Empathy, Part 1: The FedEx package

The world runs on empathy. While empathy is hard, and I'm not very successful at it, I would like cultivating empathy to be a high priority for everyone.

During my stays in Germany, one of my hobbies was visiting Jewish museums. I found those visits more chilling after someone told me that Hitler wanted to create museums whose purpose was to inform people about the Jews, after ridding the world of them.

In November of 1999, I went to part of a research conference about Jewish life in the local region. After a talk given by a curator at a nearby town's Jewish Museum, we exchanged contact information so she could send me a published version of her talk. I asked her how she got interested in the subject, and she said she was trained as a historian (but not in Jewish history), and this was the only job offer she got. I asked if anyone Jewish had provided input for the exhibits at her museum, and she said no.

In early December I visited the museum. I found one of the exhibits to be both strangely mundane and oddly memorable. A large display case contained only some closed black prayer books and the FedEx envelope they came in. The FedEx label on the envelope was easy to read. It included the name, address, and home phone number of the sender, and gave instuctions to bill the recipient for transportation charges, duties, and taxes. The exhibit's caption said that the books were donated by a former resident of the town, and had belonged to her uncle. The caption emphasized that the donor described the contents as "used prayer books --- sentimental value only".

The donor's address was in Bayside, Queens, in New York City. To a museum curator in Germany, Queens was far away. As a woman from Queens, I empathized with the sender. I would have been unhappy if my home address and phone number appeared on an exhibit at a German museum (let alone the information that I hadn't paid for the postage).

On December 9, I emailed the curator I had met, thanked her for sending me the copy of her talk, and asked about the FedEx exhibit. When I didn't receive a reply, I wrote to the museum with my question. I've lightly edited for anonymity and brevity the correspondence I had with a different museum employee. (I wanted to write in German, but decided that the recipient's English would be better than my German. I apologize for not correcting the recipient's English, but I wanted to retain the flavor of the correspondence.)

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To: Jüdisches Museum 

Date: Fri, March 3, 2000

Dear Sir/Madam:

I have visited the Jewish Museum in [town's name], and 

found it very interesting. I have a question that I

hope you can answer. One exhibit contained prayer books 

that had been sent from the USA. The exhibit included 

the FedEx envelope that the books had been sent in, and 

noted that the sender had put "sentimental value only" 

on the envelope. Why was the FedEx envelope included in 

the exhibit, and what was its significance?

Thank you very much. 

Yours sincerely, 

Prof. Dr. A. Silverberg

Professor of Mathematics, Ohio State University

Visiting Professor and Humboldt Research Fellow, [my affiliation in Germany]

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From: Jüdisches Museum  

Date: Mon, March 6, 2000

Dear Ms. Silverberg,

[apology that no one responded to my December message] 

The station is named "Preservation" and its more a museological topic 

than a historical one. The Pentateuch of Mr. X would not be 

complete as object without the fedex formular. At "Preservation" we 

are showing small collections of very different inhoulds from financial 

value far behind great collections as the Gundelfingers one for 

example. But for our museum they have another kind of value. These 

objects were all given with a letter or another kind of message. The 

donators want to communicate their history and those of their 

families to the public. They want to rescribe their history to the 

public history.

That in very short terms.

Hoping to have given a answer, I remain with kind regards, ...

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To: Jüdisches Museum 

Date: Thu, March 30, 2000

Thank you very much for your reply, and for taking the

time to answer my question.

I have 2 comments to make about the exhibit of the FedEx 

envelope, which I hope will be helpful to you. 

First, the phrase "sentimental value only" on a package

sent from the USA to overseas is only a formulaic phrase, 

and has a standard meaning. It is put there so that the

recipient will not be asked to pay customs duty on the

package. This phrase is not meant to be taken literally.

What it means is that the sender is asking the "Zollamt" 

to charge no customs duty. 

The second thing that struck me was that the FedEx envelope

included the phone number and address of the sender. I

wondered whether the museum had obtained the permission of

the sender, before exhibiting her phone number and address.

(In fact, I considered writing down the phone number so that

I could call the sender and ask her that myself, the next 

time that I am in New York.) Personally, I would not want 

my phone number and address to be displayed in a museum.

I hope that these comments are useful to you. I would be

interested in hearing your reactions to them.

Yours sincerely,

Prof. Dr. Alice Silverberg

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I never received a reply. I visited the museum again, and glanced through the guest book. Schoolchildren had scribbled in it, complaining that they found the museum incomprehensible. They said that the exhibits were not explained well enough for them to understand the point. I added a comment on how I thought the museum was sacrificing clarity to please postmodern museumologists, and I mentioned some of the problematic and unnecessarily obscure exhibits.

While I was there, I copied down the information on the FedEx envelope, and the exhibit's caption. When I returned to the U.S., I mailed a letter to the donor to let her know about the exhibit. She replied with a gracious handwritten note thanking me for alerting her. She had no idea that her full address and phone number were on public display. She phoned the museum director, who agreed to remove the address and phone number.

I recently found an article on the Internet from around the time I was writing to the museum, reporting that the local Jewish community was calling for the resignation of the museum's director for lacking the necessary sensitivity to the Jewish faith, and for nearly completely failing to include the Holocaust in the permanent exhibit. His critics pointed out that 90% of the exhibits come from members of the Jewish community, but the exhibits are not adequately explained. I was glad to see that I wasn't the only one who noticed.

If you believe in fairness, it's important to learn to empathize with everyone. Put yourself in the other person's shoes. If you wouldn't want your home address and phone number displayed in a museum on the other side of the world without your knowledge or permission, then perhaps you should think twice about displaying someone else's home address and phone number without their knowledge or permission.