Thank You, Wendy Leibowitz?
FREUDENHEIM, TOM L.
Thank You, Wendy Leibowitz? Thanks, Wendy Leibowitz! We needed that! Or did we? What exactly does she want? Jewish museums have a hard enough time trying to make it in this culture-competitive...
...Yet the book is reasonably priced at $14.95J Readers will feel a wonderful sense of time and place as they move about both chronologically and geographically...
...Yet few American museums would have survived in the past without patronage from Jews...
...I would question one statement of the authors Many of the museums, they say, "are not frequented even by Israelis...
...Of course, not everyone will respond equally to all items that are found in museums...
...Leibowitz wonders what would happen if there were Christian museums doing the same thing...
...We might, in fact, do well to listen carefully...
...an underwater museum at Eilat—the list could go on and on...
...Again, this is not unique to Jewish museums, but that makes it no less important an issue...
...and for experimentation, so that Jewish museums both learn and teach...
...We feel somehow responsible for the Holocaust...
...All museums need more direct dialogue with their audiences, and she offers the beginning of such communication...
...It will close at the end of 1990 for construction and the new building is scheduled to reopen by the end of 1992 When it reopens, half the doubted gallery space will be devoted to a permanent exhibit that will reflect -4,000 years of Jewish experience,' says museum director Joan Rosenbaum...
...Why do those same exhibits take for granted the notion that this material can be seen as art, without making necessary connections with more general decorative arts issues...
...J'ewish museums have generally been collection-based...
...How is the viewer to relate Jewish folk art, craft or decorative art to what he or she has seen elsewhere in the non-Jewish museums...
...But Leibowiu reminds us thai there are committed and potentially interested Jews anxiously waiting to be brought into the Jewish museum orbit...
...In the Jewish museum realm, the compelling A Passion For Museums in Israel Israel boasts more than 120 museums...
...I guess she's never seen the many museums and treasuries with just such Christian materials, often connected with great churches...
...Let's not worry that genocide continues around us unabated...
...By placing a kiddush cup in a museum case we pay it appropriate respect, and show that we care about the object...
...And the beautiful pictures give us a feeling of being there from the Stekelis Museum of Prehistory—a very effective picture of an exhibit there—to the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum—another impressive picture—and everything in between...
...The splendid exhibition of historical and art materials from the Prague State Jewish Museum included only one Jewish museum in its very successful national tour...
...for creative ideas that could engage the kind of visitor that Leibowitz seems to represent...
...I agree...
...They fail to engage visitors with the full potential of either the learning experience or the enjoyment that they believe themselves to be purveying...
...The other half of the newly renovated museum will be used for special exhibits, but not in the same fragmented way these are shown now...
...From Herzl's tomb, at the top of the mount, on a clear day one can see the Mediterranean on the western horizon and the Dead Sea to the east Between them lies Herzl's vision, his "Old-New Land...
...Bedouin culture...
...My sense is that Israelis use their museums more intensely than we do in this country...
...Why this unfair griping about unmet expectations or service not received...
...No one is better equipped to describe these exciting cultural treasures than the two authors of this delightful book one (Rosovsky) curator of exhibitions at the Harvard Semitic Museum...
...Using period films, memorabilia, letters, journals, paintings, drawings and more, the Dreyfus exhibit surveyed the tumultuous history of the scandal, which lasted from 1894 to 1906, A Golem Danger, Deliverance and Art, a recent exhibit interprets complex themes of mysticism, creation and doppelganger or alter ego to audiences of different ages and backgrounds in another innovative display...
...A chronological chart from 1.5 million years "Before Present" until 1979 gives a compact historical panorama...
...Yet she seems to have visited the larger museums at their least interesting moments, and to have noticed only the worst elements in the smaller ones...
...This is not to say that one generally agreed-upon mission would serve all Jewish museums...
...Yet, Leibowitz has done us a service through her comments about Jewish museums...
...The museum runs a coffee shop and book store in which patrons meet This encourages people to think of the museum as a place to be, and gives museum-goers a place to reflect on their experience," Bilski said...
...But she also seems to have missed or disliked the San Francisco Jewish Community Museum's display of the architectural competition for a sukkah design, which produced some wonderful results...
...Yet why should anyone assume that Jewish history-related (sometimes only vaguely related) archaeological materials on display will elicit interest...
...Students and art teachers from a nearby synagogue designed and built the artistic backdrop for the play...
...did someone once really say "Never again...
...Let's not worry about the ceremony...
