Anonymous Question Cards: The museum as a space for questions
By Charlotte Hafner
Here at the Jewish Museum London, we have schools coming in for our Judaism or history workshops almost every day. A big amount of the students that come with these schools have a lot of questions they want to ask about Judaism, however, they sometimes seem to feel a bit shy about directly approaching either their teachers or us from the Learning Team.
It might be because they’re afraid of offending us or saying something insensitive about the Jewish community by accident. Or it might be because it is a question about Jewish LGBT, or because they just think that their question might sound a bit silly.
Regardless, we want the Jewish Museum to be a space for questions and a space for learning and we don’t want students to feel anxious about asking us anything. This is why we offer the students to use our Anonymous Question Cards.
The Learning Team hands out these cards at the start of most of our workshop sessions, and then try to answer all the questions students write on them at the end of our workshop sessions.
A big benefit of using the Anonymous Question Cards that we noticed is, that the students generally seem to be more confident about asking us things that some might deem controversial or silly.
A few examples of questions that we frequently get on our Anonymous Question Cards are:
Are you Jewish?
What kind of Jew are you?
Do you have to be Jewish to work at the Jewish Museum?
Do you keep kosher?
Why do Jewish people write G-d instead of God?
Is being LGBT accepted in Judaism?
Why is circumcision practised?
Are there any specific rules about marriage?
Why don’t Jewish people believe in Jesus?
What do Jewish people believe happens after you die?
Do you get punished if you touch the Torah with your hand?
Do you dislike German people?
Do you want revenge on the Nazis?
The first three questions are actually questions that we get asked every time we offer to do the anonymous questions. It seems to be that a lot of students assume that everyone who works at the Jewish Museum is Jewish, or that the Learning Team is full of Jewish people because we know so much about Judaism, and they are often very surprised to learn how diverse the Museum staff actually is.
Using the Anonymous Question Cards has enabled us to find out more about what topics we might have to add to our workshop plans and what concepts of Judaism seem to be tricky to understand, which helps us help the children learn more about Judaism.
No matter what kind of question we get, it is always interesting what students want to know more about and with which assumptions they enter the Jewish Museum.
