By Jeff Lipton
About 200 protesters rallied across the street from the museum at 5th Avenue and 92nd Street, on Thursday, March 7, to voice their disgust with the exhibit, called Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, which is slated to run from March 17-June 30.
Rambam students have become famous for their protest rallies most of them to bring accused Nazis to justice and have been extremely successful in the past.
The museum recently made a catalogue of the works that will be displayed in the exhibit, which was organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, a curator of fine arts at the museum.
According to the catalog put together by the museum, the exhibit focuses on 13 contemporary internationally recognized artists who use imagery from the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil.
The students, many of whom are the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, held the hour-long demonstration because they said the artwork that will be displayed trivializes the Holocaust.
In one artwork, called It's The Real Thing: Self-Portrait at Buchenwald, by Alan Schechner, the artist alters a famous picture from the Holocaust of prisoners in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, by superimposing a picture of himself, in a prison uniform, drinking from a can of Diet Coke.
In another work, called LEGO Concentration Camp Set, Zbigniew Libera made models of concentration camps and acts of Nazi brutality towards prisoners using LEGO. The same exhibit was banned from an art fair in Poland because they reportedly were viewed as anti-Semitic and trivialized the Holocaust, Rambam officials said.
The exhibit also would contain the bust of Joseph Mengele, known as the Doctor of Death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, who is responsible for performing savage medical experiments on prisoners and sending more than two million people to their deaths.
One of the protesters on March 7 was Irene Hizme, who was one of the twins brutalized during Mengele's experiments and is confined to a wheelchair as a result.
It is offensive, said Izzy Weinstein, a ninth-grader at Rambam. It depicts the Holocaust and trivializes it.
He said it is very surprising for the Jewish Museum to hold such an exhibit. If any other museum did it, it would be considered anti-Semitic.
When he learned what artwork would be presented, his immediate reaction was, Wow, that's repugnant and offensive.
He added that the museum should decide to immediately withdraw the exhibit, which was the main goal of the protest.
If the exhibit is not withdrawn, students said they will probably return to the Manhattan street during its grand opening on March 17.
Museum officials said the exhibit employs the challenging language of conceptual art, bringing highly charged imagery of the Third Reich out of the past and into the present, leading us to question how images shape our perception of evil today.
Joan Rosenbaum, a director at the Jewish Museum, said in a statement: As an art museum that presents all of Jewish culture, we are committed to showing works of contemporary artists who have used images of the Nazi era to make a powerful and timely investigation of the nature of evil. These artists ask each viewer to consider his or her responsibility toward civil society, and to be vigilant about the bigotry and dehumanization that continue in the world more than fifty years after the Holocaust.
Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors met with representatives of the Jewish Museum on Feb. 27 underscoring the insensitivity of the exhibit and asking them to pull it from the museum. Museum officials refused to withdraw the exhibit but said warning signs will be put up cautioning that the art may be sensitive to some.
The bottom line is they said,
