Which Way is Up???

In 1154 Muhammad al-Idrisi created for King Roger II of Sicily the "Upside Down World Map," which today is known as the Tabula Rogeriana. al-Idrisi was a famous Islamic explorer and cartographer that pieced the map together from his personal knowledge and information from other travelers. The result was one of the most advanced and accurate maps for more than 300 years!

S.P. Scott, in his 1904 tome, The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, wrote:

"The noble and elevating pursuits of science were not neglected under the Moors of Sicily and their intelligent and progressive conquerors, the Norman princes. Geography, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine were studied with diligence and success. al-Idrisi, whose decent from the royal dynasty of the Fez has been obscured by the eminent reputation he attained as a geographer and a philosopher, made for Roger II a planisphere which represented at once the surface of the earth and the positions of the heavenly bodies. From the minarets of Palermo, the Arab astronomer observed the motions of the planets, the periodical recurrence of eclipses, the relative positions and general distribution of the stars in space, by the aid of instruments invented on the Guadalquivir and the Tigris, and of tables computed on the plains of Babylon centuries before the Christian era. The Moslem thus consecrated to the prosecution of scientific research the towers of his most sacred temples, at a time when from the cathedrals of Europe doctrines were promulgated which menaced, with the severest penalties that ecclesiatical malignity could devise, every occupation which in any way contributed to the emancipation of reason or the intellectual progress of humanity [...]"

"The great work of al-Idrisi was compiled under the auspices of Roger II. The Arab was peculiarly fitted for the treatment of the comprehensive science of physical and descriptive geography. His information had been largely obtained by practical experience. He had served in campaigns conducted on the frontiers of civilization; in the capacity of a merchant he had traversed with the plodding caravan vast regions diversified with illimitable plains, lofty mountains, noble rivers; as a pilgrim he had performed his devotions at the cradle of the Moslem faith; in the tirels pursuit of learning he had prosecuted his researches over strange countries and among strange peoples; his features and his costume were familiar to the residents of the great European and Asiatic capitals; his peregrinations had extended from the Douro to the Indus, from the shores of the Baltic to the sources of the Nile. Thus endowed with especial qualifications, the Arab geographer was equally at home, whether recounting to a delighted audience the experiences of an extended journey or explaining to an assemblage of students the physical features of the earth and the relative distribution of land and water as depicted on the surface of a terrestrial globe. The work of al-Idrisi is an imperishable monument to the intelligence, the industry, the criticism, of the compiler, whose studies were confirmed in many instances by personal observation, and hte practical value of whose undertaking was established by his scientific atainments as well as by the copious erudition of the illustrious monarch by whose command it originated and was brought to a successful termination." (Pp. 68 - 72)

To read more from this book click here.
To see an online exhibition from the  Bibliothèque nationale de France dedicated to Muhammad al-Idrisi (in French) click here.

When Fear Turns Graphic

January 17, 2010
Abroad
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ZURICH

SWITZERLAND stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss, when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the building of minarets. Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere.

A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”

He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles (“mushrooms,” Mr. Segert demurred, implausibly). Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, black letters.

The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.

In this heavily immigrant country the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party is now the leading political party, aided at the polls by incidents like the New Year’s Day attack by a Somali Muslim immigrant in Denmark on Kurt Westergaard, the artist whose caricature of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban was among the cartoons published in 2005 in a Danish newspaper that provoked violent protests around the world. All across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing, to an extent unknown across the Atlantic, on a very old-fashioned brand of propaganda art. The dominance in America today of the 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet, the sheer size of the country, the basic conventions of public discourse, not to mention that the only two major parties have, or at least feign having, a desire to court the political center, all tend to mitigate against the sort of propaganda that one can now find in Europe.

It manages, if often just barely, to skirt racism laws. In Italy, where attacks on immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno this month incited the country’s worst riots in years, the Lega Nord, part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has circulated various anti-immigrant posters. One, mimicked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party in France, showed an American Indian to make the point that immigrants will soon turn Europeans into embattled minorities stuck on reservations.

The National Front also distributed a poster of Charles de Gaulle alongside a remark he once made (in the context of the Algerian occupation) to suggest that true Gaullists today would vote for Le Pen. “It is good that there are yellow Frenchmen and black Frenchmen and brown Frenchmen,” de Gaulle is quoted as saying. “They prove that France is open to all races,” adding, “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France.”

In Austria the far-right Freedom Party has come up with a poster bearing the slangy slogan: “Daham Statt Islam, Wir Für Euch” (roughly, Home Instead of Islam, or Islam Go Home, We Are for You). And Britain’s neo-Nazi National Party, which, to the great embarrassment of the country’s political leaders, lately won two seats on the European Parliament, swiped the minaret poster by switching the Swiss flag for a Union Jack. Mr. Segert and the Swiss People’s Party weren’t too pleased, populists being one thing, neo-Nazis, another.

