Warfare of Art & Law Podcast
Warfare of Art and Law Podcast sparks conversation about the intriguing – and sometimes infuriating – stories that arise in the worlds of art and law with artist and attorney Stephanie Drawdy.
Warfare of Art & Law Podcast
Dr. Samson Munn on Recovering Art by Jacob Mącznik and other School of Paris Artists, Escaping the Burden of Silence Through Dialogue, Citizenship, Israeli PM Netanyahu, the Fraught Concept of Legacy & Defining Justice
Cover Image: Self-Portrait, oil on canvas by Jacob Mącznik.
To learn more, please visit the website for Jacob Mącznik, the Lost Art Database page for Mącznik's Still Life with Fish, The Austrian Encounter and the trailer to The Ghosts of the Third Reich.
Show Notes:
0:00 Dr. Samson Munn discussing Van Ham art auctionhouse
1:45 Munn’s background
2:50 history of Holocaust-related dialogue with Dan Bar-On
4:00 Children of the Third Reich
4:20 Austrian dialogue group
4:35 Ghosts of the Third Reich
6:00 second group, The Encounter
7:45 Dan Bar-On’s book Fear and Hope
12:00 examples from dialogue groups
17:15 Munn’s initial motivation to start dialogue group - emotional responsibility
24:40 Munn’s dialogue work in Northern Ireland
27:25 dialogue work with descendants of displaced indigenous peoples
28:50 preparation for dialogue group facilitators
32:20 screening individuals for dialogue groups
33:45 Israeli, Polish and German citizenship
44:30 Jacob Mącznik’s work
1:00:00 Van Ham auctionhouse
1:06:00 Parisian archive research
1:11:00 Munn’s research of other artists from the Paris School
1:12:30 female artists from the Paris School
1:14:30 Mącznik catalogue raisonne
1:17:00 legacy that Munn is working to create
1:19:30 justice
1:22:30 Israeli PM Netanyahu
Please share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com
Music by Toulme.
To hear more episodes, please visit Warfare of Art and Law podcast's website.
To leave questions or comments about this or other episodes of the podcast and/or for information about joining the 2ND Saturday discussion on art, culture and justice, please message me at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com.
Thanks so much for listening!
© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]
I asked Van Ham well, why don't you try to do the right thing here? Why don't you just ask her what her father was doing during World War II? They declined, as you might have imagined, on a business level, but not on an ethical level. I said why don't you try to persuade her to do the right thing? And they said that we're not in the business of doing that. You know, we want to make money and we want her to make money, and that's what it's about for us.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that focuses on how justice does or doesn't play out when art and law overlap. Hi everyone, it's Stephanie, and that was Dr Samson Munn discussing the reaction of Cologne Auction House, van Ham, after Dr Munn refused to drop his claim related to artwork created by his uncle, rising Ecole de Paris artist, jacob Munchenek. What follows is a conversation with Dr Munn in which he shares more about the Van Ham affair, his ongoing efforts to revive the legacy of his uncle and other Ecole de Paris artists who, like his uncle, had their careers and lives cut short during the Holocaust, and goes on from there to a range of other topics, starting with Dr Munn's work to bring together descendants of Nazis and descendants of those targeted during the Holocaust to create dialogue and closing Dr Munn's thoughts on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Samson Munn, welcome to Warfare of Art and Law. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2:Would you give an overview of your background and your career, your work thus far?
Speaker 1:Sure, professionally I'm a physician, I'm a radiologist and medical school professor, but I think the reason I'm on this program is unrelated to my being a radiologist. It's more related to work I do in relation to the Holocaust in terms of group dialogues or encounters, and also work I do with respect to paintings done by the Ecole de Paris artists.
Speaker 2:An overarching point I would love to start with is how you see the work you do with Holocaust-related dialogue, how it relates to many different issues in our society, and maybe we can start with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, let me start with a little bit of history.
Speaker 1:In 1992, an Israeli professor named Dan Baron, b-a-r-o-n, created an amazing encounter. He brought together sons and daughters of Holocaust victims with sons and daughters of Holocaust perpetrators in an intensive dialogue that took place in Wuppertal, germany, for four days no agenda, no fee, no therapy, just no historiography. No religiosity, just conversation. Literally no agenda. So he didn't even introduce people. They sat and then they started a conversation after several minutes of silence, which was very pregnant silence, and a conversation began that turned into a very intensive dialogue. It became the group. The group lasted from 1992 until 2008 when Dan Baron died.
Speaker 1:It became the subject of multiple newspaper articles, bbc documentary film and many other things.
Speaker 1:The BBC documentary film was called Children of the Third Reich and I took part in that dialogue and became a close friend and, I guess, follower of Dan Baron.
Speaker 1:And I started my own dialogue project in Vienna in 1995, which lasted for 26 years, and it was also the subject of at least half a documentary film called Ghosts of the Third Reich, I think.
Speaker 1:And it was also a very personal experience for everybody, a very deep experience, a very moving experience, and it's all about getting to know the other really deeply and it's all about getting to a point where you not just intellectually but emotionally realize that you're the other's other and that's what relates to what you asked about in terms of Northern Ireland or South Africa or Israel, palestine, people getting to really deeply get to know the other. It changes your views tremendously when you do that and you become much more empathetic, much more understanding understanding not just emotionally, but intellectually. You actually understand them better. It makes much more sense what they're doing and why they're doing it, and that's what these dialogues are about. There is the Austrian group lasted 26 years, as I said, until the summer of 2021. And another one has come to the scene and it's called the Encounter and it had its first meeting in 2022 outside Paris and its second meeting earlier this month in Berlin.
Speaker 2:How does that go with the individuals that are able to participate in these groups? And I guess maybe just kind of like the format which you've sort of touched on from its early years I don't know if it's evolved.
Speaker 1:The format is still very similar. The current group, the Encounter, is meeting without an official or designated facilitator, but the group itself may choose to change that. The Austrian group. The first 18 years or so I facilitated, and then it shows after a while. After a while I chose no longer to be a facilitator and, rather than replace me, it continued to meet for another eight years or so without a facilitator. The group sits at a circle. It's a quiet, private place. Everything that's discussed or shared is private, not to be shared. Subsequently, the Barron group recorded its sessions, so there are recordings of it that have never been shared or played anywhere. The Austrian group recorded its sessions and currently the Encounter doesn't record its sessions.
Speaker 1:I might say something else about format. So Dan Barron became renowned when he published a book which was the first systematic series of interviews with children, sons and daughters of Nazi perpetrators. There were, and there are, other books about this topic and that are interviews, but they weren't systematic and they weren't a large number. His was, I think, 80 or so in. The book was published by Harvard University Press and I suggested to people I can't think of the title of it right now, but Dan Barron, harvard University Press and it'll come up. His approach was that the dialogue should grow from itself. So people sit in a circle and that's it. Maybe they'll introduce themselves, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll change how they introduce themselves, maybe they'll first be worried about other issues like whether to record or not to record or whatever.
