The Berlin Experience at Tufts

An amazing program for undergrads at Tufts....

Judging Racism....

The national debate on race, decorum, and presumption reminded me of Project Implicit which coordinates a series of anonymous tests that measure one's (un/conscious) prejudices and biases. If you have the time, they are worth the self-discovery.

The news from the German Consulate...

The Wall Project brings together the city of Los Angeles and the German Consul General for the two parts of The Wall Project: The Wall Across Wilshire and The Wall Along Wilshire.

Dividing and Repairing

The Wende Museum (a museum and archive of the Cold War) in Los Angeles is sponsoring a contest in connection with The Wall Project. Put all those pictures and images to creative use and win a trip back to Germany. The museum invites folks to "use words, photographs, videos to address the issue of barriers and boundaries in your lives."
"What kind of words, sounds, images, and/or text would you create if you had to address and physically interact with the walls in our lives?"
(Look for the details under the "create" button.)

The Kidz of Horst

More celebratory art for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: the multilingual music video "Break Down the Walls."

Is it live or is it...

Twenty years later Los Angeles will build its own Berlin Wall stretching down a part of Wilshire Boulevard. On the eve of the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Wall, there will be a live stream from LA to Berlin. Here's the article in the LA Times.

Libeskind's newest venture

A pre-fab house from the architect of The Jewish Museum.

Amos Elon

Strange that we did not know this while we were gone, but Amos Elon passed away on the second day of our trip.

on one foot....

So, it turns out that walking on a foot with several fractures (more than two, less than five) for a couple of weeks can really slow down recovery time.

and while we're talking monuments....

Some notes about NY's 9/11 monument which bring up the same issues of memorializing the unthinkable.

Pics from our last night together

The Last Supper

At Schneeweiss in Friedrichshain, saying goodbye to Berlin (and our German friends)...

at Schloss Charlottenburg

After a fascinating day of three excellent intellectual encounters (with Prof. Dr. Peter von der Osten-Sacken, then at the Foreign Ministry, then with Dr. Atina Grossman) we headed waaayyy west for a concert of baroque music (with musicians and singers dressed up in (18th century) period costumes).

I think we're all in a bit of shock knowing tomorrow is our last full day here.

The Hamburg-lers

Here's the group (minus the Leahs, though a tiny bit of one can be seen third from the right) with our guide Georg (who sounded much like Cary Grant) as we made our way through the port of Hamburg. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, which half the folks used to take a Schifffahrt (boat ride) through the harbor. The city's reconstruction plan is ambitious (to say the least) but also a wonder in urban development.

Hamburg's broken mural

On our tour of "Jewish" Hamburg, where it became clear that the city is less interested in preserving remnants of its past than in constructing a beautiful new (and extremely well-planned city), we were struck by the erasure of buildings or sites that marked the long, vibrant life of Hamburg's Jews. At the corner of the old Jewish section of the city, however, we happened upon a magnificent mural:


The broken fragments are populated by sites and people and signs of the real life that Jews in Hamburg lived (especially in the post-Emancipation period). The large section on the bottom is filled with a poem by Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs.



A recent article in The Jewish Exponent does our experience some justice.