Jewish American Heritage Month
It is a great source of personal pride that the first legislation I filed that was passed by Congress back in 2006 was a resolution that created Jewish American Heritage Month, or JAHM, to be celebrated every May. JAHM seeks to create awareness of the contributions that Jewish Americans have made to our country and its history. From sports to academia to the arts to politics, Jewish men and women have brought their mettle, creativity and fresh ideas to the table. No matter what your background, we can all learn a great deal from the inspiring Jews who came before us.
Now in 2011, we are about to celebrate JAHM for the sixth time. The number six has an interesting significance in Judaism—it represents imperfections we face on our way to creating a whole or perfect world. This is a great message for our modern-day American Jewish community: We have come through a diverse and challenging history; we have scattered throughout the Diaspora and watched the growth of a Jewish national homeland in Israel; and now we must continue to draw on our imperfections and the beauty of our traditions to help make the world a better place.
As we face today’s challenges, it is truly a joy to share our rich history and to tell the tales of our contributions to America and the ideal of Tikkun Olam. This May, I hope you enjoy some of these wonderful exhibitions throughout our country that showcase our impact on this great nation as we work together to create a more perfect world.
—Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, May 2011
Farmville: Jewish Edition
(Cape May County, NJ)
Follow the history of a failed Jewish agrarian utopia as you walk the painted floor map of the Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage, housed below a preserved but little-used synagogue. The small town of Woodbine was founded in the 1890s with funds from German-Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch as a place where new Russian Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms could learn to farm. Factories soon replaced farms, and the community produced a handful of inventors such as Azeez—who designed early mobile phone networks—along the way.
(609) 646-9400, www.thesam.org
The Refugee Experience
(Atlanta, GA)
Permanent exhibitions at the William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum cover the history of Atlanta’s vibrant Jewish community and, through interviews with survivors, the Holocaust. Opening in September, “Torn from Home: My Life as a Refugee” explores the life of exile from a child’s perspective. Don an ID bracelet on entering and calculate the nutritional value of daily rations. In a mock schoolroom, experience the refugee struggle for education.
(678) 222-3700, www.thebreman.org
Back to the Future
(Denver, CO)
Funky architecture and bright bursts of color characterize the new “Road Trip” ride through Jewish history and art at the Mizel Museum. Housed in a Jetsons-era synagogue in Denver’s Hilltop neighborhood, the permanent exhibition tells the Jewish story through artifacts, art by contemporary artists (such as Indian-Jewish painter Siona Benjamin, sculptor Itamar Jobani and photographer Zion Ozeri) and oral histories.
(303) 394-9993, www.mizelmuseum.org
Pirates and Jews of the Caribbean
(Bridgetown, Barbados)
At the Nidhe Israel Synagogue and Museum complex, you can attend Orthodox Friday night services in the original 1654 Sephardic temple, tour a new museum filled with artifacts tracing the history of Jews on the island, wander through the cemetery or dip your hand in the waters of a stone and mortar mikveh recently discovered beneath the parking lot. Barbados’s first Jews arrived a year after the British, in 1628, and introduced sugarcane to the island. Learn about the Jewish origins of common Spanish names and discover the real meaning of the pirate skull-and-crossbones image on gravestones.
(246) 436-6869, nidhe@caribsurf.com
Streisand! Baseball! Confederate Cash!
(Philadelphia, PA)
There’s nothing understated about the National Museum of American Jewish History—not its newly opened location in a “glass box” overlooking Independence Mall or its displays of everything from a $2 note featuring the Confederacy’s Jewish Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin to comedienne Molly Picon’s velvet undergarments. Exhibits include a covered wagon, Irving Berlin’s piano and audio clips of David Ben-Gurion. Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand and Sandy Koufax are included in “Only in America,” an homage to Jewish celebrity.
(215) 923-3811, www.nmajh.org
Cradle of Jewish Modernism
(New York, NY)
From famous American artists to emerging Israeli ones and fresh takes on the Holocaust, Torah and ritual, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum always surprises. Located on West 4th Street, it also originates traveling exhibitions such as “Provocative Textiles” (through June 30), featuring a dress made of torn ketubas (marriage contracts) and antique nurses’ tunics styled as the 10 plagues, among other works.
