by Jon Lackman | 8 July 2010 | Architecture, Contemporary, Museums
The Winter 2010 issue of Critical Inquiry is gripping, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention. Editor W.J.T. Mitchell gives the background in his introduction:
In the spring of 2009, Critical Inquiry received an article from [UCLA English and comparative literature professor] Saree Makdisi critiquing the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation’s proposed Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. Designed by Frank Gehry, the proposed museum has been the subject of controversy since it was first proposed. The chosen site was on one of the oldest Arab cemeteries in the Middle East … [We] accepted the article for publication with the idea of soliciting responses that would fairly represent the major positions on the issues. We began by inviting Frank Gehry himself to respond, which he agreed to do. At the same time, however, he requested that Critical Inquiry provide space for a response from a team of Israeli scholars that Gehry regarded as more conversant with the complex legal issues … [We also invited responses from] Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, who has written extensively on Gehry, [and from] Daniel Monk, an Israeli architect and the head of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University … The whole dossier is gathered here [together with Makdisi's response to the responses] … We should mention one event that occurred in the early fall of 2009, just as this dossier was nearing completion. Frank Gehry announced his decision to withdraw from the [museum] project, but not, he hastened to assure us, because of Makdisi’s essay.
In his essay, Gehry states, “Although the court-imposed delays have now passed, for scheduling reasons I have withdrawn from the project and am no longer involved with it or the project owner, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”
It seems impossible for me to summarize or quote from the issue’s many lengthy essays in a fair and representative fashion. That said, here first is a portion of Makdisi’s:
… The redefinition of tolerance as an exclusive claim and the usurpation of universality enacted by the Museum of Tolerance must be read in this context as well – as a profoundly ironic gesture, though one for which the irony must be seen as unavailable to the project’s backers, even when it is stated as baldly as in The Independent’s headline reporting the story, “Israel Plans to Build ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on Muslim Graves.” (Or for that matter when it is considered in terms of the fact that this museum so unrelentingly hostile to the other in the name of tolerance is being designed by an architect who has only recently publicly embraced his Jewishness but who, in an age of actual intolerance in America in the 1950s had felt compelled to change his name from Goldberg to Gehry and to suppress his Jewish identity in order better to fit in with a mainstream from which he felt he might be excluded as other) …
What is at work here, then, is not a first-order kind of denial and erasure, but rather a second-order kind. This form of Zionist subjectivity is premised on the act of denying that there has been a denial, erasing the fact that an erasure has taken place. Rather than denying the rights of the Palestinians, it denies that their rights have been denied …
This second-order denial is exactly what the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem is all about … And it is perfectly fitting, then, not simply that such a museum should be built on top of an ethnically cleansed graveyard but that those who will eventually gather to celebrate its opening – and those who will visit it in the years afterwards—will have no idea of the profundity of the historical, material, and psychical layers of denial on which they stand.
And here is some more of Gehry’s essay:
When I was eight years old I lived in a town in northern Ontario – Timmins – and there were only thirty Jewish families. It was a mining town of thirty thousand people. My family name is Goldberg. I was the only Jew at the elementary school I attended. I was beaten up regularly on the way home from school for killing Christ. This went on for a couple of years; I would come home bloody. There were unfair numbers against me. At some point I gathered up the strength to fight back and prevail … At the end, the last year I was in Timmins, I became friends with my enemies. So this experience ingrained in me a model of how to deal with anti-Semitism at a very young age …
Now many years later I have outgrown any religious involvement. I am married to a Catholic. My sons have been baptized, and I’m generally liberal about what people believe in and don’t have a need for formal religious involvement. Of course, there are residual cultural gratifications like bagels and lox and matzo ball soup. My name was changed to Gehry to please my former wife, who was pregnant and worried about bringing a child into a world that showed its anti-Semitism even in my college days at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s …
Why would I read in a so-called scholarly treatise on the Israeli-Palestinian issue a critical word about my hiding my Jewishness by changing my name? The Hitler period proved that it did not matter whether you were religious or had a Jewish name; as long as you were considered Jewish even marginally you were put in the ovens … [Makdisi] further undermines his credibility by choosing to enter the field of architectural criticism — a field in which he is obviously illiterate. He discusses the symbolism of walls from model pictures when he does not have any clue what they really are and how they look in real time and at real scale.
