[ Modiya > Museums > Exhibiting Jews ]
Topic: Exhibiting Jews
Jewish Museum Family
As is the case with any culture, attempts to turn the dynamic reality of Jewish life into museum installations can result in two-dimensional caricatures or cardboard cutouts of lived Jewish experience.
Jewish Identity
Jewish museums became central vehicles for enacting, circulating and constructing Jewish identity, most notably in Israel and the United States, with identity understood as a key to Jewish continuity. Museums vary in how they define Jewish identity and what they advocate, to compare, for example: Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
See, in particular, the opening multi-media orientation and the first floor exhibition of twentieth-century Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust, which emphasize religion).
Readings:
Jeffrey Shandler, "Heritage and Holocaust on display-- New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust," The Public Historian 21, 1 (1999): 73-86.
