romanticizes, and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.”

While Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has defended the inclusion of the opera in this year’s concert schedule, he yielded to the joint request of the Klinghoffer family and the ADL.

Hyman Silverglad, an attorney and resident of the Lower East Side, says he knew the Klinghoffers long before the controversy. He denounced the opera for “stimulating anti-Semitism throughout the world,” and took great offense at the argument that censorship is a violation of first amendment rights. He was pleased to see a young presence at the demonstration. He said “it was a sight for sore eyes to finally see young Jewish people taking part in these issues,” many of whom, have “turned off” Jewish affairs due to assimilation.

The Death of Klinghoffer premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991, only six years after the events that it depicts. Many, including former New York Governor George Pataki, have blasted the title alone, which critics say undermines and trivializes Klinghoffer’s brutal murder. O­peras give dramatic weight to both the protagonists and antagonists, a compositional technique employed by canonical composers like Mozart and Verdi, and The Death of Klinghoffer is no exception. Protesters say they are not enraged over the fact that the terrorists have arias, but rather that they sing lyrics many regard as anti-Semitic. (For example, “whenever poor men are gathered they can find Jews getting fat.”)

Siblings Sam and Shayna Schochet, aged 24 and 19 respectively, took issue with the how the opera frames the politics of Klinghoffer’s murder, arguing that it portrays the hijackers as “freedom fighters.”

“From my own estimation, I conclude that they are sympathizing with the Palestinian terrorists,” said Sam.

Shana added, “they’re humanizing the terrorist… At the end of the day, [Klinghoffer] was a helpless Jewish man who went on a cruise with his wife. He was killed. That’s not [the actions of] a freedom fighter; that’s a terrorist.”

(Image: A protester holds up a sign outside the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center on opening night of the opera, ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ on October 20. Credit: Bryan Thomas/Getty)

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Amidst the tragic events unfolding in Israel, an important moment transpired in the Orthodox Jewish community: Rachel Fraenkel recited the mourner’s Kaddish at the funeral of her murdered son, Naftali, and the numerous male attendees—including the Israel’s chief rabbi, David Lau—responded “amen.”

Yair Ettinger, writing for Haaretz, described Fraenkel’s public recitation of the Kaddish prayer as “a seminal moment from a religious perspective”:

This was no demonstrative act; it was the act of a bereaved mother saying the Kaddish for her son, immersed in the Aramaic text.

Still, there was great significance in her doing so before a large crowd of people, including Chief Rabbi David Lau and Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, the dean of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, who sat in the front row, and the Knesset members who attended the funeral — all of whom, coincidentally or not, belong either to national-religious circles or to Shas.

Most of them had probably heard of women who recite the Kaddish, but it is doubtful whether they had ever had the opportunity to respond “Amen” to a woman who actually did so. More important, most of the thousands of people in attendance, and the even larger number who watched the funeral at home, had never seen a woman reciting the Kaddish before.

In non-Orthodox Jewish congregations where women are counted as part of a minyan (quorum), this is not a new development, but in Orthodox communities, women traditionally do not recite Kaddish. Halachically, it is an obligation that falls to male family members. But in recent years, increasing numbers of Orthodox women have been adopting this mitzvah, either in female-only prayer groups, partnership minyanim, or more progressive Orthodox synagogues.

In January this year, Shelley Richman Cohen wrote movingly for Tablet Magazine about the comfort she derived from saying Kaddish for her son Nathaniel, who died at the age of 21 from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy:

Had Nathaniel had the zechut, the privilege of living a full healthy life, chances are he would have had children to say Kaddish for him. Since that was not to be his fate, who would be more appropriate to say Kaddish for him than his mother? I carried him in my womb, I birthed him, and I orchestrated the life he led. For his 21 years our lives—his and mine—were inextricably bound together. It was out of a profound sense of loss that I took on the commitment to say Kaddish.

At that moment, I don’t think I fully grasped what saying Kaddish would really mean. Yes, I knew it was said at three different prayer times every single day. Yes, I knew I would have to say it for close to a year. But no, I don’t really think I thought about how difficult it would be for a person like me who is, despite the best of intentions, perpetually tardy. All I knew was that I was grieving for almost every aspect of my son’s short life and I wanted desperately to be able to connect to him. Kaddish was a means for me to continue doing for Nathaniel.

The online response to Fraenkel’s public Kaddish has thus far been overwhelmingly sympathetic and positive. Fraenkel is a respected halachic authority who teaches Jewish law at two renowned women’s institutions in Jerusalem; Ettinger notes that she contributed last year to a “religious responsum examining the issue, with a bias toward the public recitation of Kaddish by women.” It is a great misfortune that she must now heed her own advice in such tragic, unnatural circumstances.

Image: Photoillustration Ivy Tashlik; original photo Shutterstock

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On Sunday, Israeli actress Moran Atias took a stand in Times Square—literally—to draw attention to the abduction of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. For several minutes, she stood in the middle of the busy thoroughfare, holding a sign which read: “Three Israeli teens KIDNAPPED from their homeland. Eyal. Naftali. Gilad.” Over the course of the three minute video posted to Atias’ Facebook page, passersby glance at the poster, though no-one stops to converse or ask about its meaning. Atias also uploaded a shorter version of the video to her Instagram page, with the following message:

“Three Israeli teens were KIDNAPPED from Their homeland. Eyal . Gil-Ad and Naftali . My heart is with their family and my mind is with my country. ALWAYS no matter how far I am.”

The boys—Gilad Shaar, 16, Naftali Frankel, 16, Eyal Yifrach, 19—were kidnapped on Thursday night while hitchhiking in the West Bank, where they are all studying at Yeshiva. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Hamas for the boys’ disappearance, but no organization has come forward to claim responsibility.

Atias rose to fame as model, but her breakthrough acting role was as Inez in the 2008 TV spin-off of the Oscar-winning film, Crash. She is currently starring in Third Person with Liam Neeson and Mila Kunis.

Related: Interview: “Crash”ing into Moran Atias

Image: ChinellatoPhoto / Shutterstock.com

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