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each other's toes.
In fact, one of the Contemporary
Jewish Museum's opening exhibits is
on loan from the Magnes, highlighting
what both institutions envision as a
close, ongoing cooperation.
"They're doing something totally
wonderful and unique says James
Leventhal, the development director
at the Magnes. "They are carving out
new ground, and the way they are
partnering with us is part of that!'
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
isn't the only large-scale Jewish muse-
um to open in recent years. There's
the splashy and quite successful 10-
year-old Skirball Cultural Center in
Los Angeles; the impressive Maltz
Museum of Jewish Heritage, which
opened in 2005 in Cleveland; and the
country's newest Jewish museum,
which opened in April in Milwaukee.
hi 2010, Philadelphia's National
Museum of Jewish History will move to
a new 100,000-square-foot facility on
Independence Mall.
The latter three, like most Jewish
museums in this country, focus on
chronicling the history of a particular
Jewish community. A lesser number
function more like Jewish art galleries.
And, of course, there are the Holocaust
museums, which range from small,
private collections in federation offices
or synagogues to the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington.
The San Francisco museum is most
similar to the Jewish Museum in New
York in terms of focus, scale and public
programming. But while the latter is a
collecting institution that interprets the
history of world Jewry San Francisco's
museum offers what director Connie
Wolf describes as "a contemporary
perspective on Jewish art, culture and
history"
Wolf sees the new museum as devot-
ed to "art and ideas." While it will host
ambitious exhibitions, the art itself isn't
the focus so much as the conversations
that art engenders and the community
that Wolf and her staff hope to create
from those conversations.
"Most people, if you say 'Jewish
museum: they think Holocaust museum
or history museum. We are neither," says
Wolf, who headed the museum in its
previous, much more modest incarna-
tion and was the driving force behind
its years-long re-imagining."We want
people to ask questions — what does
`contemporary' mean?"
It's a lofty goal, envisioning museum
as community builder. The day before
the official opening, the museum hosted
"Dawn',' a dusk-to-sunrise Shavuot

celebration for young Bay Area Jews, fea-
turing live music, spoken word, film, DJ,
dancing and rabbi-led text study.
And art, of course. The revelers were able
to wander through the exhibit halls all
night, enjoying the artwork while mark-
ing a Jewish holiday. The holiday actually
began the next night, Wolf says, so as to
enable observant Jews to attend.
That kind of innovative program-
ming, focusing on events that appeal
to the young, largely unaffiliated
Jewish generation, is more typical of
what one might expect from a Jewish
community center. What distinguishes
it as a museum is the conscious refer-
ence back to the arts.
For example, the three inaugu-
ral exhibitions are "The Aleph-Bet
Project:' a series of sound pieces based
on letters of the Hebrew alphabet,
commissioned by musician John Zorn;
"From the New Yorker to Shrek: The
Art of William Steig," on loan from
New York's Jewish Museum; and "In
the Beginning: Artists Respond to
Genesis:' where the museum invited
seven artists — not all of them Jewish
— to create works inspired by the first
book of the Hebrew Bible.
Five of the artists did a morning
study session in New York with Arnold
Eisen, the chancellor of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, demonstrating
the museum's focus on the interplay
between art and ideas.
That focus is illustrated also in the
writer-in-residence position created for
Berkeley writer Dan Schifrin, who is
doubling as the director of public pro-
gramming. Many of his initial offerings
show a heavy literary bias, including a
yearlong hosting of StoryCorps, the New
York-based oral history project run by
MacArthur "genius" grant winner Dave
Is ay.
Schifrin himself will facilitate a book
group focusing on Jewish literature that
deals with Jewish art.
"The book group is an innovation that
will create community and bring it into
the museum," he says.
Museum organizers hope these
cutting-edge programs, as well as the
physical design of the museum and its
downtown location, will draw visitors,
especially younger California Jews, who
do not engage with the Jewish commu-
nity in other ways.
"A museum is an easier place to inter-
act with Judaism than a synagogue —
membership is much cheaper, and the
obligations are pretty light:' Schwarzer
says. "But it's not instead of synagogue.
It might even get people interested in
synagogue'

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