Approaching the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center faces a reckoning. Its president Alice Greenwald has said that COVID-19 destroyed the private nonprofit’s “business model” of appealing to tourists at $26 a ticket to fund an $80 million annual budget. After the organization fired a large percentage of staff and bungled the public relations of a decision to suspend the Tribute in Light commemoration, former workers criticized Greenwald in the New York Times for seizing creative control. At the same time, a new documentary film called The Outsider, authorized to follow the museum’s creation, illuminates how its leadership made top-down decisions that condensed and weaponized the memory of September 11 into a quasi-religion that can be relied on to indefinitely fuel a vengeful American nationalism.
In this context, another long-standing concern has reemerged: the treatment of Arab-Americans, Muslims, and Islam. One of the former staff members quoted in the New York Times claims that the museum actively blocked programming that would consider the spread of Islamophobia after September 11. She also relates how her bosses rejected the inclusion of Christchurch, New Zealand in a new exhibit about other terrorist attacks. For the Muslim and Arab communities of the New York City area — the largest in the United States — these claims align with a long history of hostile behavior from the institution.
Beginning with the airport-style security control at the entrance, the September 11 Museum sells a full and visceral immersion into the horrific day, as if aiming to place their guests under siege, making them feel like victims themselves. What follows is a series of exhibits that draw from a specific curatorial philosophy of “witness,” relentlessly exploiting architectural and cinematographic tricks — moody lighting, cacophonous sounds, horrific imagery, claustrophobic passageways with heavy crowds, first-person narration, and deeply-set religious archetypes — to evoke an unsettled, highly emotional response that can be channeled in any direction.
Alice Greenwald, who conceived the experience, came from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, the prototypical example of the new genre of a “memorial museum,” which seeks not just to educate and inform, but to move its visitor emotionally — for example to ensure that we “never again” face a genocide. Yet, the New York museum would never ask guests to consider how they might prevent a terrorist attack; hence the cultivated feelings of victimization and humiliation may have nowhere to go except desire for vengeance against those “responsible,” a perfect brew for “never forget” nationalism.