Supporting Human Dignity

I have chosen not to write about political issues in this blog previously, but unfortunately fundamental issues of dignity and human rights have become politicized.  One of my themes has been Jewish identity and that is inextricably interwoven with a belief in human dignity.  Yesterday I spent the afternoon with 700 people from the Jewish community organizing to defeat the Marriage Amendment in Minnesota.  The marriage amendment would change the constitution to only recognize marriage as a union between a man and a woman.   Fifteen synagogues and institutions and thirty-five rabbis came together in opposition to the amendment. 
 
I especially liked the fact that they arrived at this agreement based on two sections of Jewish text.  One is known as the Kavod HaBriyot and speaks to the belief that human beings are created in the image of God and must be treated with dignity and respect. The second was a passage from Leviticus 19:16 that states “do not stand idly by as your neighbor bleeds.”   While I have always shared those values, I lacked the vocabulary to explain why in religious terms. 

We were asked to think about our own story and how that led us to be there that day and at first I had a difficult time articulating it beyond it being the right thing to do.  I began to play the child’s game of “Why” with myself.  You know, the one where you keep asking “why”.   Why do I bristle at intrusions on human rights?  Because it feels like a personal violation.  Why does it feel like a personal violation?  Because what affects another also affects me.  And why is that?  And here I have my ah-ha moment.  Growing up Jewish reinforced a sense of otherness.  It is often that very otherness that reinforces the importance of protecting human rights and respecting differences.   I am well aware from history that it is a slippery slope and a failure to protect someone else’s rights will quickly lead to an incursion on my own.  Every Jew is conscious of this.  We are all in this together.

I was heartened to look at this room filled with people who shared a belief in human dignity and to claim them as my own.

Demographics Tell a Story

Much of our time at the Council of American Jewish Museums’ conference (CAJM) was based in the many local Jewish institutions.  They were impressive institutions based on both size and breadth, a necessity with a metropolitan Jewish population of about 67,000 to serve.  By contrast the Twin Cities Jewish community, where I now live, has about 39,000.  That seemed enormous to me based on my original reference point, my hometown of Peoria, Illinois which has 800. *

I have noted these statistics from the Berman Institute because a talk at the conference really highlighted the fact that while Jews represent a small percent of the total population they tend to concentrate in larger metropolitan areas and compose a significant population base.  This means that while they may represent a minority, their experience is often not that of a minority.  Except for those of us who grew up in smaller cities, the Jewish experience in America often revolves around an urban core and is surrounded by a large Jewish community. 

I am often quite fascinated by demographic information as it informs the experience of our society and foretells the changes that are yet to come.  A very interesting speaker on this topic was Deborah Dash Moore, a Professor of History at the University of Michigan.  Moore is an author and serves as the Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.  She provided a map of where Jews lived in 2000 and pointed out that while Jews roughly exceed 2% of the general population, they represent a much more significant proportion of many populations centers. 

She traced the history of Judaism in the early United States and shared a response from George Washington to the Jews of Newport at the Touro Synagogue.  Here he echos their language reinforcing that this new government provided“to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance… All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship”.  This welcoming message laid a framework that drew many Jews to America in subsequent years.

Moore traced the growth of the five largest cities in terms of Jewish population through time contrasting it with Europe.  In 1877 NYC with 73,000 was comparable to Vienna (72,000) and Budapest (70,000) while still dwarfed by Warsaw with 127,000.  The top five cities (New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Baltimore) represented half of the Jewish population in the US. During the early 1900s demographics began to change with one third of Eastern European Jews coming to America.

By 1905 NYC represented 772,000 Jews versus Warsaw with a mere 306,000.    The top five cities of Jewish population (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis) represented one million of the two million American Jews.  Immigration laws tightened in response to this flood of immigrants, but by 1927 New York City held 1.8 million Jews while Warsaw remained constant as the largest Eastern European Jewish population at 310,000.  In the US, Cleveland edged St. Louis out among the top five. The growth of the NY population began to stabilize around two million in 1940 and 1955 as more population began to move to suburbs.  The more recent metro data that I noted above indicates a 2002 Jewish population just shy of one million in the city and about 1.4 million in the metropolitan area.  Still they represent the largest single ethnic group in the city creating a rich cultural ferment that is reflected in the influence of Jewish culture on the larger society.


* Berman Institute- North American Jewish Data Bank University of Connecticut

Preserving Collective Memory

I just returned from the conference of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) and am busy digesting much of what was discussed.  While the conference is designed for museum professionals, as an artist working with Jewish themes there is much that applies to what I do.  One of the fun aspects of this conference is that it is a bit like a progressive dinner only with museums as fodder.  We often went to as many as three museums in a day with meetings in each as well as an opportunity to tour the exhibitions. 

