That dilemma is unexplored. That would mean examining the idea of resistance more intensively; making more distinctions, not fewer. Why, for example, did it take so much time for Jewish resistance to erupt into outright refusal and rebellion? In the show's companion book, the historian David Engel suggests that at first Jews saw the Nazi phenomenon as a recurrence of earlier traumas, as part of the cycle of Jewish historical experience. Jews, after all, had received full German citizenship only in 1871, so if they were deprived of benefits in 1933, it was more a regression than a cataclysm.
The sense of repetitive cycles was reinforced by the literal medievalism of German oppression: the ghettos, the yellow stars, the governing Jewish councils. These historical echoes, Engel suggests, made Jews less likely to see clearly what was happening and made resistance less likely.
Those who did see, like the partisan Abba Kovner, took very different actions. In 1941, at 23, he said the German goal was the "absolute, total annihilation" of the Jews. This put the entire situation in a new context. Unfortunately in this show one doesn't fully grasp how drastically interpretation shaped response; the partisans were a turning point as much as a continuation. Here, though, their acts almost become a supplement to broadly defined resistance, and the fighters lack individuality.
In a 2001 PBS documentary, Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans, Kenneth Mandel and Daniel Polin tell the story through interviews with 11 partisans who become recognizable individuals recounting an astonishing past. Some of those same figures appear in this exhibition's videos, but they are stripped of context and speaking in snippets. We don't learn enough about them to fully understand their achievement.
This makes the exhibition less powerful than it might have been. But at a time when Nazism has become a denatured metaphor for any political system deemed unpleasantly powerful, and when the concept of resistance has been perverted into meaninglessness by terrorist groups boasting exterminationist goals, this show begins to re-establish the sense of scale that once made Nazism so horrific and resistance so difficult.
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