Join us on a virtual, livestreamed walking tour of Paris. Our journey will take us all the way back to the Middle Ages, where we'll explore the beginnings of the Jewish community in the city. We'll then explore Marais, where the heart of the community lies. Our guide will delve deep into the center of the neighborhood, known as "the Pletzl" in Yiddish, where we'll learn about the community during the 19th century. We'll then learn about the Nazi period, beginning with the occupation in 1940 and the first convoys to the concentration camps in 1942. We'll see the Shoah Memorial and the synagogue of Pave Street, where we will pay our respects and honor the memories of those who suffered during this tragic time. Lastly, we'll wrap up our tour by exploring the vibrant Jewish community in the city today, and life on the bustling Rue des Rosiers. Co-presented with Wowzitude.

The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of "feminized" American Jewish supplemental learning, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was too feminized, saccharine, and dependent on Christian paradigms. 

In Jewish Sunday Schools, Laura Yares traces the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century and shows that this was not the reality. In addition, Yares argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of these precursors to Hebrew School.

How do we tell our family’s story? Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage for an afternoon celebrating family (mishpachah in Hebrew) and the stories and culture that we inherit. The 2024 Mishpachah Festival explores the evolution and multifaceted cultural legacies of Jewish immigrant experiences. Physically set overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the Festival takes on extra meaning as we mark one hundred years since the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and its reverberations for global Jewry. This year’s festival provides opportunities for adults and families of all ages to engage with genealogy, learn Jewish languages, and reflect on how we tell our individual and collective stories.

Karmela Waldman is an eighty-something psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor. Her son, Joel Waldman, is a successful broadcast journalist. After a discontented Joel chooses to leave his network news job, he gets a crazy idea for the next step in his career: what if he and his elderly mother did a podcast together? Things get off to a bumpy start as the mother-son duo struggle to figure out the art of podcasting, but they master the format and watch as the show becomes a wildly popular true-crime hit. 

Along the way, the two discover things about each other they never knew. Joel is stunned to learn that Karmela survived World War II by hiding in a boys' Catholic school. Karmela also sheds light on the emotional struggles she endured when Joel's older brother died and how she's struggling with the loss of her husband. Mother and son engage frankly and movingly with each other for the first time as adults, discussing child-rearing, aging, illness, death, and the secrets to enjoying life no matter how complicated it gets.

Joel and Karmela will be in conversation about Joel's book Surviving the Survivor: A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist & My Podcast Co-Host. Moderated by Jim Axelrod, CBS News Senior Correspondent.

Karmela Waldman is an eighty-something psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor. Her son, Joel Waldman, is a successful broadcast journalist. After a discontented Joel chooses to leave his network news job, he gets a crazy idea for the next step in his career: what if he and his elderly mother did a podcast together? Things get off to a bumpy start as the mother-son duo struggle to figure out the art of podcasting, but they master the format and watch as the show becomes a wildly popular true-crime hit. 

Along the way, the two discover things about each other they never knew. Joel is stunned to learn that Karmela survived World War II by hiding in a boys' Catholic school. Karmela also sheds light on the emotional struggles she endured when Joel's older brother died and how she's struggling with the loss of her husband. Mother and son engage frankly and movingly with each other for the first time as adults, discussing child-rearing, aging, illness, death, and the secrets to enjoying life no matter how complicated it gets.

Joel and Karmela will be in conversation about Joel's book Surviving the Survivor: A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist & My Podcast Co-Host. Moderated by Jim Axelrod, CBS News Senior Correspondent.

In the middle of the twentieth century, good cameras became smaller and lighter, enabling street photographers to roam alleyways, ride elevated trains and subways, and stroll beaches in the summertime to capture daily life with urgency and intimacy. Deborah Dash Moore's book Walkers in the City showcases the distinct urban vision that working-class Jewish photographers produced with these new cameras on New York City's streets and in public spaces.

Drawing on the experiences of and photographs by a generation of young Jewish photographers who belonged to the New York Photo League, Moore offers a new perspective on New York as seen through their eyes - a cityscape of working-class people and democratizing public transit. With their cameras, they pictured Gotham's abrasive social milieu and its evanescent textures and light, creating an archive of vernacular images of city life and a distinctive tradition of street photography that would be widely imitated.

In Jewish Life in Medieval Spain, Jonathan Ray explores the Jewish experience in medieval Spain from the dawn of Sephardic society in the ninth century to the expulsion of 1492. An important contribution of the book is the integration of the rise and fall of Jewish life in Muslim al-Andalus into the history of the Jews in medieval Christian Spain. It traces the collapse of Jewish life in Muslim Spain, the emigration of Andalusi Jewry to the lands of Christian Iberia, and the long and difficult confluence of these two distinct Jewish subcultures.

