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Whose Museum Is It? Jewish Museums and Indigenous Theory
Abstract
Are museums places about a community or for the community? This article addresses this question by bringing into conversation Jewish museums and Indigenous museum theory, with special attention paid to two major institutions: the Jewish Museum Berlin and the National Museum of the American Indian. The JMB’s exhibitions and the controversies surrounding them, I contend, allow us to see the limits of rhetorical sovereignty, namely the ability and right of a community to determine the narrative. The comparison between Indigenous and Jewish museal practices is grounded in the idea of multidirectional memory. Stories of origins in museums, foundational to a community’s self-understanding, are analyzed as expressions of rhetorical sovereignty. The last section expands the discussion to the public sphere by looking at the debates that led to the resignation of Peter Schäfer, the JMB’s former director, following a series of events that were construed as anti-Israeli and hence, so was the argument, anti-Jewish. These claims are based on two narrow conceptions: First, that of the source community that makes a claim for the museum. Second, on the equation of Jewishness with a pro-Israeli stance. Taken together, the presentation of origins and the public debate show the limits of rhetorical sovereignty by exposing the contested dynamics of community claims. Ultimately, I suggest, museums should be seen not only as a site for contestation about communal voice, but as a space for constituting the community.
... Объекты и выставки могут быть использованы не только для передачи результатов исследований аудитории за пределами академических кругов, но и для практики экспериментальных форм этнографии. Исследователи [27,28] фиксируют поворот этнографических музеев в выстраивании своих экспозиций от куратора-ученого, знающего «как надо» представлять локальную культуру этноса, к куратору-члену сообщества (этноса), знающего из первых рук среду, из которой произошли материальные ценности. ...
The article presents the analysis of changes in the logic of representation of the culture of indigenous peoples living on the territory of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (Khanty-Mansiysk) in ethnographic expositions of the Museum of Nature and Man (Khanty-Mansiysk). Contemporary researchers fix the crisis of ethnographic museums, which consists in the inconsistency of the narratives broadcast by the museum with contemporary discourse and is based on such processes as globalization and urbanization. Museums are facing questions about the need to reconsider their approaches to exhibiting. Using postcolonial methodology in the analysis of the experience of creating ethnographic exhibition projects allowed to distinguish colonial and postcolonial narratives, the authors based on the decolonial lens problematized the postcolonial narrative and identified in it the subjects, which could become possible scenarios for the development of future exhibitions. The ethnographic collection of the Museum of Nature and Man (Khanty-Mansiysk) consists of more than 5000 unique artifacts of Khanty, Mansi, Forest Nenets, Komi-Zyrian, as well as a great number of related photographs, film and video footage, documents and DPI objects. From the moment of its creation and up to the end of the 1990s the ethnographic expositions of the museum were a reflection of the Soviet modernist discourse exoticizing the culture of the indigenous peoples. In the early 2000s the museum underwent a complete change in its ethnographic exposition. Created under the leadership of A.V. Golovnev, the innovative exposition “Mythological Time”, based on the mythology of the indigenous peoples of the North, was a breakthrough in the museum business in Russia. The new exhibition, which is available to visitors today, marked a transition to the postcolonial logic of exhibiting. The creative approach to creating ethnographic exhibitions was preserved and developed by the museum staff in the following exhibition projects: Cape of the Sacred Dog (2014–2019, curator L.V. Porshunova) and Ringing of the Dancing Fate (2017–2018, curator I.Yu. Kopyltsova). These two projects already contained elements of decolonial discourse. In modern conditions, the development of new ethnographic exhibition projects should be based on close interaction with the local community of bearers of national culture.
Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction looks at the history and character of the systems developed by adherents of the Kabbalah and examines the key ancient texts of this tradition, including the Sefer Yezira or ‘Book of Creation’, The Book of Bahir, and the Zohar. Embraced by celebrities and integrated in many contemporary spiritual phenomena, Kabbalah has reaped a wealth of attention in recent years. But many critics argue that the form of Kabbalah practised in Hollywood is more New Age pabulum than authentic tradition. Can there be a positive role for the Kabbalah in the contemporary quest for spirituality? What is the relationship between Kabbalah and Christianity on the one hand and New Age religion on the other?
For millennia, Jews have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their annihilation. Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction points to two unlikely factors to explain the survival of the Jews: antisemitism and assimilation. Usually regarded as grave dangers, these two factors have continually interacted with one other to enable the persistence of the Jews. At every turn in their history, Jews have adapted to new environments, cultures, languages, and social norms through a process of assimilation, but full assimilation has been checked by the nearly constant presence of hatred toward the Jew. Antisemitism has affirmed the Jews’ sense of difference from the host society.
This book explores the transformative impact that the immigration of large numbers of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Germany had on Jewish communities from 1990 to 2005. It focuses on four points of tension and conflict between existing community members and new Russian-speaking arrivals. These raised the fundamental questions: who should count as a Jew, how should Jews in Germany relate to the Holocaust, and who should the communities represent? By analyzing a wide range of source material, including Jewish and German newspapers, Bundestag debates and the opinions of some prominent Jewish commentators, Joseph Cronin investigates how such conflicts arose within Jewish communities and the measures taken to deal with them. This book provides a unique insight into a Jewish population little understood outside Germany, but whose significance in the post-Holocaust world cannot be underestimated.
Local and national contexts shape the way people commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. In settler-colonial contexts, Holocaust memory has a tendency to marginalize Indigenous peoples and obscure histories of colonial violence. In 2017 Canada unveiled its first national site dedicated exclusively to the Holocaust—the National Holocaust Monument (NHM)—several blocks away from the federal Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa. I contend that while the monument ostensibly commemorates the genocide of European Jewry, it also reflects Canada's ongoing history as a settler state founded on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Proponents of the NHM—monument designers, spokespersons, and political supporters—engage with themes that are central to Canada's national myth. They frame civilizational progress as the overarching narrative of both human and national history and identify contemporary Canada as the culmination of this history. This narrative marginalizes Indigenous peoples in mutually reinforcing ways: it erases Indigenous peoples from the landscape while at the same time constructing settler society as newly “indigenized” inhabitants. In this way, the Canadian state uses the NHM to legitimize the theft of land while also suppressing Indigenous claims to land.
A word conventionally imbued with melancholy meanings, "diaspora" has been used variously to describe the cataclysmic historical event of displacement, the subsequent geographical scattering of peoples, or the conditions of alienation abroad and yearning for an ancestral home. But as Daniel Boyarin writes, diaspora may be more constructively construed as a form of cultural hybridity or a mode of analysis. In A Traveling Homeland, he makes the case that a shared homeland or past and traumatic dissociation are not necessary conditions for diaspora and that Jews carry their homeland with them in diaspora, in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study. For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of homeland, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. Ultimately, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing apart from other cultural migrations.
The motivations for and outcomes of repatriation are frequently described within post-colonial processes of self-determination and self-representation. In contrast, repatriation is here considered as an expression of kinship and as a means of producing collective memory and identity. This article considers the repatriation process undertaken by the Haida First Nation to return their ancestors’ remains from museum collections with a particular focus on the material culture made by Haidas to remember, respect and rebury their ancestors. Joined through shared, embodied experiences of making, using and encountering artefacts, it is argued that the repatriation process has reinforced kinship relations and identity through the production of collective memory.
After years of colonization, oppression, and resistance, American Indians are making clear what they want from the heretofore compromised technology of writing. Rhetorical sovereignty, a people's control of its meaning, is found in sites legal, aesthetic, and pedagogical, and composition studies can both contribute to and learn from this work.
