Menachem Wecker on What's Wrong with the Jewish Museum

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, News, Politics, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New York's legendary Jewish Museum was founded by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in 1904 with just 26 objects. When it opened to the public in 1947, JTS Chancellor Louis Finkelstein told the New York Times that he hoped the museum's artifacts would celebrate "the singular beauty of Jewish life, as ordained in the laws of Moses, developed in the Talmud, and embellished in tradition." Though the museum grew and changed over the decades, its commitment to this fundamentally Jewish—even religious—mission never completely disappeared, even as it waxed and waned.

But the museum's new permanent exhibition—titled Scenes from the Collection—couldn't be farther from realizing Chancellor Finklelstein's ambition. Filled largely with nostalgic kitsch, the exhibit does little more than flatter the shallowest of contemporary cultural prejudices about Jews in Judaism. In Mosaic's May Essay, Menachem Wecker reviews the exhibit and shows us how and why it went wrong.

This week, Wecker joins the Tikvah Podcast to discuss his essay. He reflects on Finkelstein's hopes for the Jewish Museum, explains what a great exhibition can accomplish, and details why Scenes from the Collection is such a wasted opportunity.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble as well as "Shining Through the Rain" by Big Score Audio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Speaking about the original purposes of the Jewish Museum in New York, the legendary
0:12.8	chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Louis Finkelstein, told the New York Times that he
0:17.5	hoped that the 1,000 exhibited artworks and artifacts would celebrate
0:21.7	the singular beauty of Jewish life, as ordained in the laws of Moses, developed in the Talmud,
0:27.2	and embellished in tradition.
0:28.8	As we should expect, the museum's main exhibition has changed over the years, with major
0:33.3	renovations in the 1960s and 1990s, but the curation of these exhibits generally reinforced the
0:39.0	underlying hierarchy of Finkelstein's statement, that the beauty in the art was to serve and
0:44.5	celebrate the Jewish life that inspired it. The art and artifacts would have their own aesthetic
0:49.2	integrity, but they would also serve something higher, something holy, and would have the power to elevate
0:54.8	the museum visitors' experience to something higher, to approach the Jewish tradition's holiness.
1:01.2	Well, in the latest curation of the Jewish Museum's permanent exhibit, the hierarchy has
1:05.0	been reversed.
1:06.5	Now, an an enemic simulacrum of the Jewish, robbed of its power to elevate, does little more
1:12.1	than flatter contemporary cultural prejudices with kitsch. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host,
1:18.2	Jonathan Silver. My guest this week is the writer and critic Monacham Wecker, who's analyzed the wreck
1:23.7	of the Jewish Museum in the May 2019 monthly essay in Mosaic magazine. If you enjoy this
1:29.3	conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify,
1:34.6	and I hope you'll leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome
1:39.5	your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast at tikfa fund.org.
1:45.4	And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at Tikva,
1:47.9	you can visit our website, tikfafund.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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