Speaker 1:This is in contradiction to somebody else who was working on something similar at the same time, named Mona Weissmark, who at the time was faculty at Harvard in. She taught scientific methods and she had an interest of personal connections to the Holocaust and she was interested in creating such a group also. And she did create such a group which, if I remember correctly, actually met a couple of weeks before, a few weeks before Dan Barron's group. However, the group she created mutinied against her and her facilitators, one of whom was her husband. They caught on to the fact that it seemed, at least to them, to be an experiment, that they were the subjects of an experiment. It seemed, at least to them, that there was too close to a 50-50 number of men and women, too close to a 50-50 numbers of children of Nazis and children of perpetrators, and then, when it became clear that one of the facilitators was her husband yet that information had not been shared with them in advance. That destroyed trust and that, amongst the other issues, destroyed trust and they mutinied and threw her out of her own project.
Speaker 1:And I think that's kind of important because it tells you how people react if you invade their privacy and it tells you, especially over such a personal and deeply felt issue, and how important trust is, which Dan was able to grow well and which I hope I grow reasonably well in these groups. And she went on to create another group which met maybe a half year later or so and I, as far as I know, that second group also mutinied and then the two groups found each other and eventually formed another larger organization that continues to meet to this day in a number of different ways, but without her. And she left Harvard and became faculty at Northwestern. And if you read about her online, you'll read nothing about what I just told you. You'll find nothing in print about the reality that they mutinied against her. I have no personal feelings about her at all. I just bring it up because it is historical fact and because it's important to understand this issue of trust in such a dialogue.
Speaker 2:I guess if we could just delve a little bit deeper into how was it for you to start out as a facilitator? There are examples in the films for, for instance or I've heard you speak about examples of individuals like I think it was Dirk Koolg and Hermann Goring's grandniece was in the film. I don't know if you could give certain examples that might, if there are examples that you could share, to kind of ground the experience that you have seen with people growing from this experience.
Speaker 1:So I think they're on the. On the victim side, there are people whose whose parents had a variety of experiences, from having been, from having to leave in the 1930s and go to another country, to having survived murder camps, nazi murder camps or labor camps. Sometimes one parent, sometimes both parents. So there are a tremendous variety. Same things true on the sons and daughters of perpetrator side, the, the. For instance, in the Dan Barone group, the son of Martin Borman, whose name is also Martin Borman was, was part of the group. I can mention that he's published it publicly. He's no longer living.
Speaker 1:A woman was in that group whose father was the highest ranking Nazi officer in white Russia, responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and the same thing goes for her. She's mentioned it publicly and she's no longer living. But there are other people whose, whose whose father or mother or grandfather or grandmother had roles that were much more mundane. You know, perhaps they were just an officer at a concentration camp, perhaps they were somebody who had a factory with two or three workers. To slave laborers, just two or three Seems like trivial compared to factories that had thousands, but it's not trivial for those two or three or the four, their families, and, and so there's a variety of perpetration in their families.
Speaker 1:I think part of the connection that you're talking about that occurs in such intensive dialogue, when people really deeply get to know each other. I mean 10, 10, 12, 15 hours a day, talking to each other for four days straight with no agenda. They really get to know each other. And you know, sometimes it's not polite, sometimes it goes beyond polite and that can be very fruitful. I'll give you an example of how things can change. Maybe it's the, for me, the most shocking example, and this one came not written relation to the Holocaust, but to a project that Dan and I did in Northern Ireland. We met with a group of people who were bombers. We met or otherwise active, and we met with a group of people who had been bombed or otherwise victimized. Sometimes people were both and they were represented.
Speaker 1:They were both from this was a secret meeting in a tiny place and there was one British ex high ranking police officer and you know it's a complicated scene. He's obligated legally for the rest of his life to arrest some of the people who are present at the meeting and of course he didn't do that or he wouldn't have come to the meeting. The meeting is not to arrest people and there was one man there who had placed the bomb and killed some people and his, the daughter of one of the people he killed, was there to be discovered at the meeting and this was a very high visibility bombing because he was a member of parliament, and the father and the you know this group of people. This was over 30 people. This group of people were very reticent to introduce themselves, very red. They certainly didn't shake hands with each other at first. They, you know there was a lot of animosity people. You know there was somebody there whose husband had left. I mean, there are lots of severe trauma present in this group of 30 something people.
Speaker 1:And three days later people were at the pub singing Christmas carols together. It's not that the purpose of this kind of encounter is not to create an overly sanguine, lovey-dovey kind of atmosphere, but that was one shocking experience that I saw and people wouldn't even shake each other's hands, wouldn't even talk to each other, wouldn't respond to questions from each other and after three days of intensive, as I say, 12 to 15 hours a day talking to each other, they were drinking beer and ale and singing Christmas carols together. I can't get over it to this day. So there can be huge changes. It's not intended to create that kind of change. It's not a therapeutic encounter. There's no presumption of psychopathology in these people. They are traumatized. That doesn't mean they're they're ill or carry any psychological diagnosis at all.
Speaker 2:The overarching hope that you have. When you were starting these encounters, would you speak to that?
Speaker 1:So I didn't start the first one, as I say Dan Barone did. What happened to me was I was there in 1992 in Wuppertal and I was moved. I found myself shockingly moved in ways I didn't think I was going to be. I found myself expecting myself to think differently to how I had thought before. And the second meeting was a year later in Israel, and that was the meeting actually that which footage was obtained for the BBC documentary film Children of the Third Reich. And it was during that second meeting that I was moved again and then I said, ok, this is the real thing, something genuinely happening here in me, this cynical person, and I also felt like you know, there's a scholar at the University of Wisconsin named Rachel Baum and she has this. She coined this term called emotional responsibility, and I felt what I think she describes as emotional responsibility. I felt like I was experiencing emotions which made me responsible to do something and more than just sit and talk, and I thought about what could I do? As you know, I'm just a radiologist. I mean, what could I do? And I and I'm I'm a son of two Holocaust victims, two Nazi murder camp victims, one from Poland, one from Germany, both Jewish, and it occurred to me.
Speaker 1:I sort of looked around the room and I said you know, I think I could do this. Yeah, I could do this. Ok, I'll do this. I'll create another dialogue. How, where was the best place for me to do that? What is this all about?
