What a 21st-Century Jewish Museum Should Look Like

Edward Rothstein’s essay, “The Problem with Jewish Museums,” is an impressive analysis of a problem that many museum-goers have noticed: most Jewish museums don’t know what they’re doing. They have no clear view of Judaism or the Jewish community; accordingly, they have little or nothing to say, except on the topic of Jewish participation in the surrounding Gentile culture.

This is one more expression of the failure of liberal Judaism, a movement that has always known what it isn’t but rarely what it is. But the failure of liberal Judaism is equally a reflection on Orthodox (and Orthodox-tending) Jewish communities, which have generally not taken the trouble to build museums good or bad. (As Rothstein mentions, Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan is an important exception.)

The Jewish-museum problem is too important to shrug off. Rothstein concludes with a challenge to those with a “more rooted and substantive view of Jewish identity” than the vague mishmash that prevails at the major museums: what, he asks, should a 21st-century Jewish museum be like?