Category: Special Exhibit

By Meitav Aaron, Jewish Museum Milwaukee Intern During times of collective crisis, the priorities of our government are laid bare for our entire country to witness.  During the height of the Great Depression, when closed signs were scattered on shop windows… Read More

Susan Friebert Rossen, May 2020 Abe and Ginka Cohn were significant figures in my life. Ginka—a gifted modern dancer, choreographer and teacher—credited my mother, Betsy Ritz Friebert, with encouraging her to teach, a career she successfully pursued to the end… Read More

As Jewish Museum Milwaukee prepares to exhibit Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photographs of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman, we wanted to highlight women who have taken a stand. While some like Faye Schulman, were part of an organized movement or… Read More

Since Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare opened many local colleges have assigned students to view and respond to the exhibit. At the Museum, we generally do not get to read their responses, so the staff was delighted when UW-Milwaukee History Professor Christine… Read More

On October 11, 2018, Jewish Museum Milwaukee opened Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare with a Premiere featuring Gene Policinski, one of the most eminent journalists on First Amendment Rights, a founder of USA Today, and President and COO of the Freedom… Read More

As Jewish Museum Milwaukee prepares to launch Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare, one might ask: What’s Jewish or Milwaukee about the Hollywood Red Scare? The answer could be: What isn’t? Learn more about local and Jewish connections to the Hollywood Red Scare here.

In planning for the anticipated return of Stitching History From The Holocaust and the added stories of the Oelsner and Spira/Stern families, Jewish Museum Milwaukee was excited to present a timeline that would integrate their narratives with the Strnad’s and provide context for events surrounding World War II. Little did we know that in contextualizing the individual experiences that happened seventy-five years ago, we would encounter disturbing parallels to what we are witnessing in our world today.

Check out how Jewish Museum Milwaukee found additional photos and documents relating to Hedy Strnad and her family. These additions show the evolution of Stitching History From the Holocaust, but also demonstrate that historical research is never done. There will always be more archives to explore and people to connect with, but each small salient connection like these helps expand our understanding of the lived experience.

JMM occupies a unique niche in the museum world in Milwaukee. We use the Jewish experience to build bridges between groups of people and between eras. We live our tagline “Where Conversations Happen” by looking at multiple perspectives of a topic or issue, by partnering with diverse organizations, by asking visitors to use critical thinking skills to contemplate commonalities and differences of a particular subject over time.

These scenes and accompanying text nag at us. Why the Jews? What power do we have over evil? How do we defend ourselves against irrational governments? How do we protect our most vulnerable citizens? What does it mean to be a refugee? And what responsibilities do we have for those being persecuted?

But how does this mysterious card get put together? That was the big question that I had for the Unger Brothers when I met with them. They described for me an awesome process led by volunteers that has been going on for almost 80 years.

My mother and grandmother started playing Mahj with the other wives in their officers’ wives’ clubs. The game was so widespread among military wives in the 1930s that the wives from the Army Air Corps field in Ohio, now known as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, decided to write down the rules of play in order to “allow players to transfer from base to post to port and still play the same game.”

My love affair with Mahj Jongg began in 1957. In my senior year of high school three of my friends and I decided to start a Mahj Jongg club. After all wasn’t it part of our Jewish DNA?. We should be naturals at this complex game.

By: Michael Fishbach I began interning at Jewish Museum Milwaukee a month ago, and last week, I took my first guided tour with a group of students from Rufus King Middle School.  We first toured the visiting exhibit, which consisted… Read More

All of this energy followed me on my trip to open Stitching History in New York. The audience in New York expands the reach of this story considerably. The curation and design in New York is just lovely, adding elements to the exhibit that enliven the story–I love the addition of Hedy’s Signature to the wall and the ingenious way in which they MJH team made the fabrics accessible to touch.

1936. Lodz. The Szyk Haggadah, The Family at the Seder.     The Szyk Haggadah Reminds Us of Struggles Past and Present By Molly Dubin, Jewish Museum Milwaukee Curator Passover and politics.  It seems rather fitting that as we find… Read More

Arthur Szyk was an immigrant to the US, but felt deeply for African Americans and portrayed their struggle in his artwork.

By: Patti Sherman-Cisler, Executive Director, Jewish Museum Milwaukee This editorial appeared in the February 2016 edition of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle.   The Jewish Museum Milwaukee will present the work of mid-20th century artist and activist Arthur Szyk, (pronounced “Shik”),… Read More