Keeping up with Snyder

Well-mannered Israel Museum director James Snyder recently received the prestigious title of Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem.

By BARRY DAVIS
James Snyder, Nir Barkat 521 (photo credit: Courtesy: Oren Nachshon)
James Snyder, Nir Barkat 521
(photo credit: Courtesy: Oren Nachshon)
James Snyder keeps fit and, considering his workload, it’s a good thing he does. The trim 60-year-old director of the Israel Museum swims between half a kilometer and a kilometer every day and seems to have been blessed with the gift of omnipresence. If there’s anything major happening at – or connected with – the Jerusalem institution, Snyder’s neat silvery coif is sure to pop up so he can offer some enlightenment to the event in question.
His constantly packed schedule also means you have to catch the man when and where you can, so we meet over a healthy salad lunch in the museum’s main eatery. The pretext for the interview is Snyder’s recent award of the prestigious title of Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem by Mayor Nir Barkat, but it also offers a good opportunity for the director to talk about some of his achievements at the museum during the course of his 16-year tenure to date.
The star-studded award ceremony was attended by Bank of Israel Governor Prof. Stanley Fischer, Charles Bronfman, Michael and Judy Steinhardt and Lynn Schusterman, to mention but a few luminaries.
Snyder says he was chuffed by the award. “Yes, it was actually very touching,” he declares. “We feel very close to Jerusalem.” The use of the first person plural could be misconstrued as indicating that Snyder harbors some royal pretensions – after all, Barkat did give him free rein of the city – but, in fact, it is a matter of marital allegiance and being in the limelight in what are for Snyder unusual circumstances.
“I’ll say what I said at the ceremony, and that is that I am used to being the MC and not the subject.
I’m not so used to being the subject, so I don’t use ‘I’ often. In this case ‘we’ means myself but also my wife. We feel very connected to Jerusalem.”
Snyder, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, feels very connected to the Israel Museum and, in fact, made his first visit to this country to consider taking his present job. He says it was love at first sight. “I was taken with the museum because of its stunning potential and because of the magnificence of its site and setting and its landscape and architecture. That’s why we came.”
It was largely the museum’s vantage point that caught his eye and heart. “I am often asked to speak about what are the ingredients needed for a successful and vibrant museum, one that communicates the importance of material culture, and the importance of preserving material culture. Those ingredients include site, setting and the way that landscape, or cityscape, and architecture work together so that, without even being inside a place, or seeing it in detail, you are struck by its power.”
In that respect, Snyder has certainly made the most of the Israel Museum’s hillside position. Anyone returning to Jerusalem after a long hiatus would find the museum almost unrecognizable. Its gallery space has been doubled, and additional important collections and permanent exhibits now grace the institution’s interior and grounds. One of the latter is Anish Kapoor’s seductively attractive Turning the World Upside Down reflective hourglass-shaped sculpture, which was installed in the Art Garden two years ago.
Snyder is, at his own admission, “a people’s person” and he has made good use of his easy social graces to bring in funding from new sources, greatly expanding the museum’s International Friends facilities around the globe and overseeing the institution’s most extensive overhaul since its founding in 1965. Last year, the museum reopened with the culmination of a $100- million renovation and expansion program.
SNYDER’S EFFUSIVE congeniality is evident throughout. As we make our way to the cafeteria, Snyder greets employees, curators and security officers alike. When I comment on his ability to find time for pleasantries, he simply says: “I am pathologically friendly.”
Harvard-educated Snyder came here with considerable experience in the field, even though he gained it in a seemingly very different milieu. Between 1986 and 1996, the latter part of a 22-year stretch at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), he served as deputy director of the New York establishment, during which time he masterminded a $60-million expansion project.
Snyder observes that, while his former and current places of employment do not appear to have too much in common, it may be a matter of a Newtonian equaland- opposite ethos.
“MOMA is about cityscape, whereas this [the Israel Museum] is about landscape,” he says. “We are a 20- acre garden rising from a remarkable topographical site, and MOMA fits into the grid of a city plan. We are a vast garden with a museum in it. MOMA is a museum with a garden within it. I was actually responsible over time, in fact for all of my time at MOMA, for the garden there.”
Snyder says he now sees that his time in New York served as good training for his role here. “In retrospect I now realize that the power of that setting [at MOMA] had a lot to do with it having its spirit sprayed from this incredible Modernist half-acre site at the heart of the museum, so it is as if the spirit of the place sprang there from within and then cascaded over it. Here, in a way, it is a little bit the obverse, because here it is about being enveloped by the spirit of this incredible landscape which is the backdrop for the museum. So there are similarities.”
Despite his long sojourn in Jerusalem, Snyder says he has managed to maintain an objective stance on much that bothers Israelis and to skirt around potential minefields. “I am not so much focused on politics,” he says with somewhat atypical understatement. “I am focused on the long view of culture, and what fascinated me about coming here was the idea of a 3,000- year-old living city,” he continues, quickly returning to the thematic environs of his daytime job. “For us, this is the backdrop for the museum, which is about illustrating the material cultural history of the world across many millennia.”
Temporal and place-related continuity are important in Snyder’s work. “We have this kind of narrative in the galleries about how all things connect across time and across geography. If you look at the time line of material culture you see it unfold in all these objects.”
There are about half a million of “these objects” at the Israel Museum, embracing a temporal bracket of no less than a million years.
The director has also demonstrated a keenness for incorporating as many local ethnic groups and cultures as possible in the museum’s dynamics. “Part of it, of course, is the longevity of where we are, and part of it is the continuous presence, across that longevity, of the cultures that have grown up here. It is not just Jews, Christians and Arabs – you have all kinds of Jews and many kinds of Christians and many kinds of Arabs who are Muslim and not Muslim. So it’s not only that we feel it is important to serve all the populations who are here, which, for us, is very basic; it is also that the presence of all those populations actually resonates with the statement that the cultural vision that the museum is about.”
This applies to all levels of the museum’s being. “Even when we rebuilt the museum, at the peak of the museum, there were 500-plus workers on the site coming from seven nationalities.”
While Snyder has one eye on Jerusalem’s heritage he has the other firmly fixed on the here-and-now, and that means juggling numerous balls simultaneously. He appears to live and breathe the museum at all times, and there are constantly people to greet and hands to shake. Our chat is interrupted several times as Snyder politely excuses himself to apeak with Tourism Minister Stas Meseznikov, who has dropped by to address a group of Russian-speaking tour guides, and then to exchange a few words with a leading Canadian scientist who is visiting with the Canadian ambassador.
Our luncheon slot is over and the director heads off, at full speed, to his next appointment – no doubt to make someone feel welcome at the museum. “I am pathologically positive,” Snyder offers as a parting shot.


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