Exhibiting ‘Jewishness’: An introspective study of the Jewish Identity and its embodiment within the European Jewish Museum informed by deconstructivist and critical argument Part 2 Dissertation 2019 Tobias Corry Manchester School of Architecture Manchester | UK The Jewish people have long settled amongst European society as a diasporic population, yet their existence on the continent today continues to be threatened by Anti-Semitic behaviour in an increasingly xenophobic context. This is partly assigned to an ambiguity surrounding what it means to be Jewish, with negative perceptions of ‘Jewishness’ (or Jewish qualities) stemming from a wider disconnection from Jewish lives today. In the built environment, the Jewish Museum has been one of the few typologies tasked with addressing this lack of knowledge, rendering it a vital tool in the mission to dismantle Anti-Semitism. Despite this unified objective, the Jewish Museum has inspired numerous conflicting architectural expressions due to the complexity of representing a highly fragmented identity. Starting from the familiarity of Jewish depictions from my personal ancestry I look outwards to three prominent case studies: the Jewish Museum Berlin, Manchester Jewish Museum and the POLIN Museum to investigate how the architects’ and curators’ personal interpretations of ‘Jewishness’ have been influenced by varying critical and deconstructivist ideologies. It is from this comparison that I may understand the way in which they believe Anti-Semitism can be tackled utilising an architectural medium. Tutor(s) Cagri Sanliturk