At the end of July, I returned from three weeks in the U.K., most of which were spent in London. As the cultural capital, the city’s attractions for Jewish visitors include but are not limited to illuminated manuscripts at the British Library, the British Museum’s Judaica collection, and the Holocaust Galleries of the Imperial War Museum. Away from London, Cambridge’s Geniza, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and Manchester’s Imperial War Museum North are among pan-U.K. installations of Jewish art, photos, and artifacts.
Although some Jewish art treasures on display throughout London, its suburbs, and elsewhere in the U.K. are correctly labeled to reflect their history, others fail to do so. There are similar omissions in attributing medical advances to Jewish researchers. When museum or library collections that have obvious Jewish connections or innovations by Jews remain unacknowledged, those collections negate – read: deny – Jews’ positive impact on society.
In recent years, Jewish voices in U.K. arts have contested both a dearth of Jewish characters in theater and TV and Jewish actors chosen to play them. This is a significant issue, but it deviates from the focus here and deserves its own platform. And lest one imagine that I am singling out the U.K.’s considerable achievements in arts and science for reprimand, read on.
Do the U.K. and U.S. experiences below represent cancel culture? In a study (Vogel, Anderson, Porteus, et al., 2021) of how Americans defined it, 14% of respondents pointed to censorship of speech or history. Rewind to my cancel culture experience, before the term went viral.
My Road to Recognizing Cancel Culture
Pre-2006, I visited a London gallery’s temporary photo exhibit on eugenics, a pseudoscience alleging some races’ superior physical characteristics and others’ inferior ones. Eugenics claimed to predict feeblemindedness, predisposition to criminal behavior, and other “undesirable” traits in “undesirable” populations.
I was disturbed that these photos’ annotations lacked sufficient context. The captions failed to take the consequences of eugenics to the next level by explaining how it was manipulated by the Nazis to justify genocides of people of color, Slavs, Roma, and others, most extensively Jews. I confided my concerns to the Open University’s late lifelong learning pioneer Naomi Sargant (aka Lady Haringey), a mensch whom I had previously interviewed. Naomi suggested that I register these concerns with the exhibit’s curators. Here’s what I did: Nothing.
On another occasion, I visited the British Museum’s Roman Britain exhibit to indulge my fascination with that history. Lo and behold, protected by a large case, there was a beautifully engraved silver bowl with a six-pointed star in the middle. The placard described it as of pagan origins. I would have described it as the work of a Jewish craftsman or belonging to a Roman Jew. Again, I did nothing.
Fast forward to July 2024. My plane home was canceled after the previous week’s worldwide “outage” debacle, so I grabbed the bonus day to visit the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum. I walked through the recommended jewelry exhibit and stopped at a solid gold necklace, largely because within it, there shined a stunning Magen David. The case’s notation for item #4 stated that it originated in 10th-11th-century Cordoba. No Jewish connection was mentioned.
Enough is enough. I wasn’t going back to my earlier Millennial Silence. I took a visitor comments card (see photo) and explained the star’s “Jewish connection” – that Cordoba’s prominent Jewish community was once home to an illustrious resident – you guessed it – Moses Maimonides. I asked them to investigate and correct the card. I left my contact information with the Museum. Since then, I have received emails reiterating the Museum’s commitment to accuracy and that the appropriate staff would research the matter, but, to date, no definitive response from them has been received.
I left the V&A, with 90 minutes to spend next door at the Science Museum. The docent suggested I visit the Space and Medicine exhibits, which I did, in that order. The space exhibit extolled man’s progress in traversing the universe, beginning with rocket science (advanced in large part by Nazi scientist Werner von Braun) and progressing to pioneering astronauts – Alan G. Shepard, Neil Armstrong, and Yuri Gagarin and others – all named.
Then I proceeded to the Medicine wing, a testament to man’s medical discoveries and those scientists behind them. One can observe how penicillin, the wonder drug discovery of Alexander Fleming, saved lives. Moving on, an iron lung and devices that alleviated the suffering of polio victims are displayed. A small card describes how inoculation halted the polio epidemic, without mentioning Jonas Salk, who first developed the polio vaccine, and Albert Sabin, whose palatable oral polio vaccine was more easily administered to children.
The Science Museum was closing, so I quickly submitted a visitor comments card. I noted that while the museum acknowledged innovations and innovators in science and medicine, it did not do so for Salk and Sabin, whose discoveries had global impact. Was this because they were Jewish, I wondered? The museum’s reply indicated that appropriate research would be conducted and after some days, a representative responded. She cited a display on Ernst Rachwalsky, a German doctor who transported his x-ray machine with him when he fled to England in 1936, but said that in the Medicines and Communities galleries, where the polio epidemic is documented, there are no stories of individual scientists. I didn’t request a story, or even that the museum mention Salk’s and Sabin’s Judaism.
Rather, I asked them “just to put a small placard mentioning their names as associated with each vaccine. I would hope this can be implemented by the museum, because source attribution, or giving credit to those who have innovated or made invaluable contributions, should be standard practice.” No response has been forthcoming.
When Jewish culture and Jews are being canceled, isn’t it time to voice our concerns?
Homegrown Cancelation
My colleague Gary Morgenstein recently remarked that when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened its museum about the history of Hollywood, it omitted virtually all references to Jews – an omission so grievous as to beg calling out. Eventually, public outrage at the Academy’s revisionist history forced the Academy to include the Jewish immigrant creators of “the studio system.” Adding insult to injury, the amended exhibit diminished these men by characterizing them as morally or otherwise depraved. Why it has come to that is, since October 7, really a rhetorical question.
Among the nations, Jews have contributed to the development of science, medicine, the arts, and almost every walk of life, disproportionate to the global Jewish population. Jews, who account for less than 0.2% demographically, comprise approximately 22% of Nobel Prize winners – 41% for economics, 26% for medicine, and 21% for physics. Yet these contributions are increasingly ignored or outright canceled. It’s time to call out this cancellation for what it is.
Anyone who would like a complete list of sources mentioned above should contact the author at [email protected].
