The Jewish Museum in Berlin tells the story of German-Jewish history from the fourth century to the present. It consists of two buildings: the first, a former courthouse, was built in the eighteenth century, and the second, a massive extension that opened to the public in 2001, was designed by the world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind (born 1946). Libeskind's building is comprised of a zinc façade and a set of three underground allegorical roads. The first leads to the main stairs, and by implication to the continuation of Berlin's history in the Museum; the second leads outdoors into the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden, representing the exile and emigration of the Jews from Germany; and the third road leads to a dead end, representing "the Holocaust void." This road cuts through the ensemble as a whole, and evokes, in the architect's words, "that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes." For Libeskind, a Polish Jew raised not far from Berlin who lost many relatives in the Holocaust, this extraordinary building was an intensely personal undertaking with numerous responsibilities. This volume details this most freighted and complex of buildings.

In recent times, ethnicity and issues of origin have become a hotly debated topic among Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora. This is particularly true both of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, who for years had remained at the margins of the Israeli national narrative, as well as the Israeli Palestinian minority. Much the same may be said of Diaspora Jews. Among the public spaces where ethnicity has become more visible are museums, together with heritage centres, art galleries, and the Internet. The aim of Memory and Ethnicity is to investigate how ethnicity is represented and narrated in such spaces. How have groups of Jews from such different backgrounds as Morocco, Egypt, India or the US elaborated their past legacies and traditions vis-a-vis a variety of national narratives and cultural or political ideologies? This volume describes the emergence of a new museological scene - that mirrors a multi-vocal Jewish and Israeli public sphere in which ethnicity has become central to a nation's cultural imagination. By considering museums as places of memory where an ethnic/communal identity is displayed, Memory and Ethnicity analyses which memories are preserved, and which suppressed. This study sets out to enrich the understanding of Israeli and Jewish cultural history, and also to deepen the field of museum studies from little investigated perspectives.