Exhibitions of Jewish Art and Culture

This article begins with a quick review of the history of the museum idea and a discussion of its parameters, noting the earliest exhibit of Jewish artifacts in 1878 and the unique exhibition of Jewish artifacts shaped by the Nazis in Prague seventy years later. The transformation of the post-Holocaust exhibition of Torah scrolls and Jewish ceremonial objects into memorial markers of destroyed synagogues and communities follows. The narrative then steps back to the shaping of the modern world, which includes the emergence of an interest in defining Jewish national art and, with it, the creation and exhibition of a growing array of kinds of artifacts as “Jewish” and the birth of the Bezalel School in Jerusalem. In turn, the burgeoning of the first Jewish museums in the United States and Europe between 1903 and World War II leads, first, to a discussion of the emergence of a council of seven American Jewish museums by the 1970s; second, to the explosive development of several score of American Jewish museums of various sorts, including Holocaust museums, in the next half century; third, to a dramatic expansion in the number of Jewish artists overtly reflecting on aspects of their Jewish identity through their art; and fourth, to an analogous expansion in the range and variety of changing museum and gallery exhibitions that reflect these last two developments. The narrative then turns to the wider world of Europe, Australia, North Africa, and Israel with regard to exhibitions of Jewish history and culture, as well those with a deliberate or even exclusive focus on the Holocaust—primarily within but also beyond Jewish museums—before concluding with brief observations concerning both digital exhibits and exhibits in which the Jewish content is ignored or denied.