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“Jews are Awesome”: Mediated publics, performance, and

written interactions in two heritage museums

Chaim Noy

University of South Florida

Paper presented at the NCA, Chicago, 2014

Museal addressivities: Comments on visitors’ comments

Addressivity is organic to the communicative and dialogic view of

human cultures and sociality held by Bakhtin. For Bakhtin (1986),

addressivity is the utterance’s quality of “being directed to

someone” (p. 95), or its “quality of turning to someone” (p. 99).

As such, it is an essential feature of all utterances, “without

[which] the utterance does not and cannot exist” (p. 99), and

communication cannot transpire. Because studying addressivity can

promote a nuanced appreciation of actual, situated acts of

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communication, and can help discern how addressees – individuals,

publics, or audiences – are discerned through different message

designs, it has been adopted fruitfully by scholars researching

language and social interaction, linguistic anthropology, and

sociolinguists in a variety of contexts (Agha, 2011; Allison,

2013; 2000; Author, 2009; Lampert, 2009, 2011; Norwood & Baxter,

2011; Seargeant, Tagg, & Ngampramuan, 2012). Elaborating on

addressivity in specific relation to written utterances, Barber

(2009) nicely expands the definition, arguing that addressivity

captures texts’ “ways of evoking their readers and suggesting

particular modes of reception and engagement with the text” (p.

32. Also Barber, 2007). These ways of reception and engagement

are essential for linguist communication as an essentially

pragmatic and dialogic affair. Bakhtin (1986, p. 63) stresses

that, “language enters life through concrete utterances (which

manifest language) and life enters language through concrete

utterances as well”, and addressivity emerges as pragmatic

communicative resources that shape spaces’ semiotics, and that

can render them inclusive or exclusive with regards to various

publics.

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Approaching museal communication and semiotics with the help

of addressivity, as both a conceptual and an analytical tool, is

promising precisely because museums offer semiotically rich

public spaces. More specifically, the agenda the heritage museums

that I study, concerns explicitly defining and performing various

audiences and projected or imagined publics. It is no news that

the heritage industry is presently booming, and if modern museums

and exhibitions were about knowledge and information, more and

more contemporary museal spaces are about identity and heritage.

The heritage industry is part of a pervasive cultural infatuation

called variously ‘heritage revolution/crusade/revival, ‘nostalgia

wave’, ‘ascent of history’, ‘memorial frenzy’, and the ‘buzz word

of the 1990s/2000s’. It revolves around the politically charged

dialectics between re-narrativized pasts and presents, and how

they are evoked through new and old media, museums artifacts and

displays, and archeological and historical sites and discourses

(Nora, 1999).

The formidable agenda of reconstituting pasts and futures

hints at why heritage sites offer rich data for performance-

inspired studies, where addressivity structures help reifying

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collective identities. By definition, the materiality of heritage

is built on the embodiment of intangible myths and narratives:

since under western epistemology ‘past’ and ‘future’ cannot be

immediately accessible to our senses or experienced directly,

there is need for mediatory work if the intended ‘experience’ is

to be performed. Consequently, heritage projects stand or fall on

how proficiently and persuasively they ‘Produce the Past’ (to

employ the title of Tamar Katriel's 1997, work), and the future

as well (see also Ashworth, 1994; Katriel, 1997; Poria &

Ashworth, 2009; Poria, Reichel, & Biran, 2006; Timothy & Boyd,

2003).

Open addressivity structures, indexicality, and

explicit/implicit addresses

I offer a short conceptual discussion, seeking to clarify and

promote a nuanced vocabulary for understanding addressivity and

its uses. Briefly, and as is the case with face-to-face

interaction, addressivity does not have to be made explicit in the

course interaction. Usually, an explicit address – a summons, an

evocation – is done in the beginning of the interaction or at a

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point therein where there is an intended change in the

addressee(s). In a research on family interactions inside cars

Noy (2012) recognizes how the youngest daughter (who is three

years old and is sitting in the back seat near her two older

brothers) is calling her mother. The mother is driving the car

and sitting in the front seat: “Mommy. It’s no fun for us

anymore” (p. 321). The address with which the girl begins her

call delineates hear intended – or ratified, to use a term

preferred by Goffman (1981) in his work on participation

framework – addressee in an explicit manner. In the context of

riding the family car, this move is communicatively required

because other potential addressees are in the physical vicinity,

and because the intended addressee (the girl’s mother) cannot

enjoy back-channel information that pertains to her daughter’s

communication (she cannot see her, etc.).

If the address accomplishes a communicative orientation to

an explicitly specified addressee, then contrariwise, sometimes

the case is that an explicit and specified addressee in not

called upon. I return to family interactions inside the cars,

where the mother, expresses an angered reprimand, which relates

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to the slow and disobedient conduct of her children that morning,

which resulted in taking very long to leave the house. As the

mother enters the car and begins driving, she says, loudly and

angrily: “I can’t believe it’s ten, since eight [I’ve been]

trying to leave the house with them” (Noy, 2012, p. 317). This

utterance does not have an explicitly specified address, but no

one inside the car is misunderstanding the utterance’s intention

or its ratified recipients. The latter are clearly discerned

because where there is no explicitly specified addressee, all

parties involved are held responsible. To rephrase, everyone who

hears the reprimand, which is everyone inside the car, is taken

to be responsible. The issue is simple and concerns physical

proximity – Goffman (1959, p. xi) initially referred to it as

“physical confines” and later, more complexly, as an “immediate

presence [which is] a fundamental condition of social life”

(1983, p. 3) – that brings indexicality to the foreground. I see

addressivity as tied to indexicality, because the latter concerns

physical connection between signifier and signified (unlike

symbolic or iconic significations). In the shared spaces afforded

by the family-car, and differently, by heritage museums, the

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presence of addressers and addressees becomes socially meaning-

bearing through indexicality. I will refer below to utterances

that have a general or unspecified addressee as possessing ‘open

addressivity’. Communicative acts which evince open addressivity are

cases where basically everyone who is physically proximate is

addressed, or everyone who can and do access the utterance,

whether inscribed or spoken (for elaboration see Author, 2009).

