The Square of Polish Innocence: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and its symbolic topography

The text refers to the space around the Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Fighters and Martyrs of the Ghetto and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN in Warsaw (Poland). The site of death – at the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto – has now become a site overloaded with other symbolic messages. Two main symbolic centers (the 1948 Monument and the 2013 Museum) are today encircled by ten other, additional memorials. The message emerging from the content as well as the proportion of commemorations is that Polish solidarity with the Jews was a fact and it stood the test of terror and death brought by the Germans. Although it does not undermine the veracity of the few and isolated exceptions, such a version of events is drastically different from the actual facts. Both symbolic centers are perceived as emblems of Jewish minority narrative. Additional artefacts are a message formulated by the Polish majority. They constitute a kind of symbolic encirclement, block. Emphasizing the dominant majority’s version of the events in this place is in fact a symbolic pre-emptive action. It is meant to silence the unwanted narrative or suppress even the mere possibility that it might emerge. What turns out to be at stake in the dominant Polish narrative about the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations is the image of Poland and the Poles. This shows not only the topographic and symbolic situation but also the socio-cultural context of the functioning of the new Museum.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.     

Housing Historic Role Models and the American Dream: Domestic Rhetoric and Institutional Decision-Making at the Tenement Museum

How does a social history museum end up obfuscating issues it intends to highlight? How does the Tenement Museum—an institution committed to “challenging the future” by “revealing the past”—come to obscure structural issues related to housing, immigration, and poverty? Through a comparison of participant observation of tours and analysis of institutional archives at the Tenement Museum, I show how decisions made for pragmatic reasons and materialized into domestic spaces obfuscate structural issues, both in the past and the present. Specifically, I demonstrate how the museum advances historic role models and the American Dream through depictions of tenement apartments, thereby displacing the very issues that tenement housing encapsulates. It is not news to sociologists that museums depict selective narratives that reinforce cultural tropes. Nor is it surprising that museums use domestic space as a mnemonic vehicle through which to portray the narratives they select. What is surprising, however, is that this happens in a museum that is invested in challenging the narratives it ends up depicting. Unpacking how this happens is especially pertinent because of the prevalence of museums that depict domestic spaces of the past, given the increased necessity for museums to educate in order to secure funding, and in light of contemporary political debates over housing and immigration.     

Retelling the Past Using New Technologies: A Case Study into the Digitization of Social Work Heritage Material and the Creation of a Virtual Exhibition

This article explains the rationale for the digitization of social work heritage material and the virtualization of an archived nondigital museum exhibit constructed by a Scottish Museum of Social Work. The project involved the “virtualization” of an existing social work museum exhibition on the migration of “Home Children” from Scotland to Canada in the late 19th and early 20th century and the digital preservation of historical assets (both text and images) held by the contemporary social care organization involved in the migration of the children. This article discusses best practice in the preservation of historical assets, the methodology and technology used in the creation of the multimedia version of the exhibition, and the complexities of negotiating intellectual property rights in the transition from historical artifacts to new digital works.     

The Risk of Historical Artefacts in Travel: The Construction of Risk in the International Travelling Exhibition

Abstract  This article interrogates the risk of historical artefacts in travel, emphasising especially on the construction of the risk of boundary-crossing when museum exhibits travel abroad through "outbound" international travelling exhibitions. This follows the history of a controversial exhibition, the "Splendour of Imperial China"– held in 1996 that travelled from the National Palace Museum in Taipei which is renowned for its abundant and unique Chinese art collection to one of the most prominent museums on the global stage – the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Drawing upon Mary Douglas's analysis of danger/risk and classification, this paper argues that the risk within the "outbound" international travelling exhibition is less ontological than constructed. Often the controversy over the risk re-delineates the boundary between "us" and "them". This article, first of all, examines the power-laden relationship, regulated by the struggle of the global museum field, when museum experts at home and abroad co-write the risk of an exhibition's travel in the language of insurance calculation. Second, it analyses the laymen's protesting discourses against the historical artefacts' overseas travel through outbound international travelling exhibition. The protest which appropriated the "keeping-while-giving" logic of exchange, and backed up with both national sentiments and international symbolic sources, rendered the exhibition a hot potato. Finally, it interrogates how the settled outbound travelling exhibition actually renders the museum collection reclassified and revalorized according to their suitability for overseas travel.     

Objects, Words, and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis

What can actor-network theory’s approach to analyzing objects offer to cultural sociology? To answer this question we ask a more specific one: How does materiality affect people’s experience of art in a museum exhibition? Research at two museums suggests that non-human agents—object and words—interact with human bodies to choreograph the art encounter. This process works through interactions between two processes of emplacement: physical position and cognitive location. Position guides location in the process of meaning-making, a relationship mediated by three mechanisms: distance, legibility, and orientation.     

