San Francisco Museum Seeks to Define Jewish Identity for the 21st Century

SAN FRANCISCO — In a crumbling brick building on the edge of the city’s downtown arts and culture center, Rabbi Brian Lurie dreams of creating an institution that will help define an American Jewish identity for the 21st century.

He talks of filling his new Jewish Center with a kaleidoscope of interactive, ever-changing exhibits aimed at introducing visitors to Judaism and challenging them to reshape it.

Lurie, long prominent as a fund-raiser in the Jewish community nationwide, has transformed what was supposed to be a modest expansion of the San Francisco Jewish Museum into an ambitious, controversial mission. He plans to erect a $60-million center of Jewish arts and culture in the heart of one of the nation’s most highly assimilated Jewish communities.

Some Bay Area Jewish leaders question the wisdom of locating such a grand project in such a small Jewish community, where the rate of intermarriage is high and synagogue affiliation low. But the 54-year-old rabbi says that San Francisco, with its love of culture and the avant-garde, is the perfect site for a Jewish institution that he promises will be radically different in concept and execution from any other Jewish museum or cultural center in America.

He has vowed to open the doors in 2 1/2 years.

Breaking Down Barriers

Kicking aside whiskey bottles and crumpled fast-food containers cluttering the doorway, Lurie laid out his vision on a recent morning.

“We won’t be a museum or a cultural center. We won’t be behind glass,” he said, framing the cavernous, musty space of what was once an urban power station with his hands. “There will be galleries above, exhibit space on either side. It’s the beauty in Judaism we have to capture.”

Visitors, Lurie said, will be greeted with a dramatic view of a Bedouin tent symbolizing the ancient, nomadic roots of Judaism. “Their first view will be a moving experience, allowing people to go beyond themselves in some meaningful way,” he said.

They will be able to explore the many chapters of the Jewish journey, hear lectures, participate in workshops, view performances, browse in the gift shop or lunch in the cafe.

“Our core exhibit will be experiential, avant-garde,” Lurie said.

He is short on details, and has only recently hired Larry Berger, a writer with no background in museums or in Jewish studies, to design the core exhibit. The two say they are engaged in ongoing debates with local Jewish artists, rabbis, scholars and community activists about what to include.

“We are talking to people about what kind of an institution would be most inspiring to them, and we’re trying to figure out what the renaissance of Jewish art and culture in San Francisco is,” Berger said.

In 1950, there were only two Jewish museums in the United States. Today, there are three dozen. In California, there is a major Holocaust museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and two arts museums: the Skirball Cultural Center in the Sepulveda Pass, celebrating the Jewish experience in America, and the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, telling the story of Jews in the Western United States.

But it is both the unusual concept of the San Francisco museum--it will not be a Holocaust memorial and will house no permanent collection of sacred objects or Jewish art--and the nature of Lurie himself that has sparked debate.

For decades, Lurie has been a powerful figure in the organized Jewish community. Lurie operated not as a maven of arts and culture but as a premier fund-raiser who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Israel and other Jewish causes. The Cleveland-born Reform rabbi was executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Federation for 17 years before becoming executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal in New York in 1991.

Last year, Lurie said, he left his United Jewish Appeal post for family reasons--his wife and children had returned to the Bay Area and he was commuting thousands of miles a month.

“I was ready to retire, to walk away from a significant participation in Jewish life,” he said.

Instead, he accepted the post of CEO of the museum.

Shifting Identities

The move of so prominent a national leader to the realm of Jewish culture was seen as a strong statement by some Jewish intellectuals that the community’s priorities are shifting, turning inward, toward the difficult task of finding ways to keep Jews in America Jewish.

“It’s splendid that suddenly, leading Jewish institutions and figures central to Jewish life such as Brian Lurie are now acknowledging the role that culture can play,” said Steven Zipperstein, director of the Jewish studies program at Stanford University.

Zipperstein said that the proliferation of Jewish museums in recent years has been so rapid that he is organizing an international conference at Stanford next year to debate the role of museums in Jewish life.

The challenge, Zipperstein says, is to ensure that the Jewish experience such institutions offer is an authentic, thought-provoking one.

“There is no, there cannot be, any easy answer to the questions of identity facing American Jews,” Zipperstein said.

Lurie agrees, but he insists that the center he envisions is a good place to engage Jews who might not feel comfortable entering a synagogue in a debate about the questions of identity, heritage and legacy.

“There was a great body of leaders--and I am one of those people--who thought the priority was to build and protect the state of Israel,” said the wiry, intense Lurie. “That focus obscured a lot. At the end of the 20th century, Israel’s a wonderful reality, but it isn’t enough. We haven’t created an authentic American Jewish experience and because of that, we’ve paid a hell of a price,” in the high rate of intermarriage and the low rate of Jewish affiliation with Jewish institutions, he said.

Lurie spends his days trying to persuade a skeptical San Francisco Jewish community that this multiethnic entrepot, where intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is thought to be well above 50%, is the ideal venue for a 70,000-square-foot, high-tech Jewish arts and cultural center.

The Jewish Center, Lurie said, will help connect unaffiliated Jews with their religion, and help explain to non-Jews that there is more to this ancient faith than Jerry Seinfeld and bagels. He has pledged to raise $30 million for the building and $30 million for an endowment by 2000.

Cost Draws Criticism

The center’s high price tag and short timeline have earned Lurie some detractors.

