Narrating Migration History in a West-Coast Jewish Museum

• In Event: Age, Emotion, Representation: Revisiting Jewish Migration History

Abstract

This paper is a practice-based one, by a scholar of Jewish migration to Latin America working, as of quite recently, in a Jewish museum at a moment of crisis for museums generally and for Jewish cultural institutions, specifically. It aims to consider the history and politics of representing Jewish migration stories in a museum context, in relation to a new exhibition on Jewish cultures on the Pacific Rim in early stages of conceptualization. The first part considers the emergence of Jewish museums in the US in the last several decades, to contextualize Jewish migration stories within these museums in relation to American national mythmaking. The second part of the paper looks at a specific set of museums in the Western part of the US and Latin America (Mexico, Chile), where Jewish migration histories intersect in different ways with national narratives of frontier settlement, urbanization, and independence from imperial control or cultural colonialism. It will consider four museum spaces -- the Magnes Museum (UC Berkeley), the Oregon Jewish Museum, the Mexican Documentation Center, and the Museo Judio de Chile – asking: How are core exhibitions organized, what materials and narratives are foregrounded, and what place do migration stories have in them? What are the institutional understandings of how migration stories matter in the local and regional context (i.e. to audiences)? This piece of the paper will be based on exhibition reviews and conversations, paired with scholarship on Jewish histories of the US, Mexico, and Chile. Lastly, the paper considers the more concrete question of how consequential northern migrations from Mexico to California have been for Mexican Jews, and for the formation of “Latino Jewish” identities in both places.

Author

• Amy Kerner, Contemporary Jewish Museum