It may be hard for Americans to grasp the role these images can play here. In subways and on the streets in America, posters and billboards are eye-catching if sexy or stylish, like Calvin Klein’s advertisements, or if modish and outrageous, like Benetton’s, but they’re basically background noise. By contrast, they’re treated more seriously here, as news, at least when they’re political Molotov cocktails. Cheap to produce compared with television commercials and easy to spread in small countries like Switzerland, where referendums are catnip to populists, they have the capacity to rise above the general noise.

Mr. Segert is the de facto reigning minister of such propaganda. He has used red rats to caricature Swiss leftists. He came up with an image of black and brown hands riffling through a stack of Swiss passports. And (until the minaret poster, this one caused the biggest kerfuffle) he cooked up the idea of three fluffy white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. “For More Security” was the accompanying slogan.

Cries of racism, occasional legal proceedings — none of which ended up in fines against him, Mr. Segert hastens to point out — and even bans on their display in left-leaning cities like Basel and Geneva, have only increased the reproduction of the images. All of which, as Mr. Segert said, suits him and his bosses just fine.

“If what we do stirs up controversy, then we’ve already won the election,” he told me, a thought echoed when I met with Marc Bühlmann, a political scientist here. “All these right-wing populist parties have learned to get TV and newspapers to show these posters over and over with the excuse of asking, ‘Should we allow such images?’ ” Mr. Bühlmann said. “The aim in making the posters is to be as racist as possible, so then when critics complain, the populists can say elites don’t want ordinary people to know the truth. And the media fall for it every time.”

Mr. Segert wouldn’t disagree. Crude, cleverly exploiting the ancient power of a still picture over moving ones to fix an image in a viewer’s mind, the posters share a calculated homeliness and violence that is in its own way artful. I showed a variety of them to Jacques Séguéla, chief creative officer for France’s second-largest advertising agency, who ran François Mitterrand’s presidential campaign.

“Fifty percent Stalin, 50 percent Norman Rockwell,” was his assessment. “The images are aggressive, not funny, without charm, straight to the point, clear and” — he was speaking aesthetically here — “in no way radical. They’re the opposite of most advertising today. They aim just at their target audience.”

And that’s all they need to do. Marcus Stricker, creative director of Netprinz, which handles advertising for Switzerland’s Free Democratic Party, a competitor of Mr. Segert’s, credits the minaret poster with employing a bygone graphic style that conjures up “good old Switzerland, when everything was safe, clean and growing.” Like Mr. Bühlmann he blames the news media for providing, as he put it, “effectively millions of dollars in free advertising.” It went without saying that my own interest in the poster brouhaha multiplied the problem.

He was nevertheless reluctant to give Mr. Segert too much credit for swinging the vote. Local issues did more to sway public opinion, he said. We met in a crowded bar above the Zurich train station, and before parting he unfurled a poster by a human rights organization called the Society for Swiss Minorities, distributed by the Swiss Council of Religions, showing a mosque, a synagogue, two churches and a Buddhist temple beneath a broad, pale blue sky, with the slogan “Der Himmel über der Schweiz ist gross genug” (“the sky over Switzerland is big enough”) in discreet lettering across the top.

It was made to compete with Mr. Segert’s work. Two can play that game, Mr. Stricker wanted me to know. Except that the image, tasteful and vague, stressing elegance over incitement, actually suggested the opposite.

Mr. Segert knows why. A 46-year-old German (yes, an immigrant himself in Switzerland), he is the father of two adopted children from North Africa, although he declined to talk about his personal life. He was happy, on the other hand, to discuss work, which he volunteered he would gladly do for the Green Party or Social Democrats, if they hired him. “For me it’s an intellectual exercise,” he said, as if cynicism were a point of professional pride.

In the next room young, clean-cut associates brooded over drawing boards and computer screens. Clients must “do their homework,” Mr. Segert said, by way of explaining how a design evolves. “It sounds easy, but most political parties don’t know their own message.” That’s the problem for centrist and many left-leaning parties.

By contrast, “everyone knows what the Swiss People’s Party stands for,” he said. “It’s against the European Union, for neutrality, lower taxes, no illegal aliens. You can hate it or love it, but the message is clear.” That message must then be refined. “Maybe 80 to 90 percent of people are not interested in elections. So our job is to tell them: Be interested in what doesn’t interest you, make a decision about something you don’t care about, then act on it, vote. That’s a lot for a poster to accomplish. We’re successful because we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking.”

This was essential, he stressed: “The message must go straight to the stomach, not to the brain, and connect with specific emotions involving fear, health, money, safety. We can focus just on our target audience so we can speak in a special language and speak to a feeling these people already have. We can’t move anyone who doesn’t already have this feeling. In our case the target audience is low income, with little schooling. They have the same right to vote as people who support the Green Party and read 3 newspapers and 10 magazines.”

I asked whether special language applied to red rats, which can conjure up Nazi propaganda. Mr. Segert brushed off the comparison. As a public-relations man he has “no taboos,” he said. “We don’t begin by thinking what we can’t do. When I chose to show rats, I didn’t ask whether it’s politically correct. I couldn’t do my job if I did that. I only wanted to know whether it serves our purpose, and if we have a problem with the law. My party already deals with taboos like Islam and immigration, so our job is just to think about how to make the strongest image, then let the lawyers tell us whether it’s racist.”

