Original Signed Print to Search Again Mike Casper

( JTA ) – A historian is accusing the Jewish Museum in New York of distorting the truth virtually a major creative person'south ethically contentious deport during and later Earth State of war 2.

Lithuanian-born Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde film, who died in 2019, is the subject of a major exhibit currently running at the museum.

The exhibit, "The Camera Was E'er Running," celebrates Mekas' role as a "filmmaker, poet, critic, and institution-builder" who "was forced to abscond his native Lithuania and [was] unable to return until 1971." Although Mekas was not Jewish, he ran a serial of flick screenings at the museum in the late 1960s, when information technology was one of the few major venues in New York City hosting contemporary art.

According to Michael Casper, a researcher at Yale University who specializes in the history of Lithuania ( and Hasidic Brooklyn ), Mekas was more involved with the Lithuanian movement that aided the Nazi cause than he had e'er let on.

A few years earlier the exhibit opened, Casper published an essay  in the New York Review of Books documenting Mekas' role in running two newspapers containing Nazi propaganda and antisemitic bile during World War II. Casper also noted that "different other members of his activist circle, Mekas was not an anti-Semitic polemicist."

The historian argued that Mekas, in his extensive repertoire of films and writings, and in interviews, fostered defoliation about his wartime feel by conflating dates and fudging certain details while allowing many to believe he was a Jew or a Holocaust survivor, or that he had spent the state of war fighting against the Nazis.

Casper had hoped an showroom on Mekas at the Jewish Museum would become beyond celebrating his artistic achievements and interrogate the uncomfortable aspects of Mekas' past that Casper had surfaced.

"Surely the Jewish Museum would address the essential question of Mekas' activities during Earth War Ii and his life'south intersections with Jewish history in Lithuania, one of the most important centers of modern Jewish civilisation and one devastated past the Holocaust," Casper wrote in a review of the exhibit published in Jewish Currents. "If not there, where?"

Instead, what Casper says he encountered at the museum was the same uncritical hero-worship to which Mekas had e'er been treated.

"The curator introduces dozens of factual errors and misleading interpretations, contributing not only to the revisionism surrounding this single creative person, but mobilizing a sentimental zipper to Mekas in a manner that erodes the integrity of the broader historical tape, and the Jewish history that the museum should be committed to honoring," Casper wrote.

Jonas Mekas

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas attends The Album Movie Archives Benefit and Auction in New York Urban center, March 2, 2017. (Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for Anthology Film Archives)

In a response to a asking for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the museum'south senior director of communications, Anne Scher, released a argument defending the showroom and referring to Casper's arguments as "unsubstantiated points."

She added that the exhibit's curator, Kelly Taxter, did extensive enquiry on Mekas' life. Taxter's work benefited from access to Mekas soon earlier he died and to his archive. She has worked closely with his estate, which was involved in the exhibit and in the museum's effort to defend it.

"No evidence has been found to support Casper's claim that Mekas falsely presented his early biography for personal benefit," Scher wrote. "The Jewish Museum stands backside the creative person'due south telling of his own life story in presenting an exhibition of his cinematic piece of work."

Taxter, meanwhile, said she had touched upon Mekas' wartime experience in an essay accompanying the showroom and that it was "sketched" in the museum'southward displays. Only she added that this topic was not "the thrust" of her curatorial work.

"The exhibition was not about Jewish history or the history of Jews in Lithuania; information technology is an exhibition about a filmmaker whose consequential past intersected with a similarly consequential era in the history of the Jewish Museum and whose artwork, I posit, is largely informed by his experiences of flight, exile, and living equally a refugee," she said in a written comment.

It was not the first fourth dimension the museum had contemplated how it would reply to the questions arising from Casper'south findings. Before the exhibit opened, the museum distributed an internal memo titled, "Talking Points for Frontline Staff," a copy of which was obtained past JTA.

The two-folio memo names Casper and attempts to abnegate his essay by distilling concerns into a ready of questions: Was Mekas an antisemite or complicit in Nazi atrocities in Lithuania? Why was the museum doing an showroom on him? Staff were and so supplied with reassuring responses, called "key messages."

"The Jewish Museum would never present the work of an creative person who was complicit in Nazi atrocities," reads 1 of the fundamental letters. It is followed past a "background," which argues that what Casper sees as Mekas' "intentional misrepresentation of historical events" is simply Mekas' "manner of coping with trauma."

The memo also notes the official reason for the exhibit, which is to revisit Mekas' connection to the museum — which had been forgotten until he mentioned it to 1 of the museum's curators in passing.

A second memo distributed to staff, also obtained by JTA, anticipated further questions about why the museum was the proper place for an exhibit on Mekas, who wasn't Jewish and whose work didn't focus on Jewish content.

"Why here?" the memo asks. "Jonas Mekas'south life and work reverberate stories and experiences shared by refugees and immigrants of Jewish heritage in the wake of World War II."

Michael Casper

Historian Michael Casper has questioned the museum's presentation of Mekas' by. (Courtesy of Casper)

For Casper, this language reflects the museum'southward larger failure to rectify the confusion about Mekas and to clarify that while Mekas may take been a refugee, the circumstances of his exile from Europe were vastly different than those of a Holocaust survivor.

In 1941, Casper has pointed out, Mekas was writing poesy and living the life of a budding intellectual in or near Birzai when the town's ii,400 Jews were massacred in a wood by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.