...Why undermine the credibility of an already overly fragile Field...
...In fact, when we use terms such as "interested in being Jewish" we may not adequately respect the emotional baggage that accompanies this sort of intellectual curiosity Interesting information, historically accurate labels, audio-visual programs, even beautiful objects—these don't necessarily take account of the viewer's need to be emotionally involved...
...The Jewish museum will have to become more credible to merit that continued support...
...to reveal the rich world of ideas behind objects," said director of education Judith Siegel in a recent lecture So the Jewish Museum commissioned a theater piece about the Golem that brought in 2200 children for 11 performances...
...Would the recent exhibition of birdhouscs designed by prominent architects, held at Southampton's Parrish Museum, be considered more meaningful...
...Israeli museums are not just places for visitors to stroll through and read the captions...
...Shabbat TOM L FREUDENHEIIV observance should be in the heart, where it really matters...
...The variety seems almost endless...
...But the fact remains that this tiny country is filled with museums mostly conceived and often staffed by dedicated, nonprofessional volunteers whose knowledge of their subjects is often extraordinary...
...On the one hand, there is a need to strengthen the Jewish museums in this country and to secure better support for them...
...the moonscape of the Maktesh Ramon crater...
...Leibowitz sees them all as frozen, unexplained relics of what is made to seem an irrelevant past...
...They will certainly create a whole new set of challenges...
...Jewish museums have a hard enough time trying to make it in this culture-competitive world...
...As Leibowitz points out, there is a great deal more creative work to be done in Jewish museums...
...Leibowitz obviously speaks for a lot of frustrated visitors, and we need to listen...
...We have increased the opportunities for the public's exposure to spectacular, often iconic works of art or history that excite viewers with their special authenticity and/or their high monetary worth...
...As authors of The Museums of Israel (Harry N. Abrams, 1989) Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson and Nitza Rosovsky say in their preface, There is a passion for museums in Israel, a passion for preserving and interpreting the past, understandable in this old-new land...
...Like professionals in other fields, we do much of our work for colleague approval...
...The museums are the focus of discussion groups and lectures...
...ancient Israelite artifacts recovered at Tel Dan...
...Heuberger ruminated...
...Apparently a lot...
...Naturally, each entry also lists the essentials—hours, fees, location, telephone, etc A series of indexes and maps makes locating a particular museum easy...
...Even now we are doing a kind of show that is unusual like the Dreyfus exhibition, for example la collection of visual responses to the Dreyfus affair) where we combined social history, art and cultural identity in a way new to museums,' said Rosenbaum...
...related material not likely to be seen elsewhere...
...Museum, working in what might be described as a "conventional" museum mode, handles Jewish objects and the accompanying information with a sensitivity to the audience's needs, if not with great imagination...
...It is also fun to read...
...There- is virtually no way that the average museum can provide the visitor with access to the potentially engaging information simply by looking at the archaeological remains on view...
...But this is not a problem to be laid only at trie feet of the Jewish museum field, even if that is Leibowitz's challenge here...
...Or is there a message of some kind that is aimed at non-Jews (an assumption that Leibowitz also seems to make, aptly reflecting the confused messages she reads...
...I would suggest, however, that there may be a need for Jewish museums to rethink their missions...
...In its first nine days of operation, more than 10,000 visitors flocked to the museum...
...Her comments on George Segal's Holocaust sculpture suggests a lack of interest in art, but one wonders whether Leibowitz would have responded to the Segal piece differently in a museum of modern art...
...They tended to develop around an existing core of objects or archival materials, and have followed the conventional collecting and exhibiting patterns and impulses of most museums...
...Even when it is not evident to visitors, many museums have been influenced by these new concepts...
...Nor does she seem interested in that same museum's excellent survey of Jews who participated in creating early 20lh-century an in Paris...
...Emily Bilski, associate curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, visited the Frankfurt museum shortly after it opened...
...It is clear that Leibowitz has seen some range of the available Jewish museums...
...But those who prefer looking at a half-empty glass, generally can't see that it's half full...
...I'd rather not defend museums, in spite of the bitter evaluation by Leibowitz, a visitor and non-colleague, which articulates the unspoken thoughts of many others in today's Jewish museum audience...
...We have an educational task to fulfill...
...Islamic art...
...It's a complicated issue...
...The Holocaust museums, on the other hand, have been created to commemorate this central event in Jewish history...
...As a Jewish museum educator my task is...
...That's an encouraging sign, and I would expect that those who work in such museums would be excited at the prospect of having Leibowitz in their audience...
