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Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History includes a series of essays in its symposium section that treat the dramatic development of the visual arts in Jewish life from the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the proliferation of Jewish museums after the Holocaust.
This book traces the history of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal's Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent to them by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illeg...
More than half a century after the Holocaust, in countries where Jews make up just a tiny fraction of the population, products of Jewish culture (or what is perceived as Jewish culture) have become very viable components of the popular public domain. But how can there be a visible and growing Jewish presence in Europe, without the significant presence of Jews? Ruth Ellen Gruber explores this phenomenon, traveling through Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, and elsewhere to observe firsthand the many facets of a remarkable trend. Across the continent, Jewish festivals, performances, publications, and study programs abound. Jewish museums have opened by the dozen, and synagogu...
Homes of the Past tells the powerful story of how immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former homes and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought to address their profound sense of loss by continuing their work, under radically different circumstances, to document the European Jewish lives, place...
Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” a...
Ideas regarding the role of the museum have become increasingly contentious. In the last fifteen years, scholars have pointed to ways in which states (especially imperialist states) use museums to showcase looted artefacts, to document their geographic expansion, to present themselves as the guardians of national treasure, and to educate citizens and subjects. At the same time, a great deal of attention has been paid to reshaping national histories and values in the wake of the collapse of the Communist bloc and the emergence of the European Union. (Re)Visualizing National History considers the wave of monument and museum building in Europe as part of an attempt to forge consensus in politic...
* Examines visual representations of the Holocaust in film, architecture, painting, photography, memorials, and monuments * Provides a context for reconsidering the processes of art making and the cultural significance of artistic images
This book is the first full-length study of the museum object as a memory medium in history exhibitions about the Nazi era, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Over recent decades, German and Austrian exhibition-makers have engaged in significant programmes of object collection, often in collaboration with witnesses and descendants. At the same time, exhibition-makers have come to recognise the degree to which the National Socialist era was experienced materially, through the loss, acquisition, imposition, destruction, and re-purposing of objects. In the decades after 1945, encounters with material culture from the Nazi past continued, both within the family and in the public sphere. In analysing how these material engagements are explored in the museum, the book not only illuminates a key aspect of German and Austrian cultural memory but contributes to wider debates about relationships between the human and object worlds.
Displays of Jewish ritual objects in public, non-Jewish settings by Jews are a comparatively recent phenomenon. So too is the establishment of Jewish museums. This volume explores the origins of the Jewish Museum of New York and its evolution from collecting and displaying Jewish ritual objects, to Jewish art, to exhibiting avant-garde art devoid of Jewish content, created by non-Jews. Established within a rabbinic seminary, the museum’s formation and development reflect changes in Jewish society over the twentieth century as it grappled with choices between religion and secularism, particularism and universalism, and ethnic pride and assimilation.
Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume deliberately break from a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments (where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice of so many prisoners, pa...