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Exhibition Reviews
"Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War." Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 36 Battery Pl., New York, NY 10280.
Temporary exhibition, Nov. 11, 2003–Dec. 31, 2006. 7,000 sq. ft. Louis D. Levine, project director; Ivy Barsky, deputy project director; Bonnie Gurewitsch and Jay Eidelman, curators; Frieda Wald, project manager; Jamie Hardis, registrar; Leslie H. Patten and Associates, interpretive planning; Sears and Russell, exhibition design; Rainmaker Productions, video production; Art Guild, Inc., fabrication and installation; Deborah Dash Moore, academic adviser.
Ours to Fight For: American Jewish Voices from the Second World War. (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2003. 176 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-9716859-1-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-0716859-0-8.)
Internet: interactive exhibition, teacher's guide, veterans' stories, and directions, http://www.ourstofightfor.org/.
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| As a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy who survived Nazi and kamikaze attacks, Robert Morgenthau, who chairs the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust board, wanted the museum's new Morgenthau wing to tell the story of American Jews who "heed[ed] their nation's call to arms." "Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War" was conceived as a chance to honor Jewish veterans and to provide a space for many American Jews to see their own families' experiences reflected. In 2000 the museum's curatorial department began conducting over four hundred oral histories with Jewish servicemen and servicewomen about their experience training and fighting in World War II. The attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the context of the exhibition almost overnight. Questions of patriotism, militarism, and foreign intervention now dominated political discourse, along with their relationship to American Jewish identity: is the "war on terror" ours to fight for? Facing an entirely new political landscape in the middle of the exhibition's development, the staff made the decision, said Louis D. Levine, project director, "not to drag that stuff into it." Ultimately, though, the exhibition inevitably triggered those larger questions; curatorial intention aside, visitors' frames of reference would very likely be shaped by current debates. |
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The design team focused on the individual human experience of fighting as a Jew in World War II. It organized the exhibition into five main sections: recruitment and training, war propaganda and why people signed up; fighting on the front lines by land, air, and sea; pow camps; experiences behind the front lines and on the home front; and the discovery of the concentration camps. |
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The exhibition team privileged the voices of rank-and-file veterans to show visitors that "every American had a role to play, and that they themselves would have participated in it had they lived at that time," according to the deputy project director, Ivy Barsky. The exhibition was narrated almost entirely in the compelling voices of the soldiers themselves. In addition to the edited interviews playing from television screens, veterans' quotes were used to describe artifacts and to introduce some sections of the exhibition. As the veteran Frank Mellion boasted, "the war was not won by this army elite or that navy elite. It was won by guys like me who were taken off the streets of New York and Spring Valley and Suffern and Niagara and Newark." In addition to making for an extremely engaging, personal, and moving exhibition, that strategy suggested that war was by and about all of us, conferring both credit and responsibility on ordinary people. |
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