...The same touring pattern has been seen in another such archaeology exhibition, focusing on Caesarea, which was shown at the Smithsonian last year...
...They lack the basic information on Jewish life...
...Jewish contributions enabled Germany to "develop from a relatively backward country in 1820 to become one of the leading industrialized countries in 1933," Heuberger explained...
...Is the Jewish museum an attempt to lure Jews into "their" kind of museum, so they should be looking at Oppenheim instead of Gerome, Chagall instead of Picasso, Lipchitz instead of Gonzalez, Rothko instead of Rauschenberg...
...Moreover, who is the target audience...
...fi1...
...In some ways Leibowitz has seen through us museum folks...
...That is why her disappointment carries a special kind of pathos...
...Its other museum showings included the city art museums in Hartford, New Orleans and San Diego...
...I don't agree with her entirely, because I've seen some exceptionally engaging material in those museums, and lots of boring things elsewhere...
...I don't know if you have visited museums wrtere the individual pieces are standing one beside the other with the same dry description...
...Or do these museums have the specific role of showing Jewish and/or IsraelIs Germany's New Jewish Museum Boring...
...After all, this is an arcane field to most people, many or whom have little or no sense of historical chronology...
...Four exhibits present life-size tableaus corresponding to four "stations in the life of the individual Jew," namely, brit milah (circumcision), barmitzvah, wedding ceremony and chevra kadisha (burial society...
...The slopes of Mount Herzl are studded with white tombstones marking the graves of soldiers who have lost their lives since 1948 in Israel's wars...
...That's the reason most museums (Jewish and other) manage to give for not addressing the challenges facing them...
...One certainly hopes that she caught the impressive array of Russian Jewish exhibitions mounted at New York's Jewish Museum in the spring of 1988...
...the museum saying...
...The largest Jewish museum in Europe, Frankfurt's new museum covers Jewish history from the first half of the 12th century to the present "We try to present this historical exhibition in such a way that it is not boring" explained Georg Heuberger, museum curator...
...What she does suggest is that some meaningful message be made evident to the visitor, and that this message be engaging, so that she/he can buy into it...
...We feel guilty about not observing Jewish ceremonies...
...They're not as good," say those who may not even know...
...A variety of occasional exhibitions at the various Jewish museums in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia have done the same, albeit irregularly...
...We might do well to listen carefully...
...Leibowitz's description of the banal way in which many Jewish museums treat Jewish information does not, however, take account of the positive examples...
...A new Jewish museum opened in what was once the Rothschild mansion in Frankfurt, West Germany, last November on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when hundreds of synagogues and Jewish-owned buildings were razed by the Nazis Walking through a gateway, visitors to the Jewish Museum enter a street reconstructed from building plans of the 12th-century Frankfurt Jewish ghetto...
...a reconstruction of Theodor Herzl's Vienna study with original furnishings...
...Archaeology, folk art, modern painting and the War of Independence...
...No doubt, I exaggerate and the situation varies from museum to museum...
...Happily, Leibowitz is interested in being Jewish, in going to museums billed as Jewish and in finding her Jewish interests engaged there...
...Thus the Israel New York Jewish Museum Will Expand Building and Vision The Jewish Museum in New York is revamping and doubling its display capacity with an addition to the old structure...
...This is a problem for archaeological exhibitions of all kinds, not just archaeological exhibits in Jewish museums...
...What's so boring about archaeological finds, ceremonial objects or coins...
...Some have, in fact, tried now and then, with uneven success...
...The fact is that most museums are boring...
...If so, it is not surprising that many of those "older" and "boring" Jewish museums are finding themselves gradually overtaken by the energetic efforts of these newer museums...
...Why don't exhibits show the relationship of the work on display to art objects that can be seen elsewhere...
...Each has an array of different factors to consider, and each would pi csumably have a different sciics of goals...
...Perhaps she didn't sec these, or she isn't interested in an...
...We want to create an attractive place where young people want to come, a place where they can learn about their own past and about the rich Jewish tradition in Germany," Heuberger said...
...Young Germans have "no opportunity to come in direct contact with Jews," said Heuberger...
...Italian Judaica...
...Why, indeed, are displays of ceremonial art so one-dimensional, interpreting liturgical information neither for the complete stranger nor for the knowledgeable Jew...
...Unable to compete with the social cachet bestowed by larger cultural institutions on museum patrons, Jewish museums have tried to rely on a different kind of commitment: the very brand of commitment that Leibowitz is anxious to give...
