Minding the Body: Space, Memory, and Visual Culture in Constructions of Jewish Identity

Abstract

While it is well established that articulations of identity must always be contextualized within time and place, only when we consider how bodies move through, touch, and are touched by physical, cognitive, and even imaginary spaces do we arrive at dynamic and intersectional expressions of identity. Using two divergent visual culture case studies, this essay first applies Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces to understand the intersection and interconnection between body, space, and culture, and how the concept of belongingness is knotted with material and representational indicators of space at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Israel. Marianne Hirsch’s ideas about the Holocaust and affiliative postmemory are also considered to further understand how Jewish bodies inherit their identifies and sense of belonging. To test how embodied spaces and affiliative postmemory or collective memory implicitly operate to help shape and articulate expressions of Jewish identities, the focus then shifts to a consideration of the eight-decade career of New York jazz musician and visual artist, Bill Wurtzel. The clever combination of “schtick and sechel” in Wurtzel’s artistic practice, activated by his movement through the Jewish spaces of his youth such as the Catskills, and through his interaction with Jewish design great, Lou Dorfsman, underscore how Jewish belonging and identity are forged at the intersection of physical and tactile “embodied spaces,” where the internal meets the external and human consciousness and experience converge.

Memory, we may say, is the shell of that which was once a body, a form of disembodied thought or reflection.

—Joan Ockman (Ockman 2006, p. 24)

1. Introduction

The discourse surrounding constructions of identities and belongingness presupposes a thinking, moving, and feeling body—one which has been shaped by any number of markers, including race, gender, class, nationality, religion, language, culture, and (dis)ableism, to name a few. For the past several decades, these bodily markers have been the subject of various scholarly treatments regarding the constructions of Jewish identities. A few such studies include Biale (2002), Brettschneider (1999), and Aviv and Schneer (2006). More recently, articulations of identity have examined the intersection of the above markers to steer away from reductive generalizations about identity formation, but how is a sense of Jewish belongingness inherited by Jewish bodies? What role do space and our movement through spaces—from the physical to the cognitive and imaginary—play in developing a sense of Jewish affiliation? Further, how does our cognitive activity in the form of memories, perspectives, and feelings collide with the experiential to determine the effect of our movement through these spaces?

When it comes to articulations of modern Jewish identities, much has been written about the Holocaust, the possibility of representation in its aftermath, and especially its impact on contouring Jewish identities from the mid-twentieth century to the present. However, less attention has been paid to the role of space—particularly the convergence of the cognitive and the experiential, or what anthropologist Setha M. Low has termed “embodied spaces”—in the construction of post-Holocaust Jewish identities (see Low 2003). If we accept that not all bodies are fashioned the same, then it follows that the ways in which they “touch space” to experience common events and even common spaces will also differ (see João Durão 2009, p. 401). As bell hooks has claimed, what we see depends entirely upon where we stand and how we occupy the space in which we stand (Hooks 2003). This realization was not lost on architect Moshe Safdie when he received the commission in 1995 to redesign the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, first established in Jerusalem in 1953 on the Mount of Remembrance. Aspiring to hold space for that which cannot be fully represented and to provide a panoramic perspective of the Holocaust, Safdie utilized architecture and multimedia storytelling devices to draw visitors in, make them attentive, and inculcate feelings of belonging, especially for the array of Jewish visitors.

This essay centers Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces, Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, and ideas about collective memory as a conceptual axis to arrive at a more integrative, entwined, and nuanced understanding of Jewish identity construction, one which looks towards indigenous conceptions of interconnectedness as a model to understand our place in the world (see Halbwachs 1992; Hirsch 2001, p. 220. See also Kimmerer 2013). In particular, it questions how Jewish bodies inherit their sense of belonging to a peoplehood, a shared history, and a culture. Low’s theory of embodied spaces is first examined in consideration of the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum owing to Safdie’s self-conscious use of architecture and spatial devices. These spatial tactics, combined with multimodal and multisensory displays, are meant to trigger somatic and visceral reactions from Jewish visitors—regardless of where they stand—to encourage their connection to the collective trauma of the Holocaust, followed by an embrace of the triumph of the establishment of the State of Israel. To test the efficacy of this entangled theoretical model in uncovering how Jewish bodies inherit their sense of belongingness, these same theories are then considered in a context that is antithetical to the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum; namely, the more playful spaces in the advertising and artistic career of New York-based artist, Bill Wurtzel. By applying this conceptual axis to two divergent case studies which use visual representation to address identity construction in the wake of rupture—one focused on the legacy of the Holocaust and the other on the legacy of immigration to America in the early 20th century—I hope to demonstrate how Jewish belonging and identity are forged at the intersection of the ecosystems of mind and body, where the internal meets the external and human consciousness and experience converge.

2. Embodied Spaces and Postmemory

…Without the role of the body, material entities would be unoriented, without the directionality of left and right, up and down, front and back.

…Body is not separate from the mind and the way the human being perceives space is interdependent on the physical structure of the body that articulates space and is articulated by it dynamically.

—Maria João Durão (2009, p. 400)

As Maria João Durão suggests in the above statements, “between body and place there is so much more than position, there is the data of our experience and expectations.” (João Durão 2009, p. 399). Following Durão’s logic, position functions both locationally and ideologically and is shaped by how the body moves through and absorbs spatial experiences. Durão’s claims build upon anthropologist Setha M. Low’s theory of embodied spaces, explained in her article, “Embodied Space(s): Anthropological Theories of Body, Space, and Culture,” wherein she posits a connection between the subjective or thinking body with its objective, physical form in order to better comprehend how the body becomes entangled in the world (Low 2003, p. 10). At the heart of Low’s theory lies a desire to supersede the customary division between the thinking and moving body by understanding how mobility and movement draw upon both the physical and metaphysical properties of the body to create space and culture (Low 2014, pp. 19–20). Leaning on the research of anthropologist Thomas Csordas, Low distinguishes between the body as a biological and social entity and embodiment, which according to Csordas, is “an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world.” (Low 2003, p 10)1 Driving this article is Low’s intersectional quest to integrate body, space, and culture in anthropological thinking so as to grasp the metaphorical and material attributes of the body interacting with and touching space.

