Mushrooming museums

Jewish museums are flourishing thanks to some exceptional exhibits

By SHULA KOPF
Jew in a Box at the Berlin Jewish Museum521 (photo credit: BERLIN JEWISH MUSEUM)
Jew in a Box at the Berlin Jewish Museum521
(photo credit: BERLIN JEWISH MUSEUM)
A group of Germans visiting Berlin’s Jewish Museum was already waiting for Bill Glucraft when he arrived to answer their questions.
Glucraft, a 27-year-old Jewish resident of the city, had volunteered to participate in an exhibit called “The Whole Truth, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Jews,” which aims to illuminate facets of Jewish culture for a mostly uninformed German public. The idea of a Jew sitting on a bench in an open glass showcase serving as a museum exhibit in the former Nazi capital sparked intense controversy and worldwide media coverage, after it became commonly referred to in the press as “Jew in a Box.”
Glucraft made himself comfortable on the bench, crossed his legs, and when he noted a certain reticence in the group, he smiled and said, “I don’t bite. Who wants to ask a question?” “Why do Jews wear a kippa?” someone asked. “What are kosher foods?” “What is it like to be a Jew in Germany compared to being a Jew in the US?” “They were mostly simple, superficial questions,” says the former Fairfield, Connecticut native who came to Berlin more than three years ago to be with his German non-Jewish girlfriend. “When you’re talking to people who have never met a Jew, you can’t talk about the Talmud. You have to start with the basics, Judaism for beginners.
Almost everyone admitted that they have never met a Jew and that they welcomed this opportunity.”
Jewish museums are suddenly sexy. Lately, they are also getting a lot of media attention.
In the past few months, two major stories relating to Jewish museums were covered by media outlets around the world. There was the much-heralded opening of the $100 million Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Then there was the controversy surrounding the “Jew in a Box” exhibition in Berlin.
“The museum opening in Warsaw is important and the museum in Berlin is important,” says Ruth Beesch, deputy director for program administration in New York City’s Jewish Museum. “It’s a sign that Jewish museums are flourishing in places where they might have never thought to exist.”
But, in addition to those two stories, one senses that something is afoot when The New York Times runs eight stories on Jewish museums in three months.
The Berlin Jewish Museum’s latest exhibition is part of a growing trend of Jewish museums sidestepping the comfort zone of staid Judaica displays of silver kiddush cups and ornate Torah crowns.
“If you look at a wall of 100 Hanukka lamps, I, and five other people in the world, will find it interesting,” says Michal Friedlander, curator at the Berlin museum for the last 12 years.
“I believe in new, creative methods to reach the audience. The question is for whom are these museums created? In the US they are created by Jewish people for Jewish people. In Europe, they are largely built by non-Jews for a non-Jewish audience. Jewish museums in the US are traditionally based around Jewish life cycle and holiday traditions and are housed in buildings that belong to the Jewish community.
“European Jewish museums are recovering the histories that have been lost,” says Friedlander. “They are doing cultural preservation. There was a big wave in the 80s and a lot of funding and it has died down. Now it is in Eastern Europe that more museums are being created. There are a lot of new ideas emerging, a lot of creativity.”
Jewish museums are mounting innovative, interactive exhibits that explore various aspects of Jewish life and history. They are digitizing their collections, expanding their online presence and using technology-driven media in their exhibitions. This is part of a move towards viewing Judaism as a culture, rather than just a religion, and a desire to tell the story of how Jews live, and not just how they died.
Some recent examples: The Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam just wrapped up an exhibit called “Jewish Flavor: A Worldwide Cuisine,” where visitors were invited to discover the Jewish kitchen and to view a collection of hundreds of Jewish cookbooks, vintage and modern, as well as kitchen tools like a Shabbat oven, a cholent pot and a kugel mold. There were cooking classes and wine tastings. An exhibit from 2008, co-produced with the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, showcased Superheroes and Schlemiels, Jewish memory in comic strip art.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is exhibiting Black Sabbath, the secret musical history of black-Jewish relations, Johnny Mathis singing “Kol Nidre” to Cab Calloway mixing Yiddishisms in his jive.
The Jewish Museum in New York has in recent years mounted some surprising shows such as “Houdini: Art and Magic,” about the renowned Jewish escape artist, “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics,” about the Jewish writers and artists who produced comic book heroes, such as Superman and Batman, “Curious George Saves the Day,” about America’s favorite monkey and his creators, German Jews living in Paris who escape Nazi-occupied Europe and how that experience influenced the Curious George books.
The National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia is exhibiting “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges,” the story of Jewish academics, dismissed in the 1930s from teaching positions in Germany and Austria, who found jobs at historically black colleges and universities in the South. The museum is planning an exhibition, due to open in 2014, called “Chasing Dreams,” about Jews and baseball. The show’s curators have opened an Internet Tumblr site to solicit user-generated content.