...experience in Tel Aviv's Museum of the Diaspora (Beth Hatcfutsoth) has mesmerized thousands of visitors, who wonder why all Jewish museums can't be like that...
...Together with the New York City Board of Education, museum educators planned a program for public school children on myths and legends of various cultures...
...By encasing it in a museum we pay it proper respect and thus meet our obligation to show we care...
...As a result, the less prestigious and usually smaller Jewish museums have recently found their patronage base undermined...
...But the only "valid" source of critical approval is someone else who labors in the same field, and therefore really understands...
...One hopes that some coherent programs will emerge from these museums, most of which are still in the planning stages...
...Since they tend to be equally uninteresting, why lay.this failure to communicate simply at the feet of Jewish museums...
...In Europe we have many museums like this On the other hand, here in the Jewish Museum we try to present exhibits using the language of our time, which includes audio-visual installations and computers...
...Seeing that extraordinary work both as a plaster model in its gallery setting (to which Leibowitz refers), and in its intended outdoor setting as a San Francisco monument, I have found Segal's sculpture compelling...
...Are we now going to be overtaken by a realization that in the end all this is just boring...
...The museum now contains the world's largest collection of Jewish-related ad and artifacts—more than 14,000 objects...
...As Leibowitz pleads, her Jewish interests and commitment compel her to demand more of the Jewish museum than she demands of other museums...
...Perhaps it is this emotional need that has brought about the new fad for Holocaust museums...
...We have to do it not in a school-type way like the teacher with the raised finger, but in an interesting active, interactive way...
...What makes a museum boring...
...a model of the Vilna ghetto...
...who don't happen to be Jewish, while implying another homogeneity among all who are...
...But it was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that the major exhibition of archaeological material from the Israel Museum was shown (prior to a nationwide tour, not to Jewish museums...
...At the other end of current museum experience, the so-called hands-on or interactive approach to communicating with visitors makes less "engaging" experiences seem boring...
...But that will take far greater levels of financial support from the American Jewish community...
...On the other hand, Jewish community leaders often are among those most anxious to provide the support (and gain the visibility) that has made possible major Jewish exhibitions at some of our important public museums...
...You have the pleasant sensation of being a breathless armchair traveler, rushing from place to place and from the famous to the obscure, all in the comfort of your own home The text is easy to absorb because it is enhanced by stunning full-color pictures on almost every one of the book's 256 pages...
...Sure, the ostensible audience is the museum-going public...
...No one kind of institution has cornered the market on either total engagement (including those notable client-centered museums in San Francisco, Boston, and Tel Aviv), or on total boredom...
...They provided family art workshops and animated films related to the Golem theme In an earlier exhibit called 7he Book and the Spade, the museum traced Jewish history through archaeological findings...
...The permanent exhibit is the centerpiece of the new museum, and every temporary show will be connected to it Well weave special exhibits into the larger picture of Jewish history...
...the Chaim Weizmann home-, the impressive interior of the Armenian Cathedral of St James...
...The constantly shifting interactive displays developed at Boston's Children's Museum and San Francisco's Exploratorium have had enormous impact on how we see museums...
...We feel uncultivated because we don't know about art...
...If the United States had a similar number of museums per capita, we would have roughly 7,500 museums...
...What are some of the feelings that generate museum-going...
...Is a "Jewish museum" a place to learn about Judaism (dead or living), about Jews, about Jewish history, about Jewish art, about Jewish science (assuming any of these categories describe useful concepts...
...Those same kinds of feelings—some intellectual curiosity, some guilt, some emotional need to connect with one's Jewishness, some search for the extra-special museum experience—have been the source of the strength that Jewish museums have developed over the years...
...Perhaps then thejewish patron will understand such suppoi t as a key community and Jewish responsibility...
...Born in 1946, Heuberger is the son of Polish Jews...
...But that will take encouragement: for museum personnel and for people wanting to enter the field as their life's work...
...He left his post at Heidelberg University where he was a specialist in Jewish affairs to become curator of the new museum...
...The public museum in America was long able to survive on the support from its traditional patrons, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy, whose leadership brought into being many of our most distinguished cultural institutions...
...Special visits are arranged for all kinds of groups, from school children to the elderly...
...But this book is much more than a guidebook to museums—although it is that, of course...
...And can we still really validate terminology such as "non-Jews"—which suggests a kind of homogeneity among all those (considerable numbers...
...kibbutz museums ranging from natural history to the Holocaust...
