Last update - 00:00 28/11/2006
Lego can teach about the Holocaust
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft
In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously observed that even though he could not define hard-core pornography, "I know it when I see it." In a similar vein, while misuse of Holocaust imagery in contemporary culture does not lend itself to easy definition or categorization, we, too, can recognize it when we see it. At the same time, we must be careful not to excoriate individuals or institutions merely for seeking to find innovative or unfamiliar ways of dealing with the Shoah.
Four and a half years ago, I was sharply critical of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art." That ill-conceived show included one artist's "Giftgas Giftset" of poison gas canisters packaged with Chanel, Hermes and Tiffany & Co. designer logos; a historical photograph of emaciated Buchenwald inmates into which another artist digitally inserted himself holding a can of Diet Coke; a "Lego Concentration Camp Set," complete with crematorium and plastic inmates made with the popular children's building blocks; and an installation of six glorifying plaster busts of the notorious Auschwitz SS doctor Josef Mengele. I believed then and believe today that individually and collectively, these works desecrated and trivialized the Holocaust.
Just because artist Zbigniew Libera's "Lego Concentration Camp Set" was part of an offensive exhibit does not mean, however, that Lego building blocks cannot legitimately be used in the context of Holocaust education. Stephen Schwartz, an American architect, has developed what appears to be an effective children's workshop in which a 400-square-foot replica of the Warsaw Ghetto is constructed with Lego blocks, followed by an age-appropriate history lesson on the ghetto.
After this workshop was recently presented at a Jewish community center in New Jersey, it was denigrated in these pages last week as an instance of "people trivializing the Shoah in the name of commemorating it." By way of background, the article quoted one of my 2002 attacks on the Mirroring Evil exhibition, thereby implying erroneously that I disapprove of the workshop as well. Nothing I have read or heard about the workshop at the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, New Jersey, suggests that Mr. Schwartz was anything but reverential and thoughtful in his effort to enable school-age children to relate to the Holocaust. I am also certain that Barbara Wind, the director of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest and herself a gifted poet as well as a daughter of survivors, would not have associated herself with a project that demeaned the remembrance of the Shoah. The use of the Lego building blocks at the workshop strikes me as a legitimate creative effort to provide a new dimension to the daunting task of educating children about the Holocaust without utterly traumatizing them.
Authors and artists have long used nonconventional mediums and approaches to convey Holocaust imagery. Israeli singer Yehuda Poliker's classic rock ballad, "This Is Treblinka Station," is one example. Another is the traveling exhibit "Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light 1985-1993," in which artist Judy Chicago interprets the Shoah through a tapestry, stained glass and images merging painting with photography. Novelist Lily Brett's superb Too Many Men features imaginary conversations between the narrator, a daughter of survivors born after the war, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess. And the protagonists of Thane Rosenbaum's moving The Golems of Gotham are the ghosts of Primo Levi, Jerzy Kozinski, Piotr Rawicz and three other survivor-writers who committed suicide.
Graphic artist Art Spiegelman has been criticized as much for his use of the comic strip genre in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, in which he recounts his parents' story during the Shoah and afterward, as for his depiction of Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. But it is his very use of a nonconventional medium that gives Maus its strength. Thus, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman praised Spiegelman's "complex but masterfully orchestrated narrative," and noted that "by exposing his characters to a range of interpretations, Mr. Spiegelman rejects precisely the caricatures that are supposedly a drawback of the comic-strip form."
There can be no question, on the other hand, that the display at Tehran's Palestine Contemporary Art Museum earlier this year of more than 200 cartoons caricaturing and ridiculing the annihilation of European Jewry was meant to offend. And yet the international outrage at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cynical exploitation of Holocaust imagery for his own political purposes was far more muted than it should have been.
We will certainly have to confront additional noxious manifestations of Holocaust desecration and trivialization, such as the Tehran cartoon exhibit and Mirroring Evil, in the future. Our credibility in doing so will depend on our ability to differentiate between them and legitimate creative efforts to enhance Holocaust remembrance.
The author, a lawyer, is the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and president of Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan.