The scandal surrounding the wholesale gutting of the Judah L. Magnes Museum’s staff reveals the clash of two different conceptions of Jewish culture in America. While the museum’s director, Connie Wolf, has argued that the cuts — which have left less than a skeletal staff at the East Bay facility — were the unavoidable result of the economy, deeper and more troubling forces are at work.
Whatever the museum’s finances — and Wolf and Warren Hellman, the chair of the museum’s board, have put out contradictory and confusing figures — the fact remains that the Magnes owns two buildings, one of them a highly valuable property in downtown Berkeley. Rather than destroying the museum’s human “capital,” its irreplaceable curators and exhibit designers, an administration truly committed to the museum’s mission would have sold or rented part of its real estate.
But this is the crux of the crisis: The current museum board and director seem to regard their mission as real-estate development. For years, their goal has been the construction of the Daniel Libeskind building on Mission street in San Francisco, even if that building remains devoid of content. And that is the likely outcome, since no coherent vision has ever been articulated for just what this building is supposed to accomplish. Meanwhile, millions of dollars were squandered on fancy building designs.
The museum’s current custodians are beset by an all-too-common problem in the American Jewish community: the “edifice complex.” Brick and mortar (or, in the case of a Libeskind design, jagged aluminum) count for everything. Fill it with a few computers and multimedia displays and voila: It must be Jewish culture. And, in the process, create a corporate management with a CEO who knows how to pull off a hostile takeover and summarily fire talented, longtime employees while continuing to pull in a six-figure salary. Not a pretty sight: the Enronization of Jewish life.
But a frame is not a picture. The Magnes Museum (or, rather, the Magnes Museum pre-merger) was an institution dedicated to the very opposite of a glitzy building. Over 40 years, led by its visionary founder, Seymour Fromer, the museum has painstakingly recovered a treasure-trove of artifacts from the remotest corners of the Jewish world, as well as paintings, posters and rare manuscripts from Europe and America. Its collection on the Jews of the West is unsurpassed. Scholars come from Israel and elsewhere to work in its ethnographic and art collections. It has mounted some of the most original and richly documented exhibits about Jewish history and life.
The Magnes has been committed to the hard work of preserving and creating Jewish culture in all its complexity. This is not glamorous work and it is perhaps unfashionable for those who like their Judaism “lite” and have little patience for supporting projects that require years of sustenance. But if Jewish culture is to survive and flourish in this corner of the American West, it will be because of institutions like the Judah Magnes Museum. It is therefore a matter of the greatest urgency for all Bay Area Jews to proclaim to those responsible for this travesty: Give us our museum back!