Podcast: Menachem Wecker Talks about His Essay on the Problems of the Jewish Museum

This Week’s Guest: Menachem Wecker

When New York’s Jewish Museum opened to the public in 1947, the eminent scholar Louis Finkelstein told the New York Times that its collection of artifacts would honor and celebrate “the singular beauty of Jewish life, as ordained in the laws of Moses, developed in the Talmud, and embellished in tradition.” Though the museum grew and changed over the decades, its commitment to this fundamentally Jewish—even religious—mission never completely disappeared from view.

But the museum’s new permanent exhibition—titled Scenes from the Collection—couldn’t be farther from realizing Finkelstein’s ambition, as Menachem Wecker has demonstrated in Mosaic’s May Essay. Filled largely with kitsch, nostalgic and otherwise, the exhibition does little more than flatter the shallowest of contemporary cultural attitudes toward Jews and Judaism.