When James Snyder started as director of the Jewish Museum in 2023, he inherited an ambitious plan to transform the galleries and education spaces that would create a new narrative framework for exploring the 3,500-year history of Jewish culture in the global diaspora.
The horrors of the Hamas-led massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza couldn’t help but inform the museum’s $14.5-million rethinking of its neo-Gothic mansion on Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. Now, as Jewish identity has become an urgent topic of international discourse, the museum is about to open its completed building project to the public, on Oct. 24.
“How do you plan a temporary exhibition program in the world where everything changes as abruptly as we’ve been experiencing?” Snyder said during a recent walk-through of the building; his appointment as director had started three weeks before Oct. 7. “You had to be very thoughtful about how you position exhibitions so that they were responsive to, and not tone-deaf to, the challenges of the moment.
“There is potential in this envelope to create a space which can be a fresh, contemporary backdrop,” he added, “both in terms of telling the Jewish story and also in terms of teaching and learning.”
The renovation signals what may be a new chapter at the Jewish Museum under Snyder, a veteran leader in the art world and Jewish community who spent more than four decades at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Jewish Museum’s current retrospective of the social realist artist and activist Ben Shahn — which originated at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and was organized by Laura Katzman, a Shahn expert and art history professor — has been a critical and popular success, and was recently extended through Oct. 26.
”The effect is gripping, and feels utterly relevant for the troubled moment we are living in now,” Blake Gopnik wrote in his New York Times review, calling the survey “revelatory.”
The museum’s reconfigured third floor features a new collection installation, “Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories From the Collection of the Jewish Museum”; four galleries that will present rotating and timely exhibitions, including new acquisitions and thematic presentations; and an expanded double-height gallery.
Visible from that gallery is the fourth floor’s striking installation of more than 130 Hanukkah lamps (from the museum’s collection of 1,400) in a 50-foot, specially-designed vitrine. The floor — which has been mostly closed to the public for the past eight years — is also devoted to the museum’s Pruzan Family Center for Learning, including two art-making studios, a simulated archaeological dig for children and a “salon” for programming and community events.
The learning center was named after Robert and Tracey Pruzan, who made the lead (undisclosed) gift to the renovation and have been long supporters of the museum. Robert served as its previous chairman.
“It’s another 25 percent of the museum that will be open to the public,” said Shari Aronson, chairwoman of the museum’s board. “Hopefully a larger and wider audience will find it a place for learning.”
The museum’s original building is a French Gothic chateau built in 1908 by Charles Prendergast H. Gilbert for Felix Warburg. It became home to the Jewish Museum in 1947. An adjacent sculpture court was added in 1959, and the Albert A. List Building was added in 1963. A 1993 expansion and renovation project doubled the total space and upgraded amenities.
The new building project was designed by UNS (United Network Studio), Amsterdam, and New Affiliates Architecture, New York, with Method Design, New York.
The new “Identity, Culture, and Community” installation gives a sense of the museum’s breadth. Michal Rovner’s “Dark Light, 2024” digital video installation — from her “Pragim” (“poppies” in Hebrew) series features the wild poppies that grow in her field in Israel, which after Oct. 7 became a symbol for the resilience of memory.
“We knew that we had an opportunity with this installation to make something that would really resonate today — selecting objects that would represent moments of great joy as well as hardship,” said Darsie Alexander, the museum’s chief curator. “Rather than lay a hard and fast thesis on top of that, we wanted people to really connect with the stories and also to provide some historical context.
“We are a place that emphasizes an enduring, global and powerful legacy of experimentation and boundary-pushing in the visual arts, which has been a trademark of Jewish culture and this museum,” she continued. “But we also take history very seriously and we leaned into that with the show and may have been particularly conscious of it, given the challenging circumstances and framework.”
Another installation focuses on the work of Pearl Bowser, the film historian, curator and collector, who was instrumental in preserving and highlighting the works of Black filmmakers from the early 20th century.
There is also an exhibition of works by Dor Guez, the son of a Palestinian Christian and a Tunisian-born Jew, who through various media narrates experiences of Arab citizens of Israel. “It’s about underscoring the importance of understanding where your heritage began,” Snyder said, “and where your experience has taken place.”
The museum presents the narrative of Jewish culture in a nonlinear way, moving from before the destruction of the First Temple to the present, combining materials, periods and categories.
“You don’t distinguish among biblical archaeology, Jewish ceremonial, fine art, modern or contemporary art,” Snyder said. “You mix them all together to tell the story.”
There is an ancient Torah scroll that was damaged by fire during the Revolutionary War; George Washington’s letter to the founders of Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., dedicated in 1793, the oldest synagogue in the United States. “Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid,” Washington wrote, quoting the Hebrew Bible.
The first exhibition in the new space points up the museum’s history with Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and Robert Motherwell used the Jewish Museum “as a kind of safe docking station for creative makers who were trying to recover from the PTSD of the Holocaust by inventing a new visual vocabulary,” Snyder said.
The third floor now features nine gallery areas that flow into one another. “The spaces are much more open — you can connect works visually that had previously been in pretty cramped quarters,” Alexander said. “For example, you can see through from a gallery that’s primarily defined by Abstract Expression into the feminist gallery, where you can see a generation of female artists in the 1970s responding to that language of Abstract Expressionism. Those through lines are much stronger.”
The new galleries will allow the museum to highlight additional gems in its collection, like a Torah ark by the architect Philip Johnson, part of his effort to publicly atone for his history of Nazi sympathies by designing a synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y. for no fee.
In a highly charged political climate in which race and ethnicity have become flash points, the Jewish Museum’s very existence raises questions about the role of a culturally specific museum in the United States. “Museums devoted to single cultures really need to present themselves in new ways,” Snyder said, “so that you understand this notion of anchored identity.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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