My focus in this article lies with inscribed utterances and

dialogues that are performed in Jewish heritage museums. I focus on

visitor books, which I refer to as an umbrella term, covering a

variety of artifacts and media, that both convey and serve to

elicit audiences’ written communication (guestbooks, logbooks,

comment books, registers, genres, autograph albums, booklets, and

signing books are just a handful of terms that re used commonly

and interchangeably in both research and popular discourse). I

turn to present inscriptions offered by institutions, i.e.

heritage museums, and by these intuitions’ audiences, i.e.

heritage audiences. I begin in the next section by presenting

background information on two sites that I studied. Then, in the

following two sections, I discuss visitors’ utterances – first at

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Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, and then at the American Jewish

History Museum in Philadelphia. In relation to these sites I

first discuss open addressivity structures, and then settings and

utterances where addressivity is direct and is explicitly

specified.

(Be)Longing: Utterances and inscriptions in Jerusalem’s

Ammunition Hill and Philadelphia’s American Jewish History

Museum

The Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site is located in

North-East Jerusalem, at the location of a known battle that took

place between the Israeli army and the Jordanian Legion during

the Six Day War (on June 6, 1967). The site was inaugurated in

1974, and was formally declared a National Memorial Site by the

Israeli Parliament in 1990. It possesses a clear ideological

mission: the commemoration of Israeli soldiers who died in the

battle, as well as in the Jerusalem Front more broadly. The site

conveys a highly conservative, Zionist ethnonational narrative,

centering on and celebrating the “liberated and unified

Jerusalem.”

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Ammunition Hill holds a special aura in Israel’s

commemoration landscape and it is a ‘must’ site for Jewish

visitors to Jerusalem – both Israelis and international tourists.

Also, many schools visit the site, as well as many military units

and personnel. In my ethnographic visits during 2006-2012, I

observed and spoke with visitors and with the site’s management.

All the visitors I saw and spoke with were Jewish, and they consisted

of three main Jewish publics: local Israelis sightseeing in

Jerusalem, international Jewish heritage tourists who travelled

to Israel as part of a Zionist organization (such as the Taglit

or Birthright project), and Ultra-Orthodox youths and families

who live in the surrounding Jewish neighborhoods and who enjoy

the site’s spacious outdoor spaces.

The Ammunition Hill museum presents information about the

1967 campaign over Jerusalem, and many commemorative exhibits and

devices, such as the Golden Wall of Commemoration, engraved with

the names of the 182 soldiers who died in the Jerusalem Front,

and a book-like device of which pages are made of large steel

leaves where information about the soldiers is supplied,

soldiers’ handwritten letters and personal journals, and more.

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Many of the artifacts are discursive, which serves to enhance the

display’s authenticity and personalize and humanize the image of

the soldiers. Inside the venerated and somber atmosphere, an

effective (and affective) ethnonational narrative of remembrance

is being narrated, a narrative which is partly communicated by

the use of the site’s commemorative visitor book. The first thing

I note about the museum’s commemorative visitor book is not what

it contains but rather where it is contained. Typically, visitor

books are positioned near sites’ exits, where visitors who

complete their visit encounter them. This choice of location

shapes the device’s function, and visitor books usually assume a

liminal position that lies betwixt-and-between: visitors who

choose to write in the book are still physically inside the site

but they are about to leave (facing the outside, as it were), and

it is this tension between the before and the after, the inside

and the outside, that the device captures. The location of the

book near the exit is ideally suited to elicit “an audience-

contributed gesture of closure”, as Katriel (1997, p. 71) puts

it. Yet the location of the book in the Ammunition Hill Museum is

not near the museum’s exit or entrance, but in a place that is

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the symbolic reverse location: in one of the museum’s innermost

halls, near the Golden Wall of Commemoration and the flickering

memorial flame. The book is located within a somber space that is

densely decorated with national symbols, including three large

flags that are hanging from its ceiling consecutively (the flag

of the State of Israel, the flag of the Israeli army, and the

flag of the Jerusalem Municipality). Positioned uniquely inside

the museum’s ‘deep’ and ‘sacred’ interior, the book is not aimed

at eliciting reflexive comments or closing gestures. Rather, it

enhances the sense of visiting an ideologically-charged site, and

supplies an interactional interface in the visit’s ideological

crescendo.

The book is offered inside a monument-like installation,

that is made of heavy, black steel. The installation’s steel

floor is elevated from the museum ground, so that visitors who

wish to read (or write) must rise for the occasion, where they

will see the book on a polished wooden platform. Befitting the

commemorative setting, and in line with the medium’s performative

role, the book itself is heavy and of a formidable appearance: it

has a hard leather cover, bearing a military logo in dark red

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ink, and 100 large pages (measuring 26 cm by 34 cm). And in its

material, too, it is distinct: it is made of thick parchment-like

material, and not of paper.

A few of these features resonate with Jewish audiences, and

evoke traditional Jewish rituals. The pedestal on which the book

rests, which requires the visitors to stand while reading and

writing, and the material of the book’s pages (parchment) echo

the materiality associated with the Jewish Torah Book (albeit

that latter is scroll and not a book). The fact that the

installation is slightly elevated from the ground evokes the

Jewish ritual of reading from the Torah at the synagogue in

particular ritualistic occasions (the Aliyah laTorah). In addition,

a silver plate attached to the pedestal addresses visitors in

Hebrew, with specific instructions as to how to write in the

book:

Students, Soldiers, and Visitors.

