A People's History Exiled

In the main gallery of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibition “Scenes From the Collection” two figures have pride of place. One is a female mannequin clothed in a richly embroidered ceremonial dress of crimson silk velvet made for a Jewish bride in Marrakech in the late 19th century and known as “The Grand Costume.” Its splendor “caught the eye of numerous foreign visitors to Morocco.”

The other is a towering masculine form, more than 6½ feet tall, wearing an ankle-length coat—a figure constructed out of papier-mâché from Chinese and Japanese newspapers.

It is called “Golem,” after the legendary Jewish animated being, and was created in 1987 by

Moidele Bickel

and the avant-garde director and playwright

Robert Wilson

to use in Mr. Wilson’s spectacle “Death, Destruction, and Detroit II.”

Why do these figures stand together, representing different genres, periods and purposes? We don’t know. Little information is offered. All we have is this odd couple, and the museum’s pride in making the match.

Similar effects recur elsewhere in a show that is now meant to be the museum’s defining exhibition, bringing to light some 600 of the collection’s 30,000 artifacts (with a planned rotation). Its predecessor was in place for 25 years and gave a multimillennial history of the Jewish people. This exhibition, in contrast, avoids what it calls a “master narrative.” It accepts the “breakup of artistic canons.” And though the Jewish Museum presents “art and Jewish culture together,” the point, we are assured, is to affirm “universal values that are shared among people of all faiths and backgrounds.”

Claudia Gould,

the museum’s director since 2012, has had a transformation like this in mind from the start. Her background is in contemporary art (she had been director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania) and she was open about how little Jewish knowledge she had. This apparently suited the museum, since art exhibitions have been an important part of its mission.

Without much attention to Judaic traditions then, emphasis is placed on the “ever-changing nature of identity.” Seven theatrically conceived galleries are being called “Scenes.” In the first, “Constellations,” objects establish “multiple meanings and conversations.” But as with that odd couple, these cryptic conversations generally tend to diminish attention to Jewish history and ritual. A wooden Torah Ark made by

Abraham Shulkin

for his synagogue in 1899 in Sioux City, Iowa, for example, is placed near a 2011

Kehinde Wiley

portrait of an Ethiopian-Israeli Jew who poses provocatively against a background that alludes to this Ark and another nearby work; it is part of a series in which Mr. Wiley remakes the “portrait tradition” and “claims a prominent space within it for people of color.”

Some objects are powerful enough to be unaffected by any such conversation. One gallery (“Masterpieces and Curiosities”), for example, is devoted to a bracelet secretly made by

Greta Perlman

in Theresienstadt, the Nazi show-camp. It is hung with coded personal charms that are deeply affecting. A gallery of turn of the 20th century 3D stereographs of the Holy Land also fascinates.

More generally, though, miscellany mixes with universalist preoccupations. A gallery devoted to the Jewish star (“Signs and Symbols”) could have been compelling if made coherent, yet it ensures we know that the star “remains a universal motif that appears in art worldwide.” Universality here is a corrective to the particular, which may be the most innocent explanation for why the presence of an Israeli flag mounted on a lifeguard tower on a Tel Aviv beach in one photograph is absurdly associated with “subverting” the surrounding serenity.

What of the museum itself? The Jewish Museum began with ritual objects like Torah cases given to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1904; the museum later assembled a great collection of such artifacts as menorahs and mezuzahs. But now these objects appear as if in exile. The smallest gallery (“Taxonomies”) mounts hundreds, isolated from function and history and reorganized in arbitrary categories. One category seems to be “knives,” which includes one knife used for kosher slaughter and another used for circumcision—practices, one hopes, about as closely related as a Moroccan bride and a papier-mâché Golem.

Such is the grand reconception of the most important Jewish museum in the U.S. At a moment when every ethnic group is establishing museums celebrating identity—often with questionable results—the Jewish Museum shreds it into an even more questionable mishmash. What a difference from the exhibition that was displaced! “Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey” was textbookish, but it was a remarkable history of Judaism that drew fully on the museum’s collection. It showed how exilic Judaism developed, it surveyed the synagogue’s evolution, explored Talmudic debate, explained Zionism’s development. Now there is no history, no ritual, no laws, no texts. Only one thing is affirmed: the mistaken belief that Judaism’s essence is continuous self-redefinition.

Where else in the U.S. could one go to see a survey of Jewish history and belief? Perhaps, in part, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Is there anything comparable to learn from this exhibition? No. When I visited the extravagantly acclaimed Jewish museum in Berlin, I wrote that there may be worse Jewish museums, but it would be difficult to imagine one as uninspiring and banal, particularly given its pedigree, promise and potential importance. Now it has stiff competition.

—Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large.