It was only months after Katrina when an old friend of Jacobson's purchases an item at a New Orleans rummage sale: a very strange looking and oddly textured lampshade. When he asked what it's made of, the seller, a man covered with jailhouse tattoos, replied, "That's made from the skin of Jews." The price: $35. A few days later, the friend sent the lampshade to Jacobson, saying, "You're the journalist, you find out what it is." DNA analysis proves it is real, and the revelation sends Jacobson halfway around the world, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
From the time he grew up in Queens in the 1950s, Jacobson has heard stories about the human skin lampshade and knew it to be the ultimate symbol of Nazi cruelty, and almost everything he finds out about it is contradictory, mysterious, shot through with legend and specious information. Through interviews with forensic experts, famous Holocaust scholars (and deniers), Buchenwald survivors and liberators, and New Orleans thieves and cops, Jacobson gradually comes to see the lampshade as a ghostly illuminator of his own existential status as a Jew, and to understand exactly what that means in the context of human responsibility.
New York City, NY; NYC