An attempt to apply a current definition of Native American sacred objects to material from another culture and religion reveals the inadequacy of a broad-based definition as a guide to the appropriate handling of sacred objects in a museum setting. These guidelines must be established individually for each culture, religion, or tribal group. Traditional Judaism divides ritual objects into two main categories, those that carry a quality of holiness; and those that are essential to the performance of a particular ritual or commandment but that have no intrinsic quality that can be defined as sacred or holy. Once they are no longer in ritual use, only some of the objects in the first category should be treated differently from the way other museum collections are treated. For these pieces, repair or restoration done by a conservator is inappropriate. For almost all other objects, conservation, repair, or restoration can be carried out without restriction.
The very existence of an object in a museum demonstrates that the past (and what we have made of it and in it) does not die.
An object is best viewed as indicative of process, rather than static relations, and this process is ongoing in museums as elsewhere, so that there is a series of continuous social relations surrounding the object connecting 'field' and 'museums.'
Moses argues that the study of indigenous genocides and the Holocaust is marred by dogmatically held positions of rival scholarly communities, reflecting the genocidal traumas of the ethnic groups with which they are closely associated. In particular, those who study genocides of indigenous peoples in colonial contexts (and many others) object to the thesis of the Holocaust's 'uniqueness' or 'singularity' on the grounds that it overshadows 'lesser' or 'incomplete' indigenous genocides-if indeed they are considered genocides at all-that are considered marginal or even 'primitive', thereby reinforcing hegemonic Eurocentrism. They claim that the moral caché of indigenous survivors of colonialism is consequently diminished in comparison to that of Jews. Such scholars counter that genocide lies at the core of western civilization, and some extend its meaning to cover a wide variety of phenomena, thereby raising the issue of definition. These positions are reflected in the two schools of thought regarding genocide: liberals who emphasize intentionality and agency, and post-liberals who highlight impersonal structures and processes. The question almost raises itself: should the victim's point of view be authoritative in this regard, when different victim groups make incommensurable, indeed competing, claims? If we are to move beyond this unproductive intellectual and moral stalemate, rehearsing the now familiar arguments is insufficient. A critical perspective that transcends that of victims and perpetrators and their descendants is clearly necessary. Moses argues that laying bare the group traumas that block conceptual development and mutual recognition can aid in their being worked through, as well as in stimulating the critical reflection needed to rethink the relationship between the Holocaust and the indigenous genocides that preceded it. Such a perspective can transcend liberal and post-liberal positions if it links the colonial genocides of the 'racial century' (1850-1950) and the Holocaust to a single modernization process of accelerating violence related to nation-building that commenced in the European colonial periphery and culminated in the Holocaust.
The picture postcard is a concrete expression of mobility in modern times. Their illustrations include many themes explicitly referring to travel, emigration and uprooting that will be highlighted in the article. As a cultural practice postcards in general may also serve as concrete indexes of the mobility of their documented senders and receivers. Postcards became very early objects of systematic collecting. Most of the Jewish postcards to be discussed in this study belong to the Joseph and Margit Hoffman Collection of the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, over seven thousand picture post cards, stemming predominantly from the period before the Shoah. The postcards discussed in the article encompass large parts of the Jewish world of the period including East, Central and West Europe, Palestine, the United States, and North Africa. Based on a semiotic explication of the illustrations of the postcards, as well as in a number of cases the personal texts on their verso side, they are here discussed as part of an attempt to interpret figures of mobility in and with regard to Jewish culture. A major European tradition shared by Christians and Jews, the Wandering Jew, is presented as a possible interpretative key for the postcards. In their particular combination of the visual and the verbal as well as of individual art and folk and popular culture, postcards are shown to present a rich source for illuminating the cultural interactions between Jews and their neighbors
American Quarterly 57.2 (2005) 485-506
On September 21, 2004, more than twenty-five thousand Native Americans gathered together on the Washington Mall to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). As a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, I, too, participated in that moment, which was beautiful for so many reasons—because of the physical beauty of the NMAI building and grounds, because of the cultural significance and even sacred connotation of so many objects in the museum, because of the more than sixty-five thousand non–Native Americans who joined the celebrations, and because the sun came out that morning after a solid week of rain. The thousands of people present that day seemed to understand that the National Museum of the American Indian is more than just a museum. As NMAI Director, W. Richard West (Southern Cheyenne) reflected, "There was just this kind of power in the air for Native people. But somehow it was almost the same for non-Indians who were there. They sensed, lots of them, the sixty-five thousand who watched the procession, that there was something very fundamental going on that day."