(212) 824-2218, www.huc.edu/museums/ny
Walking the Wild West
(Vancouver, BC, Canada)
Having closed its brick-and-mortar venues, the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia offers two-hour walking tours that explore Vancouver’s Gastown and Strathcona districts, Yiddish-inflected enclaves of the city’s late-19th-century immigrant inrush. Learn about early Jewish merchants (some still in business) and the mikvehs, cemeteries and synagogues they built.
(604) 257-5199, www.jewishmuseum.ca/strathcona
L.A.’s “New” Holocaust Museum
(Los Angeles, CA)
Established in 1961 when a group of Holocaust survivors in an ESL class pooled items that they brought from Europe, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust reopened last fall in capacious new quarters built into the slopes of Pan-Pacific Park. Artifacts include a survivor’s wood model of the Sobibor concentration camp, built from memory, and interactive exhibits take flight in the modernist new space. A free iPhone app offers survivors’ oral histories.
(323) 651-3704, www.lamoth.org
Crossing Delancey: Two Synagogues
(New York, NY)
Through sepia photos and documents—including a mohel’s list of “honorees”—explore the little-known history of Sephardic-Romaniote Greeks in the Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum. Also on the Lower East Side, immigration history and the trials and thrills of historic preservation are on display at the Museum at Eldridge Street. Housed in the landmark 1887 synagogue, Eldridge recently dedicated a monumental new rose window—a modernist stained-glass circle depicting what’s been described as a “veil of stars.”
(212) 431-1619, www.kkjsm.org
(212) 219-0888, www.eldridgestreet.org
Cleveland or Krypton?
(Cleveland, OH)
The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage chronicles the growth of Ohio’s active Jewish community. Its permanent collection recounts the immigrant story in part by chronicling a group who arrived in 1837 from the Bavarian village of Unslaben. Later exhibits focus on Jewish veterans, community growth and the “birth” in Cleveland of Superman, the brainchild of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the sons of local Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.
(216) 593-0575, www.maltzmuseum.org
Bagels ‘n’ Grits
(Natchez, MS and Utica, MS)
“Being Jewish in Southern small towns takes a lot of effort,” was the notion behind the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, a bow to cotton-covered sukkahs, bagels with grits, and drawled Yiddish. The museum’s site in Natchez, where Jews now number 15, is an elegant, domed synagogue with a marble bima that is home to the state’s oldest congregation. An exhibit at the museum’s Utica site follows the trail of Jewish immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine.
(601) 362-6357, www.isjl.org/museum
Prairie Pioneers Reach Out
(Tulsa, OK)
“Building the Land,” a show of Zionist posters from the Jewish National Fund, will be up from July to September, but the history of Oklahoma’s own Jews is the permanent focus of the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art. With only 2,000 Jews in Tulsa, the exhibits on Diaspora Jewry stretch as far as China, India and Ethiopia, as well as the Holocaust and domestic race relations. A highlight is Jewish-themed art ranging from Warhol to Chagall and beyond.
(918) 492-1818, www.jewishmuseum.net
Eating Ham for Uncle Sam
(Washington, DC)
Jews have served in the armed forces on U.S. soil since the 1600s. The National Museum of American Jewish Military History tells their story. Its Hall of Heroes commemorates the 15 Jewish Medal of Honor recipients from the Civil through Korean Wars, with medals on display. World War II exhibits cover the 1933 anti-Nazi march in Washington and the Jewish soldiers who helped DPs rebuild their lives. A temporary exhibit memorializes Jewish American losses in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.
(202) 265-6280, www.nmajmh.org
Mapping Jewish Chi-town
(Chicago, IL)
The multi-year “Uncovered & Rediscovered” exhibit at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies recounts Chicago’s Jewish history through tales of pioneers and politicians, artists and anarchists, authors, entrepreneurs and boxers. Presented in four chapters, the third one, “North, South, East, and West” (until September 15) traces the influx of Jews to Lawndale and city neighborhoods and the later “white flight” that ineradicably changed them. Images include a 15-foot hand-drawn diagram of a bygone shopping street, with individual stores drawn in. On a “Chicago Jewish Memory Map,” visitors can pin personal histories to an online grid.
(312) 322-1700, www.spertus.edu
Moment Magazine’s Jewish American Heritage Guide editor, Mandy Katz, is a communications consultant to museums and other non-profits. She is a long-time contributor to Moment.
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