When the invitation came to serve as an artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, not far from where I had lived out my teenage years as a mostly assimilated Jewish woman making my way in a Christian dominant culture, I had just recently read Edward Rothstein’s article, The Problem With Jewish Museums:

“Nothing, it seems, will shatter their paltry view of Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish public responsibility. Minimize your profile, mute your pride, be overly indulgent, even perversely so, of the taste and priorities of the surrounding culture; resist any hint of difficult scholarship or religious thought; avoid any sort of self assertion that might infringe the dictates of political correctness or intellectual fashion: these are the defining characteristics of the modern Jewish identity museum. As for those who insist on holding out for a more rooted and substantive view of Jewish identity, they will have to rely on the small handful of exceptions, or start to think about what it would be like to create a new Jewish museum in the first third of the 21st century.” (Mosaic Journal, Feb 2016)

Jewish identity and museums were on my mind. Rothstein’s challenge, posed at the end of his essay, stood out as a singular direction for my work in Greensboro. I would, of course, create a new Jewish museum in the first third of the 21st century.

What can serve as an emerging model of a contemporary Jewish museum in the United States today? How can small Jewish communities throughout the Southern United States claim the same cultural agency to create a Jewish museum as that of their metropolis counterparts in San Francisco, New York or LA? What would be housed in this museum? Who amongst the Jewish people would be represented? What would that representation look like through material and other cultural production? What could this museum offer to the discourse on contemporary Jewish life? These are the questions that activated my research and shaped the vision of the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum (GCJM).

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem
Artist Founder and Co-Curator of the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum