By Daled Amos
This week, there were reports about several US museums that returned artwork, stolen by the Nazis, back to their original Jewish owners:
Seven artworks from the collection of Austrian Jewish cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum, who died in the Dachau concentration camp, were returned late last month to Grünbaum’s heirs.
The Manhattan district attorney, which arranged the return, believed that the works, by 19th-century Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, were improperly housed in U.S. museum collections, after having been looted by the Nazis.
...The museums and galleries agreed to release the works “after they were presented with evidence that they were stolen by the Nazis,” according to the Manhattan district attorney.
Not all of the museums involved have returned the artwork in question. Two insist that their acquisition of the pieces is legal and said as much in response to inquiries by JNS. A third museum did not respond.
That would be the Allen Museum at Oberlin College, which currently has possession of Girl with Black Hair by Egon Schiele.
One legal basis for returning the artwork is the Holocaust Expropriated Recovery Act, which eases the restriction on the statute of limitations that exists on recovering pieces of art stolen during WWII.
Another legal basis in this case undercuts the apparent power of attorney that Grünbaum's wife had over the artwork. In a 2019 decision in this ongoing case
The higher court agreed that Mr. Grünbaum had not voluntarily parted with his collection, despite signed documents, including a power of attorney supposedly given to his wife, and that essentially the Nazis had stolen it from him before his imprisonment. “We reject the notion that a person who signs a power of attorney in a death camp can be said to have executed the document voluntarily,” the judges wrote. [emphasis added]
Yet Oberlin College continues to argue it has the legal right to Girl with Black Hair.
Which is odd.
Legal Insurrection makes the point that in a different circumstance, Oberlin voluntarily returned an item to its rightful owners:
There is precedent for Oberlin College returning items wrongfully (but not necessarily illegally) acquired. In 2002, Oberlin College returned a twined root bag that had been taken from the Nez Perce tribe a century before, and even held a symposium celebrating the return:
On April 27, 2002, the Oberlin College Department of Anthropology returned to the Nez Perce Tribe a twined root bag that had been lost in their ethnographic collections for over a hundred years. This bag was collected by Henry Harmon Spalding, missionary to the Nez Perce, in the 1840’s, and is part of the Spalding-Allen Collection that is on display at the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Spalding, Idaho. The symposium consisted of lectures on the history of the collection and the development of flat twined weaving in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as panel discussions on museum collections and repatriation of Native American cultural patrimony. [emphasis added]
Why voluntarily return the bag, which was not illegally acquired, to the Nez Perce yet insist on holding on to artwork requested by the heirs of a man murdered by the Nazis?
William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection points out that it could be that behind the scenes Oberlin College could be preparing to return the work to the heirs -- but why allow the issue to turn into what is becoming a public relations nightmare?
It is tempting to recall how Oberlin dealt with Professor Joy Karega.
In addition to vicious antisemitic posts about Jewish control of the world, Karega also claimed that Jews were responsible for 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and ISIS. In reaction to the resulting uproar, the college president, Marvin Krislov, blandly responded, that "Oberlin College respects the rights of its faculty, students, staff and alumni to express their personal views." Alan Dershowitz pointed out that the college would not have resorted to such boilerplate if such hateful remarks had targeted Blacks, Muslims or gays.
Karega was eventually fired.
But what stands out in connection to Oberlin College's current failure to return artwork stolen by the Nazis during the Holocaust is the apparent attitude toward the Holocaust on campus.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2016, David Bernstein wrote The Holocaust as ‘white on white crime’ and other signs of intellectual decay In it, Bernstein described a Facebook post by an Oberlin alumna about her experience there. Her post described how some of her experiences showed how the view of Jews as "white" and "privileged" extended to the Holocaust as well. She wrote about
o "The multiple times the Holocaust was referred to as “white on white crime” by my POC peers and hip white Jewish peers..."
o "That time a Jewish person made a comment on fb saying “the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to white people” and got tons of likes from white and POC friends alike..."
o "When I overheard someone say “Islamophobia is like the anti-Semitism of our time” as if anti semitism is over/ started and ended with the Holocaust/ has been replaced by anti-muslim racism"o "How inevitably during discussions about the establishment of Israel, people would say “the Jews decided to make Palestinians suffer for the crimes the Germans committed against them” while failing to understand that Zionism is way older than the Holocaust as is the need and the yearning for a Jewish homeland."
o "Generally antisemitic ideas floating around such as Jews are milking the Holocaust for their own gain// everything is as bad as the Holocaust except for the actual Holocaust which wasnt as bad as people say it was// Jews only care about themselves"
Oberlin president Marvin Krislov has boasted about:
our community's shared values. They set Oberlin apart from other institutions of higher education. When confronted by bias, our community turned our shared values into meaningful, positive action.
What is it waiting for?
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