Low acknowledges a slew of scholars before her who shared an interest in space and culture. They include Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of habitus, which aimed to discern how the body, mind, and emotions coalesced to better uncover how social status and class are embedded in everyday life. Edward Hall’s theory of proxemics asserted the body as a site of spatial orientation and people’s use of space as an aspect of culture. (Ibid., p. 13) Of special note, in the context of identity formation, is Miles Richardson, who deemed that body experience and perception could be symbolized in objects and that these same symbols could then be used to shape experiences. Infused with references to others’ embodied experiences, these symbols can effectively trigger our own “decisive experiential moments” because of how laden they are with symbolic meaning.2 Such use of symbolic artifacts serves as an important strategy to tell the story of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem and to encourage a collective sense of postmemory.

First coined in 1992 by Marianne Hirsch, the child of Holocaust survivors and a scholar of Comparative Literature, the term postmemory “describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply so as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”3 More specifically, “postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.” (Hirsch 2008, pp. 103–28). The postmemories of this second generation stem from imaginative projections, often drawing upon photographic images or material artifacts from the Holocaust rather than from their own legitimate experiences and recollections (Hirsch, p. 107).

For this reason, some have objected to the very concept of inheriting a memory that was never theirs, arguing that memory can only result from the direct experience of an event. In response to this doubt, Hirsch maintains that using “post” as a qualifier to memory acknowledges the differences between directly bearing witness as opposed to forming a memory based upon the “affective force” of images and storytelling (Ibid., p. 109) It is through images and storytelling that a “living connection” is created for the second generation (Ibid.) This supports the work of memory theorists such as Steven Schrag, who argues that memory is not simply the stored past but rather “an active process of retrieval, rearrangement, and revival.” Similar to Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, Schrag contends that theories of socially mediated trauma, wherein collective identities confront violent histories, “underscore the fact that the mnemonic is also memetic,” which is to say that memory has the capacity for replication via imitation” (Schrag 2016, p. 208). Indeed, as we shall see, the photographs and material artifacts abundantly displayed at Yad Vashem or the illustrations and advertisements created by Bill Wurtzel serve both a mnemonic and memetic role, perpetuating memories from the past forward. Still, as theorist Joan Ockman reminds us in the opening quote of this essay, as a form of disembodied reflection, memory functions as a specter of the past. Only by traversing physical and symbolic spaces does our memory become animated in the present; herein lies the work of storytelling and representation.

For the second generation of Holocaust survivors, representation in its various forms becomes a mechanism through which to process the burden and pain that they have inherited. However, as a postmemory, this representation will always be mediated by extant representational forms. The question then arises as to how far the transmission of postmemory can be extended. While we have already established that this notion of postmemory exists within the purview of the once-removed second generation, can postmemory also be experienced by the larger post-generation? Here, Hirsch differentiates between familial postmemory, or a direct vertical transmission from parent to child, as opposed to affiliative postmemory, or a horizontal identification that becomes more broadly available:

Affiliative postmemory would thus be the result of contemporaneity and generational connection with the literal second generation combined with structures of mediation that would be broadly appropriable, available, and indeed, compelling enough to encompass a larger collective in an organic web of transmission.

(Hirsch 2008, pp. 114–15)

Whether the postmemory is familial or affiliative, certain forms of representation, like testimonials, material artifacts, and especially photography, function as the conduit to memory work because representation has the capacity to touch and trigger embodied feelings of empathy and connection. (Ibid., p. 117) Likewise, architecture, through its work of shaping space, also has the ability to effectuate a somatic response that heightens receptors to trigger feelings of alienation or identification and belonging. The redesigned Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum makes apparent how embodied spaces animate a collective or affiliative postmemory.

3. The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum

…We dreamed of building a home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and of raising a new Jewish generation, changing the world, and healing the fractured, shattered lives of post-Holocaust Jews.

—Avner Shalev (Shalev 2006, p. 50)

Established by the Israeli Knesset in 1953 and opened to the public as the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in 1957, Yad Vashem exists to memorialize each one of the six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust, recognize the righteous non-Jews who found the courage to aid and abet Jews despite tremendous peril to themselves and their families, and to perpetuate the lessons of the Holocaust so as to educate and prevent such grotesque anti-Semitism in the future. Space and place matter at Yad Vashem. Its placement on a hilltop on the western slope of Mount Herzl, also known as the “Mount of Remembrance”—the burial place of preeminent Israeli prime ministers, presidents, and other prominent Jewish leaders—imbues this hilltop with historical and symbolic significance regarding the State of Israel. Here the repugnant past meets the propitious present in an attempt to process humankind’s propensity for evil, to preserve the memory of those who perished, and ultimately, to position Israel as synonymous with the promise for the future of Jewish life.