Speaker 1:And it became clear to me that it's all about truth. It's not about facts, it's about truth. And where is truth regarding the Holocaust Most lacking? And that's where I'll do it. This was all naive, in in in a space of a few minutes. And I, you know, I'm quite aware that probably the place that it's most poignantly lacking and truth is most poignantly lacking at the Holocaust is Austria, since Austria was. You know, if one thinks about the experience of those years as two separate experiences World War Two, on the one hand, the European venue of World War Two, on the one hand, and the Holocaust, which is something distinct from war, on the other hand then you might say that Germany is really responsible for the war part, but Austria is much more responsible for the Holocaust part. A disproportionate number of leaders in concentration camps and similarly heinous behavior towards Jews and Gypsies and others who were victims of the Holocaust. A disproportionate number of these leaders and people who wrote doctrine and so on were Austrian, not German. I mean, it starts with Hitler, who is Austrian, not German, and it goes down from there Many, many, many. It just purport way disproportionate, you know, per capita. So that's why I created the group in Austria, was what moved me to create the group in Austria that began in 1995.
Speaker 1:Between 93 and 95, I went to Vienna five times in order to create this group and, as I say, it meant for 26 years, and it gave birth to this more recent group that met in Paris earlier this month, in Berlin. So that's the background behind what motivated me. I felt like I was speaking as much as everybody else, contributing as much as everybody else, certainly listening hard the way everyone else was. Yet I felt that I was getting more than I was giving. And that's when this concept of emotional responsibility kicked in. I felt like I'm obligated now, since I'm getting so much, to do more. And I created the Austrian group.
Speaker 1:Now, was I scared, as a radiologist, to do this? Yep, was I right to be scared? Yep, did. What did I do about that? I created. I had eight psychotherapists in the wings in Vienna, or women, for men to Jewish to not Jewish. It goes on like that so that anybody who might have a breakdown or something similar in the group would have a therapist they might resonate with. Available, instantly available. And for my own self, I had Dan Barone available in Israel by phone and none of that was necessary. None of that proved to be necessary, which was amazing, and of course I said that to Dan. I was just shocked that none of it was necessary and he said of course it won't be necessary. And I said why not? And he said people who subconsciously could not handle such an encounter will not come.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's the biggest point that kept coming out to me was that these people were willing to show up, and that says so much. Even if you can't speak the first few hours to even introduce yourself, the fact that you even showed up says you have this willingness to do the work.
Speaker 1:Right For your audience. I should probably make clear that none of these sons and daughters of perpetrators are defensive of their parent. They're all embarrassed and or feel shame and or feel guilt. They know what their forebear did and they know it was awful. The question is, how awful was it? Was it awful for them? Likewise, you know, we have people who have been in such groups whose parent was an absolutely lovely, loving parent at home and they were shocked to discover what their father grandfather did during the Holocaust. And we have people in the group whose father was awful in the Holocaust, awful perpetrator in the Holocaust and was an awful perpetrator at home Maybe rape them at home. And then we have people in between different family experiences in the sons and daughters of perpetrators. Yet they nonetheless, you know, were not defensive or trying to excuse their parent in any way.
Speaker 2:And that was we broke up for just a moment. I just wanted to clarify was that also true for your experience in Northern Ireland as well?
Speaker 1:That's a much more mixed picture because in the Holocaust which if you study it closely is a very mixed picture, nonetheless there are there's a larger group of more clear perpetrators and a larger group of more clear victims Jews, roma, sinti, homosexual men, people born with birth defects, communists, various other groups. In Northern Ireland a lot of people were both victim, either victim and perpetrator, or from victimized family and a perpetrator family. So it becomes a little bit of a different discussion. But to get back to your point, yeah, these people who come to a meeting like this are brave, they're demonstrating courage.
Speaker 1:You know, it's hard for someone whose father maybe led the Anzac Group in Poland or Ukraine indiscriminately murdering on the spot Jews or Roma or Sinti, to come to a group of people like this and meet someone whose parents might have been in that town or might have been in the neighboring town and been victimized by the other person's parents. So it's hard for them. I think it's hard for the Jews to come, and I think it's hard for Roma and Sinti to come, and I think it's hard for perpetrators, perpetrators, descendants to come. But I will say one thing that if in most cases, when the Jews look back in their families. You know they find mostly innocent parents and when the Germans or Austrians look back, they will often find not so innocent parents or grandparents. And that is a harder thing. To look back in your own family past and grapple with. It raises a question for me.
Speaker 2:I've heard you speaking about the potential for using this kind of dialogue for issues in the United States. That takes you back many more generations and I wondered if you had any thoughts on how that might be, or if you've had any experience with that, or just thoughts on it of how to deal with it when it does go back so many generations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the the, the instance that comes to my mind is Indigenous peoples, native Americans, and how they were victimized by colonizers and people who benefited from colonizers. You know that victimization was horrendous and there are many who are descended from those Indigenous individuals who feel the pain just as poignantly, just as genuinely today, regardless of the fact that it was two or 22 generations ago. Do I feel that such a dialogue project could be useful in the setting of Indigenous people in America and Canada, for that matter, or elsewhere, even for that matter? Yes, have I been involved with it? No, remember, I'm doing a lot and we haven't talked about the artwork yet, and and I still work full time as a radiologist, so, and I have two kids, so it's the only so much I do, but I do, I would, I would, I recommend that it be done Absolutely, if somebody wanted to do such a project and they wanted help.
Speaker 1:I would be grateful for the opportunity to advise, but I couldn't really get involved Hands on, probably because I'm too busy as it is. If anyone wanted to do work on their side in preparation for something like that.
Speaker 2:if it was on their heart to do it, what would you recommend by prepare? Do you mean by preparation? Do you recommend?
Speaker 1:by prepare Do you mean the participants or the, or somebody who would be a?
Speaker 2:facilitator and group and create the group facilitator to create the group.
Speaker 1:Ok, so it depends on how much experience they have as a facilitator and and what kind of training they've had. So now I've been doing this for a long time and I know people who do it. You know I'll like Carl Rogers or people who inject themselves in the dynamic much more and lead the dynamic much more, and everybody and all styles that are in between. I think that somebody can do it well without having studied any of that stuff. I'm reminded of an incident at that second meeting of Dan Barone's group which took place in in Israel. It was there that I had the idea to create the Austrian group. I shared that with the group and there were 18 people there If you take me and Dan out 16,.
Speaker 1:The first people to react in the group to my comment were the Jewish people from America, my colleagues, with a possible exception of one guy. They were pretty much adamant that I had no business doing this, that I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychotherapist, people could have severe reactions and I would be responsible for traumatizing them and so on, that it was irresponsible of me. The Germans in the group were much more polite. They would use words, phrases like well, you know, you haven't had much experience in this realm. It is an important thing to do. You know things like that. It happened to go around the room and it happened that I was the first person to speak when I said I was going to do this and Dan kept himself out of the circle until the very end and spoke last. So basically every person in the room either kept quiet or criticized, except possibly one guy who remembers that he was a bit more supportive.
