The Jewish Museum has reopened with a £10m remake - and new stories. Simon Tait reports
It’s hard to present something like the Jewish Museum without making it a kind of sectarian memory bank, said Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director. “But it’s not just for religious people, not just for Jews, it’s for all people interested in their history and in their shared past” he said.
He and Nigella Lawson were opening the museum behind its genteel Georgian terrace façade after a £10m transformation. The space has been tripled, the museum having been able to acquire an old piano factory.
It has enabled them to do more justice to their colletions, and those of the London Museum of Jewish Life with which the Jewish Museum amalgamated in 1995.
It is a story, as Nigella Lawson said, of a people maintaining its distinctiveness but also being deeply interwoven in the society around; a lesson, Yentob added, that is relevant to all immigrant issues, currently to the French government’s confrontation with its Muslims of the wearing of the burka. “It’s a debate that has to happen” he said.
The museum does not debate, however, but sets out its stories clearly with humour, scholarship and sometimes almost unbearable poignancy.
There are four distinct sections, beginning with a multimedia array of a range of contemporary Jewish people and a brief account of them, from a marathon-running great-grandmother who was born in India, to a fourth generation smoked salmon manufacturer, to a taxi driver, to an ex-army engineer commended for her bravey during the 2005 London bombing.
Then, being shown in public for the first time, is a mikveh, a ritual bath dating from about 1270, found in London and the oldest object in the museum. Many of the objects on show now haven’t been on display before.
The Living Faith gallery gives a pragmatic and respectful introduction to Judaism, with a representation of a synagogue, a description of the life rituals of Jewish life, from birth through bar mitzvah, marriage – and divorce – and death. Four rabbis from four different schools of the faith give dissertations on their beliefs, and there are precious Torah scrolls, including a travelling silver scroll made by George III’s silversmith, Frederick Kandler.
The history gallery should begin with the bringing of Jews to this country for the first time by William the Conqueror because they had already proved the huse as businessmen in France, but instead the visitor is greeted by a panel with a few of the personal stories of Jewish immigrants to Britain: the tiny doll Edith Rothstein smuggled in her clothing when she joined the Kinder Transport from Germany to England in 1938; the hazelnuts Simon Berman brought from Lithuania in the 1880s as a souvenir; the Washington Senators baseball Ned Temko brought with him in 1987.
The story of the Jews in Britain is by turns glorious and shameful. Edward I banned them from Britain in 1290 and they did not have their reswidency rights restored until 1656. But during the exclusion Jews had lived, worked and risen in English society, keeping their faith secretly. Elizabeth I had a Jewish physician, Rodrigo Lopez, who was eventually executed, though as a suspected spy.
AI Profile
Peter Jenkinson, cultural broker
Peter Jenkinson gazes over the battlements of the last walled city in Ireland, the oldest walled city in Britain. He’s looking towards the Bogside, where more than 38 years ago British soldiers fired on British civil rights demonstrators and killed 14 of them dying on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The Saville Inquiry into the massacre has just concluded but the report has yet to be published.
Although Derry~Londonderry, as the city is officially known, has been at peace for 15 years and there are no soldiers garrisoned here now, the history refuses to fade – even though the majority of the modest 110,000 population with the official inquiry expected to report this year. Jenkinson hopes to put that particular history in its place: firmly in the past.
He once described himself as part-time showman, part-time labourer, implying that there is little intellectual substance to what he does. His disingenuousness fools nobody: after spending more than 12 years creating and opening the Walsall New Art Gallery, and then moving on to start Creative Partnerships, the kind of nervous hyperactivity of which be became a personification doesn’t just stop.
He is part of a global inquiry of his own devising into culture and conflict and the effects one can have on the other, which has recently taken him many of the world’s hotspots. He was part of Channel 4’s Big Art Project series last year. With CultureLab he is advising on a major new cultural centre in the Middle East, and his consultancy has taken him to Alice Springs, Belfast , Dublin, Hong Kong, Liverpool, Shanghai, Seoul, Gongju and Damascus in the last year or so.
Jenkinson’s preoccupation now is closer to home. As specialist adviser, he is behind the bid of Derry~Londonderry to be the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013.