While some people take assumed that when Mekas talked about fleeing Lithuania he was talking most fleeing the Nazis, the truth is likely quite different, co-ordinate to Casper. Mekas had stayed in the land throughout the war right until the Soviet Matrimony was on the cusp of pushing the Nazis out. When he fled, he just traveled deeper into the Tertiary Reich, boarding a train to Vienna.

Before he could attain his destination, however, Mekas' train was redirected and he was detained by Nazi officers for an unknown reason and eventually forced to work in a German factory for a few months. The incident, which Mekas never fully explained, looms big in the image he and his supporters take projected, crowding out, according to Casper, the retention of his earlier wartime experience.

The exhibit has garnered positive reviews, primarily in the art press just also in the New York Times. The Times review  refers to Casper's revelations but uses them to assert that in Mekas' example, concepts similar reliability and consistency cannot serve as proper barometers for truth-telling. "It'southward Mekas's refusal to impose whatever single narrative on his work that gives information technology its truth," The Times wrote.

These positive reviews, still, confute other, decidedly different reactions to the Casper affair. At least some of the museum's staff are angry that the exhibit didn't tackle Mekas' World State of war Two record, co-ordinate to interviews. And while the staff members are not willing to go on the tape with their criticism citing a prohibition on speaking to the media, several cultural critics and scholars reached by JTA are.

Richard Brody, a film critic of The New Yorker, who is Jewish, told JTA in an email that he plant the allegations in Casper's original essay "cogent and troubling." He said he hadn't gone to see the Mekas exhibit but that he'd "expect any exhibit centered on him to address Casper'south findings seriously."

Also Jewish, film critic J. Hoberman, a lifelong Mekas gentleman, had called Casper'southward article a "bombshell" and said it "stirred upwardly conflicted feelings."  He told JTA in an email that he has "bang-up respect" for Casper's scholarship and expressed misgivings near the exhibit.

"Mekas is an undeniably major figure in American culture," Hoberman wrote. "Nonetheless, I would have preferred a less simplistic exhibition or better that the Jewish Museum had honored any one of a dozen Jewish filmmakers (many of them women) active in avant-garde movie theatre."

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Shandler has been post-obit events from an academic vantage point. A professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, Shandler studies Jewish memory practices effectually the Holocaust, including the role museums play in commemorating Holocaust history.

A temporary strange passport of Jonas Mekas, issued by the German Third Reich, lists his profession every bit worker and his accost as Elmshorn, c. 1944. (Estate of Jonas Mekas, courtesy of the Jewish Museum)

Shandler told JTA that he was disappointed with how the museum handled the topic, and that he couldn't call back of a similar example in the long history of controversial curatorial decisions by Jewish museums.

"They are taking at confront value the narrative that Mekas had crafted nearly his wartime experience," he said. "It would be problematic anywhere, in any museum. But I think information technology is doubly so in a Jewish museum. Information technology really raises questions well-nigh their understanding of their mission."

Several people have pointed out with concern that the exhibit is funded in part by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the Lithuanian Culture Found and the Lithuanian Motion picture Centre, which are government entities. Lithuania has a complicated relationship with its Holocaust past, rejecting the kind of revisionism that has taken root in neighboring Poland but also struggling with the role that local collaboration played in the murder of 95% of the country'south prewar Jewish population.

Scher, the museum spokesperson, said the museum makes its curatorial decisions independently from the interests of funders.

Years before the exhibit, a 94-year-old Mekas allowed himself to be interviewed by Casper only rejected the conclusions of the scholar's inquiries. When Casper published his original essay, the artist dismissed it as "fake news." The incident prompted Mekas to claim the final word by submitting to an interview with the U.South. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the recording of which is more six hours long.

While some of Mekas' friends and disciples expressed shock and dismay about Casper'due south revelations, many people came to Mekas' support, criticizing or even attacking  Casper. "The wagons started circling immediately to protect a sacred figure of the avant-garde," wrote Pic Quarterly editor B. Ruby Rich .

In defending Mekas, Taxter, the exhibit'due south curator, has gone further than nigh.

Responding to a request for comment from JTA, Taxter sent a copy of Casper's Jewish Currents essay annotated with dozens of comments, offering an almost betoken-past-indicate rebuttal.

She disputed various facts and characterizations, writing that "Casper insinuates in this article and in his NYRB article that Mekas was a Nazi sympathizer or had Nazi allegiances, but he has nonetheless to present any bear witness to back up the claim. In the absence of such substantiation, available historical cloth and Mekas's biography have been accustomed as fact."

She also claimed that Casper became so zealous about this work that he harassed Mekas or worse.

"In ongoing correspondence between Michael Casper and Jonas Mekas, Casper regularly demanded information from Mekas under the guise of then-called testimony," she wrote. "The tone of these emails is often aggressive, with the cumulative consequence of these emails existence that Casper was bullying or even threatening Mekas."

To support this allegation, Taxter quoted from Casper's emails to Mekas and eventually supplied 40 pages of email exchanges obtained through Mekas' son Sebastian.

In an example of the declared harassment highlighted by Taxter, Casper had written to Mekas, "You have spent many years erasing important details from your story. What I want is for you lot to confront and acknowledge them, as painful or hard as they may exist."

Casper rejected the notion that he harassed Mekas. "The sense of urgency behind my questioning only comes from it existence at the tail end of our correspondence, and in response to Mekas's own style at that time," Casper told JTA.

Jackie Hajdenberg contributed to this story.

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Source: https://www.jta.org/2022/05/12/global/historian-accuses-nys-jewish-museum-of-sanitizing-filmmakers-world-war-ii-record-in-new-exhibit

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