Hello and welcome to "Wannsee. Looking at the international dimensions of the Holocaust". This is a special edition and a wrap-up of our German language edition about the special exhibition "The Vicious Circle". "The Vicious Circle" is an exhibition of the National Holocaust Museum in Nottinghamshire. And with me is Maiken Umbach, the curator of the exhibition. Maiken, would you tell us something about the exhibition? What is it about? It's about five pogroms. The pogrom in Berlin in 1938, the so-called crystal night, the Farhud pogrom in Iraq, Baghdad in 1941, one post-war pogrom in Poland, 1946 in Kielce, and another one in Aden that's in the British Crown colony that's now located in Yemen. And then as the last pogrom, the Hamas attacks of 7th October, 2023 on the kibbutzes in the Gaza envelope. Why did you make this exhibition? What was the reason for you to curate this exhibition about these specific five pogroms?
Thanks. So I'm from the National Holocaust Museum in England, and it's a team effort. It's not just me, first of all. It's an international touring exhibition that we've created in response to a number of challenges, but most importantly, the steep rise of anti-Jewish racism in recent years and especially after the 7th of October. A horrifying rise in attacks on British Jewish people in campus environments and streets, online. But that's not confined to England. It's a transnational phenomenon. This hatred and vitriol spreads with lightning speed on social media. So we were thinking about how does Holocaust education help and where does it not help in meeting this new or worsening societal challenge. Now Holocaust commemoration and education is what we do, that's our core business. But we feel it is insufficient, increasingly insufficient on its own and in isolation. The Holocaust feels very distant, especially to many young people. So it's easy to think that politics now has absolutely nothing to do with what crazy Nazis did a long time ago. We find that amongst younger people, that that's increasingly a widespread view. So we wanted to reveal kind of the genealogy, if you like, of anti-Jewish thinking and the images, the slogans and so on. That, you know, why in the Hamas founding charta of 1988, people talk about the protocols of the elders of Zion. It's a Russian forgery from 1903 that Hitler uses in Mein Kampf to prove there's a world Jewish conspiracy theory. You have to kill all Jews, otherwise we'll be victims. It's in every Nazi textbook. Now we have it in the Hamas Charter. That doesn't mean that Hamas are Nazis and indeed this is not about a comparison with the Holocaust itself, but it is about showing this process of recycling, that's why we call the exhibition "The Vicious Circle", the constant taking up and reworking of anti-Jewish tropes. Second point is if we only talk about the Holocaust, we're looking at a purely European history. There were some aspects of it in former French colonies in North Africa, doesn't really make it into the textbooks, but we particularly leave out the history of Mizrahi Jews, a million of whom, nearly a million of whom were displaced during and after the Holocaust from their homelands across North Africa and the Middle East, all these different places where there were thriving Jewish populations for many, many centuries, in many cases many millennia. Which were entirely wiped out in the 1940s and 1950s. A lot of those people then found refuge in Israel, the only place where Jewish people can still live in that part of the world. This is a story that's largely unknown in the West. It is unknown by people who've only ... the only bit of Jewish history they've ever heard is the Holocaust. They think all Jews are European, all Jews are Ashkenazis, you know, in biblical times they lived in Israel, but then they all left and then they've all been in Germany and in Poland, and that's it, and it's not that far-fetched, if that's the only thing you know, to then go into some protest and start screaming that all Jewish people in Israel today are white settler-colonialists, because we haven't talked about Arabic-speaking Jews, we haven' talked about the Jews of Iraq and the Jews of Yemen and of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, etc.
I didn't knew anything about it, so you have a "Vicious Circle" exhibition, which is built in a circle, very immersive, you have five big flat screens on which you first see the Jewish communities of Berlin, Bagdad, Kielce, Aden and the Kibbutz Kisufim, so one of the communities that was attacked in 2023, and you have 5 perpetrators, you have five objects from these Jewish communities. And I learned a lot because I knew there was a Jewish community in Baghdad, I knew that there was a pogrom in 1941, but I never realized that this was one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world until it was completely destroyed after the war in 1950 to 1951 when most of Baghdad's Jews were fleeing to then new founded Israel. You told that one of the reasons for the exhibition was the anti-Jewish violence that started all over Great Britain, all over Germany after October 7th. You told me you're also a professor at Nottingham University, that antisemitism has a lot of subtle effects, for instance, that the kosher menu in your canteen, is that the right English word, is not sold as much as it was before, that there are 80% less kosher meals sold now. So that shows that obviously Jewish students don't dare to order the kosher menu anymore. And this is an atmosphere that's not only in British universities or American universities, but sadly enough also in Germany the case. The reason that we show your exhibition here at the House of the Wannsee Conference is that it was not possible to show it at the Freie Universität Berlin, the free university, because they said there were some security concerns about showing it in public. It could have emotional reactions. What do you say to that?
Yes, it was a bizarre decision and, you know, we'd worked very, very successfully, I think, with the colleagues in the history department of that university. They were very supportive. We planned a whole range of different events, public discussions around it, and we were extremely disappointed when at the eleventh hour the president or vice president intervened and canceled the whole thing. I think it's a missed opportunity, even if I'm extremely grateful that we were, in part as a result of the kind of public debate that followed that decision, were able to show it this week in the Berlin State Parliament and now from next week here at the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is fantastic, and is part of a much wider international tour. We launched it in London and we had it in Tallinn and Estonia and we had it in the EU Parliament in Brussels last week and it's going to go to other places in Berlin too, including the town hall in Neukölln, which should be very exciting. But it is a great shame that it apparently cannot be shown at a university campus. This was not the only place where we asked, but so far everybody has said no. It was just most unexpected at the free university because we'd already gotten so far with the planning. I think it's a missed opportunity. People say that protests against Israel have nothing to do with anti-Semitism, well let's take them by their word and trust that they really mean it because this is not an exhibition about Israel, it is an exhibition about anti-semitism, past and present, and you know let's come together and unite around our shared conviction that this is not an acceptable aspect of political life. And, you know, whatever we think about the Israeli government or what we think about any other conflict or indeed any other genocide or any other form of persecution is going on around the globe right now. I think we should all be able to agree that anti-Semitism is simply wrong and we shouldn't tolerate it and you know let's put it out there and debate it and see where we get to.
Yeah, and it's very important that we come back to a culture of debate. Universities should be places where we debate, where we disagree, and where there is place for also emotions and emotional debate, but always in a peaceful atmosphere without threats, without violence. And when it's the case that some positions are not to be uttered freely anymore on our campuses, then we have a huge problem and I hope that your exhibition and us showing it can maybe contribute a bit to a change in this shameful situation that we're in now. Thank you very much for being here on the podcast and to all of our English-speaking listeners who are in Berlin: you can see the exhibition in the House of the Wannsee Conference in the whole month of March and afterwards in Rathaus Neukölln. And if you're able to listen to our podcast in German, you can listen to the extended version of this episode together with our director here at the House of the Wannsee Conference, Deborah Hartmann, who also says something on why we show it here at the House of the Wannsee Conference. Thank you very much for listening.