Even in 1989, when Congress passed Public Law 105-189 establishing a National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Smithsonian, those involved knew something fundamental was occurring. Introduced by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawai'i and then Representative Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne) of Colorado, the bill significantly embodied the cultural resurgence that had been growing in Indian country for a number of years, a resurgence that took a more clearly limned shape and form and a stronger, more insistent voice in the public arena. This consciousness recognized and acknowledged, in the words of poet Simon Ortiz (Acoma), that "This America has been a burden of steel and mad death" but also saw, in the "flowers and new grass and . . . spring wind rising" a different future for Native peoples. This outpouring from Native Americans manifested itself in everything from the red power movement, to the growth of American Indian studies in the academe, to the renaissance of contemporary Native American art, literature, and film, to the emergence of tribal museums and cultural centers, to the upsurge in economic development and the increased exercise of tribal sovereignty in legal and political arenas. The congressional bill, which appropriated funds for three museum facilities—the Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.—was one of the many institutional changes wrought by Native cultural resurgence and revitalization and one of the most significant because it involved museums, which have served as powerful colonizing forces throughout Native America.
As I walked through the NMAI, I was particularly struck by a display in Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories, one of the three permanent exhibitions. The installation consisted of long, curvilinear glass cases, one of which was filled to overflowing with guns, one with Bibles, and one with government treaties. The accompanying wall text argues that the three major forces of colonization were warfare, churches, and government, and through the display of literally hundreds of guns, Bibles, and treaties, the exhibit demonstrates how all three served as instruments of dispossession. But, the exhibit goes on to say that these same objects—in the hands of Native Americans—served also as instruments of resistance, resilience, and survival. Armies may have used guns and warfare to seize land and conquer tribes, but Native peoples used guns to protect their communities and fight back. Missionaries and schoolteachers may have used churches and Bibles to "civilize" Native individuals in their attempt to destroy elements of Native cultures, but Native Americans, in an exercise of profound cultural agency, either rejected the imposed religion or adapted elements of it into existing religious and spiritual traditions, using religion as a common thread to bind the community together. Government officials may have used treaties to forge alliances and force the cession of land, but Native nations learned to use these documents...
The American Indian Quarterly 24.3 (2000) 353-380
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind
German-speaking Jewish writers have long felt comfortable expropriating images and analogies from the site of Native American identity in their literary imagination. Today, a growing sentiment of sympathy for the "vanishing American" in Germany has upped the ante in the identity-appropriations game, and German-speaking Jewish writers now appropriate Native American identity in the attempt to inflect their own historiography with an added degree of moral currency on the landscape of a contemporary Germany still caught in the throes of denial concerning its own genocidal past.
In German-speaking literary circles, the examples of Else Lasker-Schüler, who stylized herself as an American Indian, and Franz Kafka's wish to be a "Red Indian" are well known. George Tabori's 1990 stage production of the Jewish Western Weisman und Rotgesicht wittily pitted [Jewish] white man against [partly Jewish] red man in a verbal duel in which the protagonists exchange a hilarious blow-for-blow account of injuries and insults suffered by the victimized populations they represent. But the phenomenon of conflating Jewish and "Indian" identity is not unique to foreign-language publications. As Seth Wolitz points out, in his discussion of Weisman und Rotgesicht, this "tradition of spoofing Jewish-Indian interrelations . . . reaches back to a Yiddish playlet, Tsvishn Indianer." This 1895 play, "Among the Indians, or The Country Peddler," as its translator states, "is not an anomaly, but rather a pathbreaker in a well-defined line of Jewish-American entertainment that leads to the films of Mel Brooks and others." The American leg of this lineage includes Eddie Cantor's redface minstrelsy in Whoopie! (1930) and Woody Allen's Zelig (1983). Fanny Brice sang herself to stardom with "I'm an Indian," and Bernard Malamud's The People provides a classic example of the phenomenon.