As the first of its kind with a mandate to never forget and to honor the lives of every single victim of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem faced the profound complexity of representation in the wake of that which cannot be easily or aptly represented.4 In its original iteration, the museum presented a collection of monuments, sculptures, paintings, artifacts, and a heavy dose of photography, including images from the Warsaw Ghetto, photographs of concentration camp inmates, and images of piles of gassed corpses, which have since become painfully iconic. While there was nothing especially noteworthy about the architecture of the original museum, perhaps what was most remarkable was the visceral impact of the above-mentioned photographs and material artifacts, including heaps of shoes removed from the inmates upon their arrival to the camps and yellow fabric stars (Figure 1):

… Amid the sea of multimedia shows in Yad Vashem’s historical museum stands an unpretentious glass case containing a small number of yellow stars, actual remnants and paradigms of Nazi stigmatizing. Having been infused with the Holocaust so completely… The effect of these scraps of cloth is like that of the ruins of the concentration camps. It is metonymic in the most direct sense, with no fanfare or explanation necessary.

(Jusidman 2001, p. 26)

Artist Yishai Yusidman’s words above drive at the emotive and somatic power triggered by remnants that were worn by victims, connected to their bodies, and which, therefore, have come to be infused with the weight of lives lived and lives lost. It is as if these artifacts, which have outlived their users, appeal to visitors and implore them to identify and consider what if it had been them, reifying Miles Richardson’s theory that the experiential can be triggered through the use of symbolic objects.

This capacity for contemplation and connection reached its zenith in the Children’s Memorial. Commissioned by the Yad Vashem Directorate in 1976 to create a space dedicated to the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust, the Children’s Memorial was completed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie in 1987. Compared to the approach taken in the curation of the original museum, Safdie states he began to “appreciate the nuance of information versus contemplation, confrontation versus meditation. I realized that the visitor emerging from the history museum would already be saturated with information. The Children’s Holocaust Memorial must therefore be about reflection.” (Safdie 2006, p. 92). With this awareness, Safdie utilized the power of space by moving visitors through an underground chamber wherein a “single candle would be made to reflect into space—millions of floating flames—through which we would move, surrounded. Then we would emerge through the mountain to the north, to light, to the view of the Jerusalem hills.” (Ibid., p. 93) As the viewer meanders through the memorial, a dispassionate voice names children who were lost, one by one. This convergence of the underground cavern—akin to a burial site—with floating lights simulating 1.5 million stars or angels in heaven set the stage for an embodied approach combining both the cognitive and experiential, symbolically moving from dark to light, which Safdie would further develop in his redesign of the entire Yad Vashem complex beginning in 1995.

According to Safdie, the story of the Holocaust was “too terrible, uniquely cruel and shameless in the annals of civilization, to be told in normal ‘galleries,’ traditional architectural constructions with doors, window frames, hardware, and other detailing.” (Ibid., pp. 94–95) Instead, as Avner Shalev, Chief Curator of the museum from 1993–2021 explained, the remodel of Yad Vashem would proactively transform the Mount of Remembrance from a more disembodied, commemorative site into a full-fledged campus dedicated to Holocaust education and the dissemination of knowledge with more than 17,000 square meters of new space, and a museum that would be almost four times larger (Shalev 2006, p. 50). The new master plan included the establishment of the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies, the online digitization of information that Yad Vashem had amassed, the construction of a new building for the archives and library, and the expansion of the research and publication divisions (Shalev 2006, p. 52). Committed to a more fully embodied experience to drive home the lessons of the Holocaust and to promote affiliation to a people and country, Safdie made the decision to cut through the mountain from the south and to situate the museum underground with only a narrow skylight coming up for light, “a reflective knife edge across the landscape that would disclose the museum’s presence.” (Safdie 2006, p. 94).

Anthropomorphic metaphors and references to life and death abound in the museum’s redesign. For example, Safdie regarded the main thrust of the museum as a spine, straddled by chambers, “with shafts rising from each one, like periscopes through earth and vegetation, for light.” (Ibid.). Like the linear spine, these chambers, too, were excavated from the mount, then cast in concrete against the bedrock, analogous to giant burial caves in the Mount of Remembrance, according to Safdie. (Ibid., p. 95) At the heart of the entire Yad Vashem complex sits the Hall of Remembrance, a vacuous space carried over from the original museum site, wherein an eternal flame burns in perpetuity to commemorate the six million Jewish lives lost. The austerity of the space matches the gravity of the overwhelming feelings of helplessness and loss visitors experience as they emerge from the museum.

Approaching the campus, the visitor first encounters what Safdie calls an aqueduct—essentially an open concrete structure with twelve archways meant to separate the sacred space through which the visitor will shortly enter from the more profane space of the city left behind. An inscription above the archway from the prophecy of Ezekiel reading, “I will put my breath into you, and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your soul,” shifts visitors into a contemplative state as they cross this threshold and brace themselves for an immersive experience that will walk them through this valley of life and death. Even the Mevoah—the visitor center which guests next approach to purchase tickets and audio guides—continues this quiet, reflective state through the use of a trellis over a glass rooftop as an architectural flourish that dissolves the sun into changing patterns of light and dark, evoking for some, the stripes of the clothing worn by concentration camp inmates (Ibid., p. 96) (Figure 2). The last architectural feature encountered by the visitor before entering the tunneled space of the museum proper is a steel bridge with wooden planked floors. This passage functions as the final transition from the quotidian present into a vanished past.

Into the museum, the visitor immediately experiences the effects of architectural manipulation through the vast use of concrete to establish a stark triangular prismatic structure (the linear spine), which creates a sense of foreboding (Figure 3).

Safdie’s intentional use of concrete, as opposed to the more conventional Jerusalem limestone, according to architectural historian and theorist Joan Ockman, deliberately calls into question the idea of context and represents an overt effort to create a temporary sense of displacement to heighten the visitor’s embodied sense of self (see Ockman 2006, p. 23). A ten-minute film montage, “The World that Was,” created by Michal Rovner, uses archival footage to illustrate Jewish life before Hitler’s rise to power and is projected onto what becomes the back wall of the approximately 1000-foot linear stretch of the museum prism (Figure 4). This footage depicting such mundane activities like couples promenading and school children from a world that the visitor understands is destined for doom triggers a gut-wrenching sensation, echoed by the massive concrete void.

