Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Isabel Wollaston, “A War against Memory? Nativizing the Holocaust,” in John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell-Meynard (eds.), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocides (Houndmills, UK, 2001), Vol. 3, p. 507. For examples of studies of “nativization,” see, in the case of the United States, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999); and Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1999). 2 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993), pp. viii–ix. And as Young makes clear, these differences can be — and are — within nations as well as between nations (p. xi). 3 In the case of Yad Vashem and USHMM, these national museums are explicitly state- sponsored. The IWM Holocaust Exhibition is supported by the UK national lottery “Heritage Lottery Fund.” 4 On the politics behind Yad Vashem, see Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, 1994), pp. 421–45; on the US museum, see Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995); on IWM, see Steven Cooke, “‘Your Story Too?’ The New Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum,” in Roth and Maxwell (eds.), Remembering for the Future, Vol. 3, pp. 590–606. 5 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London, 1995), p. 6. 6 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 244. 7 Yad Vashem, The Memorial to the Deportations (undated pamphlet). 8 Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York, 1996), p. 178. 9 See Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge, 1990) pp. 191–233, and Young, Texture of Memory, pp. 263–81. 10 Cited in Handelman, Models and Mirrors, p. 201. 11 Reuven Dafni (ed.), Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, 5th edn. (Jerusalem, 1990), p. 26. 12 Cited in Linenthal, Preserving Memory, p. 57. 13 Cited in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” in idem (ed.), Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Bloomington, 1997), p. 127. 14 Gaynor Kavanagh, “Museum as Memorial: The Origins of the Imperial War Museum,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1988), pp. 77–97; and Sue Malvern, “War, Memory and Museums: Art and Artefact in the Imperial War Museum,” History Workshop Journal, Vol. 49 (2002), pp. 177–203. 15 Cited in Cooke, “Your Story Too?” p. 598. 16 Cited in Cooke, “Your Story Too?” p. 598. Although, as Cooke points out, there was also criticism of siting a Holocaust exhibition in a museum whose very name contained a reference to imperialism. 17 Cited in Imperial War Museum, Report (Winter 1996/97), p. 1. 18 Robert Crawford, “Foreword,” in Imperial War Museum, The Holocaust: The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (London, 2000). 19 See, for example, Tony Kushner, “The Meaning of Auschwitz: Anglo-American Responses to the Hungarian Jewish Tragedy,” in David Cesarani (ed.), Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 159–78; Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 1979); Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees, and the Holocaust, 1933–1948 (Cambridge, 2000). For a counter-view, see William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London, 1997). 20 Suzanne Bardgett, “The British Perspective on the Holocaust,” in Imperial War Museum, The Holocaust: A Major Permanent Exhibition for the New Millennium (London, undated manuscript), pp. 6–7; cf. Tony Kushner, “The Holocaust and the Museum World in Britain: A Study of Ethnography,” Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 21, Nos. 1–2 (2002), p. 27. 21 In the newly planned Yad Vashem, visitors will exit a newly created Visitors' Center which will “create the appropriate atmosphere at the start of the visit,” “either directly to the museum, or to the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations which will lead to the memorial square at the entrance of the Hall of Remembrance.” See Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem 2001 — Masterplan: The New Museum Complex and the Visitors’ Center (undated booklet), p. 19. 22 Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold (New York, 1999), p. 122. 23 Dafni, Yad Vashem, p. 8. 24 Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem 2001, p. 21. 25 Young, Texture of Memory, p. 253. 26 Cited in Linenthal, Preserving Memory, p. 167. 27 For further discussion on the use of identity cards, see Cole, Selling the Holocaust, pp. 161–4; and Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, 1998), pp. 13–26. 28 See Linenthal, Preserving Memory, pp. 217–24 for a discussion of the question of Allied bombings of Auschwitz. This section of the permanent exhibition has been revised. 29 Cole, Selling the Holocaust, p. 151. 30 Jeshajahu Weinberg and Rina Elieli, The Holocaust Museum in Washington (New York, 1995), p. 148. 31 See Linenthal's discussion in Preserving Memory, pp. 253–4. 32 Cf. USHMM, where the only other use of survivors' voices is in the “Voices from Auschwitz” section, set back from the main exhibition route. 33 Suzanne Bardgett, “The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum,” http://www.iwm.org.uk/lambeth/pdf files/hol_bardgett.pdf, p. 3. 34 The display is reminiscent of the charts in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961) 35 Bardgett, “The Holocaust Exhibition.” 36 Although, as I have noted, at Yad Vashem, heroism does provide a link between Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and the more recent history of the Israeli state.