BY DANIEL A. SEGAL

An opera based on Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with music by Mason Bates and libretto by Gene Scheer, had its world premiere at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music on November 15. The opera is glorious, and the performance, with every note sung and played by students, was brilliant.

I watched and admired it all in grief and rage.

Kavalier and Clay is a story about the Holocaust, with a plot centered around rescuing Jewish children. And what, after all, is the point of an opera about the Holocaust—or any representation of the Holocaust—if it does not prod us to be concerned with and act against a genocide in our own historical moment? And what, to ask a second and related question, is the role of the university in a democratic society if it does not foster, and even demand, unfettered engagement with discomfiting questions?

From conversations with others who saw the opera at IU, I know it left many thinking about Gaza and the failure of the world—the failure of us—to end the genocide. That speaks well of both Chabon’s story and its operatic telling. Yet those were individual responses. What was entirely absent from the opera’s run at Indiana University was any institutional or public recognition that the opera presented a story about one genocide, with a plot focused especially on its child victims, in the time of another genocide, one marked especially by the number of its child victims.

This institutional silence about the opera’s relevance to our world and lives was, I expect, arrived at by default rather than deliberation. But even if this is true, it does not justify the silence. “We did it by default” is hardly better than “we were just following orders.” The silence could not, moreover, have been achieved simply by happenstance: It required work of avoidance and bracketing, even if this work also was by default.

Consider what the dean of the music school, Abra Bush, both said and did not say when she welcomed the audience and introduced the opera on the night I attended its performance. “About a year ago,” she told us, beaming and jubilant, she had received a phone call from the Metropolitan Opera in New York asking her if the Jacobs School would like to stage the world premiere of Kavalier and Clay before it was brought to the Met. The dean added that she had immediately seized the opportunity, even knowing that funding the production was something she would “have to figure out later.” Taken on their own, these comments seem a deserved celebration of the Jacobs School as an extraordinary site of music education, especially at a time when arts education and funding for it are under threat. Yet, taking this victory lap in November 2024 required that the dean not talk about several things that had unfolded at the university in the same span of time during which so much work had been done to bring the opera to the Jacobs School.

Samia Halaby’s “Red and Green Steel,” used with permission of the artist. See author’s note below.*

It was also “about a year ago,” in fact, that Indiana University’s president, Pamela Whitten, had canceled a lifetime retrospective of the paintings of the renowned Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, which had been scheduled to open in the spring semester at the university’s Eskenazi Art Museum after roughly three years of curatorial work. Chillingly, Whitten had treated art by a Palestinian artist much as the Nazi Reich had treated Jewish art—as dangerous art that needed to be kept from public view.

Recalling this episode of censorship by the IU administration casts Dean Bush’s feel-good story of bringing the opera to the university in a very different light. Rather than the production of Kavalier and Clay being a case of the university operating as it ideally should, by taking on and succeeding in an ambitious educational and artistic project, the coeval censorship reveals a fundamental lack of moral constancy regarding which genocide, against which victims, the university deems worthy of recognition and which, to the contrary, it refuses to recognize.

Like many other universities and colleges, IU has fiercely suppressed pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protests throughout the past year. This included placing Indiana state troopers, with high-powered rifles, on the roofs of its buildings, with their gunsights trained on students.

Here, let us also recall that the heroine in Chabon’s story is Rosa Saks (Rosa Luxemburg Saks in the novel), who leads a Kindertransport nonprofit. Despite this, there was not one word from the dean, nor one word in the printed program for the opera, about the thousands of children murdered in Gaza in the last year. And nowhere at the university was there any programming in conjunction with the opera asking us to consider its contemporary relevance.

Put simply, though Kavalier and Clay had been brilliantly produced at IU, the institutional framing or treatment of the opera did everything possible to render it mute about Gaza. All of this was silencing—not mere silence. This silencing was, moreover, Zionist silencing, since it upheld the Zionist precepts that the Holocaust and Jewish oppression are sui generis, and that Israeli state violence against Palestinians is necessarily something else entirely.

At this moment, it is urgent that we bring these Zionist precepts into the open for debate rather than allow them—embedded in default practices—to preempt and shut down pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide views. The premiere of Cavalier and Klay at Indiana University was thus anything but the university at its best. It was, in fact, just the opposite: one more instance of a university cowed and diminished by the pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian hysteria that has swept across US higher education over the last year, echoing the Red Scare of the McCarthy era some seven decades ago.

As for the opera itself, it is terrific and “good to think.” If you have the opportunity to see it when it arrives at the Met in New York, by all means do so—and dress up for the occasion in your finest keffiyeh.

Daniel A. Segal is the Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. His scholarship ranges from Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to theorizing states and nonstates in world history. He is a past president of the Claremont Colleges AAUP chapter and organizes with Jewish Voice for Peace and TIAA-Divest!

* Samia Halaby’s Red and Green Steel (1973; 66×66 inches, oil on canvas) was one of the paintings scheduled to be included in the retrospective of Halaby’s works at Indiana University that was canceled by the university administration just a few months before its planned opening in February 2024. That all but a small segment of Halaby’s works (and all that were to be in the retrospective) are abstractions is indicative of both the sheer anti-Palestinianism behind the cancellation of the retrospective and the complex ways art can be political. Halaby was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1938 and was forced from her home in 1948 by the creation of Israel. After her family took refuge in the US Midwest, Halaby earned her MFA at Indiana University in 1963, before becoming the first woman with a full-time faculty appointment at the Yale School of Art.