This is consistent with Joan Ockman’s assertion that there are two modes of representation in place at Yad Vashem: (1) the historical, documentary, and narrative, meant to activate and to pass on the (post)memory and (2) the spatial and aesthetic, meant to engender an embodied response. Whereas the documentary work offers information to help provide context for the past, the function of the architecture aims at creating an “unmediated apprehension of something ineffable.” (Ibid., p. 24) This perception is additionally shaped by a five-degree subtle slope downward as the visitor descends into the prism. A subtle narrowing of the central spine further compresses space, reaching its narrowest dimension before visitors enter the side chamber where they will confront the annihilation of over 1.1 million Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This architectural manipulation positions and opens the sensibilities of the visitor to an uncomfortable absorption of the events and evidence that lie ahead. Neither the footage nor the architecture alone gives form to our affiliative postmemory of the Holocaust; in Safdie’s words, the exhibits and architecture needed to reinforce each other (Safdie 2006, p. 96). As such, it is precisely the fusion of the documentary and the spatial that produces an embodied experience and fosters our sense of connection to the atrocities that unfold.

We might say that the interaction between the architecture and exhibition design at Yad Vashem equates to a dialogue between embodied spaces and postmemory, where the cognitive, internal meets the somatic, external. For the most part, the central spine of the museum comprises an uneasy spatial void, save ruptures created by floor installations, likened by Safdie to an earthquake that rips the spine apart. (Ibid., p. 97) These strategically placed floor channels move guests in zig-zag fashion through impenetrable barriers across the spine to adjoining side chamber galleries—four on one side, five on the other—where visitors, through an overwhelming number of testimonials and material artifacts, including letters and other memorabilia—some 46,000 audio, video, and written testimonies in all, experience the story of the Nazi rise to power, its occupation of European countries, and its establishment of ghettos and concentration camps (Lu 2017, p. 445) (Figure 5 and Figure 6).

The floor rupture exhibits range from video footage to installations, including material artifacts like books, shoes, and burned railway tracks (Figure 7).

Referencing Merleau Ponty’s notion that perception is inextricably connected to movement in his article, “Museum Architecture as Spatial Storytelling of Historical Time: Manifesting a Primary Example of Jewish Space in Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum,” Fangquing Lu equates visitors’ understanding of historical time with movement and the experiential:

Compared with the symbolic, dominant, and embodied experiences created by architectural spaces, the artifacts in each gallery contribute to illustrating individual stories with entire themes and events and bring out the human dimension…

…Moreover by means of creating eye-level encounters between the ‘narrator’ or ‘witness’ within each gallery, visitors are led through a two-tiered exhibit structure: the context, which describes the historical processes, and the artifact, which tells the story at a personal level.

(Lu 2017, p. 450)

In each of the side chambers, guests confront videos of survivors’ testimonials and numerous artifacts ranging from books and art to clothing worn by inmates and other memorabilia such as flags, letters, and identification cards. However, as Maria João Durão has suggested in her work on embodied spaces, it is only through bodily movement that these video testimonials and artifacts—symbolically infused with lives and moments from the past—are experienced as a haptic memory, which for post-Holocaust Jewish visitors can ignite a post or collective memory of the Holocaust and its role in their self-understanding. That is, it is the fusion of movement through a particular spatial environment together with the content presented in these spaces that builds an affiliative postmemory for visitors. As Shalev conveys in his essay, “Building a Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem,” the main goal of the exhibitions and artifacts is to have visitors—especially Jewish visitors—connect to and empathize with the victims (Shalev 2006, p. 54). Storytelling, according to Fangqing Lu, helps to invoke a physical space conducive to generating experiences (Lu 2017, p. 444). It is for this reason that, in each gallery, Holocaust survivors look visitors straight in the eye and share their video testimonials, as if to convert the affiliative postmemory of the post-Holocaust generation into a more immediate familial postmemory.

Like artifacts, photography plays a crucial role in the transmission of historical events and the creation of postmemory, which according to Marianne Hirsch, functions to extend memory across three to four generations or eighty to one hundred years (Hirsch 2008, p. 110). Nowhere is this more evident than in the Hall of Names—an archive and memorial to the six million who perished in the Holocaust—situated at the north end of the east side of the corridor. Here sit two large cones, one which shoots upward approximately thirty feet, lined with 600 photographs of Holocaust victims, and the other which is excavated about thirty feet below into the Mount of Remembrance and is filled with water, serving as a reflective mirror of the photos featured above, whose subjects’ names we may never know (Lu 2017, p. 450) (Figure 8).

Further, we are reminded of Yad Vashem’s imperative to memorialize each one of the six million lives lost: “It is not that six million Jews were murdered. Rather there were six million murders, and in each case, one Jew was murdered.”5 This is the shared trauma that forms the foundation of an affiliative, collective postmemory.

