Antisemitism , Racism, Prejudice
“Hate Industry – Antisemitism, Racism, Prejudice – the Past Hundred Years” is an exhibition that focuses on the century bracketed by the 1920s and the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It investigates the perils of incitement and propaganda that exploit mass media, the kind of propaganda that did much to ready the way for the ghastliest genocide in modern history, the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust.
The first part of the exhibition centers on the period between the advent of Nazism and the end of World War II (1945). Exhibited are propaganda posters and cartoons, chiefly those that the Nazi authorities used to shape the image of the Jew as an enemy of the Reich. An interactive multimedia system allows visitors to analyze the overt and covert racist and antisemitic messages that abetted the demonization and dehumanization of the Jews.
The second part reviews the period between the end of the war and the second decade of the twentieth century. It migrates between hope that the international community had learned the lesson of the Holocaust at the end of World War II, when a series of international treaties was signed (on human rights, on preventing genocide, and the Geneva Convention), and the upturn in racism and antisemitism in the 2010s. By so doing, it expresses the transition from a sense of de-legitimization of any expression of racism, after the Holocaust, to manifestations of genocide, antisemitism, and racism despite it all. The exhibition concludes by analyzing the processes that typify incitement in today’s social media.