Shadowing history: National narratives and the persistence of the everyday

The issue this paper wishes to address is how history, as encoded in historiography of history-writing, is actually based upon its capacity to conceal, disguise and indeed suppress the everyday. This is especially true when you consider that most history is really driven by the nation state and that far from envisaging a history free or rescued from the nation, most history-writing ends up reinforcing it. In other words, history’s primary vocation has been to displace the constant danger posed by the surplus of everyday life, to overcome its apparent ‘trivia’, ‘banalities’ and untidiness in order to find an encompassing register that will fix meaning. With Hegel, narrative was given the role of supplying the maximal unity by which to grasp the meaning of history. What immediately got privileged was, of course, the nation state in the making of world historical events or and ultimately class, subjects who can claim world historical agency. By the same measure, the surplus or messy residues of modern life, especially its immensely staggering complexities, its endless incompletions and repetitions – all irreducible – are repressed or in some instances the microcosmic is sometimes mobilized to reinforce macrocosmic meaning. (This has frequently been called history from below and what Germans have called Alltagsgeschichte.) What I would like to do is explore the category of everydayness, ushered in with the masses and the appearance of the subaltern, as a minimal unity that provides its own principle of historical temporality that easily challenges the practice of history-writing as we know it.     

Brody always on my mind: the mental mapping of a Jewish city

Once overwhelmingly inhabited by Jews, the Austro-Galician border town of Brody, in present-day Western Ukraine, has retained an important place on Ashkenazi mental maps until today, even though scholarly studies on Brody are scarce. The present article tries to capture the elements that allowed Brody to inscribe itself so successfully in Jewish memory. Therefore, this paper analyses several lieux de mémoire underlining Brody's enduring perception as a town closely related to Jewish issues. These places, however, are not only physical spots in the cityscape, like the ruins of the synagogue and the cemetery, but also images of and texts about Brody. Whether intended or not, pictures and postcards also have an impact on how Brody has been remembered; and so do memory books, be they written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish or Ukrainian. This study argues that Brody appears on the mental maps of Eastern European Jewry as an amalgam of physical places, icons and texts linked to a multi-layered and multifaceted urban history     

Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art in Los Angeles: transnational exhibition,diasporic emplacement,and the expedient politics of display

In this essay, I trace the Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art exhibition from its inception in a privatized programme managed by the transnational bank Banamex through its multiple instantiations within U.S. museums in order to explore the transnational politics of the exhibition, as well as its role in the diasporic emplacement of Mexican Americans. In so doing, I unsettle the ways we understand the commodification of difference through museum display and argue for the re-conceptualization of the museum as a transnational space in which varied multicultural imaginaries can be engaged and mobilized.     

From Restored Past to Unsettled Present: New Challenges for Jewish Museums in East Central Europe

This article examines the institutional development of Jewish museums in Prague, Budapest, and Bratislava from 1989 to the present, with special reference to their role as agents of cultural memory. I consider how these museums contribute to the formation of Jewish identities in post-communist societies, which are themselves struggling to form collective identities. After analyzing the institutional structures and exhibition concepts of these museums in relation to shifts in the politics of representation, I propose a core area on which each museum could base its future development.     

从公众特性上思考博物馆建筑设计

博物馆是城市历史文化的栖息地,是保存人类文明和城市记忆的场所。博物馆为社会公众服务,除了体现在陈列展示、科学研究、社会教育服务等方面,也包括博物馆的建筑设计。为公众服务的博物馆建筑设计,不仅要考虑外部公共空间的设计,更要考虑内部公共活动区域的各种人性化设置,使博物馆为公众服务落在实处。     

The Matter of Space: Bodily Performances and the Emergence of Boundary Objects During Multidisciplinary Design Meetings

Prior research has identified the importance of embodied action in establishing representational infrastructure during disruptions in interdisciplinary work. This study expands on such research by examining meetings of interdisciplinary museum design teams—including educators, designers, researchers, and museum professionals. In these meetings, the museum space (exhibition room) emerges as a boundary object as it is presented through diverse material artifacts including floor-plans and mock-ups. The authors’ analyses identify and describe bodily and discursive practices of place-making and place-imagining that the participants perform as they attempt to maintain continuity across these shifting material forms and occasions.     

Reconsidering the corporate narrative in U.S. PR history: A critique of Alfred Chandler's influence on PR historiography

This study explores the influence and dominance of Alfred Chandler Jr.’s theory of corporate development within public relations [PR] history. Chandler's work on late 19th Century corporate development is influential in PR historiography. PR oftentimes places its genesis in the late 19th Century corporate sphere to distance itself from press agentry. Examining critiques of Chandler's work on corporate development, this study argues that rooting PR in a corporate context does not provide legitimacy to PR practice and skews PR history to favor a corporate narrative. Implications for both history and normative PR theory development are discussed.     

Times Up World History: Broadening the World History Narrative

The emergence of the Times Up and the #MeToo movements has sparked a conversation in the United States uncovering the grim realities that many women face. As the focus on gender equity and power dynamics between men and women continue to garner national attention, the authors of this article were curious to see if this progress manifested itself in recently revised Tennessee world history standards. It is not surprising that we found a vastly disproportionate amount of material focusing on men. Thus, we proceed to offer readers a rationale for broadening the world history narrative to include the lives and experiences of women, while also offering specific lesson plan examples and resources that could be used by classroom teachers to supplement the curriculum and highlight the pivotal role women have played in shaping human history.     

