Whose Holocaust Museum?

The Jewish Week
May 4 2011

Whose Holocaust Museum?

May 3, 2011
Steve Lipman

The controversy that often surrounds a Holocaust museum’s decision to
include the mass murder of other groups – like the Armenian Genocide
in Turkey a century ago, or the 1994 killings in Rwanda – is expanding
beyond a small group of scholars to the wider public.

In a series of recent articles, Edward Rothstein, critic-at-large at
The New York Times, asks if the Shoah is a uniquely Jewish tragedy, if
a Holocaust museum should broaden beyond its immediate subject, if
there are universal lessons to be learned from the Jewish experience
at the hands of the Third Reich.

His answers: the Holocaust should be treated as uniquely Jewish, and
institutions dilute their message when they present other genocides as
comparable. `It is as if familiarity is breeding analogy … [some
Holocaust museums] began to see the Holocaust as an extreme
manifestation of a refusal to care about injustice or the fate of
one’s neighbor,’ he wrote.

(The expansion of the Holocaust’s message is worldwide: the Holocaust
Centre in Cape Town, South Africa, introduces a parallel track about
apartheid, and a Holocaust museum that is to open this year in
Johannesburg will feature references to the genocide in Rwanda.)

`This is always one of the major tensions’ among Holocaust scholars,
Edward Linenthal, author of `Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create
America’s Holocaust Museum’ (Viking, 1995), says in an e-mail
interview. `The relationship between historic specificity and wider
contexts was always on the minds of those tasked with the creation of
the [U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum].’

Many leaders of the Holocaust remembrance movement take issue with
Rothstein’s conclusions, but credit him with sparking a national
dialogue on the subject.

Newspapers and online forums carried excerpts from his articles the
last few weeks, and David Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish
Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in Battery Park City,
issued a statement that his institution’s balanced approach to
Holocaust memory `presents this difficult history in a way that both
respects its unique character and distills important lessons for our
visitors.’

While Rothstein’s critique is `worthy of consideration,’ he fails to
understand that the Holocaust’s legacy led to a universal condemnation
of genocide, says Michael Berenbaum, former director of the Holocaust
Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. `The
transition was organic.’

`People are discussing this,’ debating the universalistic and
particularistic aspects of the Holocaust, says Arthur Flug, executive
director of the Holocaust Resource Center at Queensborough Community
College in Bayside. `He’s opened up the topic for discussion.’

In `Making the Holocaust the Lessons on All Evils,’ an April 29 essay
that focuses on Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance, Rothstein implies
that Queensborough’s `modest’ center is guilty of universalizing the
Shoah, alluding to the center’s exhibitions and hate crimes curriculum
that teach students `options’ when confronted with bias.

But Flug says that an effective museum exhibit `is more than a history lesson.’

Otherwise, he adds, `it becomes static. We are required as educators
to teach some course of action.’

From: A. Papazian