Collecting Anti-Semitic Art in Order to Discredit It
An exhibit of anti-Semitic imagery will debut next March. Its organizer, a London physician named Simon Cohen, has single-mindedly gathered nearly 300 items of anti-Semitica, from medieval depictions of Jews murdering Christian children to Nazi propaganda denigrating Jews as subhuman parasites to modern anti-Israel imagery supposedly based on anti-Semitic stereotypes.
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Cohen is an Orthodox Jew. (There are two kinds of people who collect anti-Semitica, a collector once declared in the Jewish weekly The Forward: neo-Nazis and Jews.) He says he hopes his show will educate and thereby chasten those who cavalierly invoke anti-Semitic language or iconography. But is exhibiting hate art the way to discourage hate? The Anglo-Jewish community isn't so sure.