This year the conference was in the Detroit area which has a large Jewish population although primarily in the surrounding suburbs. We spent much of our time visiting the uniquely Jewish institutions in the area, but also focused on other ethnic populations that are equally well represented in Detroit.

We began the event with a visit to the Motown Museum where our guide spoke about the Motown sound.  The “Motown sound” is reverberation, an echo effect best created in a bathroom where they once in fact recorded, but abandoned due to competing demands for its use.  They later recreated that sound in the garage where the many Motown recordings that we know were made and which still exists for visitors.

When we later visited the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, our guide, a beautiful woman in dreadlocks and African dress, met us under a high domed ceiling.  There she dramatically pointed out the meaning of an inlaid pattern on the floor as her voice reverberated to the ceiling.  We looked at each other and mouthed, “the Motown sound”.  I suspect someone “echoed” that in the design as they captured it too well for it to be purely accidental. 

The Wright Museum is the world’s largest institution focused on the African American experience.  Also in Detroit is the Arab American National Museum, the first museum of its kind, that focuses on the story of Arabs who came to the US and contributed to the American story.  With a local Arab population of 30,000, they serve both to reflect their experience and make it accessible to the larger population. Each of these museums focuses on a specific ethnicity and tells the story from their perspective, a reminder that while we may have shared experiences, history is viewed through many eyes that may experience and witness different parts of the story. 

At one of the sessions they spoke of museums as creating generational collective memory.  I was intrigued by that concept as much of what I am working on in the Jewish Identity and Legacy project relates to memory and legacy.  To take that concept further is the question of what is “collective memory”?  Is it the memory of the dominant culture or is it also represented uniquely through museums focusing on a specific ethnicity, be it black, Arab or Jewish?  And where do those “collective memories” meet?  Is there a nexus for all of them from which we each mine the fertile soil of an ethnic culture within a broader culture?  These are questions that are somewhat unique to the US with its mix of cultures.  If museums are in fact dealing with “generational” memory then curators play a role in both preserving past generational memory and capturing shifts in generational memory over time.

What Makes a Story

I’ve written of my exhibition of artwork related to the Holocaust.  Lately I’ve been busy doing presentations and talks around it.   I’ve been surprised at the range of audiences and the ways in which they connect to the material.  The audiences have represented very diverse backgrounds ranging from Talmud Torah students to a technical college with a class on visual interpretation.  I’ve met with students from an Adopt a Survivor program where they are matched with a survivor to learn their story and carry it forward.  For them I spoke about my observations on building a relationship, questions to elicit story and the elements that make a good story for them to retell.  I tend to do and then analyze later.  The process of preparing a talk forces me to think about my work in a different way and often leads me to new insights.

I realized that my process of developing a painting around a story closely relates to what makes a good story.  A good story is visual and sensory.  If you can picture it, odds are it will stay with you and the people with whom you share it.  Just as our memories are visual, stories that have legs can be easily visualized.  If they can be visualized, then they in turn provide good source material for painting.

I shared with the class a story that my friend Dora told me about a death march that she was on during the war.  She told me that they were given three things, a can with a picture of a chicken on it, a blanket and some bread.  The first thing they did was discard the can as they had no way to open it.  The road was strewn with cans of chicken.  Then they tied the blanket around their neck.  First they put it over one shoulder, then the other.  Quickly it became a noose around their neck and some abandoned the blankets as well.  The bread of course was precious and they ate some and saved the rest for it meant survival.  When she told me that story I found I could easily picture the road strewn with cans of chicken.  I could feel the tug of the blanket around my neck as I imagined it first on one shoulder, then the other.  It was the sensory elements of the story as well as the theme of three things that helped me to retain it.

The stories that stay with me often have some small detail buried in them that I’ve never heard elsewhere.  It is the details that make it memorable.  One of my paintings is called Bricks for Bread.  It is about how the Nazis not only destroyed the Warsaw ghetto, but then sold the bricks to the Poles, a detail that I had never learned prior to the interviews I did as part of the Identity and Legacy project.  Another detail that stayed with me was the fact that the Germans had fled the Russians, abandoning their homes.  Survivors from the camps often became squatters in those homes as they sought shelter after being freed. 

In addition to artwork,  the Identity and Legacy project has also generated some video.  I often share a brief video of a survivor’s story and then discuss how I developed artwork around that story.  In this way I can open up the creative process taking them into the source material and how I decided which elements to focus on in the subsequent artwork. 