Please indicate your impressions in a concise and respected manner.

Kindly, regard the visitor book in a manner that is

appropriate to the Ammunition Hill Site.

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The wording and language of these instructions suggest

explicit addressees who the museum’s curators see as their

imagined and desired audiences, namely “Students, Soldiers, and

Visitors.” In a historical study of museums, Arnold (2006, p. 99)

notes that museum labels “stand in for the absent curator,

prompting a form of conversation of sorts,” and this label is

revealing in terms of both who the museum addresses as its

audiences, and how it imagines and instructs commemoration

inscriptions (“respected manner”). The label further helps

establish a connection between the device (the book) and the

site, establishing that both share the same ideological mission.

Looking inside the book’s pages suggests a further thickness

of military and ethnonational symbolism, which repeat, correspond

with, and augment the plethora of symbols crowding the site’s

spaces. Running down the center of each page is a column of four

symbols printed in shades of military- shades: the symbol of the

State of Israel, of the city of Jerusalem, of the Israeli Defense

Forces, and of the Ammunition Hill site. Again, while the

physical placement of the book inside the museum premises

designates it as an institutional artifact, the printed symbols

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discursively reassert this connection from within the books’ each

and every page. These pages comprise what Blommaert (2004, p.

654) calls, “‘special’ paper, inviting ‘special’ writing.” As the

image below shows (Figure 1), visitors’ texts are visually

enmeshed into the book’s symbolic layout, creating a hybrid

visual-cum-textual genre: it offers traces of interactions

between traveler and site, between impromptu individual

utterances and familiar institutional emblems.

Most of the visitors’ entries in the book present normative

utterances: short ideological expressions that comply with and

(re)affirm Zionism’s militaristic narrative, as it is recounted

at/by the site. Indeed, visitors’ basic inscribed performance at

this site is that of acknowledgment of the Zionist sacrificial

narrative, which consists of showing appreciation and paying

homage to those who fell in action. Yet the addressees of and for

these sincere emotional expressions vary.

I now turn to briefly describe the second Jewish heritage

museum I studied, namely the American Jewish History, located in

the historic district of Philadelphia. This museum was

established in 1976, yet was relocated and comprehensively

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restructured in 2010, which is when it assumed its present shape.

The museum narrates the history of Jewish immigration to and

experience of livelihood in the US, portraying a liberal and

progressive agenda with regards to history, identity and

heritage, and a high degree of integration of Jewish communities.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that this Jewish heritage museum

is not a Jewish holocaust museum, and the holocaust, though

presented, plays a small role in the overall exhibit space and in

the museum’s narrative. My first visit to the museum was by

chance opportunity, when I was on a fellowship at University of

Pennsylvania (2010-2011), dedicated to the study of Jews Travel.

On my way to my office, during that year, I would pass the museum

daily, until I eventually gravitated into the building, and spent

more and more time visiting its exhibitions and then studying

them.

Reminiscent of Ammunition Hill, the exhibition in Jewish

History museum in Philadelphia is rich with handwritten textual

artifacts, including historic originals, and reproductions and

representations thereof. From the inventory of the butcher Asser

Levy, who immigrated to the US and settled in Philadelphia in

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1682, through the many early immigration certificates and

documents (handwritten and/or hand-signed), to postcards and

letters written by members of the young Jewish communities in the

17th and 18th centuries, the museum’s contemporary an appealing

exhibitions offer indexical traces of writing activities

performed mostly, but not solely, by Jews. The exhibition spaces

are laid out chronologically, and within them a number of

surfaces for visitors’ inscription are offered. These surfaces

include post-it notes on which visitors can write their replies

to questions that the museum puts forth (where both questions and

replies are presented publically), and two notebooks that are

located in and as part of historic exhibitions, where visitors

are invited to write, and which function to some degree as museum

visitor books.

One of these notebooks is presented as a kind of travel

diary in a period room that tells of Jewish travel and

immigration to the West of the United States during the 19th

century. The notebook is located near several illustrative items

that travelers typically took on their trips. A label located

near the diary addresses visitors as follows:

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Think about the things you might want with you

during your long journey to the West. Some supplies are already

in your wagon. WHAT ELSE WILL YOU PACK?

This text engages the exhibition’s audience playfully, and

it scripts them into action in the midst of preparations for

travel. It differs from the instructions at the Ammunition Hill’s

visitor book in that it is less pedagogical, and intently

humorous and playful. I note that, symbolically, the visitors are

themselves travelers (they travelled to the museum), which raises a

question regarding what they have brought with them to the

museum, or alternatively what they have taken away from it. One

of book’s entries echoes this notion. The entry begins with the

historic date, Feb 15, 1853, and then humorously evokes the

present: Trip has been OK so far/except my iPad is almost dead/and 3G coverage is

spotty.1 The author of this entry is humorously playing on the

temporal duality evinced in any heritage museum, attempting to

reconcile bygones and immediate experience. It might be that for

1 I use a forward slash (/) to mark a line break in the inscribed entry.

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this visitor in this trip, the iPad was dead and cellular

coverage was spotty.

Further, I also note that the label requests visitors to

complete a collection (indicating that some supplies have already been

collected). Visitors are symbolically invited to supplement the

exhibition by adding to it; yet they add not material objects to

an old Jewish wagon, but texts to the contemporary discursive

“wagon” that metaphorizes heritage.