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Although the U.S. population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, research indicates that minority participation in the arts continues to decline. This article addresses the racial disparity of public art museum attendance by examining the role of the art museum curator and the process by which concepts of race are reproduced within the space of the public art museum. Utilizing Bourdieu's theories of cultural reproduction, social space, and symbolic power as a preliminary framework of inquiry, we examine the concept of whiteness as privileged social construct. Through face‐to‐face in‐depth interviews with museum curators, we investigate the means by which the dominant cultural narrative of whiteness is maintained through the preferences, decisions, and social interactions of curators. We draw upon critical white studies, a part of critical race theory, to underline the manner in which whiteness presents itself as a position of dominance. Our findings show that whiteness is maintained through the process of exclusion by presenting the white cultural narrative as both ordinary and invisible.     

Jewish epitaphs from Białystok, 1892–1902: embracing the spirit of Dubnow

In the early twentieth century, Polish historian Mejer Ba?aban delivered a most telling condemnation of Jewish epitaphs as “blatantly baroque,” “overloaded with epithets” and difficult to understand. In the late nineteenth century, the maskil Simon Dubnow had delivered a plea to the maskilim (intellectuals) and mithnagdim (traditionalists) of his day to engage in documenting and writing the woefully lacking past history of Yiddish civilisation as a means to unite past history with emerging nationalistic inclinations. Dubnow specified gathering epitaphs as part of this documentation. Despite Dubnow's plea it is Ba?aban's condemnation that has held sway in American and English-speaking European academies and which has not yet been fully reversed in the scholarship of the century since then. In the spirit of Dubnow, the current paper examines the first decade of extant epitaphs from Bagnowka Beth Olam in Bia?ystok, Poland, dating from 1892 to 1902, as an example by which we can move towards establishing the potential that Jewish epitaphs hold as another evidentiary source corroborating or enriching Jewish history. In this first decade of epitaphs from Bagnowka Beth Olam, we will encounter the world of the mithnagdim amidst which the minority of the maskilim are in evidence. Place names bring remembrance of the cities, towns and shtetlekh from which Jews migrated to Bia?ystok. Surnames evoke remembrance of founding families that would continue to build Jewish Bia?ystok in the coming decades. Unexpected historical and biographical details remind the reader of the professions and businesses in which Bia?ystoker Jews engaged and life's circumstances that prompted charitable responses. Subtle words or a unique phrase, intentionally or unintentionally incorporated into the epitaphs, are telling of the realities of the harshness of everyday life at the turn of the twentieth century and telling of what is significant to both individual and collective memory. One singular epitaph serves as a portent of the violence that would soon descend upon Bia?ystok. Through these representative examples we are offered a microcosm of Jewish Bia?ystok from 1892 to 1902, and a glimpse of the changing trends to be revealed in the next five decades as written upon the matzevoth of Bagnowka Beth Olam.     

“I bled like you,brother, although I was a thousand miles away”: postwar Yiddish sources on the experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet exile during World War II

ABSTRACT

An estimated 230,000 Polish Jews escaped Nazi persecution during World War II by flight or deportation to the interior of the Soviet Union. This article examines early postwar Yiddish and Polish sources on their survival in Soviet exile such as poems, newspaper articles, and witness testimonies. Two sets of sources are analyzed in-depth, testimonies written by young people in Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) camps in occupied Germany and Yiddish poetry from Poland and the DP camps. The author argues that many former exiles were eager to write down their experiences. In doing so, they were aware of the complex nature of deportation and flight that characterized the experiences of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. In their testimonies many young witnesses express their understanding that they too were “marked by the khurbn.” Whereas Yiddish poetry from the same period helps us understand how writers dealt with their own story of wartime survival outside the realm of German persecution. In their poetry they seek meaning in their own suffering and express their desire to establish a dialogue with other survivors.     

城市更新背景下的博物馆发展策略研究

简要回顾了博物馆、博物馆学理论的发展过程、城市更新理念的演变过程,分析了博物馆与城市更新的互动关系,指出我国在城市更新中,应高度重视博物馆的建设发展,重点发展地方性、专业性的中小型博物馆以及生态博物馆、社区博物馆,应丰富博物馆的功能、参与性和体验性,努力创造条件,鼓励社会各方面参与博物馆的建设发展,促进博物馆与社区的互动与对话。     

Journalistic right in the “first rough draft of history”: a comparative study of news copyright in the United States and the People's Republic of China

As more and more American media products enter the Chinese market, and vice versa, it is becoming increasingly important for legal scholars and journalists to understand how news products are regulated differently by the two countries' copyright policies. This article examines the issue of copyright protection for news in both China and the United States. The following research questions are discussed and answered in order to identify major conceptual and practical differences and similarities in the news copyright regimes of the two countries: How did the copyright law on news evolve? Is news copyrightable? Who owns news products? What rights do copyright owners have? How long is news work copyright protected? What are news work copyright restrictions? What if news copyright owners are foreign citizens? The article concludes by presenting and analyzing a hypothetical case involving both the Chinese and American copyright laws.