Together, the artifacts, video testimonials, and extensive use of photography in Yad Vashem establish a common memory, connecting survivors and the post-Holocaust generation and shoring up shared beliefs that control memories, which then give form to familiar narratives. However, we must ask to what effect? Aside from the post-Holocaust Jewish vow to vigilantly monitor the treatment of Jews to prohibit the spread of such vitriol and raging anti-Semitism in the future, what other purpose or purposes might be served by the absorption and perpetuation of a collective Holocaust postmemory? Hirsch gets at this question by stating that the growth of a memory culture may be symptomatic of “a need for inclusion in a collective membrane forged by a shared inheritance of multiple traumatic histories.” (Hirsch 2012, p. 111). In other words, this ongoing narrative of trauma and tragedy animates Jewish life in the present, providing for many a sense of purpose, urgency, and belongingness. This theory aligns neatly with Vamik Volkan’s concept of “chosen trauma.” According to Volkan, large groups unconsciously choose to adopt a past generation’s mental representation of a shared event as part of their own identity as a potential way of connecting to millions of others through a shared mental representation of trauma.6 Similar to postmemory:

… [Transgenerational transmission of chosen trauma] is the end result of mostly unconscious psychological processes by which children’s core identities are flooded with and therefore influenced by the injured self- and internalized object-images and associated affects that rightfully belong to the original victims, caregivers or parents.

… [C]hosen traumas are much stronger ethnic or large-group markers than chosen glories—the mental representations of past shared successful events that lift up the large group’s self-esteem—because the psychological processes they initiate are much more profound. Whereas chosen glories merely raise the self-esteem of group members, transgenerational transmission of chosen traumas provoke complicated tasks of mourning and/or reversing humiliation; since all are carriers of the unconscious psychological processes of past generations, chosen traumas bind group members together more powerfully.

(Stein 2014, pp. 238–39)

The power of “chosen trauma” and an inheritance of hardship lies in its ability to transcend the present and to link together Jews across time and space in a shared narrative of suffering. This sense of Jewish belongingness is established at Yad Vashem through both the content of the exhibitions, which jogs the affiliative postmemory of Jewish visitors, and the use of space—more specifically, a tension between light and dark, up and down, contraction and expansion—that heightens visitors’ awareness and absorption of the content as they traverse space, thereby connecting the somatic and the perceptual. As guests gradually descend into space in an architectural attempt to align the darkness of the tragedy and trauma with what we understand as the Holocaust, so does the width of the prismatic tunnel widen, and the floors and roof planes slant slightly upward as visitors emerge out of the darkness at the end and into the light of what we are led to equate with modern Israel. In effect, their movement through space symbolically has visitors making “aliyah,” which literally means to ascend or rise, but for generations, has signified immigration to Israel. Indeed, as museum guests complete their journey, they step out onto a wide, bright terrace whose form culminates in wing-like projections over the landscape of the Jerusalem hills beyond (Figure 9).

Listening to a 1930s recording of “Hatikva”—Israel’s national anthem—sung by a children’s choir from Czechoslovakia, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz, Israel is proclaimed as the answer to what was lost, resolving the initial sense of displacement that is intentionally fostered at the beginning of the journey. Visitors now experience a strong sense of presence.

The from-tragedy-to-triumph trajectory that is both narratively and spatially staged at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum—or in Howard Stein’s words, “chosen trauma” and “chosen glory”—beginning in 1930s Europe and culminating in present-day Israel intends to inculcate in Jewish visitors a strong sense of connection to a people and to a place. I have argued that for Jews, the affiliative post-memory of the Holocaust preconditions them to experience or to touch space in a manner that affirms that this is their story and that they, therefore, belong to the Jewish people. If we acknowledge that your body is identified as Jewish because of the spaces that you touch and occupy, then it is precisely movement through these spaces that causes the body to inherit its sense of Jewish belonging. Let us put this theory to the test through an entirely different case study, one which examines the career of New York Jewish creative Bill Wurtzel, now eighty-five years old.

4. Jewish Embodied Inspirations in the Artistic Career of Bill Wurtzel

To best understand the meaningfulness of the sometimes subtle, and at other times more overtly Jewish references, and particularly how embodied Jewish spaces and iterations of a collective Jewish memory figure in artist Bill Wurtzel’s work, we must first consider his eight-decade career against the rich, yet complicated history of Jewish emigration to, and acculturation in America during the late 19th century and early decades of the 20th century. Unlike his immigrant grandparents, as a third-generation American Jew, Bill was spared the challenging and stressful accommodation process of adjusting to the requirements of life in the new world. However, this is precisely the point: even though Bill himself was not an immigrant, the power of the immigration experience was so palpable in Jewish residential, commercial, and entertainment spaces that it was absorbed as an intergenerational, collective memory for many second and third-generation American Jews. Even though emigration to America—regarded as the land of opportunity—was the desired goal of the massive wave of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe beginning in 1881 with the assassination of Russian Czar Alexander II and the subsequent implementation of repressive laws that essentially squeezed Jews out of Russia, the perilous and dire circumstances that culminated in their migration to America, not to mention the poverty, squalor, and anxiety the majority of immigrants faced throughout their journey, left a lasting impression—one that would certainly feed American Jewish life and American Jewish culture for decades to come. One need only consult the Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, the Forverts, established by Abraham Cahan in 1897, or any number of other Yiddish daily journals between 1881 through 1920 to appreciate the complexity and deep anxiety that accompanied these immigrants beginning with their travel across oceans under miserably crowded conditions, to their arrival in Ellis Island, where they could only hope to be processed and not sent back to the old country, to their settlement in tenement slums.7 Even though many immigrants had no choice other than to escape Eastern European anti-Semitism, not only was their journey through the aforementioned spaces distressing but what they experienced was a rupture with a past lifestyle that they had endured for centuries. These are the embodied physical and emotional spaces endured by three million Eastern European Jewish immigrants that shaped the ways in which they became entangled in America. It is their movement through these spaces that defined how they themselves negotiated being in America as Jews and, ultimately, how their memories were absorbed by subsequent generations of American Jews as their own familial or affiliative (post)memories. It is these collective memories, reified years later by passage through either actual or symbolic spaces occupied by Jews, that make an appearance throughout Bill Wurtzel’s expansive artistic career.

Bill’s journey as a Jewish creative began in the early 1940s, not in the expected spaces occupied by New York Jews such as the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, or the Bronx, but in a more unlikely space for Jews: the backcountry of Forestburgh, Sullivan County. Here Bill’s parents, Al and Beatrice Wurtzel, owned and operated Forest Tavern, a bar and grill, which was frequented by local folks, who were sometimes entertained by a guitar-strumming cowboy. At nine years old, this cowboy taught Bill how to play the guitar and his first two guitar chords, G and C. He learned his third guitar chord, D, from a former wrestler, who Bill’s dad, Al Wurtzel, hired to train Bill in self-defense so that he could protect himself against anti-Semitic bullying during his five-mile bus ride to school. With these three chords, Bill could now teach himself country music—the music of the backroads. When the radio station WVOS in Liberty, New York invited Al to advertise Forest Tavern, he auditioned Bill to sing and play his guitar, and Pecos Bill, the guitar-playing country western singer was born, along with a fifteen-minute radio show, starring Bill three times a week. His radio popularity landed him a weekly spot at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills during the summer of 1950, where he performed each Tuesday night in his all-American cowboy attire (Figure 10). Now twelve years old, Bill would play before an audience of 1500, largely first- and second-generation American Jews. Each week for his encore, Bill sang “Joe and Paul,” a popular Yiddish song, originally written in 1912 by Yiddish theater composer Shalom Secunda as an advertisement for Paul Kofsky’s clothing store in Brooklyn by the same name (JOE 1947. Also see the Yiddish Radio Project 2002). To experience a twelve-year-old “Yiddish cowboy”8 yodeling about purchasing a “suit, a ‘koyt’ (coat), and a gaberdine” (for a bargain no less), was enough to make this audience of first and second-generation immigrants kvell (gush) with delight.

Popularized by the Jewish comedian Red Buttons as the basis for his spoof of Yiddish radio, which he performed in the Catskills to the enjoyment of thousands of hotel guests, “Joe and Paul” was the epitome of Borscht Belt humor.9 Buttons’s parody tickled Catskills patrons and struck a chord with this first and second-generation Jewish immigrant population, many of whom found their way from peddler pushcarts into the garment business and ready-to-wear shops like Joe and Paul’s. Buttons’s exaggerated routine consisted of a fictitious radio station with a series of fabricated advertisements for products such as Alka Seltzer and Castor Oil, one commercial sillier than the next:

Like much Yiddish-American comedy, “Joe and Paul” is focused on the physical. Divided into four mock commercials, each of the commercials offers relief for a particular ache: a prostitute for sexual repression, an open window for excessively smelly feet, a belch-inducing antacid for indigestion, and an overdose of castor oil for an annoying cough (“If your husband coughs too much from smoking, just give him a bottle of castor oil to drink and he’ll be afraid to cough”). The humor is crude; the emphasis is on getting by… “Joe and Paul” offers a comic primer on the here-and-now, a how-to manual on how to stay alive.

(The Free Library 2000)

Through a synthesis of Yiddish and English, the rhythmic and comedic spirit of the comedy act brought Catskill audiences to tears, specifically because it paralleled the careful assimilationist choreography rehearsed by many American Jews and because of their shared understanding of having traveled the same geographical and emotional spaces which brought them to the here and now in the Catskills, connecting a common past to the present. In his article, “Collective Memory Anchors: Collective Identity and Continuity in Social Movements,” sociologist Timothy Gongaware builds upon Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, which maintains that human memory can only function within a collective context (Russell 2006, pp. 792–804). Gongaware explains how collective memory lives on through what he terms “collective memory anchoring.” Similar to postmemory, collective memory is established through an anchoring process wherein images and storytelling form the basis of interactive experiences that “bring the past forward” to forge a link of continuity—a collective memory—where the present meets the past to affirm articulations of identity (see Gongaware 2010, p. 215). In other words, collective memory relies upon an interactive process that uses narrative commemorations from the past to contour and to constrain collective identity in the present (see Gongaware 2010, p. 222). According to Gongaware, both collective identity and memory draw upon a wider culture that perpetuates a common stock of world views and vocabularies, along with discrete beliefs, images, feelings, and values (Ibid., p. 215). For Jews, the Catskills provided just the right interactive space where storytelling and humor could be used to assuage the challenges of the acculturation process in America. Here, among kindred spirits, first- and second-generation immigrant Jews could be themselves without fear of reprisal, laughing and crying to their hearts’ content, as comedians like Red Buttons used raucous and crude humor as the storytelling vehicle to acknowledge their common ties and tribulations. Often shrill and frenetic, the comic voices that emerged from the Catskills reflected the tensions of their tentative lives:

Like most parodies, it is both a homage to the old and a bridge to the new; it is both reverence and revision.

…Theirs was a comedy of survival--getting by, after all, was a Jewish trademark, a lesson passed on from generation to generation. The mouth was the mechanism, and getting by was the message. Alone in the world, and on a stage, Jewish comics laughed at the world even as they struggled with it.

(The Free Library 2000)

Listening and absorbing the Borscht Belt humor of such comedians like Buddy Hackett, Sam Levenson, and Mel Brookes at the Concord Hotel during the summer of 1950 proved lucrative for our twelve-year-old guitar-strumming, Yiddish-crooning cowboy, Bill, beyond the meager wages he earned. His movement through this distinctly Jewish space where hundreds of Jews convened oriented Bill, entangled him in American Jewish life and culture and primed him for his career as a creative.

