Museums, Memory, And The Imaginary: Jewish Homes Of The Past In Contemporary Artworks

Abstract: Museums provide prominent encounters with past Jewish domesticity. The most provocative encounters appear in contemporary art installations by Christian Boltanski, Simon Fujiwara, Maira Kalman and Alex Kalman, Elaine Reichek, Ellen Rothenberg, the Sala-Manca Group, and Maya Zack that variously evoke, conjure, or problematize Jewish home life in former times. Unlike historic residences or re-creations staged for historical or ethnographic exhibitions, these artworks are entirely “at home” in the museum, where they simultaneously present and interrogate notions of Jewish domesticity. This attention to artworks looks beyond the primary focus of most historians’ studies of Jewish homes, which examine the social and cultural contexts of actual houses of a bygone era, or the work of scholars in various fields who explore Jewish domestic practices as expressions of a collective identity. The artworks in question scrutinize what it has meant for Jews to feel “at home” and reveal how the imagination figures in representations of bygone Jewish domestic life as memory sites.