NEW YORK.- The Jewish Museum is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Established in 1904 as part of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the museum has been challenging the status quo since the beginning. For Joan Rosenbaum, the museum’s director since 1981, the search for identity, which has become so fashionable, has always been part of the Jewish Museum. As she and her curators look ahead, she said, they find it impossible not to be affected by world events, namely the rise of anti-Semitism throughout the world and the chaos in Israel. "Everyone feels it tremendously," she said.
Assimilated Jews in Europe and the United States were interested in making a break with the ghetto without losing their heritage. The founders wanted to examine Jewish culture "scientifically," by removing the Torah and other religious artifacts from synagogues and putting them in museums. This would also, they thought, help to combat anti-Semitism by demystifying Jewish ritual and history. The museum opened on January 20, 1904 as part of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and moved to its current site in 1947.
The museum’s exhibits have reflected world-acclaimed art and novelties such as psychoanalysis, created by Sigmund Freud, an Austrian Jew, and the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg, another Jewish Austrian better known for his 12-tone method of musical composition. In its permanent exhibition, "Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey," whose reinstallation was completed last year, the museum, at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, offers a wide-ranging dissertation on 4,000 years of Jewish life. Yet the museum has also attracted attention for upsetting its primary constituency with exhibitions like "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art." That 2002 exhibition infuriated some people, who thought that the Holocaust was trivialized by pieces like "Giftgas Giftset," a 1998 work by the American artist Tom Sachs, which included cardboard gas canisters festooned with Chanel and Tiffany logos.
As part of the centennial celebration, artist Tony Kushner will read his work "It’s an Undoing World, or Why Should It Be Easy When It Can Be Hard?" Other centennial exhibitions include a laser installation by Shimon Attie in collaboration with Norman Ballard, the photographs of Lotte Jacobi (Feb. 6-April 11), the art of Modigliani (May 21-Sept. 19) and a celebration of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a Bauhaus-trained artist who gave art instruction to children in the Terezin concentration camp (Sept. 10-Jan. 9).
As The Jewish Museum enters its second century, it continues to redefine the Jewish heritage in such projects as a centennial exhibit of American art linked to the Jewish experience and an annual film festival presented at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Admission will be free today, Saturday and Sunday.
