New Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco
N.Y. Times Daniel Libeskind designed the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, which opened in San Francisco on Sunday. Lobby lights in the museum form four Hebrew letters that spell a word invoking paradise.
The major opening show is “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis,” in which a mixture of contemporary artworks rub shoulders with a 15th-century Prague Hebrew Bible, left, and Rodin’s sculpture “The Hand of God.”
The museum, like its audience, is interested in assimilation, even in the ways in which the larger culture assimilates Jewish ideas and associations.
In the inaugural exhibition, “Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait,” the museum pays tribute to its community. Backs of display cases are covered with photographs of Jews of differing races, ages and degrees of observance.
The objects displayed, including Andrew Skurman’s “San Francisco Pyramid Spice Box,” foreground, are associated with Jewish life in its local incarnation.
The exhibit also includes a “Rally Rabbi” bobblehead doll.
A bottle of He’Brew, “the chosen beer,” is on display.
A shirt from the clothing company Jewish Fashion Conspiracy.
Its skewed geometries are unsettling; the effect is more vertiginous than harmonious. Alienation rather than stability is suggested, despite the self-conscious symbols being grasped at.
Right now the Contemporary Jewish Museum celebrates a vision of Judaism as a kind of freewheeling allegory, a pardes of open-mindedness and diversity and artistic enterprise. But for all the institution’s considerable appeal, Judaism’s fundamental, literal meanings — texts and laws and beliefs and history — are left outside the gates of paradise.
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