by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
The staff of the Jewish Museum in Berlin has a substantial record of provocation against mainstream Jewry.
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| The Jewish Museum in Berlin, photo by Dominic Simpson via Flickr CC |
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,226, July 14, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
recent resignation of Peter Schäfer, Director of the Berlin Jewish
Museum, follows a series of missteps by the museum that have led the
German Jewish umbrella organization to declare that the museum has lost
the trust of the community. Schäfer, a respected scholar, resigned from a
position that requires an experienced manager with profound political
understanding and instincts who is able to operate in what is for German
Jews a highly problematic reality.
The staff of the Jewish Museum in Berlin has a
substantial record of provocation against mainstream Jewry. In 2012,
under a previous director, this taxpayer-funded museum hosted a podium
discussion with a leading American Jewish anti-Israel inciter, Judith
Butler. She took that opportunity to call for a boycott of Israel. The
audience was sold out. More than 700 attended the event and they
frequently showered Butler with applause.
Butler said in 2006 that “understanding
Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on
the left, that are part of a global left is extremely important.” A few
weeks before the meeting at the Berlin museum, an agency of the city of
Frankfurt decided to award Butler the prestigious Theodore Adorno award
for excellence in the field of humanities.
Another invitee to the museum was Farid Hafez, who has published a book called Islamic Political Thinkers.
In it, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood are presented as
democrats and anti-imperialists. Their fantasies about genocide against
the Jews in Palestine are not mentioned. Nevertheless, Hafez was invited
to speak about Islamophobia at the Museum.
In 2013, the keynote speaker at a museum
conference on antisemitism in Europe was Oxford University academic Dr.
Brian Klug, who contends that Zionism “prevents Jews from having a
normal conception of their own life.”
In March of this year, museum director Schäfer
invited Iranian diplomat Seyed Ali Moujani to the museum. At that
meeting, the Iranian expressed his view that anti-Zionism is not
antisemitism.
The umbrella body of German Jewry, the Zentralrat
der Juden, attacked the museum in June because it tweeted a
recommendation to read an article entitled “240 Academics against BDS
Vote” in the extreme left daily, TAZ. The paper reported that a
group of Israeli and Jewish scholars were criticizing the German
parliament over a May 17 motion that considered the boycott movement of
Israel antisemitic. The Zentralrat wrote that the museum had apparently
gone off the rails, adding that it “has lost the trust of the Jewish
community in Germany.” (As an aside: not surprisingly, Butler was one of
the 240 academics referred to in the tweet. That list also included
many other anti-Israel hatemongers.)
Earlier this year, Schäfer invited British
journalist and Middle East expert Tom Gross to tour the museum’s
Jerusalem exhibition. Gross subsequently criticized the exhibit in
strong terms. He told the Jerusalem Post and wrote on his
Facebook page: “I was recently invited by the Berlin Jewish Museum
Director’s office to tour the museum’s current ‘Jerusalem’ exhibition. I
was shocked by the prevalence of the anti-Zionist, often anti-Semitic,
fringe Neturei Karta movement in the Jewish part of the exhibit. The
hateful placards of this group (who have supported Holocaust deniers in
Iran) were on display without any contrary explanation for museum goers
of who they are.”
Gross added: “When I expressed my dismay to the
museum director’s office, even though they had invited me to the museum,
they failed to respond. The Jerusalem exhibit presently dominates the
museum since the permanent exhibition is closed for over a year while it
is completely re-done. I just hope that when it reopens it will give an
honest assessment of the Holocaust and antisemitism, and not some
distorted version.”
The Jerusalem Post brought the scoop
about the museum’s tweet. It then published additional criticism of the
museum from various sources. Among these critics was the Commissioner
for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Antisemitism of the Federal State
of Hessen, Uwe Becker, who said: “The Jewish Museum in Berlin obviously
sees as its task to take a stand against Jewish life in our country and
especially against Israel. The recent support for BDS is a disgrace!
After a total single-sided exhibition about Jerusalem now another
scandal. This is not a Jewish but an anti-Jewish Museum.”
After the massive criticism, Schäfer announced his
resignation on June 14 to “avoid further damage.” At the end of May his
contract had been prolonged for a year until 2021. His departure led to
a letter of support for Schäfer signed by museum officials from various
countries. They expressed their concern about the attacks against
Schäfer that had led to his resignation. The letter stated that he is a
man of great personal integrity and an international scholar who had
made important contributions in the field of Jewish studies. The
signatories were shocked by the extreme personal attacks on Schäfer and
his professional work. They added that they saw his resignation as an
alarming indication of the stifling of free discussion and free debate.
As so often in Germany, the above collection of
statements and counter-statements creates confusion and hides key
issues. Schäfer, who is not Jewish, is indeed an important scholar who
has made substantial contributions to Jewish studies. But this is hardly
the sole requirement for a director of a Jewish museum in Berlin. That
city is the capital of European antisemitism and is located in the
country with the worst past concerning the Jewish people by far.
The position has many complex political and
managerial aspects and Schäfer, primarily a scholar, never should have
accepted it. It requires an experienced manager with profound political
understanding and instincts who is able to operate in what is for German
Jews a highly problematic reality. That is at least as important as
organizing quality exhibitions. The record shows that the activities of
the museum’s employees, some of whom seem to have problematic political
views, have to be closely supervised. Those who wrote to support Schäfer
do not seem to understand this, though they rightly say he should not
be personally attacked with radically false arguments.
There are many topics that merit attention or even
exhibitions by a Jewish museum in Berlin, but are taboo. For example:
the mutation over the years of murderous antisemitism against Jews in
Nazi Germany into the massive demonization of Israel in contemporary
Germany. This expresses itself in the frequent comparisons of Israel’s
actions against the Palestinians to those of the Nazis toward the Jews.
Another exhibition could compare the modern-day
Arab demonization of Israel and the Jews to that conducted by the Nazis,
in which themes such as promoting murder, animalizing the Jews, and the
blood libel could be shown. Yet another example of a worthwhile
exhibition would be a comparison between the reward system of Nazi
Germany for those who betrayed Jews so they could be murdered and the
Palestinian Authority’s financial rewards to those among their citizens
who murder Israelis.
There are very different possible subjects of
exhibitions as well, such as the role of the church in creating the
infrastructure for persecution in Germany and how much of that survives
in the current German Christian environment.
And finally: An exhibition on Jews and German
culture, including how antisemitism is interwoven into the fabric of
contemporary German society.
When the day comes that the Jewish Museum
organizes such exhibitions, we will know the messianic age is dawning.
In the meantime, it is unlikely that the Museum will tweet that anyone
should read this article.
This is an extended version of an article that appeared on July 4, 2019 in Algemeiner.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/berlin-jewish-museum/
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