...By going to see King Tut we become engaged by both the splendid objects from a faraway place and by the spooky story that accompanies them...
...Leibowitz probably isn't demanding a single visible mission, in spite of her somewhat simplistic way of lumping all Jewish museums in one general boredom category...
...So collection/ exhibition programs have been developed to accomplish that mission...
...The museum hopes to introduce non-Jews to Jewish culture and to Judaism...
...After all, she came to pray even if she stayed to mock.** Is the Jewish museum meant to enlighten adult Jews, kids, or the Hadassah ladies of whom Leibowitz makes sport...
...Let's not notice that our local museum has a respectable collection of similar Egyptian antiquities...
...Audience expectations have been redefined by a number of changes in museum practices during the past quarter century...
...I note that Leibowitz doesn't mention "The Precious Legacy" exhibition, which was not organized by Jewish museums, but utilized some of the more imaginative talents of American museums, and was shown at New York's Jewish Museum (and elsewhere in "general" museums...
...The museum also developed a self-guiding activity book for children and accompanying adults to use in the galleries...
...Ironically, many Jewish museums aie now receiving more significant assistance from the federal, state and local arts and humanities agencies (including the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities) than the\ receive either from Jewish community sources or from private patronage...
...an outdoor museum in an ancient synagogue...
...In our society, the main excuse for inadequacy tends to be lack of funding...
...So why notice only the flaws of the one in London...
...Amajor problem facing the Jewish museums is that they are probably not certain what kind of museums they are trying to be...
...This occurred at the same time that the audience for these museums eroded because of the museums' failure to fulfill new expectations created by blockbuster exhibitions and creative exhibition techniques...
...Each entry in the book gives a bit of history and setting In the section on the Herzl Museum we are told that it is located near the entrance to Mount Herzl where Herzl himself is buried...
...It is presumably that emotional need, not only the cerebral need, that brings people such as Leibowitz to Jewish museums in the first place...
...The museum will inform its visitors about Jewish customs, ritual objects, cuisine and everyday Jewish life, which was nearly wiped out by the Nazis, Heuberger said...
...As they passed a genealogical chart one young boy stopped and studied it "I watched him trying to connect the chart to what he had learned in the galleries Suddenly he looked up and said, 'Now, I get it1'" The museum's objective, says Siegel, is that "students of all ages can have access to the entire spectrum of Jewish experience and say with wonder, 'Now I get it...
...The smaller museums in particular are educational and cultural centers...
...This gives the museum an enormous range of possibilities for its exhibits,' Rosenbaum said...
...The exhibit focused on the passionate debate among the great intellectuals of the day such as Anatole France, Marcel Proust and Emlie Zola: among the artists including Edgar Degas Augusts Rodin, Claude Monet and Sarah Bernhardt as well as among prominent politicians and journalists...
...So should we ask that all Jewish museums follow one or another of these newer communication techniques...
...The museum has already established a place for itself in the community," she said...
...One hopes that the thrill of other values (quality, aesthetics, significance) may also come into play for the visitors, but those tend to be seen as less central issues, unless we take the lime to look carefully and critically...
...and the other (Ungerleider-Mayerson) a former director of the Jewish Museum in New York Read and enjoy this book whether or not you ever intend to set foot in any of the museums they describe—H5...
...And that is a mapr change,* says Rosenbaum...
...It has become a gathering spot for a diverse audience that seemed to be engaged by the museum...
...We want to draw attention to the considerable achievements made by Jews in the arts, sciences and politics...
...Programs frequently change and a local museum may function as something between a community center and a movie house, with a cultural offering instead of a film—in short, a vitaf, living institution...
...And they are both right...
...They are, after all, an essential part of the fabric of our national and local Jewish communal lives...
...The museum owns a large Judaica collection and uses interactive "theater-like installations" in its presentation of this material...
...After all, she came to pray even if she stayed to mock...
...Is it embarrassment, laziness, or ignorance that keeps museums from articulating questions about ethnology and anthropology while exhibiting art...
...Recent changes in societal and funding patterns have made evident the need for those same museums to expand their bases of support and bring in patronage from broader segments of the community (i.e., Jews, and others who might have previously been excluded...
...The gauntlet is thus thrown down in both directions—the visitor saying, "Shape up and become interesting...
...Help us to do our job better...
...Siegel took a fourth-grade day school class through Iron Age tools and weapons and compared oil lamps to see which were older...
Vol. 14 • October 1989 • No. 6