Speaker 1:Dan Baran had a completely different reaction. He said the most important characteristics for doing this kind of project are the knack for it and the motivation for it. And he said he thought I had both. And he said he thought I should move forward and just do it and that doing it with a few errors might be much more valuable than not doing it for fear of those errors. And then he ended by saying that he had known many psychotherapists and psychologists and psychiatrists, and then he said, with the grandest of degrees, who had destroyed their patients. And so he said and felt that having that tremendous educational experience and degrees was a guarantee of nothing. So I went ahead and did the projects and, as I said last 26 years you asked about what would I recommend to somebody who wanted to do this with, perhaps, the indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1:I think if a person comes forward and has so much energy that they really want to do this, that's required. Number two what is required is that they be able to speak. Number three, that they be able to listen. And number four, that they screen everybody who will take part in the encounter so that they can listen. Because there will be people who are so moved by this that they're just or so traumatized that all they can do is talk about it and they can't really hear the other person. They might stop talking for a while, but they don't hear the other person. They're just waiting to jump in again and speak again. And then there will be other people who are so traumatized or so concerned about it that they can hardly ever speak and they're willing to listen and they're willing to listen hard, but they can hardly ever share of themselves. Or. This kind of account is better if people can do can both listen and speak.
Speaker 2:How do you do that then, to know that you're having that right balance when you bring someone into a group?
Speaker 1:So, for instance, the people in the Austrian encounter or the people in the current the encounter, which is the one that met in Paris, in Berlin. I meet with each of them either in person or by Zoom, sometimes for half hour, sometimes for three hours, and gauge if they're able to share a little bit and whether they're able to hear. And sometimes I make mistakes. Usually I do okay, but I've made mistakes. One does what one can do in life, of course.
Speaker 2:Perhaps it would be a good point to discuss how the dialogue work that you've been doing was part of your ability to deal with the German government in achieving citizenship.
Speaker 1:Oh, citizenship, yeah. So the citizenship story started for me this way. I am Jewish, so I feel some kind of connection to Israel, and I saw this guy named Netanyahu treating people horribly and making decisions that were unethical and I couldn't stand it anymore and decided I wanted to do my least. My little part is vote against Netanyahu. So I decided to become an Israeli citizen. That meant assembling a lot of documents and a lot of work, and I eventually became an Israeli citizen.
Speaker 1:After that was done, I looked at this pile of documents I had and said you know, I've pretty much done all the legwork already. I might as well apply for Polish and German citizenship. My mother's from Aarich, ostfriesland, germany, which is way in the north and way next to Holland, and my father is from in Yiddish, the pronunciation is Lodz, and then Polish is Łódź, poland. So I did. The reactions from the two were completely different. Poland was incredibly helpful, accommodating. When they needed documents that I didn't have, they offered to find them themselves. They offered to take them to court on my behalf themselves. They did. The judge found in my favor, which is to say their favor, and I became a Polish citizen In this point. In relating this to you. I have an American passport. I was born and raised here, now I have an Israeli passport and now I have a Polish passport.
Speaker 1:In this story, german said, no, it's interesting, germany and Israel don't have constitutions, they have what's called basic laws. Basic laws are different from constitutions. The fundamental difference is this the constitution is thought of in our country as the law of the land, the highest law there is. The purpose of basic law typically is to get through a transition period in the creation of a new country, after which there may or may not be a constitution. One was never drafted in Germany and to this day it has no constitution. In Israel there is no constitution also, but many of the early leaders and legal scholars who helped create or work on the basic law and the implementation of the basic law in Israel made it clear that there must eventually be a constitution, and here's why we need to have it and it would never happen. So one feature of a basic law is that it gets you through a transition period, a temporary period. Another feature is that it's no longer, it's never thought of as the highest law of the land. The other laws can be created that can supersede it, and that was kind of important in Israel because there's religious law also present in Israel, right and there's religious. There are Jewish courts, separate from the secular courts, and they have different spheres of influence. One is governmental and the other one is just amongst the Orthodox Jews, so but it has power amongst those Orthodox Jews.
Speaker 1:In Germany there's a provision of the basic laws which says that anyone who was a victim of the Nuremberg laws and by virtue of the Nuremberg laws lost their German they use a certain word which most people in Germany take to mean citizenship, but it's actually technically nationality and wish to have it back, can have it back simply upon request, comma and their descendants. This gets very interesting. So I applied on that basis, saying that my mother was in a Nazi slave labor camp and a Nazi murder camp, lost her nationality or citizenship and I wanted back on her descendant and they said sorry, you can't have it because your mother never lost her nationality, she only lost her citizenship. There is a subtle distinction and actually the US makes that distinction too. There are certain US territories, on islands in the South Pacific for instance, where people are US nationals but not US citizens, and I had not known any of that and it was an interesting, fine point and I thought it was BS, because the whole point of that provision of the law was not to find a loophole and not to get people like me citizenship Nonetheless. That's how it was interpreted.
Speaker 1:Then I reapplied and I said my grandparents, who were murdered, lost their nationality. My argument was that when you're murdered, you lose everything your property, your life, everything you own, including your nationality, and they this is a process that went on for several years. They responded you are right that your grandparents were German citizens and they lost their nationality. However, for the purpose of this provision of the Rungesetz the basic law you are not their descendant. And I said why not For the purposes of citizenship?
Speaker 1:The endent for this, for the purpose of this provision, has been defined by the highest administrative court in Germany, and that court has determined that it's only one generation, so it applies to your mother but not to you. At that point I decided to sue Germany, which I had to do at a local court, representative of the last region of Germany that my mother lived in, and I lost, and then I took it to a higher court and eventually to the highest administrative court of Germany, where I lost again, and then I took it to the court of Europe, where Germany offered to settle with me within one week. That was because there this whole thing would be heard in multiple languages beyond German and would become quickly public information, even though it's technically publicly available. In Germany nobody's looking up cases by Samson Mann. But once this got out that they you know in the court of Europe in the EU that Germany was denying citizenship to a son of a Nazi victim, it would have been embarrassing.
Speaker 1:So I had done all these projects and they offered to settle with me rather than to give me citizenship because I deserved it on the basis of my mother and grandparents. They instead offered to give me citizenship on the basis of special importance to the German nation very rare basis and they did that because of the projects I've done related to the Holocaust. You know I'm a full-grant specialist in peace and reconciliation studies and I speak some German. So they put it all together and said you deserve this on that, we'll give it to you on that basis, thereby not creating a precedent for other people to gain citizenship the way they should. I immediately took my kids in and applied for passports for my kids and it was denied. And I said why? And Germany said well, you have citizenship on the basis of special importance to the German nation. We have different hierarchical keyword in relation to them, right, but we have a hierarchy of citizenships. Not all citizenships are equal in Germany and the citizenship you have doesn't pass to your children. So I filed suit against Germany again and again, had to move up the ladder of courts, and again when I lost at the highest administrative court in Germany and this took over 10 years, by the way, but when I took it to the court of Europe they offered to settle within a week. They gave both my kids standard garden variety, regular German citizenship, which does pass to their children, and I have no evidence that this is causally related. But at this time, at that very time, germany changed its approach and they decided no longer. You see what happened was.
