I tried to post this picture, and a comment on it, a few days ago --- my first post to Cliopatria, but I failed to get it posted, and it went into thin air, along with a number of other messages I have sent into outer space over the years. I commented that I chose to make my first note a visual one, in part because I am involved in ‘reading’ meanings and messages in art, specifically in the art of Bill Traylor (my current project), and more generally because I find art a wonderfully open-ended way to suggest things. So, I am trying again, and perhaps it is for the best as there has been some resolution to an issue I raised in the disappeared note. Art has been at the center of a conflict over values and meaning in Haifa this week: An exhibition at the Haifa Museum of Art [Four Chapters on Water” by Dana Brest] includes a photograph of the man who committed a suicide attack on Dizengoff Shopping Center in Tel Aviv. When the press reported that this picture was in the exhibition, bereaved families demanded that the museum withdraw it. The museum decided to hold a public debate on the issue, and asked an organization of bereaved families to send representatives. At the meeting the artist explained her decision to use the photo, which had appeared in a local newspaper at the time of the attack. She maintained that: “It plays a vital role in the work.... It is not intended to say anything for or against, beautiful or not, but to awaken the viewer with a jolt.” A representative of the bereaved families countered: ”The museum is a public place. It would have been correct to ask the people hurt by this particular terrorist attack if they consented before touching their exposed grief. .... You are immortalizing a cursed terrorist and, in this way, you have sinned.” In response, Dr. Ilan Saban, who teaches at the University of Haifa’s Law School, referred to the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Director Mohammed Bakri’s file “Jenin, Jenin” saying: “The High Court permitted expression that inflicted more pain than the case being discussed here when it allowed the screening of the film. .... Almost everything is painful in our fragmented Israeli society.” After the forum, the museum decided not to take down the picture, but it will post a sign at the entrance noting its presence. [As reported by Dana Gillerman in HaAretz, July 8,2004.] A similar issue caused a major controversy in the University itself just over a year ago: an issue of “research’ into the collective past in which questions of “collective memory”, myth-making, and “truth” were conflated, and further complicated by methodological failings and missing evidence. (At issue was an MA essay in history which dealt with Arab villagers’ “memories” of “atrocities” during the 1948 war.) Many people from outside the University who took part in actions in this village during the war, participated in a public forum on this issue as well. I find teaching American history in this context an extraordinary experience: students project their problems into and out of the documents they read, and the issues they discuss, and find a sort of neutral ground on which to say things about themselves and their society that is in some ways liberating, and occasionally gives them a new insight into the problems here (or into the universality of our problems). At any rate, in my experience it is very different from teaching U.S. history in the U.S.