There’s Plenty of Significant Contemporary Jewish Art Hiding in Plain Sight

First there was Edward Rothstein’s brilliant 2016 analysis in Mosaic of “The Problem of Jewish Museums.” The essence of that problem, he wrote, lies in their being “identity museum[s] that [are] wary of identity”—specifically, their own Jewish identity.

Now Menachem Wecker, again in Mosaic, has dissected at length the new permanent exhibition of New York’s Jewish Museum. In his judgment, the exhibition, with its scattershot sampling of artifacts from the museum’s core collection, all too faithfully confirms the curators’ own stated purpose in mounting it—namely, to affirm not so much the values of Judaism or of Jewish culture as, in the curators’ words, “universal values that are shared among people of all faiths and backgrounds.” In thus distancing itself from the particular substance of Jewish thought and practice, Wecker writes, the Jewish Museum has vitiated any possibility of becoming what its founders envisioned it would become: “the hub for contemporary Jewish conversation, education, and memory.”

Next, Tom Freudenheim, continuing the discussion in a response to Wecker’s essay, has reminded readers of the museum’s off-and-on penchant over recent decades for “displaying contemporary art lacking any palpable connection to Jews or Judaism”—a penchant now manifested even with respect to the museum’s core collection of Judaica. As with many American museums in general, Freudenheim points out, so with the Jewish Museum, one detects a “pervasive discomfort or embarrassment when it comes to Western religion.”