Published: 3 November 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Their purpose is changing from preservers of heritage to a 'safe place for unsafe ideas', says museum maven BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT.
When The Whole Truth … Everything You Wanted to Know about Jews opened at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in March 2013, many Jewish people were incensed and said so publicly. It was intended as education for visitors living increasingly distant from WW2. Part of it, a performance piece popularly known as The Jew in the Box, was held once a week, on Sundays. It entailed a volunteer sitting in a large glass exhibition case for two hours at a time, fielding visitors’ questions about Jewish life in answer to the final question posed by the exhibition, and written at the bottom of the glass case: “Are there still Jews in Germany?”
The museum’s website explains that the questions were about “the FAQs, the difficult questions, the funny questions, the clever questions, and the questions that really have no answer. Some of them made the questioner uneasy and some were politically incorrect, while others revealed something about the person who asked them”.
Stephen Kramer - then secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who had worked hard on religious freedom, Muslim-Jewish relations, and antisemitism among other things - emphatically declined the invitation to participate. Another Jewish man - Eran Levy, an Israeli who had lived in Berlin for years - was horrified by the idea of presenting a Jew as a museum piece.
"It's a horrible thing to do, completely degrading and not helpful," he told CBS News when it opened. "The Jewish Museum absolutely missed the point if they wanted to do anything to improve the relations between Germans and Jews."
Ten years later, Toronto-born Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an authority in all matters of museology with a PhD speciality in East European and especially Yiddish culture (her parents were born in Poland), calls the segment a “gold standard” in museum practice.
A high point in the exhibition came when a Holocaust survivor was asked to take the chair in the glass case. For some, that was the final straw. “But then her response was just extraordinary,” says Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor Emerita at NYU, a Chief Curator with POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, by telephone in New York.