I IDF!♥ : Open and specified addressivities at Ammunition

Hill

Unless explicitly specified otherwise, the utterances visitors

choose to write on the publically available surfaces evince open

addressivity: they are directed to audiences who can access them.

In this way, these utterances have two main imagined audiences:

the museum’s curators and management, on the one hand, and fellow

visitors, on the other hand. Both groups of audiences are

imagined because they are generally not co-present. While the

former are usually unavailable and invisible to museum goers

(they occupy the institution’s backstages), fellow visitors have

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either been there before – and have left earlier traces in the

book, or they will be there later – futures readers and

commenters in the book, but in any case they are not immediately

available. Hence the need for mediation, which the visitors book

facilitates, and which (hand)writing accomplishes.

At the Ammunition Hill Museum, a typical open discursive

entry embodies a performative retelling of the narrative the museum narrates.

Consider the following entry (Written in Hebrew in August, 2005):

The visit taught us of the difficult battles

and of the high and dear cost we paid in blood

so that today we would be able to stroll and live in Jerusalem

in a quiet and free manner.

It was very moving.

The Shaked Family

This is a typical entry insofar as it accomplishes a

normative performance: it first addresses the educational nature

of the experience of visiting this heritage site (which is in

line with how the site’s management sees the site’s commemoration

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agenda), and then it repeats or re-tells the site’s commemoration

narrative. This narrative is at the core of the site’s

ideological agenda, supplying a moral account of the deaths of

the soldiers in the 1967 War, arguing that without their

justified deaths (in the past), the present – and the leisurely

everyday activities that inhabit it (strolling, living) – would

not have been possible. Hence, those visitors who are enjoying

sights and views of Jerusalem and Ammunition Hill, are indebted

by definition to the deaths of the soldiers, which are then re-

framed as ‘sacrifices’ (Author, 2008). Further, in terms of

discursive competence of commemoration literacy, such entries

account and validate that i. the undersigned visitors actually

visited the site, ii. they understood the narrative that it tells

to a point where, iii. they are able to reproduce it in their

words/voices.

The Shakeds’ entry is representative of normative

performances also in that it addresses the museum only

implicitly. The address is implied. Since visitor books are

commonly understood as surfaces of communication with the museum,

or as a feed-backing channel, there is no need for the address to

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be stated explicitly. This is why it is interesting to explore

how, occasionally, visitors do employ explicit addressivity

structures when directing their utterances at the museum. Such is

the case evinced in the two entries below (written in Hebrew

around August, 2003. The second entry appears in Figure 1, below,

on the right page).

Dear Museum!

I was very much moved, to the point of crying

from the movie and the general exhibition.

Onwards and upwards!

“If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”

Shai

To all the museum personnel!

If you ever reach this page please know that I was here

and that I was very impressed Respect to all the soldiers!!!

and warm regards to all those who know me!

Bye

Sara Rifkeind

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Safed

There are various reasons why certain visitors would choose

to address the museum specifically and explicitly. For some, this

type of address serves to personalize the message, which is

structured as an interpersonal act of communication (such as in a

letter or a postcard, which formulaically open with a specific

and explicit address). This is clear in the first entry, where

the museum is personalized and the text takes the rhetoric of a

letter. This specific and explicit addressivity tells of the

mediative function of the visitor book, and that for at least

some visitors writing an entry feels like sending a letter.

Reading Shai’s entry evokes the idea of role-distance (Goffman,

1959, 1961) and its relation to performativity. Consider the

entry’s fifth line, where the writer cites a well-known Psalmic

verse. The verse attests to the personal significance of

Jerusalem for Jews, and it is often sited on the pages of this

book. Citing it in this context is how the visitor is showing

knowledge of Psalms, and of the discursive arsenal of idioms and

verses, which is relevant for performing commemoration in situ.

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The point here is that the verse is cited within quotation marks.

Quotations indicate some perspective on the performance

undertaken by the inscriber: it can indicate some role-distance

on behalf of the writer, who shows how various writing actions

are performed: addressing the museum, citing well-known and

appropriate verses.

The reason for and function of the direct address in the

second entry are quite different. What Rifkeind’s entry

accomplishes is not the retelling of the site’s commemoration

narrative. Rather, the text begins (in line two, immediately

following the address), by inquiring – skeptically, humorously,

and perhaps also anxiously – whether the book is attended to and

whether the texts are read. Again, because the museum’s staff is

not co-present, visitors are obliged to ‘call’ them. The ‘absent

addressee/reader’ is an issue and an anxiety that are particular

and immediate, but also general and existential: is there anyone

listening/reading? In fact, communication philosopher Peters

(1999) argues that “communication with the dead is the paradigm

case of hermeneutics,” which amounts to “the art of

interpretation where no return message can be received” (p. 149).

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Rifkeind is not concerned with the dead, but the illocutionary

anxiety is apparent in here words. Indeed, the site’s staff

rarely attends to the book and almost never reads the texts. As

one of the sites directors told me, sarcastically, “it is there

for the visitors, not for us.”

In the following line in the entry, the writer moves to the

normative body of the message. She was “very impressed,” and

expresses “Respect to all the soldiers!!!” But, again, towards

the signature (line 4), the author irregularity addresses other

visitors explicitly, by sending them “warm regards”. There is

here a further elaboration of addressivity, which is as

infrequent as it is revealing, where the author acknowledges the

fact that the acts of writing she engages in are public and

visible to various audiences. Of all the visitors she delineates

a particular group, or even a public: “all those who know me!”

The subtext here is not if someone reads/hears these words, but

who does so – and the related issues of intimacy and anonymity

within the imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) conjured by this

medium.

