Owning our “Roots”

A blog post by JMM Executive Director Marvin Pinkert. To read more posts from Marvin click HERE.

At the AAM Conference in DC last week, my favorite session (somewhat unexpectedly) was the networking meeting of the traveling exhibits group.  In this unusual “speed dating” exercise, 35 exhibit providers are allowed about 2 minutes each to pitch their latest traveling exhibits.  I came to promote Beyond Chicken Soup:  Jews and Medicine in America as well as our future exhibit American Alchemy: From Junk to Scrap to Recycling.  But what started out as a sales effort soon became an exercise in nostalgia.  To start with I ended up being seated at a table comprised of staff from my two former employers – Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and DC’s National Archives Museum – walking in at that awkward moment when they were sharing “Marvin” stories.  When the program began Kelly Fernandi of Minotaur Mazes was the lead-off speaker and he gave a shout out to me and to The A-Mazing Mendes Cohen.  When it was my turn, I included a joke about the Paul Simon exhibit and several subsequent speakers slyly referenced my name as a way to link to that joke.  The last person on the agenda was “Dino” Don Lessem.  Don has developed a specialized enterprise that mounts large national tours of dinosaur exhibits coming out of China.  As he finished his pitch, he said “and I want you to know that I wrote a play 42 years ago in which Marvin played a singing dog”.  The room cracked up, but Don was telling the truth.  We were classmates at Brandeis and he wrote a musical orientation show based on the Wizard of Oz and yes, I was Toto.  What had started as a sales meeting had become a roast!

The meeting also triggered a serious thought about how we own or deny our past, both personal and collective.  It is easy to lay claim to resume achievements – a whole lot tougher to embrace what we’ve learned from our personal failings – and tougher still to accept ownership of the historic failings of our society.  In Judaism, our annual recitation of the “al cheyt” prayer is just one example of a recognition that we need to take ownership of acts we did not personally commit but are still a part of our communal legacy.

This is all an explanation of why I’ll be watching this week’s remake of the mini-series “Roots” with such keen interest.  For the original series, the executive producer was David Wolper and the producer was Stan Margulies.  Several of the directors and writers of individual episodes were also Jewish.  The idea of re-introducing the series for the 21st century has its origins with David’s son Mark Wolper.

The History channel has commissioned a remake of the miniseries after acquiring rights from David L. Wolper's son, Mark Wolper, and Alex Haley's estate.
The History channel has commissioned a remake of the miniseries after acquiring rights from David L. Wolper’s son, Mark Wolper, and Alex Haley’s estate.

This is the way he describes the start of his journey in the Observer:

The younger Wolper knew that he had to create a new version of the series after having a tumultuous time getting his own 16-year-old son to watch it. “It was very difficult to keep his attention. After it ended he said, ‘Alright Dad, I understand why this is important, but it’s like your music, it just doesn’t speak to me.’ In that moment I knew why we needed to do this. No one is going to go back and watch it – it’s 40 years old and it looks very dated, it’s slow, it’s not produced at the high level that television is produced at today so I knew it needed to be redone.”

One of his early steps was to recruit LeVar Burton, the original Kunte Kinte, as co-producer.  In an article in Mother Jones, Burton is asked why he would choose to remake a piece of media as iconic as “Roots”.  I found his response interesting:

Well, how often have we seen Holocaust stories? I bring that up because there’s a wonderful tradition in Jewish culture that is about “never forget.” In insisting that this story is passed onto each successive generation, it has become part and parcel of Jewish identity. Human beings have remarkably short memories, and so it is essential that we continually remind ourselves.

Short memories – and powerful mechanisms for distancing ourselves from history we find uncomfortable.  In the time of slavery, Jews were a part of a white society that benefited from the suffering of slaves. My ancestors did not arrive on these shores until the 1890s, however, when our family accepted the mantle of American citizenship we became owners of all of American history – the glory of our democracy, the success of our innovation and the horrors of our exploitation of peoples of color.

So this Memorial Day, I simultaneously take pride in the role of American Jews in pushing our nation towards accepting accountability for a troubled past, and repentance for historic actions (and in-actions) that we can never fully repair – pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.

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Museum Stories World of Museums

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