Most recently perhaps, Raphael Seligmann has gone on record stating that the Jews are "the Indians of Germany." That this statement begs the question of identifying "Uncle Sam's willing executioners" seems, however, of minimal concern to the Jewish community in America and abroad. In fact, when the time comes to put the Shoah on the other foot and parallels are drawn between atrocities experienced by the American Indian population over a five-hundred-year period and those experienced by the Jewish population of Europe in the twelve-year reign of Nazi terror, the knowledge of self-described "Jewish Indians" recedes into the recesses of repressed memory. In a seditious reversal of national identity politics, Lucy Dawidowicz charges those who would dare to compare with "a vicious anti-Americanism." Rabbi Irving Greenberg, founder of the Holocaust Resource Center and first director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Commission, has described the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust with other acts of genocide as "blasphemous." In The Holocaust in American Life, Jewish historian Peter Novik describes the way in which any attempt to compare is dismissed as a "felonious assault" on truth and memory.
In the pathological dynamic of genocidal histories, the perpetrator culture invariably turns its gaze to the horrors registered in the archives and accounts of the "other guys." This is why Holocaust studies in the United States focus almost exclusively on the atrocity of Auschwitz, not of Wounded Knee or Sand Creek. Norman Finkelstein, in his discussion of the way images of the Holocaust have been manufactured to reap moral and economic benefits for members of...
Is museum space religious space? Do strategies of display, i.e., the ways certain objects such as human remains and ritual items are presented and/or experienced, make them into sacred objects? Who or what determines whether or not a particular object may be appropriately displayed in a museum context? In focusing on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and on a series of staged encounters there with spaces, objects, and other people, this article considers the possibility that the USHMM serves as a contemporary Jewish reliquary as well as the implications of such a notion, especially in relation to the performance of different types of Jewish identity at the museum. Using archival sources, it examines the debates over the treatment and display of selected artifacts and how those decisions impact the Museum's Jewish character.
Erinnerungsstücke und Migrationsgeschichten-Porträts in Deutschland lebender Jüdinnen*Juden
- Alina Gromova
- Tamar Lewinsky
- Theresia Ziehe
- Objekttage
Change and Challenge: Museums in the Information Society
- George Macdonald
Interview mit Peter Schäfer: Weg mit den Klischees
- Kerstin Krupp
Besuch von den Mullahs: Warum sich das Jüdische Museum Berlin genauer anschauen sollte, wen es einlädt
- Michael Wuliger
67 Google Scholar. The presentation in front of the “members of the academy” intentionally mirrors Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy
- Tomer Gardi
- Broken German
Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture
- Kavita Singh
In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Golden: Fulcrum, 2013), 282; and Niezen
- R Walter
- Echo-Hawk
On this debate, see Peter E. Gordon, “Why Historical Analogy Matters
- Anika Walke
See also Liane Feldman and Candida Moss, “Was the Director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum Really Pro-BDS?” Daily Beast
- Susannah Heschel
- Shaul Magid
- Annette Yoshiko
Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; see also Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s comments in Melissa Eddy
- Hooper-Greenhill
Opening Keynote Discussion” (Museums, Religion, and the Work of Reconciliation and Remembrance
- Léontine Meijer-Van Mensch
for the side of uniqueness) and David Stannard (challenging it)
- Katz