Jew-in-the-Box

Several weeks after the election, I took a road trip through the South. It was my first time in the region: beyond a Miami spring break in college and a volunteer trip to New Orleans after Katrina, I had never seen the America below Washington, DC. At the end of our first day on the road, we decided to stop for dinner in Staunton, Virginia. As we pulled off 81 onto Lee Highway behind a truck with a confederate-flag sticker plastered on the cab window, I felt surprised to feel a thrill of familiarity. Nine months before a group of torch-bearing supremacists made the connection coarsely obvious, I recognized Germany in Virginia.

I moved abroad when I was twenty-two for a year-long internship at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Like the South, Berlin is a place where the past is never far from mind: streets named Karl-Marx-Allee, buildings marked with bullet holes, and the path of the Berlin wall traced by a double row of red cobblestones—a pink scar that runs through the city streets, a semi-healed wound underfoot. But unlike America, Germany has made an art out of re-appropriating its history into its landscape and creating sites for meaningful confrontation. From my vantage point, the Jewish Museum Berlin was at the heart of the city’s reckoning