Berlin's Jewish Museum's 'Jew in the Box' exhibit offends people

[undeterred]

Bizarre ‘Jew in the Box’ educational exhibit in Germany draws criticism despite positive aim

The exhibit, officially called 'The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews,' was designed to help educate Germans about Jewish culture. But its strange format, which includes a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day to answer questions, is drawing the ire of the country's 200,000 Jews.

BERLIN — “Are there still Jews in Germany?” ‘’Are the Jews a chosen people?” Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, there is no more sensitive an issue in German life as the role of Jews. With fewer than 200,000 Jews among Germany’s 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them.

To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum features a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day through August to answer visitors’ questions about Jews and Jewish life. The base of the box asks: “Are there still Jews in Germany?”

“A lot of our visitors don’t know any Jews and have questions they want to ask,” museum official Tina Luedecke said. “With this exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to know more about Jews and Jewish life.”

But not everybody thinks putting a Jew on display is the best way to build understanding and mutual respect. Since the exhibit — “The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews” — opened this month, the “Jew in the Box,” as it is popularly known, has drawn sharp criticism within the Jewish community — especially in the city where the Nazis orchestrated the slaughter of 6 million Jews until Adolf Hitler’s defeat in 1945.


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/jew-box-exhibit-germany-draws-criticism-article-1.1303276




I wonder if we could set up a similar museum just for Congress to meet the poor, the uninsured, and others they seem to have never encountered.

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Your comment does provide food for thought

but there's a crucial difference: Jews in Germany are a rarity to this day, but there are millions of poor in this country. It's not as though any member of Congress couldn't venture a mere few blocks from the capitol and find plenty of poor people...if they had the slightest interest, that is.

As for the exhibit in Berlin, I am inclined to believe it is not offensive - instead, it is thought-provoking. After all, the policies of that government in power only 60-odd years ago led to the relative scarcity of Jews in Germany, and it's worthwhile to remind the generations of Germans who have come along in the meantime that they must never allow such monsters to come into power again.

[COLGATE4]

3. One of my SIL is married to a German

fellow. Their daughter visited us in the US when she was 15. She had absolutely no idea of what the Holocaust was. It's important to make sure that the newer generations of German youth are made aware of the sins of the past. This is one tool for doing that.

[Ian David]

2. I presented a similar idea to a gay rights group while Massachusetts was debating Marriage Equality.

Except instead of a box, it was a gay family inside a small living room.

[Cirque du So-What]

4. What was the range of their responses?

I could imagine responses ranged from 'great idea' to 'incredibly insulting,' although I'm interested in numbers on each side and whether your proposal ever came to pass.

[Ian David]

9. It took some explaining, and I think people "got it."

However, I'm still not sure if people were being polite when they told me it was a good idea.

[MineralMan]

5. I can understand the controversy, for sure.

However, the intent is good. I wonder what the man in the photograph thinks about this idea. My bet is that he thinks it is a good one.

Such exhibits seem like they'd always result in controversy.

[undeterred]

6. Its an interactive exhibit

So there is a different jewish person there every day, and they talk to people all day. The concept and the idea is pretty startling, but once I read about it in context - it doesn't seem so weird. Its a Jewish Museum, so nobody is going to be going there unless they are interested in that part of Jewish history.

I'd assume that the person on display has been pretty well prepared to deal with all sorts of questions so- this actually might be a way of breaking down stereotypes.

A few years ago I had a student whose father was a holocaust survivor. He wasn't in the camps, but his whole family and all of his relatives were in the camps and he never saw them again. When he went back to the home he grew up in there were other people living there. He pointed to the sewing machine and the sewing table cabinet he had build for his mother and the engraving of the family name upon it. They told him to get out of the house and never ever come back. He came to the US at age 16 with nothing.

I'm sure some of the jews left in Germany have stories like these.

[MineralMan]

8. I'm sure there are many, many such stories.

And, as you say, it is a Jewish history museum. Personally, I'd find it very interesting to visit, and I'd ask questions of the person who is in the interactive display. I wonder how many Germans who are not Jewish actually visit this museum, though. I have a suspicion that it is not many, and that tourists make up most of the visitors. But I don't know.

[surrealAmerican]

7. I think it's a bold artistic statement.

I also like your idea.