The Wurtzel family returned to New York City when Bill was thirteen, where his musical interests took a turn from country to more urban, popular music. On his sixteenth birthday, the family moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, and it was here that Bill first saw himself as an artist. Without formal musical training, music, like art, was something to be felt. In fact, not until his twenties did Bill learn how to read music. In Springfield, Bill honed his art and design skills, working as an illustrator and designer for the public library and as a sign painter for supermarkets. Bill eventually worked his way up to art director for the multipurpose cleaning product, Lestoil, where he could have remained had the pace and opportunities available in NYC not perpetually tugged at him. In New York, he took a liking to advertising and design, and in 1960, Bill was hired at Grey Advertising, a primarily Jewish firm. His first account was for NBC TV, creating promotional ads. But when the firm lost the account, the creatives abandoned ship, including Bill.

In 1962. Lou Dorfsman, then creative director of CBS Television, before being named in 1964 as director of design for the CBS Corporation, hired Bill to work at CBS. Though twenty years his senior, Dorfsman would fulfill the role of mentor to Bill. Despite their age difference, there was plenty of common ground between the two men: both descended from eastern European Jewish immigrant families, both served in the army, and both were outsiders in the distinctly non-Jewish corporate world of CBS. Their relationship was more than friendly; it was familial—in large part due to a collective identity that was based upon a shared Jewish survivalist mentality centered on sechel—common sense. Even though their experience as Jewish outsiders certainly informed their creative sensibilities, providing ample opportunities for them to see things differently, this common sense, survivalist mentality dictated that, outwardly, they blend in with CBS corporate America through their language and mannerisms.10 However, as the “Lou Dorsfman Lexicon,” pictured in Figure 11, illustrates, the knowing nods and subtle winks Lou and Bill exchanged affirmed that they both understood their professional roles based upon having moved through essential spaces that formed the common framework of being Jewish in America.

Passed down by Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their offspring, the word sechel stems from the Hebrew word for the Enlightenment, haskalah, a late 18th- and 19th-century movement which introduced European Jews to secular ideas and society. The Jewish Enlightenment opposed the teachings of traditionalist religious thinkers and many of their accompanying superstitious old ways. As a Jewish enlightenment concept, sechel acknowledges the necessity of common sense in navigating the often unwelcome and contested spaces encountered by Jews in the diaspora (Johnson 2013). With its emphasis on common sense and practicality, sechel might further be understood as a response to Jewish anxiety prompted by displacement and not fitting in. Because sechel required the exercise of self-discipline and a heightened awareness of your surroundings necessary to fit in, we might also consider it as a catalyst for the rather crude and raucous Borscht Belt humor—itself a catharsis for the anxiety of adjusting to a new world. Visually, this Jewish sensibility manifested itself through clever text and image combinations that helped to uncover the things right under your very nose. Lou Dorfsman mentored Bill in seeing the world this way—making visible that which is before your very eyes but often hard to see. Take, for example, Bill’s award-winning television commercial for Bellagio Wine, created in 1986 (Figure 12). Isolating the Ls from the wine label animates them and invites viewers to see them more kinetically and symbolically—as legs with feet, ready to squash the round grape-like form in the right-hand corner. At the same time, pulling the Ls down outside of the label creates negative space, splitting the brand name into two words to suggest, “Be ‘agio’”—otherwise implying, “get comfortable and cozy” (with Bellagio Wine)! By looking closer and using a common sense, no-frills, economy of means approach, this playful and witty advertisement pulls out of invisibility that which is present but lies buried, thereby expanding awareness of the Bellagio brand and deepening its value.

By 1967, Bill had moved from CBS to become Creative Director at the Lampert Agency, where building upon the lessons learned from Dorfsman at CBS, he would go on to earn numerous awards, including an ASIFA award for the best animated television commercial for Hanes Hosiery, a Clio for the best radio commercial of the year in travel and recreation, and a Gold Lion award at the Cannes International Film Festival for his 1967, “Please no dancing in the aisles” television ad for Olympic airlines. Owned by Greek billionaire, Aristotle Onassis, advertising for Olympic Airlines boasted service befitting that of a billionaire in economy class, such as a steak dinner served with gold flatware.

When a passenger, seated in economy, turns on his “vibrant Greek music” on “a stereo channel” (no less!), he simply can’t contain his feet, and it becomes a party in the aisles, prompting the male narrator of the commercial to respond, “Please no dancing in the aisles.” The written tagline on the print ad likewise advises passengers to “Please fasten your feet belts.” (Figure 13). Despite the ad’s pristine “Madison Avenue” pedigree, its exaggerated, silly premise has direct ties to the uproarious humor of the Borscht Belt. After all, in Bill’s mind, the star of the ad was the classic shmegege (silly person), clearly indicating a carryover from his Catskills days.

Music and creative improvisation have remained a constant thread in Bill’s eight-decade artistic career. He continues to play jazz guitar throughout the world, and over the years, he has played alongside some of the most acclaimed musicians, including The Count Basie Countsmen, Jimmy McGriff, and Jay Leonhart, to name just a few. Still drawing upon his well-worn practice of bringing out of invisibility that which is easy to look past and Borscht Belt schtick (gimmick) humor, about fifteen years ago, Bill’s pursuits took a new creative turn. For the past sixty years, each morning, Bill has created and photographed playful breakfast plates for his wife, Claire (Figure 14 and Figure 15).

Having amassed an archive of thousands of food images, Bill, and Claire, an educator by training, realized that these playful images of healthy breakfast foods had inherent educational value for children. Funny Food Art, a Bill and Claire collaboration, was born. Whimsical and improvisational, in typical Bill Wurtzel fashion, there is more to this art than may initially meet the eye (Figure 16).