I have come to realize that my focus in all that I do is story. Artwork, writing and speaking are all just expressions of that common theme.   Story is universal.  We grow up having stories read to us and a well-told story never fails to captivate.

A Personal Legacy

This blog was begun around the theme of family history.  This week I have been living a bit of my own family history as we laid my father to rest.  I delivered a eulogy at the service hoping I would get through it without triggering tears.   It felt important to me that I speak publicly about a man who was very much a public figure, but whom I knew through the lens of family.

I last visited my father shortly before he died.  As I walked into the room I was heartened when he exclaimed "Susela", to which I replied "Dadela", and he smiled.  That was our well worn path.  I sat with him and told him a little about what I was working on which ironically was a series of cross generational interviews in the Jewish Identity and Legacy project.  As I've written in these pages, I am interviewing elders and their children about the elder's legacy and its influence on their adult child. As I told him about it, it dawned on me that perhaps I should answer the same questions I was asking of others.

Sitting there with both my mother and father I began to tell my dad what I thought my legacy was from him.  I later wove much of what I told him into a eulogy.   What a wonderful gift to be able to share it with him directly.   A gift for him and a gift for me, nothing unfinished.

Among his many accomplishments, my father, Philip Weinberg, created the public television station that serves central Illinois.  He was a rather eclectic man with the ability to leverage technology to serve his love of culture and the arts.   He was a university professor, trained as an electrical engineer, but very much a visionary.  If something didn't exist that he felt was important, he didn't hesitate to start it.  He started the Electrical Engineering department at Bradley University and was its dean for twenty years.  Later in his career he founded and led the College of Communications and Fine Arts.  In between he built public radio, public television and numerous buildings and performance spaces. 

After his funeral the TV station interviewed me.  "Did you think it unusual that he went from being an engineer to communications and fine arts?" they asked.  "No", I replied as I thought of my own rather eclectic career spanning nonprofits, finance and the arts, a combination that never seemed unusual to me because of my father who encouraged me in all of my pursuits.   I grew up thinking you started things if they didn't exist, you loved your work and of course you would have diverse interests and explore them with passion.  Doesn't everybody? I took that for granted because that's what I witnessed every day.  Unlike the external world that saw what he did as extraordinary, I knew him in his everyday life as my Dad.  From the vantage point of that front row seat, I learned to view his perspective as the norm.  And that is quite a legacy.

Art and Memory

Lately I’ve been reflecting on memory. With two parents in their 80s struggling with failing memories, it is a subject that often occupies my thoughts. When I stumbled across the book Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, a book that focuses on the topic of memory, I read it with great interest. Foer, a journalist, began his engagement with the topic when he wrote an article about a memory competition that encompassed seemingly impossible feats for us mere mortals.

As I read his book I learned about memory palaces in which one secretes images, the more ludicrous the image the better, as the purpose is to recall memories in a sequential order. The first memory palace was created after the ceiling fell at a banquet killing the people in the hall. The speaker had momentarily been called out of the room and was then called upon to try to recall everyone in the room to identify the dead. Working his way around the table he found he could recapture the visual information by visualizing spatially. The same concept was subsequently applied to assist in memory. Actual physical spaces are imagined as home to items on a list, each tucked into a different room. Numbers are converted to two letters that can be transformed to words and images as well. Soon Foer is bitten by the bug and begins to train for the American competition which he amazingly wins.

My mother is reading the book as well and taking notes, hoping to find some trick to make her recalcitrant memories stay put. She asked me what stayed with me from the book, even as I realized that my adequate and sometimes good memory often failed to retain the complexity of a book a month after reading it. But this book has meaning for me on a number of levels, both the personal and the artistic, and some key concepts have stayed with me because of their relevance.

Foer writes about the fact that we are using our memories in ways for which they were not originally designed. Memories weren’t designed to remember numbers; they were designed to rely on visual indicators for such practical tasks as determining if something was safe to eat. Thus most of the methods of retaining memory revolve around creating memorable visual imagery.

If you read this blog you know that I combine painting and story. I am often surprised when people come into my studio and tell me they were there a year ago and remember a story I told about a painting. Often they bring someone with them and ask me to tell them a particular story or show them a particular painting. My paintings seem to become memorable to them because of the accompanying stories and similarly the stories remain because of their association with imagery. It seems like a pretty basic concept, but I never fully appreciated the interrelationship between imagery and story until I began to think about it through the lens of memory.

When I take a story and imagine how to evoke it in a painting, I often combine disparate imagery, juxtaposing different times and places. When I give talks about my artwork, I don’t need notes to evoke the accompanying story. The image is a more than adequate prompt even providing sequencing similar to the rooms of a memory palace as I work my way through the directionality inherent in the painting. The act of doing a painting is actually not so different than that of creating a memory palace.

