Museum maestro

With a major expansion of the Israel Museum behind him, director James Snyder has visions of even greater accomplishments

By JAMES SNYDER
James Snyder521 (photo credit: elie posner / courtesy israel museum)
James Snyder521
(photo credit: elie posner / courtesy israel museum)
When James Snyder, the former deputy director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, became director of the Israel Museum in 1997, at the age of 45, he envisioned turning the complex into an even more important world-class institution. Visiting Israel and the museum for the first time in the spring of 1996, he found that the 7,000 items on display had been set up with little regard for chronology and were, in fact, “many museums under one roof.”
Though he has spent the past 16 years as director of Israel’s most important cultural institution, Snyder, born in Pennsylvania, has not become an Israeli citizen and acknowledges that he will return to the United States one day. “I am an American and I came here because I wanted to do this,” he tells The Jerusalem Report, pointing to a wall-sized photograph of the $100 million renovation of the museum that Snyder supervised from 2007 to 2010.
Having grown up among numerous Jewish relatives along the Monongahela River in the tiny town of Belle Vernon (population 1,900), an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh, Snyder had no Zionists among his relatives prodding him to move to Israel; nor did Israel insist that he take out Israeli citizenship. Still, it was unusual for a non-Israeli to be asked to run a major Israeli institution, as Snyder does. He has, he says, learned Hebrew, but has urged museum employees to use English as much as possible to make it comfortable for the many English-speaking visitors.
When Snyder, his wife, Tina Davis, a graphic designer and also an American, and their two children, Lily, now 29, and Daniel, now 27, arrived in Israel in 1997, they had no idea how long they would stay. But Snyder counted the time in years, not months. “I came here with the belief that it might be possible to achieve a transformation at the museum and really bring it to a whole new level of potential. And you don’t do that in three or four years,” he says. Meanwhile, Lily got married and has gone off to work at Sotheby’s in New York, in its private-client group; Daniel is a budding journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
We met in Snyder’s book-lined office, located at the far end of the museum, a halfmile walk from the front gate. On any given day, Snyder is easy to spot, with his wavy white hair and pale skin, walking briskly around the museum, often conducting personal tours for VIPs, always in a suit and tie. On the day of our interview, he wears a shocking pink tie and a dark suit, along with black sandals with socks. He speaks fast, mostly about the wonders of the museum.
For the four days before our interview, Snyder was working non-stop to acquire for the Israel Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York a 15th century Hebrew manuscript, half of a rare illuminated copy of the Mishna Torah, Maimonides’ key 12th century legal work. The two museums succeeded in buying the manuscript jointly for an undisclosed price.
March 21 was a highlight for Snyder. On that day, he escorted US President Barack Obama on a brief tour of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known manuscripts of the Old Testament. Snyder says of the Scrolls, “They are to the Israel Museum what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre.” The director was thrilled to meet Obama. “I voted for him twice.”
During Snyder’s 22 years at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), no American president had ever visited the museum. For a world leader to visit a museum while visiting a foreign country is rare, yet here was Obama looking at biblical manuscripts that are 2,000 years old. And he was not the first US president that Snyder had escorted around the museum – George W. Bush visited in 2008.
Growing up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, a coal-mining district where steel was also manufactured, Snyder grew enchanted with the nearby natural landscapes and modern architecture, an artistic impulse that led him later to study art history and yearn to become a museum director. “You had the sense of the connection between architecture and landscape,” he says.
His parents had immigrated to the Monongahela River region in the 1920s. His mother was originally Czech; his father’s parents came from Germany and Lithuania.
James, the second oldest of his parents’ four children, was their only son. They lived next to five other Jewish families, all relatives – 10 aunts and uncles and 45 cousins. “Together,” says Snyder, “we were the Jewish community in that area.” Entering Harvard in 1969, he majored in art history and English and American literature. “I was impressed with the connection between words and images.”
While still an undergraduate, he began graduate studies in art history and literature.
He graduated from Harvard in 1973.
A newly-minted college graduate, Snyder decided on a career path. “I had an idea that being a museum director would put me out in the world but allow me to stay in my field,” he says. But when he talked to several museum directors they advised him to go to business school first, before joining a museum. About to go to business school, Snyder landed an internship in 1974 at MOMA . He was 22 years old. Once there, he finally shed the idea of returning to academic work. “One year at MOMA turned into two, two into three, and after three years I was asked, ‘Why would you leave MOMA to go to school?’ If this is what you want to do, then stay,” he recalls.
In 1979, after five years at MOMA, Snyder oversaw the facility’s five-year $60 million, 350,000 square-foot expansion, which was completed in 1984. Two years later, he became MOMA’s deputy director and remained in that post for the next 10 years.
He was responsible, among other things, for the museum’s exhibition program in New York and worldwide. William Rubin, whom Snyder calls one of the great art historians of 20th century modern art, served as his mentor.
In 1997, former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, who was still chairman of the Israel Museum, which he founded in 1965, and other museum officials were hoping to find a new director who would make the cultural centerpiece more engaged in the international museum community. Because Snyder had been involved increasingly in museum activity globally, it seemed quite natural for the Israel Museum to offer him the post of director.
