The Nazis were immune to irony. Like all propagandists, they were practiced at ignoring even glaring disparities between what they said and what they did. For example, the discrepancy between Hitler's much publicized Aryan prototype — tall, blond, and muscular — and the actual physiques of Hitler and his close aides Goebbels and Goering is obvious, as are the inconsistencies of the official Nazi pronouncements on purity and virtue next to the licentious behavior of the Nazi leaders themselves.

The "Degenerate Art Exhibition" Hitler staged in Germany in 1937 as an assault on modern art was another example of the German failure to make reality match an imaginary ideal. Dr. Brent Yanke — who joined Associates in Urology in West Orange on July 2 — wrote an academic thesis on the exhibition, talked about the grotesque inconsistencies in Nazi doctrine and practice in an interview with NJ Jewish News.

"From a horde of 16,000 confiscated works of art, the Nazis chose 650 works for this show," Yanke explained. "Hitler didn't like museums or art dealers or curators — he believed many of them were Jewish — but in fact, only six of the 116 artists represented were actually Jewish." Strangest of all, he said, "although the term ‘degenerate Jew' was in common use at the time, the term ‘degenerate' had first been applied to art by a Jewish-German Zionist, Max Nordau, in 1893," who had no idea of the uses that would be made of his epithet.

Across the street from this show, Yanke said, the Nazis purposely located the annual Great German Art Exhibition "to present to the public the official Nazi policy of art" — a collection of classical works with heroic themes to inspire the volk, the German people. In an absurd, table-turning conclusion worthy of a Mel Brooks skit, however, "the Exhibition of Degenerate Art was so popular that it had five times more visitors during its stay in Munich than the officially praised ‘Great German Art Exhibition,'" Yanke wrote. This traveling show "became the most popular exhibition ever to have been staged" in Germany.

Yanke of Tenafly who recently relocated to New Jersey to join the West Orange practice, is a robotic urologist with a specialty in minimally invasive surgery. He grew up in Los Angeles, where he became a bar mitzva at Temple Judea in Tarzana. He pursued a lifetime interest in art at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a dual major in neuroscience and art history. "I see parallels between art and medicine," he said. "Medicine is an art. The patient is a kind of canvas." In the operating room, using a specially designed computer console to control surgical instruments on thin robotic arms, the links are apparent: "You can look at the anatomy, see the spatial relations of both."