He recounted the making of the minarets design. There were some early all-text trials, he recalled, which looked too wordy. One version showed missiles without the woman, another, the woman in a burqa, without eyes. “That was too impersonal,” Mr. Segert said. He and his colleagues, adding eyes, then debated what should be behind them. “Should they look sexy, not sexy?” he said. “To me the look we decided on is less aggressive than helpless.”

It can also be read the other way around. Mr. Segert added that, instead of the Swiss flag, the Matterhorn was tried, but the mix of minarets with the woman in a niqab and the mountain created confusion. Without the mountain, he said, the image, “could have been Istanbul or Dubai.”

“There was nothing wrong,” he continued, “nothing to disturb the view.”

But a flag solved that. “Minarets and the Swiss flag sent the message we wanted because they don’t fit together. A person looks and thinks, ‘This must be changed.’ ”

A certain person, anyway. The final poster, though heavy-handed, performs a complex task. The image of minarets beside the woman in the niqab stirs up a negative feeling among target voters. “No, I don’t want minarets because I will find myself living under Sharia law,” the viewer decides. But the referendum to ban minarets required a yes vote. “It’s always easier to do a campaign for a no vote,” Mr. Segert noted, “because people instinctively want to maintain the status quo. It’s what they already know. With a yes vote you need some positive symbol. But we had only this negative one, of minarets and Sharia.

“So we needed some bridge, some transition from no to yes.”

The designers experimented with the word “Verbieten,” meaning to forbid, but this turned out to look too complicated. The obvious solution, arrived at after a few false starts, was simply, “stop.”

The word performs a double role, emphasizing the initial message (stop minarets) then causing a viewer, when arriving at the word, mentally to stop, be free to switch gears and register “yes,” written just below “stop.” That is, vote yes.

“So there are three steps to the image,” Mr. Segert concluded. “Minarets lead to Sharia. No to minarets. Yes to the referendum.”

“It looks simple,” he said, staring at the finished image.

“But that’s the art of it.”

He smiled.

Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book

August 13, 2009
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse

It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.

So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”

In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”

“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”

Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”

Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.

Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.

Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.

Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.

Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”

Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.

Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.

“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”


August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.

August 13, 2009
3:45 pm


The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.

Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.

Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart

— FireInsideTheMan

4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm


Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.

— Stewart Trickett

5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm


This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.

— Ilsa Frank

6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm


“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”

Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship

Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.

Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.

I’m with Ilsa.

— david wilder

7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm


brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.

— jeff hamren

8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm


Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?

— Gerald Boisen

9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm


Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…

— esthermiriam

10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm


Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?

— esthermiriam

11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm


Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?

— Emily Satterthwaite

12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am


The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.

— Robert Sadin

13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am


Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!

— Sam Cruz

14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am


Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!

— David

15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am


Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.

— Karan

16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm


Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.

Ellen

— Ellen Shanley

17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm


Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.

— Charles Duwel

18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm


The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.

What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.

— Ben Ledbetter

19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am


The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.

— Roberta Wagner

20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am


Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.

— Brian

21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm


Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”

You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.

— Claire

22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm


This is the very definition of Cowardice.

— Christian in NYC

23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm

To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.

— FAL

Showcase: Neighborly Hatred

If you have the chance check out the NYTs gallery of photos and video on their website! Plus Justyna's website, which is amazing!!!

September 3, 2009, 12:00 am
By James Estrin
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/showcase-45/?ref=global-home

PERPIGNAN, France — If you want to understand why Justyna Mielnikiewicz has spent eight years photographing border disputes and ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, you should know two stories from her childhood.

First: When she was a child in Marklowice, in the Silesian region of Poland, she said her family spoke “proper” Polish at home and the local Silesian dialect outside, to fit in with the locals. Justyna watched her sister switch to dialect the moment she crossed the fence around their yard. But Justyna was a stubborn child and got it in her head to speak only proper Polish everywhere. As a result, she was mercilessly bullied by her schoolmates and nicknamed “the stranger.”

Second: On the way to school every day, she passed a large monument commemorating the Auschwitz prisoners who were marched through her village by the German army as they retreated from the Russians in early 1945. Thousands died along the way.

Now, Ms. Mielnikiewicz, 36, focuses on the crossroads between ethnicity, political borders and history. She sees the Caucasus — where Russia has recognized the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent from Georgia — as a place perfectly suited to explore these themes.

She recalled: “When I started going to Abkhazia, people said: ‘Why are you coming here? Nobody’s interested. I said it’s because it’s my personal journey to learn why people are doing this to each other, why people who live together can suddenly hate each other.”

This eight-year journey has now brought Ms. Mielnikiewicz to the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France, where she is to receive the Canon Female Photojournalist Award on Saturday. It is presented by the French Association of Female Journalists and includes a prize of 8,000 euros ($11,418) that will enable Ms. Mielnikiewicz to finish a project that will be exhibited at next year’s festival in Perpignan.

