Gentiles and the new American Jewish History Museum

"No Jews' club belongs on Broad Street," Horace Stern advised his co-religionists in the 1920s when Philadelphia's Locust Club contemplated moving next door to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Stern, who was already self-conscious as the only Jewish justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, was merely applying the age-old philosophy by which Jews had survived for centuries in a hostile gentile world: Don't stir up the goyim.

But times have clearly changed. Last November an obviously more confident generation of American Jews moved the National Museum of American Jewish History into its very-high-profile new quarters— five gleaming glass stories and 100,000 square feet— on the most sacred piece of American soil: Independence Mall, directly across from the Liberty Bell.

Tourists who flock to Philadelphia's historic district from Kentucky or Kansas might well wonder: What is this Jewish Museum doing here, on seemingly equal footing with Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center? The English, the Irish, the Scots, the Germans and the African-Americans have been here much longer and in much greater numbers. So why a Jewish museum, and only a Jewish museum?

Jews' unique experience

There's actually a good answer to that question. America is based above all on the proposition that freedom benefits society at large. The entire country— even Native Americans, whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia thousands of years ago— consists of immigrants or descendants of immigrants who came here in search of a better life.

But America's Jews, thanks to their uniquely long history of persecution, are uniquely positioned to answer the ultimate question about the efficacy of an immigrant society, to wit: What happens when a group of outcasts who have spent two thousand years surviving by their wits suddenly find themselves in a land where, relatively speaking, they can do pretty much whatever they damn please?

The answer is truly astonishing, and it transcends the customary recitations of Jewish success in politics, science, medicine, the arts, the law and so on.

Levittown and Levi Strauss

When denied opportunities in mainstream U.S. companies, Jews created entire new industries of their own (cigars, scrap metal, motion pictures, advertising, public relations, cable TV, shopping malls, cosmetics) and transformed many others (clothing, retailing, banking, investments, liquor, newspapers, magazines, book publishing, real estate, insurance)— sometimes for the worse, but mostly for the better.

In these fields and others Jews relentlessly broke down established class lines among consumers— for example, with William Levitt's suburban housing developments, the shopping malls of Alfred Taubman and Melvin Simon, the blue jeans of Levi Strauss, and of course the movies. In the process, Jews played a major role in restructuring America's formerly closed and clubby corporate world, opening it up to broad participation.

How America changed Jews

But at the same time that Jews were changing America, America was changing them. From the time of Abraham until the late 20th Century, Jewish culture was essentially defensive: It assumed that Jews would relate to the world as underdogs and, consequently, would keep to their own narrow group even when they weren't being segregated in Jewish ghettoes.

The authors of the Torah or the Talmud, not to mention Justice Horace Stern, would be astounded by the notion that gentiles might freely elect Jews to such offices as governor, U.S. Senator, mayor or district attorney, as Philadelphians and Pennsylvanians do routinely. The new American Jewish History Museum, if only by its choice of location, effectively announces the birth of a new kind of American Jew— confident, worldly and at ease in a non-Jewish society. To other immigrant groups, it holds out the hope that "You can do this too."

Whether the museum's three floors of permanent exhibits will attract a non-Jewish audience— which strikes me as the primary justification of any museum on Independence Mall— is the critical question. (Full disclosure: The "Beacon" light sculpture atop the museum was designed by my son-in-law, Ben Rubin.)

Catholics suffered, too

The museum's inventive interactive displays carry visitors almost effortlessly through more than three centuries of American history, much of which is only peripherally Jewish. The burning of St. Augustine's Church in Philadelphia during the Know-Nothing riots in 1844, a display notes, serves as "a reminder that mid-19th-Century religious intolerance focused much more on Catholics than Jews." Newsreels of Hitler's rise to power in Germany in the 1930s appear side-by-side with contemporaneous films of marches and demonstrations at the same time in the U.S., by Nazis and anti-Nazis alike.

Within the museum you can walk through a tenement on the Lower East Side circa 1900, a suburban kitchen and living room circa 1950, even a bunk in a summer camp in the Poconos. And since Jews were so heavily involved in show business, you can spend perhaps a few hours just watching snippets from films and TV shows featuring the Marx brothers, the Three Stooges, Paul Muni, John Garfield, Gertrude Berg, Gilda Radner, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld and countless others.

Will that lineup suffice to attract gentiles at $12 a head? Only, I suspect, if the museum chooses to perceive itself as a constantly evolving organism, much like America and the Jews themselves.♦


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