opinion
This Is Not Art!
BY DANIEL S. MARIASCHIN
O nce again, the nexus of art, culture, politics and
political bias against Israel and antisemitism is
roiling Germany.

The 15th Documenta, an international art show
held every five years in Kassel, Germany, opened
on June 18 and runs through Sept. 25. Curated
this year by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa
and including work by Taring Padi — an artists’
collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia — the
exhibition highlights works on violence and war,
some of it focusing on the late Indonesian dictator
Suharto. Included in the exhibition is an egregious
antisemitic banner in the style of street art or peo-
ple’s art, depicting Mossad operatives with pig
heads and faces against a backdrop of a classic
antisemitic character of an Orthodox Jew with
peyot and fangs, smoking a cigar and wearing a
hat adorned by an SS symbol.

At first covered up after significant outcry, it
was finally removed. But not before it was widely
seen. Removing the piece does not undo the
damage. Called out for this Der Stürmer-type “art,” Tarang
Padi’s response could be seen as either daft or
intentionally meant to defend the purpose of the
piece: “It is not meant to be related in any way to
anti-Semitism. … We are saddened that details
in this banner are understood differently from
its original purpose. We apologize for the hurt
caused in this context.”
“Understood differently from its original pur-
pose”? For heaven’s sake, this exhibition is occur-
ring in Germany. There is no hidden meaning in
any of this. For all to see, are symbols like that of
the SS that are banned from being displayed pub-
licly in Germany. And the Mossad with pig’s faces?
Who could miss this?
After an initial feeble response about respect
for “artistic freedom,” Germany’s Minister of
Culture Claudia Roth recalibrated and said
that such an expression “finds its limits” with
pieces like this. German President Frank-Walter
Steinmeier, in his remarks at the opening of the
exhibition, after saying that “art must provoke,”
acknowledged the antisemitism in the Taring
Padi piece by adding: “There is a need to talk
about these limits.”
The Israeli embassy in Germany simply called
it out for what it is: “Goebbels-style propaganda.”
Adding insult to injury, the inclusion in the exhi-
bition of the Palestinian collective, “Question of
Funding,” seemingly unconnected to Taring Padi,
has added additional fuel to the Documenta
fire. A number of German Jewish organizations
expressed their outrage over the presence of
12 JUNE 30, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
IF THIS IS “ART” —
WITH ITS HOOKED NOSES
AND STEREOTYPICAL SIDE
LOCKS, WHICH WAS THE
STUFF OF INCESSANT
ATTACKS ON GERMAN JEWRY
LESS THAN EIGHT DECADES
AGO, WITHIN THE MEMORY
TODAY OF THOSE WHO
SURVIVED THE SHOAH —
THEN SOMETHING NEEDS
TO BE DONE, AND SOON,
TO SENSITIZE INSTITUTIONS
LIKE DOCUMENTA.

the group, targeting Documenta for politicizing
its exhibition through the participation of a group
with a pronounced bias against Israel.

How does this happen in Germany? For the
past several years, some government-supported
Jewish museums, of all places, have been criti-
cized for politically tinged exhibitions that promote
the BDS campaign against Israel and criticize
Israeli settlement policy.

And now this.

The immediate reaction by Documenta, in a
moment of public-relations panic, was to cover
the offensive piece.

But covering up art revealed to be so egre-
giously offensive is merely to apply a Band-Aid.

It doesn’t speak to how such antisemitic-soaked
pieces like this manage to make their way into
otherwise respectable museums, galleries and
exhibitions. Is it sheer sloppiness and inattention
to detail? Or is it more than that: a way of using
art to express deeply held biases and prejudice?
Or in the case of Germany, is it a generational
issue, where the present leaders in politics, art
and culture don’t see the need or urgency or are
removed from the historical imperative, to block
such expressions of antisemitism on German
soil? Or all of the above?
In taking down the piece, Kassel Mayor Christian
Geselle said “we feel ashamed” with the appear-
ance of the Taring Padi piece having caused
“immense damage to the City of Kassel, the State
of Hesse and Documenta.” Roth has called for an
investigation into how the banner was included in
the exhibition in the first place.

Documenta’s general director, Sabine
Schormann, who also heads its primary exhibi-
tion space in Kassel — the Fridericianum — has
come under pointed criticism for her handling of
the issue, offering apologies to those “who have
been hurt” by the controversy and distancing her
organization from the Taring Padi piece.

Too often, our community has been on the
receiving end of expressions of remorse or “pain
caused” to the point where, once revealed, we
sort of expect that apologetic knock on the pro-
verbial door from a neighbor who just didn’t real-
ize what antisemitism is or why it causes us to rise
up when it appears.

The concern is not about this piece only. If
this is “art” — with its hooked noses and ste-
reotypical side locks, which was the stuff of
incessant attacks on German Jewry less than
eight decades ago, within the memory today of
those who survived the Shoah — then something
needs to be done, and soon, to sensitize institu-
tions like Documenta. There is no shelf-life on
Holocaust remembrance or on the antisemitism
that brought it all about.

Pig faces and SS symbols have no place appear-
ing in today’s Germany or anywhere else. That is
concerning enough.