Ms. Mielnikiewicz photographed the war in South Ossetia for The Times. Her coverage included an audio slide show, “Photographers Journal: Fleeing the Georgian Conflict” and her pictures appeared in “Conflict in South Ossetia.”

Patrick Witty, the international picture editor at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Mielnikiewicz. On the second day of the war, he recalled, she sent him an e-mail message saying she had no ambitions to become a war photographer. “Despite this,” Mr. Witty said, “and despite her lack of a flak jacket, a helmet, or any experience photographing conflict before, she made the most memorable and moving pictures of the war. Her work is breathtaking.”

For the Perpignan competition, however, the photographs she submitted were not about the war but about the context of the war and the forces that create divisions.

While the chaos of war was a jarring experience for Ms. Mielnikiewicz, it was the the empty streets of the the Georgian city of Gori that really bothered her.

“I never realized that silence was the scariest thing, more than the explosions,” she said. “There were no cars, no one walking. It is not normal to hear silence in a big city. During war, reality goes upside down.”

The fighting has ended — at least for now — and Ms. Mielnikiewicz has gone back to documenting the context of the conflict . She is still trying to figure out why people can act so cruelly to their neighbors.

At Nazi Camp, Obama Calls Holocaust Denial ‘Hateful’

June 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/world/europe/06prexy.html?hp
By NICHOLAS KULISH, JEFF ZELENY AND ALAN COWELL

WEIMAR, Germany —President Obama traveled to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald Friday, laid a single white rose at a memorial to the dead and, returning emotionally to a theme he addressed in a major speech in Cairo on Thursday, criticized those who denied the Holocaust.

“To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful,” the President said, echoing his words in Cairo in an address that reached for what he called a “new beginning” in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world.

By visiting Buchenwald on Friday, he also underscored what he termed in Cairo America’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel. Mr. Obama has been pushing hard during this trip for a two-state solution in the Middle East, and the administration has angered some in Israel by taking a tough stand against Israel’s expanding existing settlements.

In his visit to the former concentration camp, Mr. Obama said the site was the “ultimate rebuke” to those who deny or seek to minimize the Holocaust.

“These sights have not lost their horror with the passage of time.”

“More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I have seen here today.”

The camp where 56,000 people died also bears a particular significance for Germans, embodying the contradiction of a civilized society’s descent into organized barbarism. The camp sits just a few miles outside the city of Weimar, one of the country’s leading cultural centers and home to the great German writers Goethe and Schiller.

With his hands behind his back and a thoughtful expression on his face, Mr. Obama walked through the former concentration camp, flanked by Chancellor Angela Merkel and Elie Wiesel, a Nobel peace prize winner, writer and Holocaust survivor, who survived a death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and was at the camp when it was liberated in April 1945.

Mr. Wiesel spoke movingly about the death of his father a few months before the liberation of the camp, calling the visit “a way of coming and visit my father’s grave. But he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky, which has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.”

Mr. Obama claims a personal connection to the concentration camp. His great-uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate a sub-camp of Buchenwald called Ohrdruf.

Mrs. Merkel, who like Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama laid a long-stemmed white rose in memory of the dead, spoke of the German responsibility “to do everything possible that something like that never happens again.”

She added, “I bow before all the victims.”

Earlier the two leaders met for talks in Dresden, where President Obama declared that “the moment is now” to press for a Middle East settlement. He put Israelis and Palestinians on notice that it was up to them to make “difficult compromises.”

President Obama said he was dispatching his top Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, to the region next week to follow up on issues raised during the Cairo speech. Time was of the essence, he said, for Israelis and the Palestinians to step up their efforts.

“The moment is now for us to act on what we all know to be the truth, which is that each side is going to have to make some difficult compromises,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to reject violence. The Palestinians have to get serious about creating a security environment that is required for Israel to feel confident. Israelis are going to have to take some difficult steps.”

“Ultimately, the United States can’t force peace upon the parties,” he added, “but what we’ve tried to do is to clear away some of the misunderstandings so we can at least begin to have frank dialogue.”

On other issues, the two leaders said they would work closely on trying to persuade Iran to abandon what the West fears is a nuclear program to build an atomic bomb but which Tehran says is for civilian purposes.

But there was no indication of major progress on Washington’s desire for Europeans to accept prisoners from Guantánamo Bay as Mr. Obama moves to redeem a pledge to close the detention center in Cuba.

“I don’t anticipate it’s going to be resolved in the next two or three months,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama’s one-day visit to Germany is laden with symbolism. Dresden, in the former East Germany, is for many Germans, a symbol of the suffering of civilians. Germans perished in large numbers when the British and American air forces fire-bombed the city in February 1945, only months before the end of World War II. Military experts still debate whether the onslaught was necessary with the German Army already in retreat.

The bombing destroyed the baroque Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady, which the president visited Friday. The church was not rebuilt until after the fall of Communism. Some $218 million, more than half of it private donations, was spent on reconstructing it, and the new church was consecrated in 2005.

