3 min read
We welcome the conversation provoked by David Herman's article in last week's JC - What's wrong with our museums and how to fix it - on the role that cultural institutions play in our community.
Herman raised important questions about Jewish museums in the 21st century. Who are they for and what should they be about? Should they talk about the past, focus on the Holocaust, or look to the future?
Here at the Jewish Museum London, we believe that our museum is for everyone. We are proud of our core Jewish audience but, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of our visitors are non-Jews.
We engage people, irrespective of age, faith or background, in Jewish history, identity and culture, through exhibitions and programmes that are designed to stimulate, provoke questions and encourage understanding.
Jewish museums by definition straddle communities and are well placed to negotiate the creative tension between the universal and the particular.
We seek to represent all denominations of the Jewish community, looking outwards to the wider world. The stories we tell connect to Jews and non-Jews alike. We see our own ambitions reflected in those of our colleagues in the museum community who have similar ambitions to attract visitors of all backgrounds.
We admire the Manchester Jewish Museum's fantastic exhibitions and learning programme that connects the local Jewish and Muslim communities.
Similarly, the diversity of programming, collections and exhibitions at the Ben Uri Gallery, broadening the conversation towards migration and identity, brings in a wider public.
And our exhibitions programme is specifically designed to attract different audiences. Our recent Judith Kerr retrospective brought in thousands of families who had never previously visited, many of whom encountered for the first time the story of British Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
The current Blood exhibition offers an adult audience the chance to explore a complex and intellectually rigorous story that is Jewish to the core, and yet has a universality that resonates with both Jewish and non-Jewish visitors.
Alongside our permanent galleries on the history of Jews in the UK, and our Judaica collection, visitors to the Jewish Museum this week will find Through a Queer Lens, a new photography exhibition documenting LGBTQ Jewish people. With exhibitions, there is no one-size-fits-all.
Museums also provide exactly the safe forum in which we can discuss the kind of story we want to tell ourselves and others about Jewish culture. They are exactly the places where these key issues of Jewish identity and culture can and should be debated. Two weeks ago, Lord Winston and Dr Adam Rutherford came to the Jewish Museum London and discussed exactly this subject in front of a packed house.
Herman also raised the issue of location - our location in Camden Town means that we are close to Camden market, one of London's most visited tourist attractions and also en route to the London Zoo. Many of our visitors last summer came to the museum to see The Tiger Who Came to Tea in our Judith Kerr exhibition, and then to the Zoo to see tigers in real life.
We value our strong connection with our local community and schools - in 2015, we held a series of crowd-sourced exhibitions featuring personal items and mementoes donated by members of the public. This included contributions from people of many faiths, nationalities and ages, including members of Regent's Park Mosque, and even a relic from St Pancras Church in Camden. We receive more than 17,000-student visits a year from schools in Camden and beyond, over 90 per cent of whose pupils are non-Jewish.
When discussing location, it is important to recognise that our museums have the power to reach out beyond our own four walls - through both partnership-building and technology.
Building key partnerships with organisations is one way of approaching this opportunity. This February, the Manchester Jewish Museum is taking some of the weirdest and wackiest objects in their collection on tour to new venues including the People's History Museum and Manchester Museum. Ben Uri's collaboration with Somerset House is another success story. We have many exciting partnerships: our Amy Winehouse exhibition is currently on an international tour, breaking box office records; our football exhibition was enjoyed by Arsene Wenger in London and Bobby Charlton at the Manchester Jewish Museum; and our exhibitions programme is enriched by academic partnerships including Birkbeck, King's College London and Queen Mary University.
Technological advances also provide us with new ways to reach out beyond our own location and to speak to new audiences - this summer we will launch a street-tour app to complement our exhibition Moses, Mods and Mr Fish: The Menswear Revolution. This will take visitors on a journey through the history of Jewish tailoring and the boutique revolution in Carnaby Street and Soho.
Visitors interested in the collections of the Ben Uri, Manchester and London Jewish Museums can also discover more without stepping through the doors through simply browsing the objects online.
We would agree with David Herman that there is always a need to increase visitor numbers, and to reach new audiences - and of course to attract more funding - but here at the Jewish Museum London we would argue that our clear sense of identity, diverse programming, and the ever-increasing reach of the museum means that our ambitions are helping us to create a Jewish museum for the 21st century.
'Blood: Uniting and Dividing' runs until February 28. 'Through a Queer Lens: Portraits of LGBTQ Jews' runs until April 17. Abigail Morris is chief executive of the Jewish Museum London
