ONE of the more fascinating displays on view at the U.S. Holocaust Museum concerns the Nazis’ racialist anthropology. The Nazi purported to identify the physical characteristics of Jews, measuring noses, in particular, and creating charts to help the Volk spot the stigmas of the non-Aryan. These charts contained nowhere near enough truth to qualify as science, but just enough for the people to find them plausible. The point of the display: Genocide does not require gas chambers. It does require stereotypes.
Indeed, the museum is a monument to the dangers of viewing people as stereotypes. All the more reason, then, to lament the fact that its continuously running orientation film on anti-Semitism fosters crude stereotypes of Christians.
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