Speaker 1:The question you might ask is who made that administrative decision and when was it made that that the descendants of Nazi victims who lost their nationality on basis of the Nuremberg laws only goes one generation? It turns out to have been a judge in Germany, a high ranking administrative judge, in the early 1950s, when Germany was a new nation and, being a new nation, it wanted this transitional thing called the basic laws. Same way, israel was around the same era, a new nation. This judge turns out was a high ranking Nazi judge just five years earlier or eight years early, 10 years early. So this guy was a Nazi who was still working as a judge.
Speaker 1:At least that's those are the data I learned from my attorney and we. You know this is information that came to light in Germany and there was a scandal over it, not related to me, not from me not sourced from me or my attorney, but around the same time and so everything changed and Germany decided no longer to enforce that judicial decision. And so now if someone in my shoes applies and people have, they get it as a long explanation and probably longer than you and your audience want. But all those details matter a lot.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and the indirect influence that you had to help make that decision is is such an important one. So thank you for going through that and for the decades that you committed to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you asked the question earlier. What's the connection between all that work to get citizenship and the dialogue work? And I think the most important connection is patience. In the dialogue projects people do change, but it can take two or 10 years for them to grow substantially and you have to be patient and wait and just discuss. And I was dogged as my wife's word and patient is my word with the German authorities and just kept cooking at it and eventually supper was ready.
Speaker 2:And speaking of your patience and doggedness, that would bring me to discuss your pursuit of your uncle's work, his artwork, his legacy. And there's also sort of an issue with a German entity, an auction house, and I don't know where you would like to start in that discussion. But the floor is yours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll start. I'll start, as so many of these things matter. I'll start with my family. So my father was from a family of Hasidic Jews in Poland, but from a very large city and an unusual sect of Hasidim. These were their Orthodox, all right, but they're called Alexander Hasid and they're very Orthodox and you see them dressed in black and all of that stuff, but they nonetheless believe much more in following those rules of Judaism that you believe in, and if you don't believe in them it's kind of false and dishonest to follow them anyway. So it's okay if you don't. It's very different from most Hasidim and I think that mattered to my father. That caused him to grow up to be a little alternative and it caused my uncle, my father's brother, to grow up to be alternative. So they were in that family, seven children, six boys and one girl. The oldest was man by the name of Jacob Monschnick that's my uncle and he married and moved to Paris in 1928. He was born in 1905. So he's 23 years old when he when he a young marriage, but not young by that era standards and pretty courageous to just move off to another city with his wife, and he moved off to Paris to paint and he had been painting already in Europe and Poland and then wanted to further his development as an artist in Paris.
Speaker 1:There existed, in the 1930s and earlier, a school of art in Paris called the Ecole de Paris. The Ecole de Paris was not a school as in a building with teachers and a dean, but a school as in a school of fish. This is a group of people who work together, maybe sometimes live together, knew each other on the street no building involved, no teachers involved. They taught each other. The vast majority of them were Jewish, but not all Famous names from the Ecole de Paris are Chagall and Modigliani and Soutine, and most of the artists in the Ecole de Paris were not famous, but the vast majority were Jewish and the vast majority were from Eastern Europe, but of course there were people who were Americans and Japanese and a variety of others in smaller numbers. So he moved there in 1928 and started to paint and became part of the Ecole de Paris and if you look up him or you look up the Ecole de Paris, you find him listed as one of the artists your audience might be interested in. A website appeared about him and I'll spell it for you. It's Amazon Mary A C Z N, like Nancy I K, m A C Z N. I K pronounced Monschnick, so it's pronounced with an N sound in there. That's not present in the spelling because there's a little mark under the A and that imparts the N sound in Polish.
Speaker 1:He lived and worked and did well in the 1930s and his art became more and more well known. He became more and well known. His renown began to crescendo in 1937. He decided to Travel east.
Speaker 1:It was pretty clear to him that Poland was going to be invaded by the Nazis and that some Synagogues of importance he thought that would be destroyed and they should be recorded. He proposed to a man, a friend of his, and a scholar and an art critic in Paris at the time named Hirsch Fenster, that the two of them should travel together and the her should write about these synagogues and that my uncle Jacob should paint them. They did travel together. You can read about this at the website and you can read about it elsewhere and that it was a very early example of resistance art. I was the term. Resistance art didn't even exist then as, so far as I know, it came into existence with respect to South Africa. But so this is decades earlier and very interesting that they would do this. Most of what we know of the writings of Hirsch Fenster about these synagogues Either disappeared or he placed in a book, which is the translations of which are Presented in five languages at the website I created for any of your audience. And but the paint, the paintings or drawings they would there were watercolor. Watercolor is done with gouache by my uncle. The way he wait he planned to do them was the following he went to these synagogues. He drew Drawings of these synagogues, pencil drawings of these synagogues. Then, when he got back to Paris, he converted the pencil drawings to original watercolors and gouaches.
Speaker 1:The intention was for 30 copies of this to be created, 30 folios. They. From the outside, it looks like a book with a hardcover and with about eight or ten pages of printed text, and then there's a pocket Inside with eight original watercolors and gouaches. Of the 30 that were intended, we don't know how many were actually made. It was intended that 20 would be a certain size and 10 would be a larger size. We know that two exist, one of the smaller size and one of the larger size.
Speaker 1:One is in the possession of the Jewish Museum in New York, which I Place the claim against, unsuccessfully, but I did place a claim against it and I'm just as an aside here. I was not really unsuccessful because I couldn't prove that they shouldn't have it, but because they. But because they have it, they physically possess it and I, while I have evidence that they shouldn't, I don't have strong enough evidence to persuade them and I'm not about to take them to court. And they they acknowledge that they don't have strong evidence for why they should have it. They acknowledge that they it was donated to them and they have no idea how the person who donated to them got it. Okay, the other folio exists and is in private hands. It's not held by anybody in the family, but it's held by somebody who bought it once and I've seen it several times in that person's home and I'm thankful for that person for sharing that with me.
Speaker 1:So, and then comes along the Holocaust and my uncle is captured With his wife. His wife does not survive. He is in Auschwitz and then later in the Abenzei division of Mount housing, which is in Northwest Austria, and that's where he dies. He dies several days after the camp was evacuated by the Nazis, from his starvation that was imposed by the Nazis earlier, after the war, my father goes back to France.