I used to keep a sketchbook when I traveled and when I recall those trips it is from the vantage point from which I did each sketch, fixed in memory by the sheer attentiveness required to do a drawing. I still remember a trip to Sorrento over Easter when there was a religious procession in the evening. It felt as if it would be disrespectful to take a photo so I mentally took a snapshot, noticing the shopkeepers framed in the light of their doorways and the sconces casting a glow on the stone walls. When we returned to our hotel I pulled out my pencils and recreated in great detail the image I had just committed to memory. I hadn’t thought myself capable of such a feat and was surprised at the capacity of my memory, one of the lessons of this book. The other lesson… paying attention is a lot of work and the very act of doing so is what contributes to memory. It is not something we tend to do habitually in this time when so much memory is externalized to computers and phones.

An artist friend told me that people often purchase her paintings because they remind them of something in their memory. Whether it is tapping existing memories or creating new ways to join story and imagery in memory, art and memory clearly have a connection. Story provides context, art provides visuals and the two together create a powerful vehicle for learning and retention.

 

Telling the Story

This week we are opening a six month exhibition of three bodies of my work that relate to the Holocaust.  This exhibition is housed in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center on the second floor of the Barry Family Campus in Minneapolis (4330 Cedar Lake Rd South).  The show is very much a collaborative effort with sponsorship by Talmud Torah, the U of M's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest and the Tychman Shapiro Gallery.

The focus of this exhibition and related programming is the question of how we tell the story of the Holocaust, particularly as we have fewer survivors to share their first-hand testimony.  Over time, “story” becomes “history” and the immediacy is lost while distortion becomes all too prevalent. 

As you enter the gallery you see my series “A Hole in Time” that looks at the pre-war Jewish community of Radom, Poland, the town my grandfather came from.    Drawn from imagery in a 1937 film of the Jews of Radom, these paintings evoke snapshots of a once thriving community.  Coupled with this artwork are the pre-war photographs of my friend Dora who grew up in Radom and was 15 years old when the war broke out.  Her photos were hidden in the shoes of her brother and her husband during their time in the camps.  We had the opportunity to exhibit this work and Dora’s photographs in Radom, Poland in 2011.

That series leads into my work on Lithuania where I looked for the traces of the former Jewish community and how Lithuania deals with the history that transpired on its soil.  My discomfort with the reframing of history that has occurred in Lithuania is expressed in several of these paintings.  When I toured the Vilnius Genocide Museum in 2009, much to my puzzlement, there was nothing on the Holocaust.  Keep in mind that the town was 45% Jewish and 95% of the Jews were murdered, the most significant case of genocide that ever occurred in that region.  If the Genocide Museum were your source of information, you would not realize the Holocaust occurred.  It addressed only the Soviet occupation. There is no need to actively deny the Holocaust, reframing and silence do a more than adequate job of that.  This series is called “The Silence Speaks Loudly” as I found the silence quite deafening.

My third series is drawn from the Jewish Identity and Legacy project.  As part of this project* I interviewed a range of Jewish elders and then developed artwork around their stories.  Included in this exhibition are interviews with four local survivors around whose stories I developed both artwork and video.

I must confess that when I was developing this artwork, I didn’t think in terms of the larger story arc.  In each case I was following a thread that intrigued me and that was sufficient.  In fact, the broader theme emerged only after I grouped these series into one exhibition.  I then began to see how they knit together. 

All the work is around the common theme of story and in each case I had the opportunity to gather stories first-hand from those who lived them.  In Lithuania I heard from our guides, a former partisan and a hidden child.  My friend Dora shared her stories of our common Polish ancestral town, both before and during the war.  In Minnesota I learned the experiences of Jewish elders who survived the war and built new lives in Minnesota.   In each case I had the opportunity to hear the stories directly.  I have deep admiration for these dynamic people in their 80s and 90s who have a commitment to educating others in the hopes of making “never again” a reality.  I often find myself thinking that ten years from now they are unlikely to be here, and what then?  I already see history being rewritten in Lithuania.  How do we keep it alive and immediate?  How do we keep it from being distorted to meet the agendas of different groups?  And what is my responsibility, and yours, to keep it alive?

My artwork grew out of a need to both process what I was learning and a sense of responsibility to retell the stories.  I often feel that my efforts are meager compared to the power of first-hand testimony, but it is my small effort to keep the stories alive and accessible. 


*Jewish Identity and Legacy interviews were funded by the State of Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund, administered through the Minnesota Historical Society