Joel Cahen: Facing Challenges of Inclusion

International Week 2023

May 9th in Room 172

10:00–14:00

This workshop deals with key changes in public memory in the Netherlands. We examine memorials, literature and art in their relationships to official memory and creative practices. We see a gradual shift in focus from war heroes to collective and individual victims of the persecution. The workshop will highlight contemporary visual artists, whose works are inspired by their family histories and by changing attitudes to their memory, whilst public visibility increased. In line with these changes and the fact that the generation of the Shoa is disappearing we will work on 2 real projects. Planning an exhibition with several levels of a Holocaust site included. The Jewish Work Village in the polder and the Westerbork transit camp. Facing challenges of inclusion.

Joel Cahen (*1948) is a historian. He was Head Curator of Museum Beit Hatfutsot, now Museum ANU, Tel Aviv, until 2002 and Director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, Amsterdam, until 2016. He regularly publishes on the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, for example: Der Amsterdamer Künstler Martin Monnickendam und das jüdische Amsterdam in: Martin Monnickendam in Lippe und im Weserbergland 1923, Bielefeld 2022; Die niederlandisch-jüdischen Wurzeln von Sophia Goudstikker, in: Die modernen Frauen des Atelier Elvira in München und Augsburg 1887–1908, München 2022; and Holocaust Memory. Memorials and the Visual Arts in the Netherlands, From Early Public Monuments to Contemporary Artists in European Judaism, A Journal for the New Europe, Volume 56, 2023.