Speaker 1:My father had been, by the way, been a sculptor and he had been in Paris living with his brother sculpting for two years in the middle-eighth 1930s. And my father was the third oldest in the family. The oldest was Jacob Munchnick, the artist, the painter, then the sole daughter and then my father. So my father was the oldest of the boys and the closest connected to the artist, the painter, and so my father went back to Paris in around 1950 or so, and in an effort to get the Paintings back, he discovered that the paintings hadn't many paintings had not been destroyed and they were in the hands of my uncle's wife's cousin, who was heft Jewish and had papers showing that she was fully Catholic and had survived in the French countryside as a Catholic. He met this woman and asked for the paintings, and she said wait a minute, wait a minute, these paintings are mine. They were, as far as I'm concerned. They were left to me by my cousin, his wife, the artist's wife. My father said wait a minute, these belong to the artists remaining siblings who survived.
Speaker 1:Five brothers survived, my father and his four younger brothers. They argued for several days and finally she agreed that he can have half of them so long as he buys them. He raised the money with from himself and his brothers and he bought them, bought half, brought him back to the United States, distributed them amongst the five brothers who survived. The sister didn't survive at all and so I inherited some. They were in our house on the wall as I grew up, so I was always felt intimately connected to them.
Speaker 1:Fast-forward decades and there comes this thing called the internet and I buy a thing called a computer and I start searching the internet for his other Other paintings of his that might crop up. To make a very long story slightly less long, it turns out that that cousin Eventually died and it was left in Her estate, was left to her cousin through marriage, was no longer connected to my family at all and that cousin eventually grew old and put them up for auction and I started buying and buying and buying them and having them conserved by an art restorer and At this point I have Over 60 of six, zero, over 60 of his paintings and drawings, all of them Carried for, restored or framed. That's more than any of anybody else in the family has, or that.
Speaker 1:You know some of his works exist in museums in Montreal, in New York and Israel elsewhere, and Add those all up with my cousins, I Still have far more than the sum total of the others and it's become very important to me to find them. Recently I received and email from an auction house in Cologne, germany, by the name of ban ham. The email said you know, we somewhat came in and a client, potential client, and this person wants to have to have this painting auction and it looks like one that you, samson Mon, have listed at lost art dot de. Do you think it is? And I wrote back. I said, of course it is. Like you know, it was identical. There was a photograph. They sent me a photograph and then ham sent me a photograph and I had a previous, previously acquired photograph uploaded to lost art dot de.
Speaker 1:Now in Germany there's a there's Legislation or regulation that says that if something's listed at lost art dot de, it may not be sold in Germany. As far as I know, it may not even be sold In the EU, but it certainly may not be sold in Germany. So I had this painting Listed there and so this auction house was unable to sell it. They felt and would I be please be so kind as to de-listed from the website? And I said no. This led to Multiple emails back and forth between me and the auction house. Basically, what I've offered the auction house is I'll buy it for market value. I'll buy it for twice market value. I'll buy it for three times market value. Maybe you should just donate it to the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris. I'd be happy with that. Maybe you should donate it to a museum that is willing to have it and display it in Germany. I'd be happy with that.
Speaker 1:All of those options have been turned down by them. I know the market value very well, since I've probably bought more on. I'm not probably. I have definitely bought more Munchneck paintings in auctions in the last 25 years than anyone else, far more than anyone else. Almost every single one that's ever come up for auction I bought. Nonetheless, they seem to feel that there's a chance, were they to put it on auction, that it might sell for much more. That's why I offered three times market value and that's why I offered the options that don't give it to me donated to a museum. But they've turned all that down and we're at a stalemate at this very moment.
Speaker 1:I can't prove that it was improperly acquired. The woman who possesses it, the potential client of Van Ham says she acquired it from her parents, inherited from them when they died. She has no idea how they got it, she has no receipt, she has no auction document that demonstrates that they bought it that way and she has no memory of how it was bought or acquired. If it was ever bought, it's important to me that it end up in my hands or in the museum hands, which is where all of the Munchneck paintings, I think, will eventually end up in museums. The reason this one is very important to me it's about the only one I know of, and maybe the only one I know of, that has explicit religious features to it. In general, he wasn't a Jewish artist. He happened to be Jewish and an artist, but he was a European and French influenced artist and painted themes that had nothing to do with religion. But this one the right half of the painting and you can see a photograph of the painting at the website and read a discussion about Van Ham there the right half of the painting is all Jewish religious articles and the left hand is mundane things like a plate and food in the table. So I think it's kind of important on that religious basis and I would love it if they would donate it to museum.
Speaker 1:Van Ham has been obviously very resistant To me. This painting was an all likelihood improperly acquired a long time ago. Maybe her father or grandfather was stationed in Paris and acquired it improperly, or maybe her father or grandfather got it from someone who was stationed in Paris and got it improperly. That whole Nazi era, as it is manifest in this painting, could be addressed by Van Ham and they're choosing not to address it. In my opinion that's a and this is all my opinion, of course that's a continued propagation of Nazi perpetration.
Speaker 1:I think anytime someone has the opportunity to undo a wrong, they're obligated to undo it. I mean, there might be impediments to that. They might not have the money, they might not have the means, they might not have the expertise, and that's understandable, and then they can't. But here they have the money, they have the opportunity and they have the expertise and they could certainly do it and choose not to. So I make every effort in my German projects and with German contacts I have and people I know hundreds of people I know to make sure they know about the Van Ham affair and make sure they don't do business with Van Ham. Because, so far as I can tell, in my view they're unscrupulous.
Speaker 2:The owner. You've dealt or exchanged emails directly with him as well. I've seen where you referenced him. Is it? Eisenbeis Is his name.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's the, he's the Eisenbeis, he's the owner.
Speaker 2:It's from the top down at every level of Van Ham auction house. They are aware of your concerns, correct?
Speaker 1:And that's both. That applies to both the owner, mr Eisenbeis, as well as the person who was the contact by the woman who wanted to sell the painting and who had written to me at the outset of the communications. I've been in communication with both of them at length, innumerable times I don't guess 20 times over the last two years. I've made it very clear to them. My first choice would be second choice, third choice. I've made it very clear to them multiple times. Just get it. Your audience needs to understand that Munchnik paintings are on the open market, not worth much. Most of them, almost all of them, have sold between, say, $800 and $2,000. We're not talking $200,000 or half million dollar paintings. So for her to donate $1,000 painting to the museum or to sell it to me, I've offered as much as $6,000 for it, actually I think 6,000 euro for it, and I've offered to pay the commission to Van Ham based on that 6,000.
Speaker 1:But I'm not gonna offer 30,000 or 40,000, because then I'm complicit with this propagation of a Nazi wrong that was done so long ago.
