The Metropolitan Opera performed its commission of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on the Met stage in October 2025, returning in February 2026 after a sold-out initial run. Kavalier and Clay, adapted from Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is set at the beginning of WWII, first in Prague and, following Joseph Kavalier’s displacement to his cousin Sam Clay’s home, in New York. The story follows these Jewish cousins as they invent a comic-book superhero, “The Escapist,” a morale-boosting character who fights on behalf of Jews. To bring “authenticity to the subject matter,” composer Mason Bates spent six months at a reform temple in San Francisco, “immersing himself in the culture” to “integrate elements of what he heard into his music” (Metropolitan Opera “Master Key,” 2025). I argue that this construction of authenticity fails to attend to the specificities of historical Jewish soundworlds. Treating opera as a hybrid medium with deep semiotic processes, I track representations of difference in the opera through marked language-in-use, Jewish melodies, and iconography (Abbate and Parker, 1989; Jakobson 1990 [1976]; Adelstein 2024; Livak 2020). I contend that the representation of Jews in the opera can be understood as a transposition of ethnolinguistic ideologies from the present onto Prague and New York in 1939. Drawing on the live production, promotional materials, and ethnographic interviews with the Met cast and creatives, I interrogate how Jewish representation was approached during production. Lastly, I explore a difficult question: What might Jewish difference sound like in 21st-century opera?

“Adio Kerida” is among the most widely performed Ladino songs today and is frequently presented as part of a medieval Sephardi past. Yet musicological evidence situates the song many hundreds of years later, shaped by European popular and operatic idioms. Most notably, its refrain closely resembles “Addio del passato” from Verdi’s La Traviata, placing the song within a modern world of musical borrowing and contrafacta rather than as a more arcane relic. This paper asks not where “Adio Kerida” originated, but how it has come to feel ancient, and what cultural work that perception performs. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with performers and members of the Sephardi community, performance analysis, and media circulation, I trace how the song acquires an aura of antiquity through layered practices of framing, allegorical interpretation, and selective remembrance. Early Music performance contexts, revivalist pedagogy, Holocaust-era narratives, and paratextual commentary each contribute to repositioning a modern song within imagined medieval and traumatic pasts. Rather than treating misattributions of age as errors, I approach “Adio Kerida” through an anti-biographical lens, attentive to how modern circulation and contrafacta enable songs to accumulate historical depth. I argue that the song’s perceived antiquity is not evidence of uninterrupted transmission but a response to histories marked by rupture, dispersal, and loss. Attending to how antiquity is produced rather than presumed offers a way to hear how Sephardic pasts are continually being made audible in the present.

Leonard Bernstein’s response to the Holocaust was his Symphony No. 3 (1963), which he titled “Kaddish,” invoking the Jewish prayer for the dead. Having visited Holocaust survivors in Europe, Bernstein composed the symphony for narrator, soprano soloist, choir, and orchestra. Before his death in 1990, he asked friend and Holocaust survivor, Samuel Pisar, to write a new narration for the symphony. Pisar finally honored this request in 2003, offering his Holocaust experience for the symphony’s narration. While Bernstein never heard it, his estate considers Samuel Pisar’s testimony to be the symphony’s authoritative text and supported Pisar’s performances of it. After Pisar’s death in 2015, his wife and daughter, Judith and Leah, began performing as the narrators for the symphony. I argue that these additions to the symphony constitute palimpsestic layers of haunting. In each of these layers, the Kaddish prayer is said for the dead—not only those who died in the Holocaust (for whom the symphony was composed), but also, in each added layer, the dead who haunt the symphony’s past: Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Pisar. Simultaneously, the performances act as a form of intergenerational Holocaust witnessing. I draw on Derrida’s “hauntology” (1993) and Stanyek and Piekut’s idea of “intermundane collaboration,” in which the dead and the living co-create. Building on previous work on the Kaddish Symphony (Schiller 2003), I also discuss my interviews with Leah Pisar, who experiences herself as a messenger of her father’s Holocaust story and works carefully to mimic his vocal inflections when performing the piece.