The critics include Phyllis Cook, associate director of the Jewish Federation and director of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Cook complains that Lurie’s museum is among $200 million in projects the federation is being asked to fund, although its annual budget is less than $20 million.

“Brian’s vision is that we have to do something revolutionary to keep Jews Jewish,” Cook said. “I have a problem with that.”

Cook said some donors are skeptical because Lurie’s plans remain so vague. “I’ve heard Brian talk about beaming out,” she said, referring to Lurie’s plans to link the center by satellite to Jewish cultural and learning institutes, and to Jewish communities around the globe.

Raising money for urgent needs such as resettling Soviet Jewish immigrants, housing the Jewish aged or educating the Jewish young in day schools is far easier than mobilizing to erect a massive arts center, Cook said.

“Sixty million dollars is a very significant chunk of money for a Jewish museum. I cannot tell if it is doable,” she said.

“What we need in this country is day schools, better Sunday schools, Jewish education,” said William Lowenberg, a longtime contributor to the San Francisco Jewish Federation who says that he supports the concept of expanding the Jewish Museum, but is troubled by the scale of Lurie’s project. “What is a cultural center? This doesn’t save Jews. Disneyland doesn’t save Jews.”

It took Uri Herscher, president of the Skirball, 15 years to raise a comparable amount from a much larger Jewish community in Los Angeles. Herscher opened his Moshe Safdie-designed, 200,000-square-foot center, built around a core exhibit of 25,000 Jewish art objects, last year.

Herscher applauds Lurie’s vision, agreeing that traditional Jewish institutions--synagogues, community centers and fund-raising organizations--are not inspiring many young Jews.

“There was good reason to have those institutions,” Herscher said. “But we have different trenches now and we now need different Jewish institutions.”

Unlike the Skirball, a quiet retreat in the Santa Monica Mountains across from the new Getty Museum but a car ride from population centers, the Jewish Center will open its doors onto one of San Francisco’s trendiest spots.

The city’s redevelopment agency sold the massive building, built in 1908, to the Jewish Museum for $1. It hunkers on the edge of the bustling Yerba Buena Gardens, just south of the city’s financial district. Yerba Buena is home to the Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and several other museums. A Mexican museum is planned next door to the Jewish Center.

A Sense of Judaism

The Jewish Center will reflect its urban setting, Lurie said. Although he recently dismissed the museum’s first architect--New York-based Peter Eisenmann--and is searching for another, Lurie said he sees the building divided into four wings: one for family and children, one for performing arts, one for temporary exhibits and one for the core exhibit.

“It will be like a three-ring circus, always changing, moving, exciting and dynamic. We will bring people in, give them a sense of what Judaism is and of their ability to add to that,” he said. “We’ll help people experience Judaism, talk to it and evolve a Judaism for the 21st century.”

Lurie said that he realizes his center will hold little appeal for the small percentage of American Jews who identify themselves as Orthodox, but he is reaching out to “the other 90%” who follow Reform or Conservative trends of Judaism or are entirely secular.

Those Jews are in danger of losing touch with Judaism completely, he said, because the key issues that helped shape a secular or non-Orthodox American Jewish identity in the latter half of this century--Israel, Soviet Jewry and the Holocaust--are no longer compelling, defining experiences for many American Jews, he said.

Preparing for its 50th anniversary, Israel is a prosperous nation, and even some Israeli politicians suggest that it no longer needs financial aid from American Jews. It also is where Judaism is defined by the Orthodox, a fact of life that has alienated many non-Orthodox American Jews from the Jewish homeland.

Soviet Jews, free to emigrate now that the Soviet Union has disbanded, no longer require a massive rescue effort. And the Holocaust is memorialized in museums and in widespread educational programs.

The need now is to develop more positive reasons for remaining Jewish, Lurie said.

Some Bay Area Jewish artists say they are excited by Lurie’s dream of creating a Jewish institution that will attract the masses to works of Jewish art and to an introduction to Jewish culture.

“I think the place could be amazing,” said Jim Kleinman, managing director of the Jewish Traveling Theatre, an experimental troupe that presents plays on Jewish themes.

“The arts are finally being recognized as a way to reach out to the community, to the tens of thousands of people who are not identifying, not affiliating but looking for some means of connecting to their Jewish identity,” Kleinman said.

“Many Jews are groping for meaning,” said Janis Plotkin, one of the founders of the Jewish Film Festival. “Arts and culture is a replacement for: We were victims. The Holocaust is over and once you go to a Holocaust museum, what do you do with that? Focusing on the Holocaust is not a Jew-positive way to feel.”

The Jewish community here --about 220,000 strong--is minuscule compared to that of Los Angeles, estimated at nearly three-quarters of a million. But this community is far more willing to take cultural risks, Lurie said.

“Because you don’t have an encrusted establishment here, creative ideas can flow,” he said.

Over the years, the Bay Area has produced the first Jewish Film Festival, an annual international showing of films by Jewish directors and on Jewish subjects; the Magnes Museum; the Traveling Jewish Theatre; the International Jewish Video competition and Klezmermania, an annual festival of Jewish Klezmer music.

It also is home to Tikkun, the left-leaning magazine of Jewish art, politics and culture edited by Michael Lerner, and was the birthplace of the short-lived Davka, a controversial magazine of avant-garde Jewish arts and culture.

Lurie shrugs when told that critics say he has set himself an impossible task.

“I am a man on fire,” he said. “A passionate man. What I am trying to do is evolve a new understanding of urgent issues in the community.”