Mrs. Merkel suggested Friday that the city symbolized the progress Germany has made since the collapse of the former East Germany.

The meeting between her and Mr. Obama renewed speculation about how friendly they really were beyond the diplomatic smiles and handshakes.

But Mr. Obama dismissed the suggestion that his relationship with Chancellor Merkel was strained. Asked by a German television reporter about it, he playfully admonished the press.

“Stop it, all of you,” Mr. Obama said. “We have more than enough problems out there without manufacturing problems.”

He smiled and looked over to his German counterpart, saying: “It is a great pleasure to be with my friend once again, who I always seek out for intelligent analysis and straight talk.”

Indeed, Mr. Obama said on Friday: “Germany is a close friend and a critical partner to the United States, and I believe that friendship is going to be essential not only for our two countries but for the world if we are to make progress on some of the critical issues that we face, whether it’s national security issues or economic issues or issues that affect the globe like climate change.”

Specifically, he alluded to the global financial crisis, which created major differences between the United States and Germany. Mr. Obama said it was “going to be very important to coordinate between Europe and the United States as we move to strengthen our financial regulatory systems.”

“We affirmed that we are not going to engage in protectionism. And, as all of us do, we have to make sure we keep our borders open and that companies can move back and forth between the United States and Europe in providing goods and services to our respective countries.”

Nicholas Kulish reported from Weimar, Germany; Jeff Zeleny Dresden ; and Alan Cowell from Paris.

Research on Lesser-Known Nazi Sites Is Now Public

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/middleeast/20holocaust.html
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: April 19, 2009
JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.

Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of the gas chambers in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about the hundreds — perhaps thousands — of smaller killing fields across the former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths.

That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites, comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, cross-checking numbers and methods. The work, gathered under the title “The Untold Stories,” is far from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts Monday evening, the research is being made public on the institution’s Web site.

“These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved smaller towns and villages,” said David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. “In many cases, locals played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next. This provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa.”

For the purposes of this project, a killing field entailed at least 50 people, Lea Prais, the project director, said. The murdering began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic Republics in the north to the Caucuses in the south, Nazi death squads combed the areas.

The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet collaborators.

The new research checks those versions against German records, diaries and letters of soldiers, and accounts by witnesses and the few surviving Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes, the researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is noted on the Web site. One goal of the project is to gain greater specificity of the numbers killed.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed actual killings in Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who claimed to have been a bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, “After the civilian guards with the yellow armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.

At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand.”

Ms. Prais, the project director, said one of the discoveries that most surprised her is the way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to commemorate those who perished. In distant fields and village squares they often placed a Star of David or some other memorial despite fears of overt Jewish expression in the Soviet era.

“The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent,” she said.

The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One case Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what happened in the town of Krupki in Belarus, where the entire Jewish community of at least 1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.

A German soldier who took part in the mass murder kept a diary that was found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of having volunteered as one of “15 men with strong nerves” asked to eliminate the Jews of Krupki. “All these had to be shot today,” he wrote. The weather was gray and rainy, he observed.

The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany but as they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident. Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time controlling the crowd.

“Ten shots rang out, ten Jews popped off,” he wrote. “This continued until all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won’t forget this spectacle in a hurry....”

Anyone Going to Paris?

Gwyneth Paltrow has a new website where she and her friends dedicate each week to another fun subject. This past week was GO, and the subject of interest was Paris! So if you are planning a trip to Paris check out all the little places mentioned. Also, if you'd like to check out Ms. Paltrow's new site click here.

Paris
When I was ten years old, my father and I took a trip to Paris, leaving my younger brother and mother in London where she was filming a movie. My dad believed in one-on-one time with us, and sometimes that extended to a weekend away. We stayed at a great hotel and he said I could order whatever I wanted for breakfast (French fries). We went to the Pompidou museum, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre - the usual spots. It was pretty great. On the plane back to London he asked me if I knew why we had gone, just he and I, to Paris for the weekend. I said no, but I felt so lucky for the trip. He said, “I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would always love you, no matter what.” From that time on, Paris was and continues to be very special to me. I lived there for five months in 1994 and I have made many trips back. These are the places in Paris I stay and eat and toast my dad.
Love,
Gwyneth Paltrow
Places to Eatl’Ami Louis
32, rue du Vertbois
3e
+33 1 48 87 77 48

There are two schools of thought regarding l’Ami Louis: one is that it is an overpriced place for tourists and the other is that it is one of the best, most venerable bistros in Paris. I am firmly in the school of the latter. It is small and wood paneled with an ancient oven and a sicko wine list. Every time I go, I see a former French president or the like, and I leave so full that I walk back to the hotel.Le Voltaire
27, Quai Voltaire
7e
+33 1 42 61 17 49

Le Voltaire is a lovely place on the river with a lighter type of French fare (grapefruit and avocado salad). It is one of my favorite spots to go for lunch. Market
15, Avenue Matignon
8e
+33 1 56 43 40 90
www.jean-georges.com