And so, in the spring of 1996, Snyder made his first visit to Israel to visit the museum.
He knew very little about the place. While he did not meet the iconic Kollek on that visit, they would work together for the next decade. Kollek, who retained an office at the museum, began mentoring Snyder once he took on the new posting in 1997. Snyder was in awe of Kollek. “I have often said that Teddy was the Thomas Jefferson of the New Jerusalem,” he says.
Snyder sensed that he was in an immediate bind when it came to making changes at the museum. How much of the Kollek-designed museum should he leave as is, and how much should he change? He decided that his mission was not to eradicate what Kollek had built and start all over. “I felt that Teddy had had an incredible vision and my job was to complete the realization of his vision,” he says. “It wasn’t to reinvent or create a new identity.”
Still, Snyder did not rest on Kollek’s laurels.
Besides, he had the advantage of bringing a fresh eye to the museum. “Sometimes it takes coming from another planet to see what’s possible,” he comments. “And really in a way I couldn’t have come more from another planet. I had no background or experience here. So I saw the museum and I saw this tremendous amount of potential, given the collections and the beauty of the site, and given the incredible legacy of modernist architecture that the museum had.” The new museum director realized that “the bones were here.” Kollek’s designers and architects had already provided “a great armature on which you could continue to build something that would be firmly rooted in the modernist tradition of those elements.”
Already, the museum had amassed nearly 500,000 objects of fine art, archaeology, Judaica and Jewish ethnography, representing the history of world culture from nearly one million years ago to the present day. Size, however, as Snyder notes, is not a good way to measure the value of a museum. There was no urgent need to add to the museum’s collection. “The point,” Snyder says, “is what you do with what you have. I don’t believe that every next iteration means getting bigger. I thought this museum was plenty big.”
When Snyder arrived, he found a modernist building made up of white boxes set on a hill across the street from the Knesset. Proudly, museum officials boasted to Snyder that the museum was in fact numerous museums, but the new director immediately realized that those “many museums under one roof” lacked a sense of continuity that complicated a visitor’s experience.
Snyder wanted to provide continuity “that would increase the museum’s power of place exponentially as a single museum that presents the material culture from the beginning to the present”; and he took on the task of unifying the disparate material cultures. By reordering the museum, Snyder could turn it into one of the world’s greatest museums “where you had a narrative with a beginning and end today.”
By 2010, Snyder had completed the renewal project that had partially shut the museum for the previous three years. “Our whole renewal,” suggests Snyder, “was about exploiting the space within those buildings.”
The renewal doubled the size of the gallery space by removing all the service elements (restaurants, shops, bathrooms) to a new building. An underground passageway was added that made the exhibits more accessible in all types of weather and for visitors of all ages. And within the museum, Snyder created a main thoroughfare so that all of the major departments (archeology, Jewish art and life, and fine arts) now open to that new corridor thus making the museum’s overall floor plan easier to follow. Since the completion of the renewal project, 600,000 people have visited the museum.
The international art community began to recognize Snyder’s vision. In 2011, he appeared on a list of the 100 most influential people in the art world, compiled each year by the Journal des Art. He was ranked 46.
Two of Snyder’s greatest accomplishments are the launchings in the past year of two temporary exhibits – one on the Hasidic ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and the other on King Herod. No exhibits have created more buzz for the museum or attracted so many visitors. Through the use of video tape, the Hasidic exhibit offered visitors a rare peek into the lifestyles of ultra-Orthodox Jews, observing rituals and customs long abandoned by non-religious Jews. Snyder’s greatest concern was making sure that the communities on display would feel comfortable enough with the content to provide the necessary materials for the exhibit. They did.
Snyder found that nearly half of the 300,000 visitors to the Hasidic exhibit came from Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations. In other words, the visitors were eager to find out how the museum had portrayed them. Until the exhibit was launched, the ultra-Orthodox community did not visit the museum on a regular basis.
The second exhibit focusing on King Herod is by far the largest project the Israel Museum has ever put together. “It’s the biggest amount of archeological tonnage that has been brought to the museum,” Snyder observes. Herod’s achievement was to be king of Judea under the aegis of the Roman Empire and to bring the aesthetic of the empire to Judea, while enabling the flourishing of the local Jewish culture. Some 100,000 visitors have seen the Herod exhibit since it opened in February. When it closes next January, Snyder believes that it will have attracted well over 500,000 visitors.
What made the Herod project so appealing was its uniqueness; there had never been a museum exhibition on Herod. “If you are going to do it,” says Snyder proudly, “this is the place to do it.” What Snyder particularly likes about these exhibits is that “they show that we are not just a collection of galleries.
We can show you this incredible continuum of time from the past to the present.”
With the museum expansion behind him, with the successful launching of two major temporary exhibits, Snyder has visions of even greater things. “In a way now,” he suggests, “the sky is the limit, and the focus of the next several years will not be about the physical building, but rather about the development of content.” 