Jewseum

The title Jewseum doesn't have a pleasant ring to it.  But that is what some of my friends are calling the new Contemporary Jewish Museum.

The wonderful NYTimes event reviewer Ed Rothstein gave the Museum a negative review.  He felt that neither the architecture nor the contents showed any meaningful identity for or definition of the purpose of the museum. Rothstein recognized that the San Francisco Jewish community is one of the most assimilated in America. 

It certainly is.  My great-grandfather came here in 1852 and the family has been here continuously since then. Jews have played a major role in the business, culture, politics and charities of the City for 150 years.

I've been to the museum and I have much stronger and clearer opinions than Rothstein.  The architecture is fine but only communicates that an expensive-dramatic architect was hired.  Jews in San Francisco have money is the message.

The only thing in the museum that is related to the name Jewish was me and another man arguing out-loud with the descriptions on the wall.  That is Jewish.  We recognized each other as kindred souls and our partners exchanged mutual sympathy for being with a man who argues out-loud with a note on a wall. (See tomorrow's blog to see what I was arguing out-loud about.)

I can see this museum as one of three.  One that could be in Kaifeng, the former Chinese capitol where a small Jewish community lived for 900 years and finally died out when they couldn't read Hebrew by 1850.  The several hundred remnants of the community are still circumcised.

The second museum exists, it is in Berlin where all the German-Jews were tortured and killed by Germans, and that is a good reason to have aJewseum.

San Francisco is the third place for a Jewseum where a prosperous Jewish population disappeared through assimilation.  The assimilation was nearly complete by 1955 when the San Francisco Jewish community was almost totally supportive of the American Jewish Committee a group opposed at the time to the state of Israel.  The AJC argued that Jews were part of a religion, Judaism, and had no connection to Israel.

As far as I can tell, the bulk of the Jews in San Francisco have little or no connection to Israel, the Reform and Conservative congregations consider Judaism to be a religious branch of the Democratic Party. They are no more than vestigial Jews.  These are Jews of the past, Jews of the Diaspora which is over.

The Jewish people have been a nation from a very early date.  Moses created a priestly group, the Cohens, who were in every one of the 12 tribes, they were a part of the Hebrew nation not the tribes. When Ruth the Moabite married King David's father she married into the nation, not a single tribe. The Jews, like a few other peoples (Rom and Tibetan) have been a nation without a country.  The Jews have been without a country of their own for over 2,000 years.  Now they are a nation with a country.

The unfortunate Jews of San Francisco, who built this Jewseum monument to themselves, sadly don't understand that the Jewish nation now has a country and that country is the core of present and future Jewish life.

Israel doesn't exist in this pathetic museum because the museum is about the death of the assimilated Jews of San Francisco.