I wasn't there to kill anybody

The two shows currently on view at the Jewish Museum resonate in subtle and profound ways. Voices of Lombard Street: A Century of Change in East Baltimore examines how the neighborhood surrounding the museum has changed over the past century. The exhibit is beautifully designed, with an abundance of archival photography and insightful text that compellingly shows the resourcefulness and tenacity of immigrant and minority communities. I scribbled the following quote in my notebook... "My father did whatever he could. He might have been a musician one day, the next day he was a machinist, the next day a junk dealer." I also enjoyed the "Deli Dialogs," an audio history put together by Rafael Alvarez, who wrote the screen painters story in our May issue. The other exhibit, Ours To Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War, offers a powerful look at the soldiers engaged in fighting a war. The fact that they are Jews is, in some ways, secondary to the larger issues at play. I was stopped in my tracks by a video of an American veteran recounting how he once stumbled across a German soldier hiding in a building. The two struggled and fought, and the American eventually knifed and killed the other man. Watching him recall the horror of that moment, and realizing how it haunts him 60 years later, put tears in my eyes. Walking away, I noticed another soldier's comment on a nearby wall... "I wasn't there to kill anybody."