He is Essex boy made good, going from Bungay Grammar School to Cambridge to read history, and then moving effortlessly into and through the museum profession - Norwich in 1978, Birmingham in 1984, Weybridge 1985, the Grange Museum in Brent in 1987 before landing Walsall in 1989 where his achievements won him an OBE in 2000, the year he opened the £21m New Art Gallery. Creative Partnerships was, he said at the time. CP was nothing less than “a policy for survival in the 21st century” but after 30 months the scheme was funded, launched and losing its fascination for him. “I’m always searching for the next edge” he says.
He has found that edge in Derry, a particularly distressing centre of The Troubles and a city has had a split personality since James I commissioned London’s livery companies to set up trade there with the city, originally Doire meaning oak grove, being renamed Londonderry. These walls are still owned by London.
We might, a moment after they’d seen the Imagine version of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner at he QEH last weekend. I never thought of that weird old totem of a pome as life affirming, rather the opposite, but this was. Imagine is the Southbank’s children’s festival, and the project had involved six London primary schools, 500 kids, the folk band Bellowhead, the poet and performer Lemn Sissay, the storyteller Jan Blake, the Southbank’s’ Pulse singers… tous le monde, and all put together by Shan Maclennan. It was a professional show, and not a little embarrassing for a flinty old hack who found himself at the end weeping silly buckets amidst a sea of bewildered but joyous juniors. And it wasn’t till later I discovered that this had been the brainchild of the writer and jazz musician Keith Shadwick who succumbed to cancer in the summer of 2008 so couldn’t see the final fruition of his brainwave. So if anyone wants an argument for not only preserving arts subsidy but ratcheting it up, this is all you need.
Why all these anodyne ‘debates’ about arts finding? Two this week, another one next week, and we’ll get the same John Knox answer: “Art? We’re for it’. There was a brief moment during the Cultural Leadership panel of Ben Bradshaw, Jeremy Hunt and the LIB Dem Don Foster when Michael Lynch – yes, back on a flying visit from Oz – asked if they would keep the Arts Council, and after they’d all said they would there was an instant in which Bradshaw tossed ‘shoe-horning cronies into jobs’ (Boris Johnson trying to get Veronica Wadley made chair of the London Arts Council) and Hunt tossed back that Labour are past masters at cronyism, but the squall was over as son as it had begun, to everybody’s disappointment. The arts, culture, creativity, whatever, has become so much a political favourite that no one is going to speak against it or for cutting it. But nor will they promise no cuts (except the Lib Dems who won’t have to prove it) because, they say, they don’t have control of the money. The debate should be between Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Vince Cable, but would we get a positive response? ‘Course we would.
Southampton City Council have abandoned their plan to sell three paintings to help pay for a new museum about the Titanic. They had been bombarded by the Tate, the Museums Association, the MLA and probably HLF as well, though they are being more discreet, but it was the word of the Charity Commission that did for the plan. The £15 costs of the new development will be met ‘through other means’, it has been decided, and so the Southampton Save Our Collection Group to celebrate at their party on March 17, but this story will come again. It may not be in Southampton, but the local workers’ union Unison has already called for Newcastle to sell some of the £75m worth of art it owns to avoid cutting jobs in the on-coming Armageddon.
The final four for the shortlist to be the UK’[s first City of Culture in 2013 have been chosen. They are Birmingham, Derry/Londonderry, Norwich and Sheffield.
They were chosen from a long list of 14 by a panel chaired by Phil Redmond, the television producer and creative director of Liverpool in its year as European Cultural Capital in 2008.
“The panel was influenced by the expected step change each city was asked to envisage, if they gained the title and subsequent media spotlight” he said.
“It was a hard choice but also heartening that all bidders had recognised the power of culture to bring people together; to work collectively within existing resources for a common goal and bring into being networks that may not have existed before.”
The four will now have to make final bids to be in by the end of May, and in the summer Redmond’s panel will see presentations from them before announcing the eventual winner.
Charities Commission block plan dispose of art to raise funds
Southampton City Council have abandoned their plan to sell works of art to help pay for a new museum.
The proceeds from the sales would have gone towards the creation of a £15m cultural quarter in Southampton City Centre, including a new museum telling the story of Titanic.
A painting and two sculptures in the city’s possession were identified: After the Race by Alfred J. Munnings, estimated to be worth between £2m and £4m; Eve by Auguste Rodin (£1m-£1.5m); and Crouching Woman also by Rodin (£300,000-£400,000).
