Revisionism

All I could think of us as I made my way through the description in Friday’s New York Times of the opening of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow was what would Anatoly Shcharansky say?

His protracted struggle for freedom, vividly depicted in Gal Beckerman’s evocative book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, was so at odds with the ways in which the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center depicted the history of the Soviet Union’s Jewish inhabitants, that it sent me into a tailspin.

If all you knew of Russian and Soviet Jewish history was what you read of the museum and of Putin’s rationale for establishing it, you could be forgiven for thinking that Jewish life was, on balance, warmhearted, expansive and positive. Not without its dark moments, especially under the Communists, the Russian Jewish experience, as the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center would have it, was, well, good for the Jews.

That impression was reinforced by the remarks made by Israel’s president, the Belarus-born Shimon Peres, at the museum’s opening ceremonies. “I came here to say thank you. Thank you for a thousand years of hospitality.” My jaw dropped at that one.

I understand that cultural diplomacy and the imperatives of realpolitik often get in the way of the truth. I’m equally mindful of the fact that the creation of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center has much more to do with contemporary politics than it does with history.

Even so, this latest instance of revisionism goes too far.