Focusing on internal developments of Jewish society, the book offers a narrative of Jewish history from the inside out, bringing to light the various divisions and rivalries within the Jewish community. This approach, in turn, allows for a deeper understanding of the complex relations between Spanish Jews and their Muslim and Christian neighbors. Ray's original perspective on the Jewish experience is particularly instructive when considering the widescale anti-Jewish riots of 1391. The combination of violence and mass conversion of the Jews irrevocably shifted the dynamics of interreligious relations as well as those within the Jewish community itself. Yet even in the wake of these tragic events, the Jews of Spain continued to flourish, fostering a culture that they would carry into exile and that would preserve the memory of Jewish Spain for centuries to come.

Visitors have access to all exhibitions in the Museum at any time during opening hours. Click here to see all exhibitions on view.

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We provide free admission to Holocaust Survivors, active members of the military, first responders, and NYC DOE K-12 students. If this applies to you, please contact us at 646-437-4202 to schedule your visit. 

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When the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Fredy Hirsch was a nineteen-year-old German Jew - and openly gay. He was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto and later Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, he set up a day care center, became much admired, and never hid his sexuality. Director Rubi Gat's film Dear Fredy tells the story of Hirsch's remarkable life and mysterious death - which happened on the eve of a revolt that never came to pass.

The fates of lesbian women in Nazi Germany have long been contested. When the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism opened in Berlin in 2008 it was an occasion for protest. Lesbian activists were frustrated that the monument focused exclusively on the fates of gay men, insinuating that women had not also faced persecution. This talk by Samuel Clowes Huneke, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, recounts several life stories of lesbians who experienced the Nazi dictatorship, highlighting the many trajectories that queer women followed in those twelve years. It argues that lesbians did, in fact, face persecution, ranging from everyday harassment and surveillance all the way to imprisonment in concentration camps. At the same time, the talk recovers these women’s agency, contending that many of them resisted fascism with solidarity that cut across lines of class, race, and gender. 

Discover the vibrant culture of Jewish Budapest on this livestreamed, virtual walking tour. Our guide will bring us through the heart of the historic Jewish quarter of Pest - one of the city center's most intriguing areas. We'll see Europe's largest synagogue, the magnificient Dohány Street Synagogue, and explore the history of Pest's Jewish community. We'll learn about the community's origins, why congregations separated, and the differences between Neolog and Orthodox Jews. You'll be fascinated by the rich heritage of this thriving community, which is currently 100,000 strong. Co-presented with Wowzitude.

Selfhelp Community Services, UJA-Federation of New York, Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust present:

Witness Theater: WE ARE HERE

This unique performance is the culmination of seven months of heartfelt collaboration between five Holocaust survivors and sixteen students. It honors and shares the survivors’ stories, celebrates these extraordinary individuals, and highlights the life-changing lessons they have imparted to the students. The performance is created based on the stories told by the Holocaust survivors to the high school students. On the stage, the survivors will be narrators while students will re-enact their wartime experiences.

We hope you will join us as we bear witness.

Selfhelp Community Services, UJA-Federation of New York, Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust present:

Witness Theater: WE ARE HERE

This unique performance is the culmination of seven months of heartfelt collaboration between five Holocaust survivors and sixteen students. It honors and shares the survivors’ stories, celebrates these extraordinary individuals, and highlights the life-changing lessons they have imparted to the students. The performance is created based on the stories told by the Holocaust survivors to the high school students. On the stage, the survivors will be narrators while students will re-enact their wartime experiences.

We hope you will join us as we bear witness.

Professor Rabea Benhalim will present on the comparative features of Jewish and Islamic law. She will discuss the historical relationship of Jewish and Islamic legal scholars, the shared features of each religious legal system, and the continued development of each within the modern, American context.

Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.

Brinn will be in conversation about her book with Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The Downtown Beats” is Church Street School for Music and Art’s free adult chorus in Battery Park City. For over ten years this chorus has welcomed all those that love to sing, regardless of experience, to join in the fun and community. Now around 20 members strong, The Downtown Beats regularly perform in recitals and at local events.

This May, they are excited to partner with the Museum of Jewish Heritage to bring a free evening of music to the residents of BPC and Lower Manhattan and highlight the hard work of these neighborhood choral volunteers. On Thursday, May 2nd at 7 PM join them for a concert celebrating peace, love and joy through pop and folk music. Directed by Church Street School founder, Dr. Lisa Ecklund-Flores, this collaborative event, held in the beautiful Museum theater, promises to be enjoyable for all. Please join us!

In The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World, diplomat and negotiator Stuart E. Eizenstat recounts America's most significant and consequential negotiations over the past fifty years. Eizenstat discusses the events that led up to the negotiations, the drama that took place around the table, and draws lessons from successful and unsuccessful strategies and tactics. Based around interviews with over 60 key figures in American diplomacy, including former presidents and secretaries of state, and major political figures abroad, he provides an intimate view of diplomacy as today's history. 

Stuart E. Eizenstat has served as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and Deputy Secretary of both Treasury and State. He is also the author of President Carter: The White House Years; The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States; and Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. He is an international lawyer in Washington D.C.

We've all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea about the widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism. Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance - They Fought Back provides a much needed corrective to the myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis. 

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.

In her book Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples' fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides' early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.