From superchef Jean-Georges, this restaurant serves Asian/nouvelle French cuisine done wonderfully and served in a clean, contemporary space.Kinugawa
9, rue du Mont-Thabor
1e
+33 1 42 60 65 07
http://kinugawa-hanawa.com

After a couple of days in Paris when I need to lay off the butter and goose fat, I head to Kinugawa for a Japanese lunch. After a lovely bowl of miso soup, some beautiful sashimi and a seaweed salad, I am ready to partake in all things French once more.T’CHA La Maison de Thé
6, rue du Pont de Lodi
6e
+33 1 43 29 61 31

This is a little teahouse off the beaten track in the sixth arrondissement. It is a great place for a light lunch or a perfect cup of sencha.Da Mimmo
39, Boulevard Magenta
10e
+33 1 42 06 44 47
www.damimmo.fr

I was told about Da Mimmo a few years ago by one of my coolest, most in-the-know friends. It is rustic Italian, super simple, super good. There is a massive display of the day’s fresh antipasti in the center of the room and that’s the best part of the dinner. No tourists here.Le Duc
243 Boulevard Raspail
14e
+33 1 43 20 96 30
http://leduc.abemadi.com

Don’t let the nautically themed room put you off. The seafood is fresh and wonderful.Mariage Frères
13, rue des Grands-Augustins
6e
+33 1 40 51 82 50
www.mariagefreres.com

I absolutely adore this tearoom and shop. It’s perfect for afternoon tea and beautiful objects for the home. Don’t miss the famous Mariage Frères candles (the Darjeeling one is my fave).Cinq-Mars
51, rue Verneuil
7e
+33 1 45 44 69 13

This place is the cozy, affordable, locals-only restaurant you always search for but never find when traveling. The food is simple but well prepared and it’s a nice break from the big, loud brasseries.Joséphine Chez Dumonet
117, rue du Cherche-Midi
6e
+33 1 45 48 52 40

This old-school bistro is one of my favorite places. The room is quite plain and unimpressive if you are looking to be dazzled but it has a wonderful feeling and it is very authentic. I love the duck confit...and watching all of the regulars. Restaurant Hélène Darroze
4, rue d’Assas
6e
+33 1 42 22 00 11
www.helenedarroze.com

Hélène Darroze is one of the few women to ever be awarded two Michelin stars. And these stars are well deserved. The food is terrific. And the room is quiet, calm and elegant.Brasserie Balzac
49, rue des Ecoles
5e
+33 1 43 54 13 67

Balzac is a great old brasserie with excellent service (the waiters have been there forever but are not pissed off, they retain a dry sense of humor). The food is good, classic brasserie fare and it’s a great spot for Sunday lunch or late dinner.Rose Bakery
30, rue Debelleyme
3e
+33 1 49 96 54 01

My friend Elena just got back from Paris and she had the most delicious meal at Rose Bakery. They have organic produce, fresh tarts, quiches and a sweet waitstaff.Lina’s Café
22, rue des Saints-Peres
7e
+33 1 40 20 42 78
www.linascafe.fr

Lina’s is a chain but you wouldn’t know it, biting into their famous turkey club. Fresh and delicious, it’s the perfect inexpensive meal to have while walking through the streets of Paris.Places to Stay Ritz Paris
15 Place Vendôme
1e
+33 1 43 16 30 30
www.ritzparis.com

Although I occasionally try the “new” spot or an old-new spot, I always keep coming back to the Ritz. The place is just beautiful and the service is pretty flawless for France. Yes, it costs an arm and a leg, but it’s worth it. Hotel Montalembert
3, rue de Montalembert
7e
+33 1 45 49 68 68
www.montalembert.com

This hotel is very small (as are the rooms) but it is clean and modern and tucked away in a great area off Boulevard Saint-Germain. You don’t feel like a tourist in the way you do when you stay at one of the grande dame hotels. When I shot a film in Paris, my dad stayed here with our black Labrador for weeks - it was our home away from home. They were incredibly gracious and welcoming. Room 81 has a view of the Eiffel Tower. Hôtel Particulier Montmartre
23, Avenue Junot
Pavillon D
8e
+33 1 53 41 81 40
http://hotel-particulier-montmartre.com/fr

This once grand mansion turned five-room chic hotel was recommended to me by a discerning travel journalist. He had just gone to the opening and said it was really special and worth checking out. Each room is distinctly decorated by various artists. I’ve never stayed in Montmartre, but I love the idea of being in that area of Paris. Hotel Saint Vincent
5 rue du Pré aux Clercs
7e
+33 1 42 61 01 51
www.hotelsaintvincentparis.com

Another spot in Saint Germain, this small boutique hotel is a great deal in an otherwise overpriced area. I have friends that have stayed here and rave about the intimate, clean rooms and ideal location.

Behind Fairy Tale Drawings, Walls Talk of Unspeakable Cruelty

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/arts/design/28wall.html?_r=1
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: February 27, 2009

Also, check out the slide show!

