Daily Podcasts Video Research

At the Mercy of the Museum: Memory Construction and the Harm of Holocaust Museums

JL;DR SUMMARY Ramona Saft's exploration of Holocaust museums, particularly the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, critiques how these institutions construct memory. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

JL;DR members get full summaries of all articles in the archive, including this one. Donate & start reading »

Tags

Holocaust EducationHolocaust Memorial MuseumCultural HeritageExperiential LearningWalter BenjaminMemory TransmissionEmotional ResponseMemory ConstructionMuseum EthicsHistorical Identity

Places mentioned

Berlin, Germany
"In his autobiography, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Walter Benjamin describes an Imperial Panorama, or Kaiserpanorama, a revolving cylinder with a stereoscopic projection of images popular across Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s."
Aix-en-Provence, Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, France
"He writes, one afternoon, while seated before a transparency of the little town of Aix, I tried to persuade myself that, once upon a time, I must have played on the patch of pavement that is guarded..."
Washington, Washington DC, United States
"When I was twelve years old, I took a trip with my bnai mitzvah class to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum."
Łódź, Poland
"On the floor exhibit titled The Final Solution, there are not traditional museum features of galleries or display cases, instead the walls are illuminated by video monitors showing newsreels from the ghettosand objects from these placestools from the ghetto workshops, stained-glass windows from the Cracow synagogue, the Lodz hospital door (132)."
Kraków, Lesser Poland, Poland
"On the floor exhibit titled The Final Solution, there are not traditional museum features of galleries or display cases, instead the walls are illuminated by video monitors showing newsreels from the ghettosand objects from these placestools from the ghetto workshops, stained-glass windows from the Cracow synagogue, the Lodz hospital door (132)."

Support this source

This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 50195
Cairo Source ID 2
Retrieved 2025-04-26 05:30:20 UTC
Curated 2025-04-26 08:30:39 UTC