Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum and Pruzan Family Center for Learning

Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum’s renovated collection galleries trace the rich history of migration, assimilation, and endurance that is the trademark of Jewish culture across the global diaspora through a new and expansive installation. Punctuated by a series of rotating focus exhibitions, Identity, Culture, and Community provides a thematic structure to reflect the diversity of Jewish experience through artworks and decorative objects, ranging from Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi ritual objects that are steeped in tradition, to large-scale painting and sculpture by boundary-pushing modern and contemporary artists, among them Mel Bochner, Nicole Eisenman, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Mark Rothko, Michal Rovner, Miriam Schapiro, and many others.

Focus Galleries

The Museum’s third floor also features a rotation of focused gallery installations that complement the central collection display, including:

Circa 1776: Jews in Colonial America, presented in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, explores themes of Jewish life throughout colonial and post-colonial America
Through August 9, 2026

Art in Focus: Dor Guez, spotlights an installation-based work that mines the personal histories and artifacts of the artist and his family
Through August 9, 2026

Togetherness, which draws photographs from the Museum’s collection of over two thousand images to explore intimacy and togetherness in human relationships across time
Through May 10, 2026

Pearl Bowser and the Black Film Series, which provides an opportunity to rediscover The Black Film series presented at the Jewish Museum in 1970 by Harlem-born filmmaker and scholar Pearl Bowser
Through March 1, 2026

Pruzan Family Center for Learning

The Jewish Museum’s transformed fourth floor features the Pruzan Family Center for Learning, highlighting a floor-to-ceiling display of more than 130 Hanukkah lamps that overlooks the Museum’s renewed double-height gallery and the collection galleries below. Drawn from the Museum’s world-renowned holdings of more than 1,000 lamps from diverse cultures, periods, and places, the installation powerfully represents the diasporic nature of the Jewish experience and represents the largest display of Hanukkah lamps the Jewish Museum has ever presented.

Other key installations include a gallery devoted to portrait and landscape painting, which invites visitors to consider how artists represent people and places to express concepts of identity, migration, acculturation, and assimilation. An objects gallery featuring ancient artifacts, ceremonial objects, and modern sculptural works completes the narrative arc of the Museum’s holdings by documenting the timeline of Jewish cultural creative-making from thousands of years ago to today.

Hands-on activities in the Center include a one-of-a-kind simulated archaeological dig for children, a touch wall exploring materials transformed by artists to create works of art, and two new art studios offering artmaking opportunities for participants of all ages. Finally, the floor features a new salon space, designed to support educational and social programming of all kinds and featuring a rotation of newly commissioned site-specific works, beginning with a mural by Brooklyn-based artist Talia Levitt.

In the Press

“After reconfiguring and rethinking two floors of its Fifth Avenue mansion, the museum reopens to the public … The new “Identity, Culture, and Community” installation gives a sense of the museum’s breadth … present(ing) the narrative of Jewish culture in a nonlinear way, moving from before the destruction of the First Temple to the present, combining materials, periods and categories.”
—The New York Times

“… the exhibit’s 200 items, ranging from antiquity to this decade, are a testament to how Jews, experiencing millennia of diaspora, suffered, thrived and engaged with their neighbors.”
—Forward