The Jewish Museum Highlights Its Holdings With New Spaces
When James Snyder started as director of the Jewish Museum in 2023, he inherited an ambitious plan to transform the galleries and education spaces that would create a new narrative framework for exploring the 3,500-year history of Jewish culture in the global diaspora.
The horrors of the Hamas-led massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza couldn’t help but inform the museum’s $14.5-million rethinking of its neo-Gothic mansion on Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. Now, as Jewish identity has become an urgent topic of international discourse, the museum is about to open its completed building project to the public, on Oct. 24.
“How do you plan a temporary exhibition program in the world where everything changes as abruptly as we’ve been experiencing?” Snyder said during a recent walk-through of the building; his appointment as director had started three weeks after Oct. 7. “You had to be very thoughtful about how you position exhibitions so that they were responsive to, and not tone-deaf to, the challenges of the moment.
