“If there is a country that has tried to deal with its past, it is Germany,” said the curator Michal Friedlander. WE DO NOT COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMS… BUT WE ARE PROUD AND GRATEFUL THAT YOUR GOD INSISTS YOU EAT OUR FOOD ON CHRISTMAS.” In a way, it reminds me of the way Americans, or New Yorkers, deal with this topic.” Indeed, many of the objects in the exhibit are American-from Sarah Silverman’s “Wowschwitz” video to a handwritten sign from a New York restaurant that reads “ THE CHINESE RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES WOULD LIKE TO EXTEND OUR THANKS TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE. It’s a bit funny, it’s ironic, it’s not the old thing of talking about the Holocaust. “It’s one of the first times a Jewish museum in Germany has dealt with the everyday life of Jews. “I think it’s fantastic,” Leeor Engländer, a columnist for Die Welt, said of the exhibit. “As a young twenty-first-century Jew, I don’t want to be defined solely by the Holocaust.” “Most Germans don’t know any Jews,” he added. “The next thing I thought of was Justin Timberlake.” “When I heard I was going in the box, the first thing I thought of was Eichmann,” said Glucroft. Glucroft, for one, said he was game as soon as he received an e-mail from a friend asking if he would be interested. However, the experiment, which has been running for a week now, has plenty of supporters. The “Jew in a box”-as it has come to be known, both in the English-language press and among some who have sat in the box-has certainly elicited criticism. It also has that clear box, where a Jewish volunteer sits for a few hours every day (except Saturdays), and answers whatever questions visitors might have about Judaism. It has a video of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode where Larry David invites a contestant from the TV show “Survivor” and a Holocaust survivor to dinner. ![]() It has interviews with rabbis about what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish Museum Berlin’s new exhibition “The Whole Truth… Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jews” (the subtitle was inspired by Woody Allen), has on display a “Don’t Worry Be Happy” kippa. For the next two hours, Glucroft, a Fairfield, Connecticut, native who moved to Berlin three and a half years ago when he fell in love with a woman from Neukölln, answered questions about God and the world-a genial, gray-jeans-wearing embodiment of the answer to the question posed in the bright-pink museum caption at his feet: “Are there still Jews in Germany?” Almost immediately, he was surrounded by a group of museumgoers. ![]() on Thursday, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Bill Glucroft climbed into a glass box in the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
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