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The next four entries employ delineations and specifications

of utterances’ addressees. However, their addresses are aimed at

other groups or publics, and not the museum’s staff or the

visitors. (With the exception of the third entry, which is

written in English, all the entries are written in Hebrew. The

first two entries were written during the summer of 2004, and the

latter two around the summer of 2005).

Figure 1

Soldiers, Officers, and Bereaved Families.

Accept our sincere salute

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For all those

expressions of sacrifice and devotion

for fighting and guarding our country

at utmost risk

From Forth Platoon, The Erez Regiment

I IDF!♥ 2

thank you for protecting

ISRAEL.

Thank you for dying for our country.

What you did enabled me and other Jews

to be able to live in Eretz Yisrael.3

with great respect,

Shira Zucker, NJ.

August 9 2005

2 I.D.F. stands for Israeli Defense Forces (tsva hagana le-yisrael)3 The words Eretz Yisrael are written in Hebrew

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YOU’RE WRONG!

[Those are] not the soldiers

who protect

but the Holy

Torah

protects and saves

period!

The writers of these entries employ explicit and specific

addressivity structures to re-direct the message away from the

museum, away from an ‘open’ addressivity communication, to the

specific audiences they wish to address and who they feel are

relevant for their message. The main addressees of the first

three entries are the soldiers who fought in the war. The

soldiers, and the bereaved families, are addressed specifically,

and are conjured in and by these utterances as the true

historical protagonists. The museum, and by association the

heritage/commemoration project as a whole, are not the addressees

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of these expressions of gratitude, and they are sidestepped in

favor of the soldiers and their families. While these entries

share a similar addressivity structure, they differ in terms of

register. Consider the opening verse of the first two entries:

the first is formal and mimics an opening of a formal speech,

while the second resembles a brief SMS message. Expressing

gratitude to the soldiers, and not to the museum, is taken ad

extremum in the third entry. In this entry, Zucker directly

addresses soldiers who are, by her account, dead (“Thank you for

dying”). Her primary audience consists of the commemorated fallen

soldiers. This addressivity design suggests that the entry’s

genre might be more akin to a prayer than most other entries that

are addressed to actual, or even potential, audiences. That said,

the entry nonetheless builds on the communicative affordances

that I mentioned earlier, which are typical of the media of

visitor books: all visitor book entries address and conjure absent

audiences: be them the site’s management, visitors who have left

already or who have not yet visited, soldiers who participated in

the war (or, again, soldiers who will participate in war), or

divine entities. In her book On Longing, Stewart (1984, p. 23)

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writes that the “desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the

absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire”. This

absence is a structural precondition of heritage institutions and

exhibitions. It is heritage’s true protagonist.

The fourth entry (YOU’RE WRONG!), commences with a second

body (plural) address, but it isn’t clear who is being scolded.

The content is clear enough, though, and suggests the utterance

is non-normative and it does not re-tell the ethos of national

(Zionist) militarism, but criticizes it. In fact, it retells it

in order to criticize it (“the soldiers/who protect/… and

saves”). This is a resisting performance, where the visitor is

indicating that the actor – namely, the agentic protagonist

behind the triumphant 1967 War is God – and not the Zionist-

military hybrid. Those who are addressed as holding a wrong view

could be the site’s management, who advocate militaristic

commemoration and narrate the story of modern, military power, or

the visitors, the majority of whom participate in a normative

fashion in the commemoration ritual that the site offers. My

impression, which is tangible, is that the entry is directed at

the co-present entries that populate the page on which it is

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inscribed. These entries are mostly normative, and the sense I

get is that the YOU’RE WRONG! entry is intertextual (or perhaps

more accurately, intra-textual, in that it addresses texts

inscribed within the same ecology), and it relates to texts in

its immediate vicinity.

JEWS ARE AWESOME: Open and specified addressivities at

the American Jewish History Museum

The Jewish History museum in Philadelphia is also rich with

handwritten textual artifacts, including historic originals, and

reproductions and representations. Within this inscriptive

ecology, audiences are invited to interact and participate by way

of writing, which is to say by adding further inscriptions and

texts to the museum’s public exhibition. The travel notebook that

is offered to museum visitors is located in a box, near three

illustrative artifacts that travelers typically took with them on

their trips: a hand mirror, a Hebrew Siddur, and a couple of

pencils. As an ethnologic context, the pencils are functional as

writing utensils that are used by visitors to write entries

(indeed, most visitors use these pens, but a few adult visitors

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use their personal pens), the Siddur frames the notebook as a

literate and Jewish artifact, and the mirror, I believe,

symbolically frames the notebook as a reflexive (i.e. mirroring)

surface.

The notebook entries hold three distinct addressivity

structures. About a third of the entries, recognizably accord

with the museum’s invitation (WHAT ELSE WILL YOU PACK?), and are

read as replies or responses. These entries imaginatively and

playfully partake in the telling of the museum’s narrative of

Jewish history and mobility. My observations, and the texts’

orthography (and occasional spelling mistakes) suggest that most

are written by young visitors. Unless specified otherwise, all

the entries from this book are written in English.

I would pack some

water and beans [smiley]

I would pack weapons just

in case something happens.

I would bring food too.

32

Joseph was here

I hate travelling. I sleep

thinking koyoties [sic]will east me.

HELP

Almost all people who

went to the west wrote

diaries.

