In the latest in the Cross Ties occasional series featuring the reflections of new leaders of humanities organizations in the Mid-Atlantic, Ivy L. Barsky, chief executive officer and Gwen Goodman Director of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, offers an impassioned statement of how history museums must meet the current challenges facing them – challenges that are simultaneously economic, technological, and broadly cultural.
By Ivy L. Barsky
courtesy of the museum.
What a remarkable time to be leading a history museum. Cultural institutions and history destinations in particular are in a complicated transition period—a paradigm shift. Changing museum-going patterns and learning styles, shifting notions of history, and contracting attention spans all affect our work. Like all museums, we are competing for leisure time with sporting events, physical activity, nature, a 24-hour news cycle, and the ever-encroaching “screen time.” Despite the generous amount of square footage we occupy (in the case of the National Museum of American Jewish History, a 100,000-square-foot building designed by James Polshek, now Ennead Architects), we also deliver increasing amounts of substantive content outside our walls.
As the economic downturn has reigned in personal and public investment in tourism and leisure time activities, cultural organizations vie for audiences who are spending more time in front of screens of various kinds. Presenting good, important history with compelling artifacts is no longer sufficient justification to mount an exhibition. High-quality, sophisticated exhibitions are expensive propositions requiring abundant resources. Deciding what events or ideas are important enough to invest in, to which our institution can make a distinct contribution to scholarship and interpretation and can market sufficiently to realize a reasonable return on investment—intellectual, emotional, and financial—is a significant challenge.
In schools, especially urban public schools, history takes a backseat to reading and math. No Child Left Behind has left history behind. In colleges across the country, humanities majors are declining in number and in prestige. Significantly, museums are asked to over-function for what our beleaguered school districts can no longer provide. Rather than supplement a classroom lesson, the museum now needs to supplant it, providing curriculum materials that fulfill very specific learning standards and core requirements. We need to help teachers make the case to their administrations about the value of a museum visit, and often we need to find a donor or other way to pay for the visit.
And then there is the changing reception of history itself. If journalism is supposed to be the
“first draft of history,” what are the implications for history in this evolving information
environment? Long-form news stories are fewer and farther between, and who, after all, looks at tweets that are more than a half hour old? So it’s not surprising that the practice of public history is also transforming.
But it is worth accentuating the obvious–that the politically charged, newsworthy events of our time are deeply rooted in history. This is hardly the first time in our history that constitutional and equity issues—marriage equality, voting rights—have taken center stage or that a hot national debate focuses on immigration and citizenship.
draws on letters from immigrants recounting their dreams of a better life in America. Marrying
style and substance, images are projected on Corian surfaces shaped to evoke letters and waves. Photograph by Jay Rosenblatt, courtesy of the National Museum of American Jewish History.
So how do history destinations survive and thrive in this history-averse, history-phobic
environment? It is our job, and our great charge, to contextualize these contemporary issues in an historical framework through exhibition, programs, and dialogue. So the National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) is an excellent place to address these incendiary topics. For example, from our third-floor exhibit, Dreams of Freedom, a visitor can learn about the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted immigration to the United States and consequently served to keep its doors closed for many Jews attempting to find safe haven from Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. In our Dell Theater we’ve convened important discussions about contemporary immigration policies and have become a home for such interethnic dialogue.
Some museum practitioners and observers think technology is the default answer to current
challenges. Since our visitors are such technivores at home and at work, they’ve grown to expect the same from their cultural institutions – so the thinking goes. A healthy amount of new media and technology is welcome, and yes, expected. NMAJH boasts fabulous, cutting-edge, thoughtful use of new media throughout our 25,000 square foot core exhibition and in each special exhibition. Our Contemporary Issues Forum, for example, is an interactive installation in which visitors can respond to some burning issues of our time (Is America too free? Is there a connection between morality and religion?) with post-it notes designed with a “Yes,” “No,” or “Um” on them. Their answers are then scanned and searchable.
