The Dismantling of Jewish Identity

The scandal of the Jewish Museum in New York, as Menachem Wecker’s fine essay shows, is a scandal caused by immense curatorial ignorance, both cultural and religious, combined with the arrogant belief that such ignorance doesn’t really matter. In his response to Wecker’s essay, Tom Freudenheim expands this indictment, noting that a palpable hostility toward Jewish religion and traditions seeps into the museum’s presentations.

Last year, in reviewing the museum’s new permanent exhibition for the Wall Street Journal—the same exhibition, Scenes from the Collection, that Wecker takes to task in Mosaic—I suggested that this venerable institution was not only abrogating its mission as a guardian of Jewish identity but also on its way to becoming one of the most offensively banal Jewish museums in the world. But as the awkward introductory panel to the Scenes exhibition makes plain, today’s museum isn’t really interested in anything like a “Jewish identity.” Instead, it speaks of plural, fluid, and indeterminate Jewish identities, and then has the temerity to propose that the museum itself might serve as a “guide for the formation of new” such identities.

In this respect, the museum seems to be promoting itself as a 21st-century reboot of such Jewish institutional innovations as the early synagogue, or perhaps as a more diverting version of the Babylonian Talmud, with lots of pictures. But, to say the least, there’s a difference: where those ancient initiatives shaped exilic Judaism with learned debate, imaginative interpretation, and profound reverence, our new museological “guide” makes no demands whatsoever on anyone. Assuming no education, offering little knowledge, and affecting not to care about either, it promises only that its handsome installations will inspire new forms of an “ever-changing” Jewish identity.