Word: danzig
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Gavin's campaign has culminated in the current exhibit. "Danzig: 1939," an artistic and photographic record of the Jewish community in that city on the eve of World War Two, and the surfacing of the museum on the upper floors...
...current Danzig exhibit is perhaps the first symptom of this institutional schizophrenia. Neither Harvard nor the Near Eastern Dept. brought "Danzig: 1939" to the Semitic Museum--the National Endowment for the Humanities. Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Dorot Foundation, and a host of other private and corporate donors did. They answered Carney Gavin's letters because it seemed to them that the Danzig exhibit was of significant historical and cultural interest to the general public...
...Museum did squeeze in one scholarly event among all the public lectures and films and special exhibits, an academic symposium on the Danzig experience moderated by Professor Isadore Twersky. But the symposium could have taken place without the museum and even without the exhibit. Holocaust studies, strictly speaking, are not in the domain of the Harvard Near Eastern department; nor does 19th-or 20th-century Judaica make up any significant portion of the Semitic Museum's collection...
...scholars had been left to their own devices, they could never have come up with an exhibit like "Danzig: 1939," an exhibit that carries so much meaning and emotion for so many people and attracts financial support from so many different sources...
...what is in store for the museum after the Danzig collection moves on in June? Provided it can come up with some display cases, part of that vast collection in the basement will go on exhibit in the upper floors. The scholarly machinery will continue humming as it has for a generation now. As Cross points out, scholars don't need display cases; they have been getting along perfectly well with the collection in the basement all this time. Without an attraction like "Danzig" and the high-gear publicity that accompanied it, will the general public bother to stop...