Alyssa, Aug. 2012

(also a Jew)

These entries, which are usually unsigned, are addressed at

the museum and intently contribute to the dialogue between

heritage visitors and institutions. The notebook diary is seen

and employed as a playful and participatory platform, and the

entries’ addressivity is implicit and is a consequence of the

fact that they are offered/uttered as replies. The two entries

that are signed (the second and the fourth entries) are

particularly interesting in terms of performing Jewish heritage

33

and claiming identity in situ. I will relate to the second entry

later, and will now focus on the signature, which is almost a

post-script: (also a Jew). Alyssa’s entry is reflexive, because she

does not in fact directly reply to the museum invite, but rather

reflects on it: like museums labels, the entry states a relevant

historic fact that pertains to the exhibit, namely the medium of

the notebook diary, and to the role it plays in travel. The

entry’s signature indicates something about how the museum’s

target publics are perceived by visitors. The words “also a Jew”

serve as qualifiers that legitimize the visitor’s participation in

Jewish travel-writing, and simultaneously claim the same: they

too are Jews, and hence they too can legitimately participate in

imagining historic Jewish travel. The signature, even if

parenthesized, importantly references Jewish identity. The word

“also” resonates with the notion of the collection, where the

undersigned visitor recognizes and publically identifies herself

as Jewish, hence fitting into the assembly (a collection of

signatures that index ‘Jewish’ identity).

Another third of the overall entries in the notebook relate

to the museum and its exhibitions in general (not specifically

34

concerned with Jewish travel). What a beautiful and educational museum,

and This is very impressive! are typical entries of this genre. These

are most common entries in visitor books, which are appropriated

by visitors as channels of communication with the museum’s

inaccessible personnel. They implicitly address the museum, and

usually tell of the positive experience of visiting it. Because

this group of entries includes all the entries that address the

museum, it also includes oppositional performances, which address

the museum, yet critically so. Oppositional entries are

infrequent in visitor books, but are highly telling in terms of

the dialogic space that they establish, the kind of criticism

that they perform, and the identity claims that they make. An

opinionated, Hebrew written entry expresses dissatisfaction with

the museum’s explanations:

I would have been happy if there was [sic.] also/explanations in Hebrew./Particularly

because this is a Jewish museum. [smiley]

35

This entry is voicing a substantial critique of an element in the

museum’s display, by reflexively raising a question as to the

museum’s appropriateness to Jewish heritage. It contents have

little to do with the westward travel of Jews in the 19th

century, and focus instead on drawing a tight correspondence

between Hebrew and the meaning of the site as a Jewish heritage

site in the eyes of Israeli visitors. Its author voices the “’one

nation, one language’ principle, by which Hebrew is seen as a

language that only (Jewish) Israelis speak” (Author, 2007, p.

101). The entry’s own language indexically supports its

expressive content. “Language ideologies,” Susan Gall (2005, p.

24) argues, “are never only about language. They posit close

relations between linguistic practices and other social

activities and have semiotic properties that provide insights

into the workings of ideologies more generally” (p. 24). The

Hebrew written entry manifests a linguistic ideology, tying the

code (Hebrew) to the adjective “Jewish,” raising questions

pertaining to whether a museum of Jewish history is a Jewish

museum, and what exactly amounts to and qualifies a museum as a

‘Jewish museum’. The visitor addresses the spaces of the

36

notebook, and through them the site’s Jewish character and

nature. In doing so, that is in writing in Hebrew, the entry

itself (performatively) contributes to the shaping of the site’s

spaces and semiotics as a Jewish-scape. The code/language serves

here as an address, excluding visitors who cannot read Hebrew. In

fact, the code is excluding also a few of the museum’s

management. This raises a question as to this utterance’s

addressees, which, by the code in which the entry is written and

by its contents, are Israelis. It might also be that the author

is a frustrated visitor who could not read the museum’s labels

and explanations, and uses the notebook’s space to pay the museum

back in the same currency: a code that might not be understood.

Another entry that has the museum as its implicit addressee,

and that also acknowledges its spaces as Jewish, is voiced from

an Other’s voice; a voice of an outsider. The entry is self-

referenced as being written by a non-Jewish visitor: This exhibition

feels real. I’m not a Jew, but I’m loving the history.4 The visitor writing this

entry reveals her or his identity in terms of (non-)membership in4 This entry is echoed by a similar and positive comment posted online by an anonymous Google reviewer (in 2011) who wrote that “I’m part Jewish and this museum was great.” at https://www.google.com/search?q=jewish+history+museum+philadelphia&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#lrd=lrd

37

a relevant group (in terms of Sack’s (1992) notion of social

membership categorization, following Garfinkel’s (1967)

ethnomethological line of thought). By endowing this text with a

somewhat apologetic tone, the entry reestablishes that, at least

from the eyes of non-Jewish visitors, the imagined audiences and

publics that the American Jewish History Museum addresses are

Jewish. An Alternative reading suggests that self-referencing the

visitor’s non-Jewish identity is not an apologetic move, but

serves to enhance the praise the entry performs, by indicating

that despite possessing an ‘outsider’s’ identity, the visitor

finds the exhibition to be “real” and expresses genuine affection

to the exhibition narrative. In any case, in this entry as well

the museum is addressed implicitly, and relevant identities

categories are explicitly and reflexively referenced and

performed in situ.