But I firmly believe that more and more museums will succeed and be sought out by virtue of being the non-virtual space in someone’s life: the most authentic place. This doesn’t mean we need to eschew technology, quite the contrary. But in emphasizing our unique value, authentic objects must remain at the forefront. Technology must be used in the service of those objects, extending their stories and our visitors’ experiences of them, and as a way to incorporate the visitors’ and end-users’ voices into the exhibition—physically and virtually. Our touch screen interactive developed around the correspondence between George Washington and the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790 is an example of this. Washington’s letter declares that our county “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution, no assistance.” The interactive helps visitors further decipher the documents. The museum’s chief historian, JonathanSarna, has interpreted passages of the letters, pointing to their meaning in the context of the late eighteenth century, providing textual sources for certain phrases, etc. It is both adjacent to the two documents in our gallery and available on line.
Ethnically specific museums are challenged even more than general history museums. American identities are more and more hyphenated—are made up of compound hyphenations, in fact. The modern family is a hybrid, and all our museums need to reflect and support that hybridity. Assimilation is not a dirty word, it is our reality. That doesn’t mean that we ignore those things that have defined us, distinguished us, or otherwise set us apart. In fact, we should and do celebrate those. But we also acknowledge that being a unique part of a greater whole is precisely wrought by the challenges and choices that come with freedom in America.
The current state of mainstream religious institutions is instructive in this regard. They are
having a harder and harder time maintaining their congregations. People are becoming much more free-wheeling about how they celebrate or practice their religion—if they choose to at all. Families are having difficulty finding houses of worship where they are comfortable, that they think reflects them, their views and values. People find too many barriers to entry—financial, philosophical, political, and practical. Museums must learn from these setbacks and diminutions. That’s why at NMAJH we have prioritized the need to be more warm and welcoming, making sure that people of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies feel comfortable walking through our doors and find deep resonance and meaningful connections in our galleries and programming, without judgment. We’ve tried to remove every barrier to entry, and we continue to work on developing these points of connection—expanding our tent, as it were–by forging strong bridges to multiple communities in the form of authentic, reciprocal, strategic partnerships.
Our Strategic Plan, developed in 2012 by staff and leadership of the museum and adopted by the full board, sets out several goals that speak to the challenges museums like NMAJH face in this new age. Establishing organizational health and a workable business plan is a clear priority. For us—a relatively new institution (we’ve existed in our present incarnation for only three years), fresh from a significant capital campaign with the attendant donor fatigue in an economically challenging environment— the organization’s health is an enormously demanding, but absolutely essential goal. While presenting good history and serving audiences are our very highest priorities, we must consider market and margin hot on their heels if we are to flourish.
But perhaps the most important pillar of the plan is deepening audience engagement with the museum – enhancing visitors’ sense of personal relevance, emotional connection, and intellectual surprise. History museum professionals need to work harder and more effectively to connect the past to the present, to get our children, their teachers, and parents to connect it to the future. We must help all our constituents—donors, students, casual visitors—to have reason to care more about our subject matter and to reach all of them affectively. Contributing to our audiences’ knowledge base and to their cognitive process is not sufficient. Sure, there’s the risk of becoming sentimental, nostalgic, Disney-esque in our translation or presentation of historic events, and we have to be ever mindful of the temptation to romanticize the past. It can be a fine line.
NMAJH aims to be a place that honors the past and propels the future by fueling imagination and ideas, culture and community, leadership and service, in ways that turn inspiration into action. With our colleague institutions who deal in the realms of history and memory, we need to artfully explore, interpret, and present complex issue in ways accessible and compelling to a broad, diverse, and sophisticated public.
Our future depends on it.
For more information on the National Museum of American Jewish History, go to:
http://www.nmajh.org
Ivy L. Barsky is chief executive officer and Gwen Goodman Director of the National Museum of American Jewish History, a position she has held since 2012. Previously, she served as the museum’s director and chief operating officer. Ms. Barsky also was deputy director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City; and has held various positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and P.S. 1 in New York City.