Pilgrimage to a Tenement: American Jewish History for Popular Audiences

Each year the Lower East Side Tenement Museum welcomes over 220,000 visitors. While the museum is not a Jewish museum, 75% of its tours focus at least in part on the stories of Jewish families or storekeepers who lived and worked in its tenement buildings. As such, then, it has become, perhaps unwittingly, one of the most prominent sites in which audiences—both Jewish and non-Jewish—encounter American Jewish history. In July of 2017, its new exhibit on post-WW2 families will include the Epstein family, Holocaust survivors. It will be the first museum in the United States to focus on how Jewish refugees built new lives once in America, and how they did so amidst Italian, Puerto Rican, Chinese, as well as Jewish neighbors. This paper explores how the museum’s effectiveness as a Jewish museum paradoxically rests on the museum founders’ aversion to being viewed solely as a Jewish museum, and their strident desire to include as diverse a swath of immigration as possible in its tenement exhibits. This approach brings to light both the tensions and opportunities inherent in American Jewish identity.