But the three works were acquired through the Chipperfield Bequest Fund, and it is understood that the Charities Commission have deemed the proposed sale to be contrary to the terms of the fund.
The development is now to be p[aid for “through other means”, the council has decided, and the decision will be seen as a particular triumph for the Save Our Collections group who had alerted the museums community to the intentijon. It was strongly criticised by the Tate, the Museums Assoiation and the ~MLA.
Roy Clare, chief executive of the MLA said: “Southampton tried to rush fences; their decision not to sell is right because they had not developed a proper curatorial case.
“Our advice to them was consistent throughout: ethically, it is perfectly feasible to disperse, dispose and sell elements of collections, but the case needs to be rational and objective.”
ResponseIn response to reports that funding for the arts will inevitably suffer after the election, culture minister Margaret Hodge calls on us to…
If there’s one thing that pretty well everyone agrees upon, it is that the last decade has been a Golden Age. As far as culture goes, you – we – all of us, have all never had it so good.
And the evidence is there across the piece, whether we look at participation numbers, commercial income, creative output or international awards. Despite the credit crunch:
• Cinema admissions in the first half of 2009 were the highest they’d been for seven years.
• West End theatres chalked up a record year for audiences, breaking through the 14 million barrier for the first time.
• English Heritage visitor numbers peaked at 1.2 million last August – and
• Museum attendance grew over three times the national average for all visitor attractions in 2008.
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But this success did not come about by accident. It was made possible by a deliberate act of public policy- more taxpayers’ money, leading to increased and sustained public investment, allowing individual talent to flourish and enabling infrastructure to be renewed.
Since 1997, we have increased our investment in the Arts by 83% in real terms and our investment in museums by 69%. It’s because of that investment that the Arts Council was able to report that new work now makes up 47% of the repertoire in subsidized theatre as compared to a mere 14% a decade ago.
And it’s because we chose to fund free admissions to all our national museums, that attendance at those museums which previously charged has grown by a massive 124% since 2002.
And more recently, people felt we had finally put to bed the false dichotomy between access and excellence. Indeed, there is now a wide consensus that it is only through excellence in artistic and cultural endeavour that we can encourage greater participation in - and enjoyment of - culture, heritage and the arts.
The last decade has also seen a coming together of the arguments deemed important to justify public investment in the sector. More and more people understand the intrinsic value of culture and yearn for the experiences which will enrich their souls and even transform their lives.
At the same time, there is wider recognition of the role arts and culture can play across our lives:
• Stimulating creativity as children develop their skills and capabilities in schools,
• Creating more attractive places where people want to live and work;
• Using cultural investment as a catalyst for regeneration;
• Or, supporting the creative sector as a key growth sector of our modern economy.
Nalgao’s Outside In symposium highlighted partnerships, commissions and contracting out as ways of combating the expected severe cuts on local authority arts funding. Ailsa Anderson of One North East and James Waters of Brighton-based Festivals and Events International outline how, together, following the success of the culture10 programme of festivals and events, they are creating a service that will work with local authorities across the region, why, and what they hope it will achieve.
Festivals have been identified as the ideal medium for bringing communities together, attracting visitors and changing perceptions, and since its creation in 2004 the NewcastleGateshead led culture10 programme has been supporting ambitious, challenging and transformational events, increasing participation and developing new audiences. Programmed events have animated North East England’s many and different public spaces and cultural institutions, and helped to build the region’s national and international profile.
But in April 2010, as the scheduled commitment to the Culture10 programme by One North East comes to an end, the Regional Development Agency, (one of the five core funders of the programme which also include Northern Rock Foundation, Arts Council England, Newcastle City Council, Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council), will embark on a new, innovative approach to maximise the economic impact that events can bring to the North East.
Increasing pressures on public sector budgets, as foreseen at the Outside In symposium, are one of a number of factors that have led One North East to take a new approach, but rather than simply absorbing difficult financial impacts, the RDA wanted to establish the region as an international player in festivals and events and to ensure that existing events were encouraged and enabled to develop their potential, but also to make sure that assets in the North East were being used to the full.