JERUSALEM — He occupies the driver’s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white steeds under his command and a sly smile across his lips. Bruno Schulz looks out at the world from his painting as if he owns it. But like much else in his life, cut short by a Nazi bullet, this is pure fantasy.

The work and story of Schulz, a Jewish writer and painter in Poland who was forced to illustrate a children’s playroom in a Nazi officer’s home and then killed, have long attracted literary attention. There was something about his humility, talent and fate that captivated writers like Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and David Grossman, who all made him a character in their works.

Yet until the wall drawings for children were discovered in 2001 by a documentary filmmaker, fading and peeling like ancient Roman frescoes, they were thought to have been destroyed. Spirited out of Schulz’s hometown in what is now Ukraine under contested circumstances by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel, they have been painstakingly preserved and put on view here for the first time.

And while this haunting show, a permanent exhibition titled “Wall Painting Under Coercion,” will not end the lingering controversy over whether Schulz belongs more to Polish than to Jewish culture, or whether the wall drawings should have remained in Ukraine rather than go to Israel, it offers a poignant example of artistic defiance in the face of overwhelming cruelty.

“There was something very Kafkaesque about his abhorrence of bureaucracy and authority,” said Yehudit Shendar, senior art curator at Yad Vashem. “He is sometimes called the Polish Kafka. He took courage with a brush in his hand. It became a weapon of rebellion.”

For example, the Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Hansel and Gretel that Schulz created for the officer’s children’s playroom bore the faces of real people: Schulz himself, his father and other members of the Jewish population in their town, Drohobych. Putting himself at the reins in his drawing struck a note of defiance, since Nazi law forbade Jews from riding in or driving carriages.

His face is also that of the witch, a reference, curators believe, to the witch hunts that Jews faced in eastern Galicia, then part of Poland, in those months after the Nazi conquest of his town in June 1941.

Instantly, some 900 Jews were rounded up and shot. Most of the rest were pressed into forced labor before being killed. Schulz was a sickly man and a talented one, and the Gestapo sergeant in charge of Jewish laborers, Felix Landau, held him aside and ordered him to decorate a riding school and his children’s nursery. It seemed to be his salvation.

Marila B., who was 11 at the time and lived in the house next to the riding school, eventually escaped through the forest with her family and lives today in Israel. She remembers the Nazi sergeant and the wall drawings because she was ordered to baby-sit for the officer’s children, aged 4 and 2.

“I would play with the children in the garden and then take them up to the playroom, and there I saw the drawings,” she said in a brief interview at the opening of the exhibition at Yad Vashem this month. Loath to be obliged to repeat her story, she asked that her full name not be published. “Landau used to walk around with a pistol in one hand and a whip in the other. He was the very embodiment of evil.”

Landau did save Schulz for more than a year, until November 1942, by providing him with work and the means for minimal sustenance. Schulz, whose literary reputation as a short-story writer had already been established, had obtained false Aryan papers and was about to escape when another Gestapo sergeant, Karl Günter, angry that Landau had killed his Jewish dentist, put a bullet in Schulz’s head. He is said to have told Landau: “You killed my Jew. Now I’ve killed yours.”

Schulz was 50 and a bachelor, and though he had published only a handful of works, he was viewed as brilliant by those who mattered most in Polish literature. His reputation later grew immensely. As Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, “What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.”

Always rooted in Drohobych, his work had a magical vitality to it.

As one of his famous lines reads, “My colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.”

Mr. Grossman, the Israeli author, says he discovered Schulz when someone told him that Schulz’s influence was evident in his own first novel. He had never heard of Schulz, but he picked up his stories and felt a chill of admiration and recognition. Upon learning of the infamous line about Nazis’ killing each other’s Jews, Mr. Grossman was filled with the ambition to write about the Holocaust.

In his widely admired novel “See Under: Love,” a character named Bruno escapes a ghetto under Nazi occupation and jumps into a river, joining a school of salmon.

Most of Schulz’s artwork has not survived but was also esteemed by his contemporaries. Expressionist in the way of Middle European artists of the interwar era, it mixed dreamlike fantasy with a touch of erotica. Because he was an assimilated Jew who wrote in Polish and whose hometown is now in Ukraine, the discovery of the murals was greeted in Eastern Europe as the retrieval of a piece of national heritage.

For officials at Yad Vashem, however, Schulz was killed for being a Jew, and his work belonged here. When they learned of the discovery, they negotiated with the family living in the house and the municipality to get permission to rescue the paintings from their neglected circumstances.

What happened next is disputed, but most of the paintings were removed and taken to Israel without the Ukrainian government’s permission. After years of bad feelings, a deal has been struck whereby the murals belong to Ukraine but are on long-term loan to Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian deputy culture minister attended the exhibition’s opening.

So did Mr. Grossman. He told the audience an anecdote from Schulz’s childhood. His mother caught him feeding sugar water to flies one autumn day, and she asked him what he was doing. “Helping them get through the long winter,” he replied.

That, Mr. Grossman said, is what Schulz’s work does for us all.

