In almost 10 years as executive director of the Jewish Museum San Francisco, Linda Steinberg has seen menorot shaped like moose, kiddush cups with cowboy motifs, and Purim masks that grappled with themes of multiculturalism using dryer lint.
She regards the artists who created such unconventional works “almost like the talmudists, the ones who wrestle with the ideas of the time.”
Now that she is leaving the museum to pursue other opportunities, Steinberg hopes that this philosophy of artist as barometer of social currents and agent for change will persist in her wake.
During her tenure at the institution, she made it a priority to court, through invitationals, artists’ contemporary interpretations of age-old themes.
“My legacy is that people understand that artists play an integral role in the revitalization of Jewish life, and that the organized Jewish community has to look to supporting its creators,” said Steinberg, who left the institution in December but is functioning as a consultant.
Currently, she serves as founding executive director of the “Thomashefsky Project,” a traveling exhibit and performing arts program that will tell the story of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, founders and stars of the Yiddish theater in New York.
For that project, which is expected to be completed in 2001, Steinberg will work arm-in-arm with the Thomashefskys’ grandson, Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.
“He felt a moral imperative to bring this to life,” Steinberg said. “It’s very important we get the story down.”
When Steinberg joined the Jewish Museum San Francisco in 1988, she already had extensive experience in the museum world, including stints as associate director of the Center for the Arts and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and as senior curator at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.
“By the time I came to San Francisco, I had a very definite vision of what I felt an American Jewish museum could be,” said the San Francisco native, who attended Lowell High School and U.C. Berkeley. “It differed from [that of] my colleagues.”
She did not view art as an end in itself but rather as a means for change as well as Jewish self-discovery and pride.
Far from repositories for collecting objects, she saw Jewish museums as arenas for engaging the entire community “with all the creative fervor one can muster.”
In keeping with that philosophy, Steinberg oversaw a diverse and sometimes eclectic array of exhibits. Those included a collection of “fiber sculptures” fashioned from tallitot, a presentation of works by “Maus” author Art Spiegelman, and a series of “altered books” by Israeli artist Gary Goldstein that ran in conjunction with the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.
Goldstein covers the pages of books with densely symbolic paintings, drawings and collages — essentially recreating them as canvases exploring questions of identity. His avant-garde explorations reflected a major theme of the museum.
“If I had to say in a few words what we are, it would be the `Why Be Jewish Museum,'” Steinberg once said.
The 13-year-old museum regularly poses that question to viewers by involving them in hands-on activities related to the exhibit of the day.
The institution also regularly engages local schoolchildren in projects that combine Jewish themes with the students’ own cultural experiences. And it presents exhibits exploring the Jewish community’s relationship to other ethnic groups.
One such example was “Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews,” which explored the complex relationship between the two groups. For such bridge-building efforts, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce gave the museum an arts excellence award in 1992, a recognition of which Steinberg is particularly proud.
She is also proud of not shying away from controversial exhibits — the museum mounted the bold, iconoclastic “Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities” in 1996 — and wears like a badge of honor labels bestowed upon the museum by the mainstream press: “museum with a social conscience” and “little museum that could.”
Steinberg leaves the institution as it prepares for a major transition. Two years ago, it recruited as its new chief Rabbi Brian Lurie, a familiar Bay Area face who had left to run the New York-based United Jewish Appeal.
He is overseeing the museum as it readies to move into its new, much-expanded site across the street from the trendy Yerba Buena Gardens.
Steinberg views the move with excitement. But she also acknowledges that museums are changing in ways that don’t always jibe with her creative sensibilities.
“As museums are getting larger and funding is decreasing, one has to rely more on a mass of people coming through the door, which makes people have to cater to public tastes,” she said. “It’s more about compromise.”
She sees one antidote as the “museum without walls” concept; the “Thomashefsky Project” falls under that rubric, offering Steinberg “a chance to do something which hasn’t been done before.
“It’s such a privilege to be part of bringing the story to life,” she said, “and such a privilege to be working with Michael Tilson Thomas.”