Show-and-Tell for the World’s Most Interesting Judaica Collectors

New York’s best off-Broadway show has been running for 50 years, but it’s still pretty obscure. Virtually invisible on Google and social media, it’s finally getting around to building its first website. Its low online profile is due to the age of the cast of characters who make it so fun to watch. Those with newly-minted AARP cards lower the average age by a couple of decades.

I refer to the Harry G. Friedman Society, which is the city’s finest show-and-tell for grizzled Judaica collectors the world over. I first encountered it about fifteen years ago at the Jewish Museum in New York, and felt like I was watching a Jewish wrestling match where the prize was winning the crowd’s approval of a newly acquired havdalah spice box rather than a championship belt. (Actually, sometimes the Friedman Society, as it’s called, did deal in belts, but they would have once belonged to Moses Mendelssohn.) When society members displayed their latest acquisitions, it could prove dramatic. I don’t recall the details, but someone might proudly hold up a kiddush cup he had just purchased and identify it as, say, 17th-century Dutch. No sooner would the attribution be made than another member would leap to his feet, insisting he would never purchase that object, with which he was familiar intimately, because it was a modern Chinese fake.

Transfixed in my seat, I knew I was watching something un-staged unfold before me that was better suited for television than Antiques Roadshow. And it was easy to imagine that just being in that room—on the second floor of the Jewish Museum—offered through osmosis a kind of Judaica education that, on reflection, points to something more.