To the Editor:
In “A Monument to Themselves” [January], Jonathan S. Tobin offers readers a confusing and somewhat disjointed review of the new National Museum of American Jewish History. Thus, while he praises the “attractive and interesting” museum’s “well-designed permanent exhibition,” commends the museum for telling “fairly well” the story of Jews in America, and applauds the museum for avoiding the extremes of “exaggerating the importance of its subjects and downplaying their faults,” he also accuses the museum of practicing “bland history” and displaying an “almost complete lack of interest in the Orthodox community,” and derides it for including a gallery devoted to chronicling the achievements of 18 particularly remarkable American Jews. Ultimately, Tobin dismissively suggests that the exhibition is “an exercise in communal ethnic pride” and, as such, is “a measure of the insecurities and the vanity of a generation of Jews whose desire to heap praise on the past is a reflection of its inability to confront a problematic future.”

Tobin’s critique simply reveals his view that American Jews should have refrained from creating a museum dedicated to telling their history. He is, of course, entitled to that view; but in an age when ethnic museums proliferate, his discomfort with such a museum is surprising. He also misses the most fundamental aspect of the story the museum tells, the story of one immigrant ethnic group’s experience with freedom. That story is certainly particularistic—it is, after all, the story of American Jews—but it is, at the same time, quite universal. It is a story whose essential elements are shared by all immigrant ethnic groups that came to these shores seeking religious and economic liberty. This oversight causes Tobin to overlook the compelling appeal of the American Jewish story to non-Jews (indeed, non-Jewish visitors to the museum see in it a reflection of their story as well) and the profound opportunity the museum presents to remind all Americans how much we have in common with one another. All this goes far beyond “an exercise in communal ethnic pride,” but Tobin is too focused on provocative existential questions to notice that fact. Had he expanded his focus, he might have appreciated that the museum is a manifestation of American Jews’ ethnic security and their belief that the American Jewish experience has something significant to say to all Americans about the freedoms that are at the heart of the American experience.

Tobin’s review also contains a number of basic errors and misunderstandings, which necessarily cast doubt on the reliability of his critique. Take, for example, his comment about the exhibition’s inattention regarding the Orthodox community. The exhibition tells the story of the American Jewish experience from 1654 to the present, a period of more than 350 years. It is important to remember (although Tobin apparently does not) that for more than 200 years of Jewish life on this continent, the only Judaism here was traditional Judaism, what most today would call “Orthodox.” One could justifiably observe, therefore, that nearly an entire floor of the exhibition is about “Orthodox” Jews, although, to be sure, Jews of that period did not label themselves so. The contributions of Orthodox American Jews, moreover, are identified and examined throughout the exhibition with respect to religious life and observance, immigration, work life, politics, summer camping, culture, and education. While the museum does not, as a matter of practice, identify Jews in the exhibition by their denomination (unless that denomination is specifically relevant to their story), that in no way means that the museum ignores the contributions and impact of America’s Orthodox community.

Tobin’s criticism of the museum’s account of the American Jewish reaction to the Holocaust is especially telling. Tobin, as is his right, has an agenda with respect to that reaction and wishes that the museum had the same agenda. But the museum, advised in its design of the exhibition by a panel of distinguished historians that included Jonathan Sarna and the eminent Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, was careful not to have an agenda. The narrative told by the exhibition was dictated by the historical record and intentionally leaves to visitors the challenge of reaching conclusions based on that record. The same may be said of the museum’s presentation of the Rosenbergs, another area in which Tobin expresses annoyance with the exhibition’s refusal to push conclusions upon visitors.

One could go on—by noting, for example, that Tobin even gets the name of the museum’s distinguished architect wrong (“Polishek” instead of “Polshek”); by recounting the story of the establishment of Conservative Judaism, a far more complex story than Tobin allows; or by recognizing that the accomplishments of the 18 American Jews featured in the Only in America Gallery / Hall of Fame are worthy of note in a museum of American Jewish history, whether or not the reputations of those individuals are thereby enhanced. But the central point is clear: visitors are best advised to see the museum for themselves. What they will see is a museum that speaks to all Americans, one that is filled with often controversial questions about the American Jewish experience and the historical information with which to begin addressing those questions, presented in a vivid, interactive, and highly engaging manner.