Saving Pompeii From the Ravages of Time and Tourists

July 26, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/arts/design/26ruin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
POMPEII, Italy — Citing threats to public security and to the site itself, the Italian government has for the first time declared a yearlong state of emergency for the ancient city of Pompeii.

Nearly 2,000 years after Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii under pumice and steaming volcanic ash, some 2.6 million tourists tramp annually through this archaeological site, which is on Unesco’s World Heritage list.

Frescoes in the ancient Roman city, one of Italy’s most popular attractions, fade under the blistering sun or are chipped at by souvenir hunters. Mosaics endure the brunt of tens of thousands of shuffling thongs and sneakers. Teetering columns and walls are propped up by wooden and steel scaffolding. Rusty padlocks deny access to recently restored houses, and custodians seem to be few and far between.

This month the government drafted a retired lawman, Renato Profili, the former prefect of Naples, to map out a strategy to combat neglect and degradation at the site. Mr. Profili has been given special powers for one year so he can bypass the Italian bureaucracy and speedily bolster security and stop the disintegration.

The hope is that many houses and villas now closed to the public and exposed to looting and vandalism will soon be opened and protected.

“Pompeii is a calling card of Italy for foreigners, and it’s important that their impression be positive,” said Italy’s culture minister, Sandro Bondi. He directed Mr. Profili to crack down on “blatant abuses” like unlicensed tour guides and the souvenir vendors who aggressively approach tourists.

Mr. Bondi also said that Mr. Profili would explore “new forms of innovative management” in which private sponsors might be recruited to finance improvements.

Government red tape is blamed for some of the inefficiencies at Pompeii. “If I have to fix a broken wall,” said Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, the superintendent of the ruins, “I first have to put out a tender for an architect to evaluate the damage.

“Then I have to put out a tender for a company to fix the wall. Then I have to see if I have enough money in my budget to pay for the repair, and then finally the work begins.

“If he can bypass all that, it would be very positive.”

“Is there an emergency? I don’t know, I’ve always been very clear about the problems at Pompeii,” Mr. Guzzo added. “The situation here is so immense that ordinary means haven’t been able to control it.”

The 109-acre ruins, about an eighth the size of Central Park (50 more acres or so are underground), are severely understaffed. Workers are prone to wildcat strikes that can leave visitors standing outside locked gates. Local criminal organizations must constantly be kept at bay when bids are solicited for maintenance work or for operating public concessions at the site.

Still, Mr. Guzzo said he had made some progress since he assumed his post in 1995. Visitors now have access to 35 percent of the ruins, compared with 14 percent when he first arrived. He admitted, however, that this improvement was “a drop in the bucket.”

Some experts say Mr. Profili will not have an easy time of it. “I truly hope that he’s able to do everything he wants to, but at Pompeii no one wants to change anything,” said Luigi Crimaco, an archaeologist.

Mr. Crimaco should know. For about two and a half years ending in 2006, he was part of a three-man team responsible for managing Pompeii. He said he had often been hamstrung by restrictive laws leaving him little leeway to address problems.

“The preservation of cultural heritage means ensuring that they survive forever,” Mr. Crimaco said. “To protect Pompeii, it’s necessary to invest and bring in people and outside capital able to inject vitality into the ancient city.”

Ticket-sale proceeds and financing from the European Union and local governments have not met Pompeii’s bottomless financial needs. “Modern cities are constantly plagued by unforeseen expenses,” said Giuseppe Proietti, the culture ministry’s secretary general. “Just put that in the context of an enormous ancient site exposed to the elements.”

That chronic shortfall has brought suggestions that investors should operate Pompeii. The ruins should “be put in a condition where people can best appreciate their beauty, because that’s money to the area,” said Antonio Irlando, an architect and the president of a local conservation group that meticulously monitors Pompeii’s cracking walls, falling stones, abandoned work sites and flaking intonaco, the thin layer of plaster on which a fresco is painted. “This is an area with high unemployment and that shouldn’t be the case, because it has an immense patrimony.”

Claudio Velardi, culture and tourism chief for the Campania region, which includes Pompeii, has suggested an “American style” sponsorship of the site, in which a business would reap image benefits if not a tangible financial return.

But around the globe there is always considerable unease with the notion of the privatization of cultural heritage. “Pompeii is a government responsibility; it’s a World Heritage site, and they don’t want it to become too much of a Disneyland,” said Steven J. R. Ellis of the University of Cincinnati, a director of a research project at Porta Stabia, one of Pompeii’s ancient gates.

“The concern is that private investment will swing interests into making money at Pompeii rather than its cultural upkeep and the assurance that funds are given over to conservation,” Dr. Ellis said.

Despite the deterioration and the bad publicity, the ruins still inspire awe.

“It’s wonderful,” said Maria Nappi, a tourist from Connecticut who was visiting with her family. She said the site gave her a “wonderful sense of life back then, and their art and love of beauty.”

As for the crumbling state of the ruins, she said it “was just Mother Nature taking over,” adding, “It doesn’t matter if it’s here, or France, or the United States.”