Religious intolerance is a topical subject anytime, including since the controversy over the Trump Administration ban on Muslim immigration. This FREE exhibition on the Roots of Zionism explores how it grew from anti-Semitism. Perhaps you’ll find parallels to today’s news headlines.
The exhibit Zionismus—The German Roots of Zionism opens Tuesday, Feb. 6th at the Leo Baeck Institute in The Village, with a FREE introduction by religious scholar David Engel at 6:30pm. The exhibit gathers artifacts from the institute’s collection of books, photos, papers, postcards and more.
Registration is required to ensure space. The Leo Baeck Institute is at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th St.
Zionism background, via the Leo Baeck Institute:
The dream that Theodor Herzl gave voice to at the end of the 19th century, for a place for the Jewish religion and culture to flourish, was largely a response to discrimination against Jews and Jewish poverty in Eastern Europe. Yet Herzl himself, and many of his early confederates, emanated from assimilated milieus in cities like Vienna and Berlin, where Jews enjoyed unprecedented rights and prosperity in this period. Indeed, many of the men and women who laid the foundations of the Zionist movement shared an allegiance to Kaiser and fatherland, or Bildung and Kultur, that was often as strong as their attachment to Judaism. Until World War I, German was the lingua franca of the Zionist movement, and German-speaking Europe was the base of its substantial organizational capacity.
The mainstream dismissed Zionism as a utopian folly at best and treasonous at worst. Even among committed German-speaking Zionists, few wanted to forsake their native homeland for an uncertain future in the desert, and Zionism remained a marginal position within German-speaking Jewish communities. That changed with the rise of the National Socialists in 1933, when increasing persecution led significant numbers of German Jews to reconsider the idea of a Jewish homeland as a matter of survival. No longer just a dream, Palestine had become a real place of refuge.
The exhibition Zionismus calls on books, periodicals, correspondence, and photographs from the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) to trace the transformation of Zionism from a utopian dream to matter of survival for German-speaking Jews. After traveling around the US as a poster exhibition, Zionismus will return to the LBI, where the original objects will be placed on display for the first time.
David Engel background:
Engel is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies; Chair, Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University. His books include Between Liberation and Flight: Holocaust Survivors in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership, 1944-1946; Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943-1945; and In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942. His research focuses on Modern Jewish political history, history of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Holocaust.