In 2018, when an old house in Prague was torn down, a stash of almost 700 works of art by Gertrud Kauders tumbled out of its walls and ceiling, more than 70 years after she had died in an extermination camp. Several of those paintings are now on display at the Jewish Museum in New York City, where renewed galleries offer fresh narratives of the Jewish diaspora.
Located in the historic Felix M. Warburg House on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the museum reopened its third and fourth floors on 24 October after a yearlong renovation. With a combined area of 20,000 sq. ft—half the building’s public space—the redesign was led by United Network Studio in Amsterdam and New Affiliates Architecture in New York. The $14m project is a significant milestone for James Snyder, the director of the Jewish Museum since 2023. In previous roles, he oversaw renewals on a larger scale: a $60m expansion of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984, and a $100m revamp of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2010.
Galleries on the third floor, last updated by Tsao & McKown in 2018, adopt a breezier, more interconnected layout to display items from the museum’s collection. Curated by theme, the rooms present centuries-old artefacts alongside Abstract Expressionist paintings by Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, as well as pieces from living artists that include queer and multicultural voices. In the feminist work What We Bring (2023) by Andi Arnovitz, thousands of laser-cut names of Jewish women—from Natalie Portman to Ruth Bader Ginsburg—pour forth from the artist’s wedding dress.
The fourth floor, previously closed to the public, is anchored by the Robert and Tracey Pruzan Center for Learning, which comprises two art studios, an interactive tactile wall and a simulated archaeological dig for children. The centre, which celebrates its opening on 16 November, is named after its lead donors—an investment banker who co-founded Centerview Partners and a writer who was a longtime interior designer at Cullman & Kravis and a lifestyle consultant on the HBO series Succession.
The new display of 139 menorahs on the fourth floor of the Jewish Museum Kris Graves/Jewish Museum
Also on the fourth floor are the Wilf Family Salon—an event space featuring a faux-woven mural by the Brooklyn-based artist Talia Levitt—additional galleries and a striking show of 139 Hanukkah lamps, housed in a 50ft vitrine that overlooks a double-height gallery below. Drawn from the museum’s collection of more than 1,000 pieces, the nine-branched menorahs are arranged geographically and reflect diverse cultures and stories of hope through the ages. There are lamps made of silver or stone, inspired by Roman tombs or Islamic art, influenced by Rococo or Art Deco, assembled with candlesticks, deconstructed violins or plastic Statues of Liberty.
Some are testaments to creativity born of constraint. One is a piece of trench art crafted from bullet casings and an artillery shell by American soldiers during the Korean War. Another is a hefty wooden creation hewn by a Turkish 15-year-old at a post-war orphanage in France. There is also lighter fare—like the Menurkey, a turkey-shaped menorah that marked the convergence of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving in 2013.
Founded in 1904 by the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Museum moved in 1947 to the Warburg House, a Gilded Age mansion built in the French Gothic style on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park. A $36m renovation in 1993 added a seven-story annex, designed by Kevin Roche, that matched the style of the original architecture. In 2024, the chef David Teyf introduced the second location of his cafe Lox, taking over the basement space vacated by Russ & Daughters, which is wrapped by a Maira Kalman illustrated mural.
