The Southern Jewish Experience

The Southern Jewish Experience

NOLA’S NEWEST MUSEUM TELLS STORIES OF THIS REGION’S THRIVING JEWISH COMMUNITIES

James Fox-Smith

Stepping inside the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience (MSJE) in New Orleans, which opened in late May, visitors familiar with other major American Jewish museums—the Breman Museum in Atlanta, The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—will find that a very different experience awaits. “We believe we’re the only museum with a pure focus on telling the history of Jews across the South,” explained Jay Tanenbaum. The born-and-raised Southerner, now living in Atlanta, is the Chairman of the MSJE Board, and he has been involved with the project to build a museum to the Southern Jewish experience, literally, since his childhood.

As a youth growing up in Dumas, Arkansas, Tanenbaum had an experience shared by many of the approximately 1.2 million Jews living across the American South, which was attending one of the network of Jewish summer camps established to foster a sense of continuity among the widely scattered members of the oldest Abrahamic faith. Tanenbaum attended the Henry S. Jacobs Camp in Utica, Mississippi, where the original Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience opened in 1986 with a mission of supporting the preservation of Jewish culture in the Deep South. By 2000, faced with the declining size of Jewish institutions in Southern towns, the MSJE had evolved to become the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL), and had become an important source of Judaic services and cultural programs to Jewish communities across a thirteenstate Southern region. In 2012, when the Jacobs Camp closed its doors, camp alumnus Jay Tanenbaum, serving as Chairman of the ISJL at the time, launched a search to find a new home for the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. Nine years later, New Orleans is that home.

The original of two Jewish parading organizations in New Orleans, Krewe du Jieux became famous for their satire and decorated bagels.

Courtesy of the MJSE.

Asked to describe what sets the MSJE apart from other Jewish museums, Tanenbaum pointed to the different patterns of settlement among the Jewish communities it represents. “When you compare the stories of Southern Jewish communities with the more typical story of Jews coming to the United States, the whole experience is different,” he said. Tanenbaum explained that Jews settling in large cities like New York, Chicago, or Baltimore—where large Jewish communities already existed— often joined enclaves, where there were already synagogues, kosher butchers, and a community of people who understood their customs and traditions. “It was easier to continue to practice Judaism the way they had before. So even if it wasn’t a matter of observance, in those cities Jews lived and associated with each other.”

“But in the South, when Jews came, they might have been the only, or one of the only, Jewish families in a community. So, they went and lived among their Christian neighbors. They assimilated, were respected, became successful, and remained Jewish,” he said. How Southern Jews managed to retain their identity and assimilate, while proudly living lives with Jewish values: that is the question the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience sets out to explore.

For visitors, exploration takes shape across nine thousand square feet of exhibit space crafted by the worldrenowned design firm Gallagher & Associates, creators of the exhibits at the National WWII Museum, the National Archives, and the National Museum of American Jewish History. Working with some four thousand artifacts including Judaica, household items, business records, photographs, letters, and other ephemera, museum staff and a corps of thirty historians, writers, and rabbis have created interactive exhibits that engage, educate, and entertain. “That’s the theme of the museum: America welcomed immigrants against a difficult history,” Tanenbaum said. “People went to these places in the Bible Belt, where you might imagine it would be a very different story. And were successful. It’s demonstrative of what should happen in America.” He continued, “There are hundreds of towns across the South where this is the same story: Jews came to town, built the communities together with—not apart from—other members. They built strong relationships. We want people to think about their own background and culture, and the people they know who are different from them. And how these different threads form the fabric of America.”

msje.org