ShareThisSAN FRANCISCO -- The Contemporary Jewish Museum, which opened this week in San Francisco, won't try to document history. Instead, it will seek to create new expressions of a culture.Unlike any Jewish museum in the world, the museum will hold no permanent collection of Judaica, nor will it attempt to create a formal record of the region's Jews. Instead, the museum will present an array of continuously changing exhibitions that use music, art, dance and other mediums to give evolving expression to Jewish identity."The story of San Francisco Jews is triumphant," said Marc Dollinger, a San Francisco State professor of Jewish studies, co-editor of the book "California Jews," and fifth-generation San Franciscan. "San Francisco has been one of the most open civic cultures to the Jewish community in the United States."Jewish museums around the world typically testify to survival, flight from persecution and lives of exile. Those institutions preserve histories that could easily be forgotten or erased. But the Contemporary Jewish Museum will be an expression not so much of the past as of possibility.One of the opening exhibits, for example, asked seven artists to explore the modern relevance of the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. In the "yud" gallery, musicians have been tasked to interpret the Hebrew alphabet through music -- and the sound of their work is the only thing "on display." Another gallery speaks to the life and work of cartoonist William Steig, a Jew who worked at the New Yorker and also created the cartoon and movie character Shrek."Tradition and history in isolation do not connect to our daily lives," said Connie Wolf, the museum director. "What you want is to not be thinking about history and tradition as something over there, but you want to be engaged with how does it impact us. How can we strive to make the world a better place?"What such expressions of Jewish life mean elicits varied interpretations.Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan at Temple Emanu-El sees the building as a major public affirmation of Jewish identity and culture. He believes there was a caveat to the success of earlier generations of the region's Jews -- to not be too loud about one's Jewish identity. A 63,000-square-foot building in the center of San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene is a very different statement."I think we're in a very different place now," said Wolf-Prusan. "We're unafraid to share not just our past, but what our present is. ... This is a place of experimentation and innovation -- a place of thought."(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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