Speaker 2:There are so many German state entities and private entities that have seen the ethical need to work with individuals, so it's hopefully changing, but this is a very good example of where it has not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are some lovely examples of what's happened in terms of restitution of paintings by Germany or Austria. Most of it is very slow, takes many years for it per painting. Most of it should be done much faster, much more smoothly, but there are some glorious successes that have occurred. They tend to be very famous paintings, very valuable paintings. Nobody, you know, tends to pay much attention to a painting that's worth a thousand bucks, but it matters to me and it matters to some scholars who care about the Golden Parade, and it matters to people who care about Polish artists and so on. Yeah, whereas at a standstill they can't sell it for her in Europe, she can sell it privately, illegally, of course, improperly, or she could destroy it. She could just say you know, this isn't worth the trouble, I'm just gonna throw it away, and that would be horrible.
Speaker 2:Instead of accepting the 6,000 euros from you.
Speaker 1:Accepting 6,000 euros from me or accepting nothing. I mean, she gets nothing if she burns it or it throws it away, right. But she also gets nothing except some sort of feeling of gratification if she donates it to a museum. I even gave the individual's name whom she could contact to make the donation in Paris. You know, people do things sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons. And occasionally people said do things just for spite, and I don't know what the future holds for this canvas.
Speaker 2:How many more works are there that you're aware of that you're trying to locate? I've seen some that are listed on the website, but I wasn't sure if that was the complete list of what you're aware of.
Speaker 1:And that's the list I know of. So there are another, so I'd say eight to 12 or so that are out there, that I know of. That. I have no inkling of where they are, if they still exist. Also, I don't know if more of these folios exist. If one goes to the website, one can actually see. If you go to the art page, you can see a link to missing or lost paintings and then that takes you to another page and you'll actually see images of them. They're almost all black and white, of course, but they're good enough resolution that you can make out what they are and they could be identified if they come along at some point.
Speaker 2:And you were recently in Paris in the archives, researching letters from and to and about your uncle. I don't know if you wanna touch on anything that you've uncovered during that journey, or even just the archive research itself, and if you have thoughts.
Speaker 1:Yeah so earlier this year or late last year, I discovered that there exists, I thought, a few letters in an archive in Paris called MED M-E-D like David E M MEDM and this is a Yiddish archive and I learned that there are a few letters there. So I endeavored to go there and my son went with me, who's a 19 year old college student, and my wife went with us and my son and I scanned all of these letters. There were over 200 pages. Just as you said, some of these were to him, some of these were by him, some of these were about him.
Speaker 1:A few are in French, a few are in Polish. The vast majority are in Yiddish. The French ones have been translated. About two thirds of the Polish ones have been translated and the Yiddish ones are in the midst of translation. So I don't have any shocking news from them to share with you yet, because the vast majority are Yiddish and those are the key ones he wrote himself. Part of the purpose of this was that many of the letters appear to have been written during that trip he took with Fenster of Resistance Art, and I'm very interested to read what he wrote in the letters about his emotions during that time and about the actual synagogues and the people he met there and what their emotions were, if it's in the letters at all, as well as to put together the exact chronology of which day he arrived where.
Speaker 2:Do we know approximately the year that he year or years he was?
Speaker 1:It was all in 37, starts in the summer and goes into the fall. Yeah, and it's described to some extent in the chapter of Fenster's book about Manchnik which, as I said earlier, is translated into five languages. At the website, people can read it in English, german, french, polish and Hebrew, and the original is in Yiddish. The book was published in Yiddish.
Speaker 2:How were the letters preserved and made their way to the archive?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, no, these are very kernel questions. So most of the letters, most of the Yiddish letters, got there, we believe, from Fenster. Fenster survived the war and wrote this phenomenal book, which you'll see as the first listing in the literature section of the website, published in Yiddish and never translated. It was very recently translated, only into French, I mean this year, translated only into French and in a bridged format. It's still pretty darn good. It's better than nothing, and the chapter on Manchnik was translated almost in its entirety. But most of the book it's about maybe 100 artists or 80 artists. Most of it is quite a bridged. The original in Yiddish is fabulous. That's all I can say and that's why I never translated at least the Manchnik chapter so much.
Speaker 1:Fenster went around after the war and for at least five years working on collecting the information to write this book. He worked terribly hard and people in your audience need to realize that everything he did he did by walking through Paris. I mean he interviewed anybody he could interview. He interviewed the doorman at the buildings where these Jews lived, if there was a doorman. I mean he did incredible amounts of legwork to write this book and he somehow got these letters, most of these letters in Yiddish and he gave them to Meden, or his family did. The remaining ones that were in Polish and French may also have come from him, but I don't know that. So Meden is not rich. It doesn't have much money, so it was simply sitting in a cardboard box since around 1950.
Speaker 1:So far as I know, fenster saw them. The next person to see them was a person at Meden who simply categorized them. Nobody translated and nobody emphasized their significance or not. And they have these boxes, these little special cartons for thousands of people, regarding thousands of people, and Munchnik's collection was not one of the biggest at all. They were wonderful in letting me spend three days there scanning at high resolution and eventually this stuff will make it to the website. I have all the images at high resolution compressed so that it's feasible for the website and the translations will make it there too when I have them.
Speaker 2:The question is why do I do all?
Speaker 1:this about Munchnik. It's not simply the love that the guy was in. It started with my uncle and this missing person from my family a missing root in my family and tracking this all down. But in the process I began to feel for all these artists. So the Okola Priyahu were murdered, the vast majority of them were murdered. The whole book is about murdered artists that fenced the route.
Speaker 1:I also have another 30 or so paintings by other murdered artists. They may be paintings that I saw and could afford, or paintings that I saw online that spoke to me, or somehow I decided to buy them and I've had them likewise conserved and framed. Then they, likewise, will end up in a museum when I'm gone.
Speaker 2:Are there any from those other artists that particularly resonate, that you'd want to mention?
Speaker 1:Oh my God, there's one by a guy named Cohen, that was done in North Africa, of two women, obviously Muslim, obviously desert women who are taking a break under a parasol in the desert with a lamb at the feet of one of them.
Speaker 1:This painting is quite small, maybe eight inches by 10 inches. It's one of the most beautiful paintings I've ever seen. That's one example that came to my mind when you asked it. I placed it next to my bed. I love it. It's beautiful. He did a lot of paintings in North Africa. At the moment I'm not sure whether it was Algeria, it was not Morocco. He was part of the École de Paris. He was not from Eastern Europe, if I remember right, but he was Jewish and part of the École de Paris.
Speaker 2:Any female artists that you had been able to collect.
Speaker 1:It's really important. Here's the deal Only in the last two, three, four years have the women artists of the École de Paris become of wider interest real tragedy. There's a whole bunch. First of all, they are a minority. They're a small portion of this larger group, but they were darn good. I don't know my personal judgment, merely my opinion far better than average for the group. There's one woman named Mouter M-U-T-E-R, but there are a bunch of women who are artists of the École de Paris who are only now becoming more important than only now. I see their auction values skyrocket.
