Julie, let's start with you.

Okay.

Thank you so much for having me here.

The chapter that I took a look at was chapter one.

It is a study that was done on, uh, 30 museum visitors to the Museum of, uh, American Jewish History, as it was called at the time, also known as NMAJ.

And the museum is in Philadelphia, and the site was identified because it is a tourist attraction with an explicit educational mission to it.

Um, and as the authors noted, this study was done right before COVID in June and July of 2019.

So how do you approach that, and how do you- In your own teaching and throughout the book

I think, um, you zoomed in on the word difficulty, and that's an important word because what we're talking about here is difficult histories.

Um, the Holocaust falls into the genre of difficult histories, not controversial histories, but difficult because they sit at this, at this juncture, they sit at this point of knowing too much and not quite knowing enough.

And what happens is that that information is overwhelming rather than empowering.

Um, [lips smack] Holocaust studies also sits in an area of what we call dark tourism, which is visiting sites that are related to death, to suffering, to mass atrocities.

And interestingly enough, there is a rise in dark tourism in the last, um, several years.

People like to visit places like prison tours, cemetery tours.

So there is an inherent difficulty there as well.

So how, what is the calculus or w-how would you comment on sort of this, this algebra of like how do we choose something that is going to be, you know, emotionally impactful, but also not sort of voyeuristic or sort of excessive?

The first word is audience.

When designing an exhibit, you have to think about your audience.

So you mentioned the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you mentioned the Auschwitz Museum, and the museums in these different places look very different.

As you said, Auschwitz is the site of, of Auschwitz, where, um, you know, [sighs] the largest Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.

Some-somewhere between 1.2, 1.5 million Jews were murdered on that site.

And so, um, you're showing up at a grave site, and you're showing up at a place where, um, the s- the impact of the site itself is just so powerful.

Right.