“Historically, Jews have always culturally engaged with music, theater, film or visual art and as scholars,” says Joanne Marks Kauvar, executive director of the Council of American Jewish Museums. “We are a selfreflecting people that bring a curiosity and intellectual rigor to exploring the larger world, but also turn that on our selves.
This tremendous intellectual and cultural curiosity manifests itself in creating our own museums.”
The fact that the council was founded 35 years ago with only seven members and has mushroomed to 80, coast to coast, is sufficient proof of the proliferation of Jewish museums in recent decades. It seems that as American Jews have become more secular, the role of the synagogue has diminished and the role of Jewish museums has become more important.
“Each community has its own vision and creates its own variation on the theme,” says Kauvar.
But are there too many? Just in April two more have opened. A Holocaust museum opened in New York City’s prestigious Bronx High School of Science, which produced eight Jewish Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry.
The Sephardic Museum of Granada, Spain, opened its doors and contains books and artifacts collected from across Andalusia that shed light on a Jewish community, which flourished there until 1492, the onset of the Spanish Inquisition. The museum is the brainchild of Gabriel Perez and Beatriz Cavalier, a historian and the daughter of a Jewish woman who fled the area during the Spanish Civil War. The two found a creative way to celebrate the grand opening – they got married in the museum on opening day.
“I wouldn’t say there are too many Jewish museums,” says Beesch, of New York’s Jewish Museum. “We all have our own unique character.”
Some new museums, designed by worldclass architects, occupy prime pieces of real estate.
The $150 million National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia opened its new facility in 2010 in the most historically resonant square mile in America, just a stone’s throw from the Liberty Bell.
Overlooking Independence National Historic Park, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed, the museum’s mission is to bring Jews closer to their own heritage and tell the story of Jews in America “unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
“It’s a very powerful, meaningful piece of geography,” says Ivy Barsky, CEO and director of the museum. “Visitors come right off Independence Mall, the foundations of American freedom, and walk into this absolutely modern museum of Jewish history.
The fact that American Jewish history gets to have this sophisticated, charged conversation about liberty and freedom in this location is kind of incredible.”
The Jewish Museum in New York City, on 92nd street and Fifth Avenue, is four blocks away from the Guggenheim, two blocks from the Cooper-Hewitt and ten blocks away from the Met. The museum, one of America’s oldest Jewish museums, has an endowment of around $94 million, larger than the Guggenheim’s.
“We are at the epicenter of art in New York,” says Beesch.
The Skirball Jewish museum in Los Angeles, designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie, opened in 1996 and occupies a magnificent facility uphill from the Getty Center. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, designed by worldrenowned architect Daniel Libeskind, placed its new facility in 2008 in the city’s arts district right on Mission Street. Libeskind also designed the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen and the Berlin Jewish Museum, Europe’s largest, which opened to the public in 2001 and was funded by the German government. The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland, Ohio, opened in 2005, imported more than 126 tons of hand-chiseled Jerusalem limestone for its façade.
Despite talk of innovation and creative exhibitions, when a reporter asks curators at the Jewish museum what they would grab if the building were on fire, the answers go right to the heart of Jewish history and ritual.
The CEO of the National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia didn’t have to think long. She would grab the yellowed, original, rag-paper copy of the letter George Washington wrote to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in which he affirmed that the nascent American government gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
“It is one of the most important objects in American history,” says Barsky. “His letter is in incredibly poetic. Every sentence is stunning. That would be what I would grab for sure.”
Beesch, the director of programming at the Jewish Museum in New York, has more of a dilemma. Since its founding in 1904, the museum has amassed more than 25,000 objects of different media. For many years the museum emphasized cutting-edge modern art exhibits. In the 60s the museum was at the vanguard of the contemporary art world with career-defining exhibitions for artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Some of the upcoming exhibits include “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” planned for September 2013, “Strong Language: Mel Bochner since 1997,” showing the work of the founding figure of the conceptual art movement, planned for 2014, and “Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television,” planned for 2015.
So, with such a baffling cornucopia of objects from which to choose at the cutting edge of modern art, Beesch cuts right to the heart of Jewish culture.
She chooses a silver Torah crown made in 1764 in what is now known as Lviv, Ukraine.
The Torah crown is decorated with patterns in relief formed by hammering and pressing on the reverse side, pierced, engraved, partly gilded and decorated with semiprecious stones.
“In our Judaica collection we have objects that are unique and tell an incredible story of the resiliency of the Jewish People. This Torah crown is an amazing, beautiful piece,” she says. 