October 16, 200 - What's so Jewish about Jewish art? By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger - It could be a science fiction segment in the spirit of Star Trek but with a twist of gematria, the kabalistic analysis of Hebrew letters. A very abstract, massive and three-dimensional hai - spelled by the letters het and yud - has seemingly landed from space on a historic metropolitan structure. What does this merging of traditional and modern, memorial and forward-looking, and Jewish and general mean?

There in downtown San Francisco, atop a defunct central power station devastated in the 1906 earthquake but revived to bring light back to the city, there is no neon to delineate the gleaming brushed blue steel form that purportedly spells out "alive" or "living" in Hebrew.
But the intention is there, to highlight the new reality that Jewish culture thrives in modernity and is embedded in the city.

Meet the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, opened this summer, a red-brick landmark building-cum-asymmetric metallic wonder.

Unlike a typical Jewish museum, it holds no permanent collections and has no predilection for Jewish artists. Neither is it a shrine to Jewish history, or even to Jewish history in San Francisco.
Instead, themes, ideas, passages and objects from Judaic philosophy, tradition or history are presented through a contemporary lens. In many cases, artists of any background are invited to study the history, ideas and materials for inspiration to create contemporary works for temporary exhibitions, some of them fund-raisers.

Still, the museum takes traveling exhibitions or borrows from collections of more traditional Jewish museums, like the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California.
"We like to have live artists be part of a dialogue that puts contemporary art in a historical context," museum director and CEO Connie Wolf, here recently to study Israeli art with a group of American museum professionals on the Artis tour, tells The Jerusalem Post.

Architect Daniel Libeskind designed the exteriors and 5,850-square-meter interiors that help exude the institution's image as both contemporary art museum and Jewish cultural and educational space for the general public.

The idea of radiating metaphoric and physical light from the former power station and from within a Jewish institution into the larger, multicultural community, informed the design around the word "hai," Libeskind explains in Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum: New Jewish Architecture from Berlin to San Francisco, published by Rizzoli.

"Following the Jewish tradition, according to which letters are not mere signs, but substantial participants in the story they create, the two Hebrew letters of the hai - het and yud - with all their symbolic, mathematical and emblematic nuance, are literally the life source that determined the form of the new museum," he said.

Outside, the blue steel exterior that makes up the letters reflects light and changes hue according to the angle of the sun, the shade and the viewer.
Piano great George Gershwin, who merged jazz, blues and classical music, inspired the interior of the yud character, said Libeskind, a virtuoso piano player who gave up music to pursue architecture. Gershwin's music is multicultural and hopeful, Libeskind explained, as compared to the atonal music of Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg, who inspired the Jewish Museum Berlin design.

Libeskind sought to embody San Francisco's hopeful, energetic and free-spirited community in the special events gallery there, where 36 - double hai - slanted windows built into the blue steel panels create dozens of reflected triangle-shaped light fragments around the cube-shaped space, where musicians and performers also respond to the current exhibition themes. Now on view, for example, 10 musicians and composers created sound installations responding to a kabbalistic approach to various Hebrew letters.

Other influences of gematria are apparent in the entrance, where the word pardess, or orchard, is inscribed in abstracted lights. "It's out of nothing that creation happens," Libeskind wrote. "History does not come to an end but opens to the future."

Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors who lost dozens of family members, Libeskind was inspired by the life symbol in contrast to the death, destruction and trauma that surrounds and informs so many of the Jewish museums in Europe, three of which he has designed. The CJM was his first North American museum.
His design for the Berlin Jewish museum stood out from the hundreds of other proposals in 1988 because it didn't seek to answer but rather to embrace and pose difficult questions of local identity and history with empty spaces and dead ends, jagged lines and slanted walls. In the years since, Libeskind has become renowned across Europe and North America for dozens of museums and public projects incorporating unusual architectural elements to signify historical meaning, including the planned Ground Zero complex in New York.

And like such architects as Frank Gehry and Antonio Gaudi, who also abandoned traditional square rooms and facades that mimic local architecture, Libeskind has been considered a shaker, who created not only new forms, but tourist attractions based on the architecture in addition to the content.

In 1999, two years before Libeskind got recognition for the inauguration of the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2001, he sat with Wolf and the museum trustees and again deliberated: "What is the purpose of a Jewish museum and how should the form follow the function? Does a Jewish museum have to be a history and ethnography museum? Do artists with Jewish backgrounds produce Jewish artworks, even if they have no connection to the Jewish religion or community?"

Jewish museum professionals have struggled with such questions since the founding of the first Jewish museums in Europe. In Vienna at the end of the 19th century, in Lithuania in 1913 and in 1933 Berlin, for example, the Jewish community was also asking how the community should chronicle its ethnic objects and works of art, while also showing its relationship to the city and state.

Art historians, such as Richard Cohen, have argued that Jewish communities in Europe were also juggling a balancing act to legitimize their own unique culture within European society, while proving their patriotism and contributions to larger society. When a Max Liebermann exhibition launched the opening of the Berlin Jewish Museum, just days before Hitler came to power, critics asked, what's so Jewish about that? Liebermann, like many of his neighbors and other artists, was assimilated and regarded as European more than Jewish.

What was true then in parts of Europe, especially in Germany and Austria, is still true in San Francisco. Jews with dual and multi-identities have always been an integrated part of the local culture, while also having a separate ethnic or religious identity, even though many of them are assimilated, says Wolf.

"Many artists don't necessarily want to be defined exclusively by their Judaism," she says. "They each bring different experiences and perspectives to their work."

The Jewish yet multicultural approach is apparent in such projects as an exhibition on spice boxes. Jewish and non-Jewish artists were invited to study the history and texts related to the objects to create their own version of the ritual object. Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim scholars were also invited to reflect on the role of scent in their respective faiths.

Another recent exhibition focused on contemporary interpretations of the first passages of Genesis. Seven contemporary artists, including non-Jews, secular Jews and one Orthodox Jew, flew to New York to study the text and commentaries with Jewish Theological Seminary faculty and chancellor Arnold Eisen, who was previously a Jewish studies professor at Stanford.

"This was one of the most powerful experiences as a museum professional to put artists together to look afresh," says Wolf.

West Coast and Bay Area Judaism is "different," she says, explaining that although Bay Area Jews comprise the third largest Jewish community in the US, they are very assimilated, with a very small Orthodox community, and see themselves as a cultural much more than religious community.
Still, Jewish law, literature and tradition play a "huge" role in the museum, she says.

"We talked to rabbis and public school teachers and discovered that there is a shared desire to reach youth audiences," Wolf says. "Synagogues lose post-bar-mitzva age kids and teachers want their students to be more engaged with culture; we want to touch these youth."

Museum officials are hoping that if the futuristic landing of a Hebrew word on a building roof in the city center isn't enough to catch the attention of young people, the free admission for those under 18 might help.