Looking with intentionality and seeing beyond the obvious is paramount to clever advertising and graphic design. However, for children and their parents, it additionally fosters critical thinking and can raise awareness about the influence and instrumentality of visual media in an image-saturated society. This, according to graphic design legend Milton Glaser, is the purpose of art, which he defined as that which makes us attentive (Glaser 2008). From his days in advertising and design to his Funny Food Art, Bill’s artistic nimbleness, combined with sechel, pays tribute to Glaser’s claim.

Bill and Claire’s most recent book collaboration, In Our Teeny Tiny Matzah House, listed by Bank Street College’s Children’s Book Committee as one of the Best Children’s Books of 2022, brings full circle the importance of narrative and images in the creation of collective memory, as well as Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces and how the external body, moving through space, meets human consciousness to come together in the construction of (Jewish) culture. Unlike their other book publications, including Funny Food Art and Meshuggah Food Faces, which both present stand-alone breakfast plates created by Bill, In Our Teeny Tiny Matzah House, uses images for the purposes of storytelling. The seven family food characters introduced on the first two pages are repeated throughout the story, along with other characters who show up for the Passover seder to crowd the teeny tiny matzah house (Figure 17). Inspired by the classic Yiddish folktale, “It Could Always Be Worse,” spatial awareness figures at the center of this narrative. Kitzel the Cat lives with his family in a tiny, noisy, and crowded matzah house. Family and friends are invited from everywhere for Passover, stressing Kitzel’s spatial comfort and pushing the house to the brink. Only when the Seder ends and all the guests leave does the house feel ample, causing Kitzel to appreciate the comfort and coziness of home (Figure 18). In other words, self-awareness is spatially driven, and movement through space lies at the heart of identity, memory, and culture. Drawing upon Bill’s and Claire’s collective memory of the American Jewish immigrant past, anchored by Claire’s firsthand childhood experience of tenement living on the Lower East Side and Bill’s interaction with Borscht Belt comedy from his youth, the award-winning In Our Teeny Tiny Matzah House children’s book brings the past forward to create a link of continuity—a collective memory—where the present meets the past to affirm a sense of Jewish connection for today’s kids.

5. Conclusions

Using two divergent visual culture case studies, this essay has considered the convergence of memory, representation, and embodied spaces to address how Jewish bodies inherit their identities. To understand how our external bodily movement through space orients us and touches our internal cognitive awareness, we applied Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces to a walk-through of the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Israel. Because, from the late twentieth century to the present, the Holocaust has figured so prominently within Jewish life, we next considered Marianne Hirsch’s ideas about the Holocaust and postmemory, and especially the role of stories, images, and even chosen trauma in inculcating memories for the generation/s after those who experienced collective trauma firsthand. Of particular interest was Hirsch’s spatial claims about the directional movement of postmemory. Whereas familial postmemory is directly passed down in a vertical fashion from survivor to the second generation, affiliative postmemory operates horizontally to form more of a collective memory that lasts between three to four generations. I argued that architect Moshe Safdie’s calculated use of space in the redesigned Yad Vashem Museum, combined with the content in the side galleries and floor installations in the center of the museum, intended to trigger a collective, affiliative postmemory to foster a sense of belonging to a people and connection to Israel for Jewish visitors. However, only through movement is this sense of belonging actualized, such that this connection may live on in perpetuity.

Inasmuch as this essay focuses on embodied spaces and memory in articulations of Jewish identity, Yad Vashem offers a convenient and explicit case study because attention to space is a key feature in connecting Jewish visitors to their identities as Jews. Therefore, to explore and test how embodied spaces and post-affiliative memory implicitly operates to help shape and articulate expressions of Jewish identities, our second case study focused on the eight-decade career of New York jazz musician and visual artist Bill Wurtzel. Bill’s summer in the Catskills as a twelve-year-old boy, opening for legendary Borscht Belt comedians, engulfed in an audience of first- and second-generation American Jews, situated him in an interactive and connective space that would prove instrumental in locating his Jewish sensibility as a creative. Though just a child, Bill responded to and absorbed the collective catharsis facilitated by the Jewish schtick humor in the space of the Concord Hotel, where guests could be wholly themselves. As Jewish bodies inhabited such spaces, their experience of these shared spaces shaped a collective memory that would live on through American Jewish culture. Further, to a degree, this humor lives on in Bill’s Funny Food art, but his art additionally relies upon what Bill regards as the Jewish sensibility of sechel—common sense—which has served Jews as an important adaptation strategy here in America. Using an economy of means to see the extraordinary in the ordinary is borne out of sechel, and this certainly has been a consistent thread throughout Bill’s advertising and design career. His clever combination of “schtick and sechel,” emanating from Bill’s experience of and movement through space in the Catskills and his days at CBS under the guidance of Lou Dorfsman, situates viewers of Bill’s advertising and design work to assume a more interactive role. Moreover, interaction, according to theorists, specifically that which uses narrative commemorations from the past to contour and to constrain identity in the present, sits at the heart of collective memory. This we observed at play in Bill and Claire’s most recent book publication, In Our Teeny Tiny Matzah House.

While it is well established that articulations of identity must always be contextualized within time and place, only when we consider how bodies move through, touch, and are touched by physical, cognitive, and even imaginary spaces do we arrive at dynamic and intersectional expressions of identity. How might we understand ourselves differently if we were to regularly practice more indigenous conceptions about our interconnectedness to our environments and to every animate object possessed with life and a spirit?11 Finally, it might be worth asking how an embodied spatial thread might be used to amplify and nuance your own family history12 and a subsequent understanding of how you became who you are.