The last third of the entries inscribed in the travel

notebook make more general and ‘open’ use of these situated,

public surfaces, in order to leave cursive traces of their

writers’ visit in situ. Many of these entries express visitors’

ways of ‘being doing heritage audience’ (Garfinkel, 1967), as it

38

is expected in a Jewish heritage site. A few visitors singed

their name and immediately near it wrote the phrase, I was here

(as did Joseph, in the second entry above). This is the essence

of the indexical marking of a visit, and as such it is the

ultimate visitor book currently (Author, forthcoming). Yet since

many of the personal and family names are recognizably Jewish

(Rosen, Cohen, Lustig, Sternberg, Goldberg), they amount to more than a

signature/presencing practice; they publically and collectively

manifest Jewish identity. On other occasions, the texts’ language

accomplishes the same indexically, as with the critical Hebrew

entry above, and also when visitors choose to sign their names in

Hebrew, or write key expressions in Hebrew (on the semiotics of

this type of codeswitching, see Author, forthcoming). Hebrew

language emerges – both here and at the Ammunition Hill visitor

book – as a powerful indexical marker, that is frequently

employed by visitors. Like accent in spoken utterances, knowing

to perform in Hebrew, even if only one’s personal name, suffices

in establishing identity and affiliation, both privately, i.e.

the visitor’s, and publically, i.e. the inscribed surfaces of the

notebook. The choice of code emerges as an integral part of

39

utterances’ addressivities, performing the public to which the

visitors see themselves belonging, addressing and sometimes also

excluding.

A few other entries in this group claim Jewish identity and

perform Jewish presence explicitly. This entry is spread over an

entire page: JEWS ARE AWESOME [smiley], and in the following page,

another large entry succinctly states: I G-d♥ . Both entries have

an open addressivity structure, and evince visitors’ recognition

of and relation to the site’s heritage agenda. Both are

performing Jewishness, but are doing so differently. In writing

on the performance of national identity, Edensor (2002, p. 70)

observes in heritage sites “competing ideas about what particular

sites symbolize may generate contrasting performances” (p. 70).

The first entry claims ‘Jewishness’ explicitly, by both naming

and praising the identity category that its author finds relevant

in the act of signing. By the term ‘naming’ I refer to explicit

referencing of an identity category that is seen as relevant to

or fitting into a given context. I note that in both interviews

with management and in public descriptions, the American Jewish

History Museum does not see Jewish visitors as its main audience;

40

rather, the museum stresses the universal and common experience

and difficulties of travel and immigration, and religious and

racial intolerance, as these are illustrated by Jewish history and

experience in the US. The museum seeks to educate and familiarize

audiences with the history and experience of American Jews, and

with their history. But visitors are free to interpret the

museum’s narrative and perform their own narrative as they wish.

Over and above naming, the entry performs a highly positive

evaluation of the category of ‘being Jewish’. This social act could

be fruitfully addressed by Du Bois’ (2007) stance theory, because

expressing evaluation is a ‘stance act’. It suggests, according

to Du Bois (2007), not only a perspective on the topic at hand

(good, bad, wonderful, etc.), but also always raises issues of

responsibility and positionality – which is to say who can take which

stance with regards to what matter, and since stance is public

(perceivable, interpretable and available for others’ inspection)

stanctaking positions the participant interactionally and

socially (Du Bois, 2007; see also Englebretson, 2007).

JEWS ARE AWESOME [smiley] also attests to that, over and above

the highly desirable evaluation of the category of ‘being

41

Jewish’, the activity of inscribing it in this way is a category-

bound activity (Sacks, 1992). It is, in other words, what Jew

visitors should do when visiting a Jewish site, and it is

publically recognized as such. The discursive surfaces that the

notebook offers become sites for claiming identity and stages for

performance of admiration and celebration of Jewishness; arguably

Jewish fandom performances.

The structure of the latter entry (I G-d♥ ), which is very

reminiscent of Ammunition Hill’s “I IDF!♥ ”, combines three

different codes into a coherent, succinct, and multimodal text:

English (I, for individualism), graphics (a heart shape,

referencing love), and Hebrew (used for the holly name. The

writer uses the Hebrew abbreviation ה' (the letter He with

apostrophe stands for the word Ha-shem), which is commonly used

in both written and spoken language in references to God. The

term literally means “the name”, but since in other visitor books

the expression ‘G-d’ is common, I preferred it over the literal

meaning. The entry, with its multimodal character and Hebrew

letter, evinces a carry-over of new media literacy and genres

unto traditional writing practices, and chic (‘young’) manner of

42

performing religious affiliation and identity. It too performs a

Jewish visit/a Jewish space, but it does so not through

admiration but through referencing religious devotion. Such

entries both perform Jewish identity in situ, and mark the

inscriptive spaces of the notebook as a Jewish-scape. For many

visitors who inscribe in the travel-diary, Jewish identities

emerge as a relevant cultural category, which is then performed

publically.

Lastly, in an encircled, unsigned and undated entry, a

visitor fluently writes: God bless the Jews of/America … and around/the

entire world./Pray for the safety & security/of Israel./[smiley]. Immediately

beneath this entry, a short entry is added (with a different

writing device): Pray for all. Besides the text, the latter entry

also consists of a vertical, two-edged arrow that is draw between

the entries, indexically establishing correspondence between the

texts above the arrow and beneath it. Both entries are ‘open’ and

do not address Jewish travel or the museum. The first and more

elaborate entry voices an ethnonational position, which is common

in the Ammunition Hill museum, whereby God and the State of

Israel are the elements that define Jewish identity and

43

ethnicity. After mentioning American Jewry and Jews worldwide,

the entry then moves to express commitment in relation to Israel

(by way of prayer). Though not explicitly critical, this entry

adds on to the museum’s exhibition something that is lacking,

namely the evocation of Israel – biblical land and political

state – as the ultimate destiny (and desire) of Jews travel and

prayer. The shorter and intertextual entry that was added

beneath, addresses and refutes the ethnic/ethnonational gist. The

utterance Pray for all, makes it case precisely by omitting the

category mentioned in the earlier entry: the marker “Jews”. This

utterance suggests a broader – perhaps cosmopolitan – view, where

ideals (here those ideals that concern safety and security) are

inclusively offered to all, rather than exclusively reserved to a

particular public. This is a reflexive and polyphonic dialogue,

that is performed in the public sphere that the museum’s

discursive surfaces offer, and where Jewish identity and desire

are negotiated. (In this regard the term “all” in this utterance,

resonates with the same word in the utterance discussed earlier:

“Almost all people who/went to the west wrote/diaries.” In both cases the term

“all” can be interpreted as forming a larger and inclusive

44

identity category, against one which is perceived as being more

limited).

