Education &PublicPrograms:LunaGoldberg

In another exceptional year, the museum hosted 45 academic lectures, musical performances, creative workshops, panels, and more! This year brought with it partnerships new and old, with organizations including the Miami Jewish Film Festival, Miami New Drama,

Exhibitions Opening Soon

Our annual Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week, presented with Hillel at FIU and the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at FIU, was the largest to date, welcoming over 700 students to campus, the museum, and beyond. Developed in partnership with more than 30 outside organizations and FIU departments, programs ranged from film screenings and talks on fighting racism and antisemitism, to a powerful ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day with descendants of Holocaust survivors.

In partnership with The Wolfsonian, the Jewish Museum FIU was proud to once again participate in the City of Miami Beach STEAM+ Program, delivering arts integrated and STEAMinfused curricula to nearly 500 Miami based publicschool students in 8. Our education department welcomed students back to the museum for person field trips and dispatched educators to 14 M Miami Beach for multiple program touchpoints throughout the school year.

The museum also hosted a number of private school groups for in-person field trips to the museum around themes of immigration, family history, and the museum’s 80 historic stained-glass windows.

Seeing Torah (August 16– October 15) The quilt exhibition by Anita Rabinoff-Goldman is a stunning artistic interpretation of a verse from each of the Torah’s 54 portions done with fabric. The small quilts are a visual commentary illuminating the spiritual, political, and feminist lessons of the 54 portions of the Torah that personally resonated with her as an artist, woman, wife, mother, and grandmother.

Raymond Elman: The Portraits (October 22– March 3, 2024) will feature approximately 20 large-scale, mixed-media portraits, combined with curated video clips of the people in the portraits that can be accessed via QR code on a mobile device (phone or tablet). The exhibition will include portraits of Richard Blanco (5th Presidential Inaugural Poet), Michele Oka Doner (creator of mile-long embedded brass sculpture floor at Miami International Airport), Lourdes Lopez (artistic director of Miami City Ballet) and others.

Sponsored by CARTA | FIU, Elman founded the Inspicio Arts publication platform in 2015. The heart and soul of Inspicio Arts is its 500+ video conversations with impactful people in the arts – Pulitzer Prize recipients, United States Poet Laureates, Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, Tony and Pritzker award winners among others.

Exhibition Highlight

Lady Liberty: A Bonnie Lautenberg Retrospective

JMOF-FIU kicked off the Art Basel season with the premiere of Lady Liberty: A Bonnie Lautenberg Retrospective. The exhibition celebrated images of powerful women including photographs of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Hillary Clinton, alongside conceptual works from her series Artistica: Hollywood Meets Art History. Other prominent works in the exhibition featured the Statue of Liberty in Guns Kill, and Tears of Roe, a 7ft x 7ft light-box showing the Statue of Liberty crying bordered by the dates synonymous with the enactment and repeal of Roe v. Wade. Bonnie, who was married to the late New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, has an extensive background in art and politics and focuses much of her work on American political issues and international relations.

“Our museum was thrilled to premiere this retrospective of Lautenberg’s work,” said Susan Gladstone Pasternack, Executive Director. “The exhibition was so popular that we held it over for an additional month giving us the opportunity to host additional lectures and luncheons featuring Bonnie as guest speaker.” Susan added “every year, our museum’s exhibitions, get attention in the press, on social media, and are talked about everywhere. This can be said about all our exhibits, but this one stood out among the rest.” n addition to the museum’s revamped media relations efforts, JMOF-FIU launched an ad campaign to raise awareness surrounding its History Harvest (reference page 5). We partnered with multiple regional Jewish newspapers around Florida to promote the History Harvest in print advertisements, with the goal of enhancing our collection by filling and updating gaps of Florida Jewish history.

The Giffords Foundation to Protect Americans from Gun Violence chose JMOF-FIU last March to celebrate the organization’s 10th anniversary. The VIP event showcased a new work by Bonnie Lautenberg titled Guns Kill which was on display as part of the exhibition Lady Liberty: A Bonnie Lautenberg Retrospective Lautenberg created the artwork especially for Gabby Giffords. “I added tears streaming down the face of the Statue of Liberty, the two simple words ‘Guns Kill’ on her crown, and locations of mass shootings written across Lady Liberty’s arm. It saddens me deeply that the list of so many places keeps growing where Americans continue to lose loved ones to gun violence” said Lautenberg.

Speakers at the event included Gabby Giffords, Bonnie Lautenberg and former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who is now a senior advisor to Giffords.

Contributors to Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence received a first edition, fine art print of the artwork signed by Bonnie Lautenberg. For additional information, contact Giffords.org.

Our museum offers a plethora of programming, events, and exhibitions that are culturally unmatched. We have interesting and thoughtful panel discussions, fun-filled opening parties, and continuously create art and education exhibitions that are both powerful and beautiful. However, with a vacancy in a communications manager, getting the word out on what was going on was a challenge. In steps Daniel Zayas, a communications professional with experience in some of South Florida’s most prominent agencies. Now, with a new communications manager we are able to implement new and effective strategies to continue to push news and information to the public in meaningful ways.

Since Daniel’s arrival in December, we have secured nearly 20 media placements in online and print publications across the country. From articles covering our book talks in Jewish Journal, to cover stories on Mann About Town Magazine about our history, organic secured media has been strong in getting our name and mission out to the masses.

Our media and marketing efforts don’t stop there. Since the start of 2023, we have coordinated several media interviews with outlets who are looking to cover our museum, its history, and the stories we house within our walls. These long-lead media opportunities include sit downs with journalists for Moment Magazine, Jewish Currents Magazine, WUCF’s show titled Florida Road Trip and more. Look for JMOF-FIU in your favorite news outlet!