Still, are we the only ones who are exercised
about this? As antisemitism sweeps the globe,
aided by the Internet through “art” like this, it is a
question to seriously ponder. JE
Daniel S. Mariaschin is the CEO of B’nai B’rith
International.




opinion
The Torah Supports Me
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
id-work / DigitalVision Vectors
F or years I worked in an office where, in order
to make an outside phone call, you had to dial
9 plus 1 plus your number. At least once a week,
the police would show up in the lobby because
someone had accidentally dialed 9-1-1. The head of
HR would scold us for not being more careful, and I
would think, just change the system!
In Jewish law, there is a name for rules or
actions that would tempt even the innocent to
make a mistake — or worse, a sin: “lifnei iver.”
It comes from Leviticus 19:14: “You shall not …
place a stumbling block before the blind.” Beyond
its literal meaning, the verse has been used to
establish the principle that you should remove
temptation from the path of those who may be
morally weak.

This became a thing in my house recently, when
my wife asked if I could be more careful when
opening our kitchen cabinets. The cabinets are
off-white, and I was leaving smudges. I replied —
with admirable honesty, I thought — that I couldn’t
break a lifetime habit of the way I reach for a cab-
inet handle, and if I said I would try I would proba-
bly be lying. Smudges, I said, are the price we pay
for beige cabinets and dainty handles. Blame the
design, not me.

What ensued was what diplomats call a frank
and honest discussion.

Convinced I was right, I sought an outside voice:
“Judge” John Hodgman, the comedian who writes
a satiric ethical advice column for The New York
Times Magazine. I explained our impasse in an
email, and Hodgman replied in the May 20 issue:
“Seen from 10,000 feet, I would agree that your
wife’s request is unreasonable. That said, from
10,000 feet, I can’t see your disgusting hands. I
can’t see what kind of muck you get into, or what
kind of smears you’re leaving as you blindly paw
at the cabinet face until you hit the handle. (Maybe
you can’t, either. Spouses often see cleanliness
differently depending on how they grew up, and
some are just dirt-blind.) Even if your hands are
clean of all sin, don’t meet one marital crime with
another. Don’t lie and promise to try. Just promise
to try, and tell the truth.”
The comments that followed were not friendly
to my cause, to put it mildly. One reader com-
pared me to Tarzan. Another urged me to be a
“grown-up.” But my favorite response came from a self-de-
scribed architect and former interior designer,
who I felt got closest to my original point, writing,
“If your home’s aesthetic is so fragile that it’s
ruined by normal daily use it’s a serious design
flaw. Everyone living in a home should feel at ease
interacting with their environment, and everyone
has different sensitivities and habits. The design
should support them all.”
In other words, home design shouldn’t be a
stumbling block before a guy with Tarzan hands.

The urban planner Jane Jacobs advocated this
sort of user-first architecture, writing, “There is
no logic that can be superimposed on the city;
people make it, and it is to them … that we must fit
our plans.” For example, if you want to keep mail
from piling up on the dining room table, you need
another little table closer to the front door (another
recurring argument from what is, astoundingly, my
first and still extant marriage).

Probably the best-known demonstration of
user-first design comes from so-called “desire
lines”: the footpaths created by people who
ignore the actual sidewalks around a building or
park and create their own routes of least resis-
tance. The smart planner pays attention to the
routes people actually want to take, and then
pours the concrete.

A close cousin of this approach is behavioral
design, which tries to influence the way people
use spaces and objects. Good behavioral design
might, for instance, put a hand sanitizer right near
the place where you are likely to pick up or spread
germs. Or, in the case of my kitchen cabinets, it
would make the handles big enough or inviting
enough that my chances of smudging the doors
is minimized.

I obsess about this topic not only because
I want to win the argument with my wife, but
because I think “lifnei iver” has important public
policy implications. As Jacobs understood, good,
intuitive design can turn private and public spaces
into friendlier, safer places by putting users first.

For decades public housing was a disaster in
part because designers ignored the ways people
actually congregated, relaxed and kept an eye
on each other. My son the engineer helps design
hospital equipment intended to keep tired, over-
worked doctors and nurses from pushing the
wrong buttons or forgetting a crucial step.

On the flip side, sinister behavioral design might
coerce someone into, say, racking up debts on an
addictive gambling app, or hooking kids on vap-
ing, as the Food and Drug Administration argued
in ordering Juul to remove its e-cigarettes from
the U.S. marketplace.

The latter is exactly the scenario that “lifnei iver”
proscribes: setting a vulnerable person up for fail-
ure. In an article for Chabad.org, Yehuda Shurpin
discusses the possibilities — and dilemmas — of
applying lifnei iver to the current debate over gun
safety. On the one hand, he writes, “The Talmud
tells us that one is forbidden to sell dangerous
items — including weapons, or anything com-
monly used to manufacture weapons, as well as
their accessories — to any person who may have
the intent to use them to cause harm or perpetrate
a crime.”
On the other hand, the law is understandably
complex when it comes to determining how to
anticipate that “intent” — and under what circum-
stances the seller is culpable. And yet, the tradi-
tion understands that the idea that “guns don’t
kill, people do” is specious: “We do not want peo-
ple getting hurt or dying,” writes Shurpin. “And
restricting evil-doers’ access to materials that
make this possible is an obvious course of action.”
Whether we are talking about gun control,
office phones or kitchen design, the principle is
the same: People are inherently clumsy and fal-
lible, and relying on their best intentions to solve
a problem is a recipe for failure. Sometimes you
have to ban the dangerous tool — or change the
number from 9 to, well, any. other. number.

Ultimately, I didn’t consult a rabbi to solve my
kitchen dilemma. But I did answer to a higher
authority: It’s now my job to clean the cabinets. JE
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

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