Speaker 1:There's a woman in Israel named Rachel Perry. That's Piazzin Peter E-R-R-Y, who's a scholar of the École de Paris and who's interested in women artists of the École de Paris. There's a woman at the museum I mentioned earlier, the Museum of Art and History of Judaism, who is also interested in the women of the École de Paris, and I think the two of them will bring this to much greater light. Like those women deserve. The vast majority of them were also murdered. But Rachel Perry at the University of Haifa in Israel, and this other woman at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism, which is the acronym, is M-A-H-J in Paris. If anybody wants to write to me, I'll send it to you by email.
Speaker 2:I believe you'd mentioned earlier and I've read that you are working on a catalogue résumé of your uncle's work, and so is that in process or with all the work you're doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have yeah, it's in process. I have at this time photographs of every piece of work that I know exists, including the folio. I have photographs of all eight pieces in the folio and each page of the folio. The next step in this is and I would like to incorporate into that catalogue résumé which is like an exhaustive catalogue of their work. I would like to incorporate in the relevant translations of those Yiddish letters and postcards and or Polish or French into the text of it and then seeking a publisher who was interested to publish such a thing about a relatively obscure artist.
Speaker 1:He was 39 when he was murdered. He never, as some people have written and as I relate now, he was already achieving renown in Paris and throughout France, but had not yet achieved it throughout Europe or the world. Given another six years he'd have done it. His paintings were really interesting and varied, but he remains for most people and obscure artists of the Ecole de Ferre, just listed on lists and present in chapters and books. So I don't know how you know what publisher would want to publish it, but should there be one, that would be great and if not, I'll sell publisher. But you can rest assured the pictures are going to be high resolution images. People in your audience can see 55 of his paintings at the website in high resolution if they want. By double clicking on an image, that get taken to a larger high resolution image of that painting.
Speaker 2:It's such a dedication and you've already spoken to how that dedication has expanded to these other artists and I would love to hear your thoughts on how you see the legacy that you are actively creating with all this work that you're doing that we've been talking about.
Speaker 1:Legacy. That's a. For me that's a fraught word. Let me explain.
Speaker 1:So I grew up with this father who had been a sculptor. He became a wood find, woodworker and saved the number of people's lives during the Holocaust. Actually I've even met one of those people. My mother was a nurse. So in their ways they did what they could in their lives to make things better for others, to make the world a little bit better place. I should say in my family the Holocaust was neither dwelled on nor was it silenced. We spoke about the Holocaust from time to time we did. We might speak at tremendous depth, even about gory details, but there were also months on end where we didn't speak about the Holocaust.
Speaker 1:So I grew up in sort of an open discussion kind of family and yet my parents were people who tried to make the world a little bit of a better place and I think there were role models for me in that way and I didn't really realize it when I was growing up. You know, my father's thing was if you see something that's broken, you go to a hotel and there's a handle that doesn't work, tell them in the hotel, try to make that room a little better, Try to make the hotel a little better, try to make the visit for the next guy a little better All these little ways that you might not think of to make the world a little better place. And my father was very handy to fix almost anything, so I grew up that way, and so for me, if you ask about legacy and why did I say it's fraught?
Speaker 1:I don't have any need for what I'm doing to be trained to carry on in the world with connected to my name or my family's name. That element of legacy I don't care about, but the element of it carrying on matters to me. So it really matters to me that people would maybe carry on some of the things I started to do with a Golda Barry artist or with my uncle or other artists or, as you raise, women artists in particular. That would be great. If that's a legacy, then I'm happy about it. But if they don't take that on and they don't take the Holocaust on and they just take on making the world better in some other way, that's important to me and that kind of legacy would really matter to me.
Speaker 1:You asked me at one point what my view is of justice. So I thought about that and I wanted to say that for me justice is about fairness and impartiality. So I restored so-called restorative justice I'm really in favor of. I'm not so much in favor of punishment for its own sake. I understand the concept of punishment as a deterrent. I'm not sure how well it works. Much more interested in other things that could be deterrence that society could leverage. I'm interested in justice, as I said, fairness, impartiality and ethical behavior. I think of those things as righteous. I hear other people use the word righteousness with respect to religiosity. That's not my view of righteousness or political fervor. That's not my view. My view is about righteousness or justice. It's about fairness, impartiality and ethical behavior. And fairness and impartiality and ethical behavior means that often majority rule is wrong. Majority rule is an important tenet of democracy and I like it, but it doesn't make it right ethically always.
Speaker 2:It makes it right sometimes.
Speaker 1:I think if anyone honestly evaluates history, there are plenty of examples of majority rule being wrong and plenty of examples of political leaders being wrong and plenty of examples of religious leaders being wrong and you could roll all of them up into the Holocaust. But there are plenty of other examples, and so for me it's. Justice has to do with ethical behavior, ethical responses to injustice, not silence. Active ethical responses, not simply opining.
Speaker 2:I'll stop there. Thank you so much for all this work that you are doing and it's not even your work per say, but such important messages that you are causing people to think about, and that in itself is just it's life changing, and so thank you for your dedication to this and for sharing it with me and with this audience.
Speaker 1:Well, you're very welcome, but all I can say is, whatever of those things that I've imparted today, they all belong to my mother, my father and Dan Barone and several other people. They just sort of passed through me.
Speaker 2:Is there anything that you would like to share that I have not asked you? No.
Speaker 1:I think it's been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for letting me talk at such great length. Yeah, I might say one thing my original motivation to vote against Netanyahu. I don't know if you remember that an event that occurred at the Ntebe Airport in 1976, a plane was brought down by terrorists at Ntebe into an airport and all the passengers, who were mostly Jewish, were held hostage and there was a brilliant special forces rescue from Israel into Ntebe this is in Africa to save these people, and the vast majority were saved. Nobody of these special forces was hurt, except one person its leader, the commander, was killed. The commander was Netanyahu's brother.
Speaker 1:So this guy is like a superhero in Israel that his brother, benjamin Netanyahu, has tried to match up to his whole life, and so it's really important to him that he appears strong. It's really important to him that he acts as if he's strong not necessarily ethically, just strong and it's really important to him that the political parties in Israel respect that he will defend Israel to the end of the earth and keep Israel a Jewish country and not treat the Palestinians so well, et cetera, et cetera. I think he's got a psychological problem that's been motivating that for decades. And he's brilliant, netanyahu, don't get me wrong, he's brilliant. He's very savvy. He's very politically savvy, and that's also unfortunate because his ethics aren't very good.
Speaker 2:And that's why I wanted to vote against him. There will be links in the show notes to learn more. If you were intrigued by this podcast, it would be much appreciated if you could leave a rating or review and tag Warfare of Art and Law podcast. Until next time, this is Stephanie Drotti bringing you Warfare of Art and Law. Thank you so much for listening and remember injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.