One enters The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, the updated core exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, through a dark corridor. Yiddish and Hebrew songs are piped in as well-lit photographs and bright video screens show moments of domestic life from across the Jewish diaspora from decades ago. Families from Germany, Poland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Greece, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere are engaged in activities lively and mundane. Then, on the wall, in print too big to ignore, the punchline: “Many of these Jews were murdered by April 1943.”
“That was my idea,” Professor Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, one of the primary historian-curators of the exhibit, tells me via a Zoom interview. “They wanted a map or something, and I said ‘no, we need something that hits you!’”
