More on Berlin’s Jewish Museum Controversy
Tablet columnist Jamie Kirchick talks with CNN’s Jake Tapper
April 08, 2013
(CNN)
In case you haven’t read Jamie Kirchick’s dispatch from last week, he wrote about his time as a representative in the Jewish Museum of Berlin’s now infamous “Jew in the Box” exhibit. Kirchick explained:
More often than not, I felt like a therapist for anxious Germans working through their fraught relationship to history. “This is very difficult for me,” a producer for a German television station said, standing just inches away, her eyes watery. “I feel it is a confrontation.” She likened the experience to a 2010 Museum of Modern Art exhibition by performance artist Marina Abramović, in which visitors sat silently across a table from Abramović for hours on end. Another middle-aged woman with her young daughter in tow related how the Jew she was closest to was her childhood piano teacher, whose Jewishness was only been hinted at through occasional references to family back in Israel. “I was a little ashamed to ask questions. It’s nice that you’re here,” she confided.
Following the story, CNN’s Jake Tapper caught up with Kirchick to talk a little bit about the experience. Check it out here.
Related: Being The Jew in the Box [Tablet]
Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.