Discussion and Conclusions

The communicative media I explore, broadly labeled ‘visitor

books’, embody visitors’ situated and public heritage act(ions).

These cursive canvases are a metonym of visitors’ interactions

with the museum; they are how visitors are able to comment on,

contribute to, and participate in the museum’s heritage

exhibition/narrative. For the display ideology associated with

heritage, the mechanism of (hand)writing is ideal: it allows the

visitor book to serve as a mnemonic device that collectively

manifests visitors’ being at the site, experiencing it, and

partaking in it, i.e. becoming part of the heritage that the site

celebrates or commemorates. In this sense, writing in situ is

very different that writing in off-site public platforms (such as

TripAdvisor).

Since all museums are performative and convey narratives,

they have imagined audiences as their addressees. More so in

heritage museums, which, by the definition, have particular publics

45

who they both address and conjure. Further, since visitor books –

and other semiotic, interactive and participatory media – are an

organic part the exhibition, they share the projected audiences

that the museums address. And museum goers usually recognize

this. Hence, addressivity emerges as a characteristic of museums’

rich communicative ecology, as well as a highly productive

analytical tool for understanding how the two-way, audience-

museum communication transpires meaningfully, and how it

established spaces, identities, and publics. Addressivities, and

the questions surrounding them, pervade these environments and

are inevitable: Who are the visitors writing to? Who do they

recognize as the museum’s imagined addressees or audiences? What

are visitors writing about (this directly relates to the former

question, because genre concerns addressivity as much as it does

coded contents)? Are visitors’ contributions performative – and

if they are, what collective identities do they claim and

exclude?

Ethnographic reading of visitor books allows recognizing the

polyphony within visitors’ heritage utterances. Often, visitors

address those who can physically access the media, namely other

46

visitors, on the one hand, and the museum’s management, on the

other hand. And the most common entry, the one which embodies the

ritual of signing visitor books and doing participation, is the

entry addressing the museum implicitly. Yet these surfaces are

open, and whoever are the potential addressees of on text or

another, written on these surfaces, there is a built-in condition

of over-hearing: in a Goffmanesque (1981) vein, we can say that

sometimes the museum is the ratified addressee and other visitors

are merely ‘over-hearers’, and at other times vice versa. There

are, however, other audiences and publics who visitors address.

At Ammunition Hill, the more ‘hardcore’ heritage visitors appeal

not to other visitors or to the site’s management, but to the

soldiers: to those who are alive, or to those who died, or to

their bereaved families. At the Jewish History museum in

Philadelphia, a few visitors’ playfully reply to the museum’s

invite to imagine Jewish travel, others address the museum in

general, and others state their presence in situ and show various

claims for Jewish identity. In both museums oppositional and

critical utterances are voiced, even if infrequently: in the

former, these utterances criticize the site’s ethnonational

47

secular narrative, stressing god as the true agent, and not

military-Zionist might. In the latter, a discontented (and

perhaps frustrated) visitor highlights the exhibitions’ language,

promoting a linguistic ideology that ties Hebrew with Jewish

identity and heritage, and offers (Jewish) Israelis as a special

group of ratified audiences, who need to be addressed in their –

distinct – language. Another implicitly critical utterance also

brings the Israel to the foreground, thus noting the fact that

the powerful relations between Israel and North American Jewelry

are omitted from the museum’s exhibition.

Further variations in genre of visitor book utterances

emerge from how address is elaborated. I paid attention to

explicit and implicit designs: the former is when ratified

addressees are singled out specifically, and the latter is

evinced when they are not, and the utterance is either ambiguous

or builds on its readers’ physical access to the book. This

touches on indexical markers, because the receivers must be in

immediate physical proximity to the message in order to receive

it (and writers know this).

48

To the utterances’ communicative richness and polyphony we

can add the communicative structure of the visitor books

themselves. These media have a ‘one-to-many’ (rather than a ‘one-

to-one’) communication structure, and so the utterances therein

are publically ‘broadcasted’. More accurately, because museums

have a number of potential audiences which they host and address,

visitor books address not ‘one-to-many’ but ‘one-to-multiple’

publics. For this reason, visitors can specify particular

audiences who they see as the ratified addressees of their

utterances, and complementarily who they situate as their un-

ratified audiences and their ‘over-hearers’. Akin to Derrida’s

(1987) open post card (cited in the epigraph), visitor books offer

open texts, yet reversely: the books are immobile, and those are

the visitors who are travelling. Visitors can and do produce

texts that are not openly available, and the managements at both

museums receive emails and faxes containing both compliments and

criticism.

The communicative richness which attending to addressivity

help recognize, suggests that museal spaces, while not personal,

cannot be simplistically termed ‘public’. It suggests that there

49

is a play, accentuated in heritage museums, between public spaces

and publics. The metonymic spaces of these institutional surfaces

suggest that museums are semiotically and communicatively rich,

and that their quazi- and multiple-public spaces are negotiated

through and through. These negotiations take place between the

visitors themselves, and between the visitors and the

establishments they visit, and are calibrated through

addressivity acts, i.e. doing and undoing ratified audiences and

ratified narratives.

50

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