The Jewish Museum

Happiness... there is a word for it in every language, yet, what it is and how best to sustain it is a perennial puzzle. There is hardly a culture, religion or political platform that fails to mention it, while few have defined it in consistently satisfying terms.

It’s the 100th anniversary of the legendary 1913 Armory Show, which took place in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and is widely credited for bringing Modern art to New York. A slew of shows are planned during 2013 in celebration. 
 

Esther as Eloise?  Makes sense when Lena Dunham channels the parentless and precocious Eloise - “I am Lena and I am six” -- for a modern retelling of the Purim spiel.

There’s something exquisite about the Offit Gallery on The Jewish Museum’s second floor:  It is high-ceilinged with lots of light flooding in from the windows overlooking Central Park.  In 2012, the Museum inaugurated a series of “laboratory” exhibitions in the space, once part of the Warburg family mansion. New works as well as pieces from the Museum’s collections are featured, in an effort to advance new ideas about art and culture.
 

These are not glamorous people.

According to the kabbalists, on Isru Chag, the day after the holidays of Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot, some of the light of the holiday lingers, so the sanctity is extended.

So it was with post-holiday eyes that I visited The Jewish Museum on Wednesday, following the season of holidays ending with Sukkot and saw Izhar Patkin’s installation “The Messiah’s glAss.”

This week I wrote my Culture View column on Maira Kalman's new exhibit at The Jewish Museum.  I've got a pet obsession with her work, and figured that it would have been near impossible to leave my utterly self-conscious bias behind for the sake of a more "critical" review.  So instead, I used it as an occasion to look at the same illustrations of hers I love--with all their winsomeness, humor, wit, vivacity and even occasional sadness--and simply view them in another light.

This week, I wrote about the retirement of The Jewish Museum's director Joan Rosenbaum, who's led the museum for 30 years.  But the story of her career raises a few fundamental questions that The Jewish Museum, and indeed all ethnic museums, must grapple with: Should ethnic museums advance the consensus opinions of their constituent group, or should they challenge those beliefs?  And if the latter, where do you draw the line?