On March 28, 2003, as on the last Friday of every month, the board of administrators of Médecins sans frontières (MSF; Doctors without Borders) met between five and eleven o’clock in the organization’s head office on the first floor of a building in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris. On that particular evening a peculiar atmosphere of expectation and excitement reigned.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., exhumes the bodies with minimum ceremony, forcing acknowledgment of the facticity, specificity, and proximity of genocide. Always in the air is the fraught question of exceptionalism; but pressing as that is, resolving it is not the task the curators have assumed.