BERLIN — It's safe to assume that the German organizers of an exhibit that centers around a Jew sitting in a Plexiglas box, answering questions from museum-goers, anticipated some controversy. "We wanted to provoke, that's true, and some people may find the show outrageous or objectionable. But that's fine by us," the Berlin Jewish Museum's curator says of the exhibit, "The Whole Truth... everything you always wanted to know about Jews." But even they may not have anticipated the level of vitriol that has greeted the project.
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The general secretary of the 105,000-member Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan J. Kramer, promptly ridiculed the exhibition, saying, "Why don't they give him a banana and a glass of water, turn up the heat and make the Jew feel really cozy in his glass box?" According to Kramer, "They actually asked me if I wanted to participate. But I told them I'm not available." Criticism has come from all sides: The popular German-language pro-Israel, pro-American website, Die Achse des Guten (The Axis of Good), labeled the exhibit "Jews for Dummies."
Germany's postwar treatment of Jews has always been a kind of litmus test for whether the country is on the path to rehabilitation. After the Third Reich exterminated some six million Jews, relations between Germany and Jews have been, well, complex.
"It's a horrible thing to do -- completely degrading and not helpful," says Eran Levy, an Israeli who lives in Berlin, adding that "the Jewish Museum absolutely missed the point if they wanted to do anything to improve the relations between Germans and Jews."
Henryk M. Broder, one of Germany's leading commentators on German-Jewish relations and a journalist with the large right-of-center daily Die Welt, described the exhibit as "pathetic and useless." In an e-mail to me, Broder, who is a German Jew himself and the author of numerous books on the community, compared the exhibit to "the 'völkerschauen' with black Africans" -- shows in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany in which people from foreign lands were displayed like animals at carnival-like festivals.
Broder said the exhibit is "evidence that the Jews are still exotic regardless of how they try to act and be 'normal."' He added that if something along these lines were done with Muslims in the Jewish Museum, the Muslims would burn the place down. "But the Jews have so little feeling for a sense of honor and self-respect that they need to participate."
In defense of the exhibit, the museum's director, Cilly Kugelmann, issued a postmodern response in a local Berlin paper: "We don't give an exclusive answer. We show many perspectives." Tina Luedecke, a museum representative, justified the "Jew in the box" exhibit, saying: "A lot of our visitors don't know any Jews and have questions they want to ask. With this exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to get to know more about Jews and Jewish life."
So, is the exhibit a kind of useful -- if by German standards provocative -- pedagogy? Or is it an offensive form of kitsch performance art that dehumanizes Jews? And putting aside the heated feelings, is the show contributing to some wobbly semblance of "normalcy" between German Jews and Germans?
The exhibit spans seven rooms of an upper floor of the Berlin Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001 and was designed by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind. The installation presents 30 questions in the various exhibit rooms and aims to provide insights through quotes, objects, and texts. It's a bit simplistic. "How can you recognize a Jew?", "Are the Jews the Chosen People?", "Is a German allowed to criticize Israel?", and "Why do Jews live in Germany?" are some of the questions that confront visitors.
But the attention-grabbing part of the exhibit takes place in the Plexiglas box, where a diverse group of Jews from the United States, Britain, Germany, Israel, and elsewhere work shifts. Leeor Engländer, a 30 year-old German Jewish journalist at Die Welt, says he sits because "it is important to me to use the attention to clear up prejudices and misunderstandings."
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