The CJM Blog

Oded Hirsch, Halfman , 2009. Chromogenic print, 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the artist & Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York.  Every fall, just after the holiday of Yom Kippur, Jews build a sukkah —an outdoor booth, open on one side, with a roof porous enough to see the stars. And here (traditionally) they eat and sleep for eight days, making a point of inviting in strangers for meals, and trusting in the fragility of the structure and the safety of their surroundings. Not unlike Burning Man, where each summer thousands of people set up temporary homes in the Nevada desert as part of a pop-up utopia, the ancient sukkah reminds us of the possibilities of a better world. This fall the CJM presents two complementary exhibitions—one about utopia, the other about the kibbutz—that ask fundamental questions about a perfectable community. In To Build & Be Built: Kibbutz History , the Museum explores the creation and evolution of this unique Israeli socialist venture. And in...

Bob Dylan’s classic album Highway 61 Revisited has been the soundtrack to the Jewish High Holidays at The Contemporary Jewish Museum this year. This past Sunday, smack in the middle between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and Yom Kippur (a holiday of reflection and atonement), UnderCover Presents offered extraordinary live cover versions of each song on Bob Dylan’s epic album Highway 61 Revisited , for the closing program for the exhibition Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg . Ginsberg and Dylan had a father-son style relationship, and were creative allies and confidants. Many see them both as secular Jewish prophets, with Ginsberg’s iconic poem “Howl” and Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” from Highway 61 Revisited evoking the strident and lyrical moral criticism of the prophets. The social critiques inherent in these works of art evoke the spiritual and sensual disorientation of the Jewish High Holidays, when the life and death of both individuals and th...

“Jackson Pollock is Jewish?” “Is this is how you define spirituality?” “How does it all come together?” Visitors to The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s (CJM) exhibition Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art , co-presented with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), are delighted and/or surprised by what they find. Most have questions; some argue with the categories; others are awed into silence. And that’s kind of the idea.