Exile and the Prophetic: Jew in the Box

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Well it has come to this – and how amazing. I was stunned when I saw it. I thought: ‘This is the other side of Wallwashing.’ Then I just gave it up and decided to flow with the absurd.

I begin with the opening of an article from the New Yorker:

Just before 2 P.M. on Thursday, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Bill Glucroft climbed into a glass box in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Almost immediately, he was surrounded by a group of museumgoers. For the next two hours, Glucroft, a Fairfield, Connecticut, native who moved to Berlin three and a half years ago when he fell in love with a woman from Neukölln, answered questions about God and the world—a genial, gray-jeans-wearing embodiment of the answer to the question posed in the bright-pink museum caption at his feet: “Are there still Jews in Germany?”

The Jewish Museum Berlin’s new exhibition “The Whole Truth… Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jews” (the subtitle was inspired by Woody Allen), has on display a “Don’t Worry Be Happy” kippa. It has interviews with rabbis about what it means to be Jewish. It has a video of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode where Larry David invites a contestant from the TV show “Survivor” and a Holocaust survivor to dinner. It also has that clear box, where a Jewish volunteer sits for a few hours every day (except Saturdays), and answers whatever questions visitors might have about Judaism.

Well, I haven’t ben to Berlin lately but I’ve been Skyping with a Jewish friend visiting the city. When I asked if she had seen the exhibit, she was astonished such an exhibit existed. From the capital where Jews were cleansed from, curious Germans could now interrogate real ‘pinch us’ Jews. Were we both going insane?

The exhibit is popularly known as ‘Jew in the Box.’

It gets worse.

Upon request to be one of the Jews in the box, a young man responded: ‘When I heard I was going in the box, the first thing I thought of was Eichmann. The next thing I thought of was Justin Timberlake.’

Being without a TV, I didn’t get the Timberlake reference. Then I learned of the much viewed Saturday Night Live skit where Timberlake gives his girlfriend a present of his penis in a box, aptly titled, ‘A Dick in the Box.’

I watched the skit on YouTube and found it tasteless. The more important lesson, though, is that it doesn’t matter if one is a mass murderer or a pop star. Fame is the name of the game.

Is this the function of a Jewish museum after the Holocaust?

Without getting stuck in the past it seems the shelf-life of the Holocaust should be longer in Germany than elsewhere.

Time to move on?

Sure, there could be others placed in boxes. I’m thinking ‘Native American in the Box.” How about an African- American?

‘Palestinian in a Box.’

Time to move on?

When it comes to justice, it’s never time to move on, is it?

To be fair, last year the museum hosted Judith Butler who spoke of her support for BDS. Various news outlets reported that over seven hundred people attended. They repeatedly cheered Butler’s statements criticizing Israeli policies and supporting BDS.

I have no idea how she felt in that environment. My initial thought is that her appearance isn’t far enough from the present exhibit.

I have given a number of lectures in Germany – starting in 1987 – and some of my writings have been translated into German. Of course, my profile is much, much lower than Butler’s. I don’t even qualify as her opening act. Like Butler, I speak my mind there. Nonetheless, the applause I receive is filtered through the past. When I speak about IsraeI in Germany, I can’t get the Holocaust out of my mind. Should I?

Would I accept such a high profile engagement on BDS and its attendant issues? The Jewish Museum hasn’t asked me – and they won’t. I do wonder about the European terrain. No doubt such thoughts can be judged retro musings or hesitant meanderings, especially when others suffer at the hand of Jewish power.

Let’s say, I prefer Germans thinking rather than cheering. At the same time, I resist attempts to restrict Jewish thought and speech in any part of the globe.

‘The Whole Truth…Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jews’ – the official title. I suppose it’s better than ‘Jew in the Box.’

Eichmann and Timberlake.

‘Pinch us’ Jews.

BDS. Applauding Germans. Judith Butler.

What was done to us. What we are doing to others.

What needs to be said. Everywhere?

Jewish museums in Germany.

Strange what history does to us, especially when the memory of atrocity becomes too difficult to bear.