Michael Rosenzweig
President and CEO
National Museum
of American Jewish History
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

_____________

Jonathan S. Tobin writes:
Contrary to Michael Rosenzweig’s assertion, it is not my position that the building of any museum of American Jewish history was wrong. Philadelphia already had such a museum before its leadership decided that the modest scale of the existing building was incommensurate with their ambitions for the place. What followed was the creation of a massive $150 million edifice at a time when Jewish institutions in that city and elsewhere were hard-pressed to find support for the vital social-service and educational needs of the community. But now that it is a fait accompli, visitors are entitled to ask whether the spirit of complacent self-congratulation that animates every corner of the museum is really a proper reflection of the concerns of contemporary American Jewry.

As for the errors that he purports to find in my essay, they are, with one exception—the spelling of James Polshek’s name, on which I stand corrected—nothing of the kind.

As I wrote, most of the history here is bland but generally well told. There were, however, two points on which the permanent exhibition needs revising. Yet rather than admit error, Mr. Rosenzweig prefers to lash out at me for pointing out the problem. One needn’t have an “agenda” to note that a decision to treat the controversy over the behavior of American Jewry during the Holocaust as an insignificant footnote is an astonishing blunder. This episode is one of the key moments in the entire history of American Jewry, since much of the activism on a variety of issues that followed in the subsequent decades is widely understood to be in no small measure a reaction to the perception that Jews were silent during this fateful crisis. The merits of that perception may be debated, but the problem here is that the museum does not encourage visitors to think seriously about the issue at all, let alone draw any conclusions, since the topic is not treated as one worthy of significant attention.

Mr. Rosenzweig’s defense of the presentation of the Rosenberg espionage case is equally unreliable. The problem here is not that the museum is reluctant to “push conclusions” on its visitors. In fact, most of the panel and accompanying display is taken up with a discussion of the “fear” of Communism and the supposed threat of anti-Semitism, in which the Rosenbergs come across more as victims than anything else. Only a single line at the bottom of the display alludes to the Soviet documents that have removed all doubt about their identity as spies even among their former defenders. What visitors encounter here is, again, not an account “dictated by the historical record” but one in which the unflattering truth is, if not entirely swept under the rug, certainly downplayed. It should not have been too much to ask that this unfortunate chapter be told with more honesty about the Rosenbergs’ undoubted identity as Communists and spies and the ideological agenda that drove the protests on their behalf.

Finally, to say, as Mr. Rosenzweig does, that the museum devotes an entire floor to Orthodox Jews simply because one concentrates on the period that precedes the mass immigrations of the 1880s is mere sophistry. The treatment of this period is one that emphasizes above all else the assimilation of America’s first Jews, not their religious beliefs or observances. Indeed, throughout the entire museum, Jewish religious practice of any sort is consistently treated as a secondary concern.

This is clearly no accident. Indeed, Mr. Rosenzweig fairly gives away the game in his letter by making it clear that the universal appeal of the immigrant story is the main focus of the institution (not to mention its main hope for financial survival). Thus it is to be expected that the most parochial aspects of the Jewish world, particularly Orthodox Judaism but also the other religious denominations as well as intellectual concerns, must be satisfied with minimal coverage, especially when compared to popular culture.

For all the myriad accomplishments of American Jewry that are justly noted in this museum, its primary theme is one of how most Jews have managed to fit into mainstream America rather than cling to their own identity. This may well be an accurate reflection of a 21st-century American Jewry that is largely secular, with increasing numbers of its population losing any sense of Jewish peoplehood. It is, one must conclude, to be expected that an institution whose creation was predicated on celebration of Jewish celebrity as a higher priority than supporting those services that could build the Jewish future here would take this point of view.