NEW YORK, NY (December 15, 2020) – The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center will present the 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) virtually from January 13 through 26. Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, NYJFF each year presents the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. The festival’s 2021 virtual lineup showcases 17 features and seven shorts, including the latest works by dynamic voices in international cinema, as well as the World Premiere of the new restoration of a 1939 classic by Edgar G. Ulmer.

The Jewish Museum will present Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, an exhibition that explores Bourgeois’s art and writings in light of her complex and ambivalent relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition will showcase a focused selection of Bourgeois’s original psychoanalytic writings — many of them presented to the public for the first time — along with approximately 40 works from throughout her career, including the Personages of the late 1940s; the organic forms in plaster and latex of the 1960s; the pivotal installation The Destruction of the Father (1974); Passage Dangereux (1997), the largest of the artist’s Cell installations; and the fabric sculptures from the last 15 years of her life. The exhibition will be on view at the Jewish Museum from April 16 through September 12, 2021.

New York, NY, November 13, 2020—Foods such as bagels, gefilte fish, babka, and matzo balls can be a potent symbol of Jewishness, frequently used to signify Jewish identity on television. The exhibition Let’s Eat: Jews and Food on Television illustrates this idea, bringing together excerpts from television and streaming programs from 1979 to 2018, including Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Sex and the City, among others. Shown as part of Scenes from the Collection on the third floor of the Jewish Museum, Let’s Eat: Jews and Food on Television will be on view November 13, 2020 through June 14, 2021. 

New York, NY, October 14, 2020 — The Jewish Museum will present Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine, an exhibition exploring how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture from 1930 to 1960. The exhibition will be on view from March 19 through July 11, 2021.

New York, NY, September 24, 2020 —The Jewish Museum is presenting We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz upon reopening to the public on Thursday, October 1, 2020. Originally scheduled to open in March 2020, We Fight to Build a Free World is an exhibition curated by Jonathan Horowitz, a New York-based artist who for three decades has made work that engages critically with politics and culture. Under his direction, the exhibition looks at how artists have historically responded to the rise of authoritarianism and xenophobia as well as racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry. On view through February 7, 2021, the exhibition also addresses issues surrounding immigration, assimilation, and cultural identity. Admission is free through December 31, 2020; timed tickets required. 

The Jewish Museum will present We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz which looks at how artists have responded to the rise of intolerance and authoritarianism, addressing issues surrounding immigration, assimilation, and cultural identity.

The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center will present the 29th annual New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF), January 15–28, 2020. Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, NYJFF each year presents the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. Featuring new work by dynamic voices in international cinema as well as film revivals, the festival’s 2020 lineup includes 30 wide-ranging and exciting features and shorts from the iconic to the iconoclastic, many of which will be screening in their world, U.S., and New York premieres.

The Jewish Museum will present Signs and Symbols: The Zodiac, featuring works from the Museum’s collection that depict the astrological signs. Jewish communities, adapting and adopting local practices over the centuries, incorporated these symbols into ceremonial objects, synagogue architecture, and art even though rabbinic authorities reject astrology as part of Jewish practice.

The Jewish Museum will present Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States, from November 1, 2019 through January 17, 2021. The exhibition includes three decades of Feinstein’s work in sculpture, painting, and video, as well as a panoramic wallpaper, a major new commission, and the artist’s maquettes for sculpture. Taken together, the works emphasize the artist’s fascination with dualities: her investigations of masculinity and femininity or good and evil echo her formal explorations of balance and precariousness or positive and negative space. Feinstein’s art follows myriad lines of inquiry, but the idea of the feminine is central. She has made a sustained examination of the many ways this concept is manifested culturally. Female protagonists and figures proliferate in her work and bind it together across diverse media.

The Jewish Museum will present Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art, the first exhibition to explore the remarkable career of Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), the influential American art dealer and founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York City. A pioneer in the field and one of New York’s first female art dealers, Halpert propelled American art to the fore at a time when the European avant-garde still enthralled the world. The artists she supported — Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler key among them — became icons of American modernism. Halpert also brought vital attention to overlooked nineteenth-century American artists, such as William Michael Harnett, Edward Hicks, and Raphaelle Peale, as well as little-known and anonymous folk artists. With her revolutionary program at the Downtown Gallery, her endless energy, and her extraordinary business acumen, Halpert inspired generations of Americans to value the art of their own country, in their own time.

The Jewish Museum will present Masterpieces and Curiosities: The Benguiat Collection, featuring over 30 works from the Museum’s H. Ephraim and Mordecai Benguiat Family Collection. This collection of 300 examples of decorative and ceremonial art related to Jewish culture is one of the formative groups of the Jewish Museum’s collection. The exhibition includes objects ranging from a newly restored Torah ark curtain from Istanbul (ca. 1735) to an ornately embroidered silk eighteenth-century pillowcase for the Passover Seder from Bulgaria.