So the North East Festivals and Events Service has been established, delivered by a consortium led by Festivals and Events International and starting next month after a six month set up, working with a dozen local authorities – Darlington, Durham, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside, Northumberland, Hartlepool, South Tyneside, Stockton-on-Tees, Redcar & Cleveland, and Sunderland - across the sub-regions of Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, Durham and the Tees Valley and with private sector event management companies.:
The NEFES moves forward into its first festival season with a series of purposes:
To run a support service for both existing and new events;
To make available mentoring for events that are still in development;
To be a bridge between events and funders, based on the service’s understanding of funders’ priorities;
To support (including One North East) in its decision making around its single programme investment;
And to act as an advocate for the north east as a major destination for festivals and events.
The Cultural Leadership Programme have announced the first Women to Watch list
Here it is, the 50 top women in the arts and cultural industries chosen by their peers, devised to be a discreet battering ram that will help shatter that apparently impermeable glass ceiling.
The Women to Watch list is compiled by an independent panel chaired by Woman’s Hour’s Jenni Murray – the other judges were Kwame Kwei Armah, Wayne McGregor, Liz Forgan, Sarah Weir and Jenny Sealey and is the first of what will probably be a biennial list. It’s all under the auspices of the Arts Council’s Cultural Leadership Programme.
There are plenty of known names there – you might pick out Claire Whitaker of Serious, Maria Balshaw of the Whitworth Gallery, Roanne Dods of Rose Orange (previously of the Jerwood Foundation) or Vanessa Reed of the PRS For Music Foundation – and you’re bound to fail to find a few you think should be there. Where is Jude Kelly of the South Bank, for instance, or Gwyn Miles of Somerset House, or Julia Peyton-Jones of the Serpentine, or Munira Mira the London mayor’s office, or Sue Hoyle of the Clore Leadership Programme?
The truth is that the list could only be compiled from nominations, called for in November with a deadline of January 29 for an announcement on March 10 to coincide with International Women’s Day. “I think next time we might allow ourselves a bit more time – there was a great rush of applicants on the last morning” says Hilary Carty.
But these are not those at the pinnacle of what their careers ought to amount to; they are the women whose peers and the panel believe have more to offer, if only they get the opportunity.
As it was, there were almost 200 nominations and the criteria were that they should be emerging to mid career leaders – “women who have the potential to make a national impact in senior leadership roles such as artistic director, chief executive, managing director, chair or organisational lead” – and they should be women working within the creative or cultural sector within the U.K.
Jenni Murray says the judging was no push over, working from a long list of about 100. “We had an afternoon of tough debate, it was a very hard fought for list.
“It’s a very good range of age, career and ethnic background. We were given no criteria. We were hoping we would make up a good range of women at the beginning of their careers and some in the middle who were suffering from the difficulty we all know of getting further in our careers.
“There are plenty of very talented women in the arts, but too many who just aren’t making it to the top. I’m not much of a fan of positive discrimination because that can be counter-productive, but I do approve of positive action and I think that includes helping women with the right support and training to get to the top. I hope it can have an impact” she says.
So, not a list of role models in a rather passive process of giving young wannabes icons to aim to emulate. These women do not want to be like anyone else, they simply want to be allowed to do the best they can.
The list is the brainchild of the CLP’s director Hilary Carty who was increasingly frustrated at seeing, in a sector widely thought to be fairer to women than most others, how many women were driving arts and cultural organisations and how few were at the top of them. “If we want the UK to have dynamic creative and cultural industries and compete globally” says her chair, David Kershaw, “we must take this issue seriously and create an environment within the sector which encourages and recognises the work of emerging women leaders”. Despite culture being worth £56.5 billion and 8% of the overall UK economy, there is a lack of investment in leadership in the creative and cultural sector generally and in particular in the talents of women.
Carty is pleased with the list, however. “I’m delighted with it, especially the range” she says. “When you start you can’t be sure how a thing like this is going to take off, whether people will get the idea or not, but I think this shows that they are.”
At the RIBA launch of the list Carty had gathered a team to give some on the spot guidance and mentoring to all the nominees, but what she wants is for the group itself to create a mentoring network that will be self-supporting.
One of those on the list is Pim Baxter, deputy director the National Portrait Gallery, was brought across the river eight years ago from the National Theatre where she had been head of marketing. “I am delighted to be on this list and to be in such amazing company as the other 49 individuals” she says. “What I think it shows is this is just one set of 50, but that there are so many women doing great jobs in the cultural sector, who are also ‘women to watch’ (and of course some are going to be better at promoting themselves than others), that one could think of many, many more groups of 50, even amongst ones own colleagues or teams”, and she says she’s keen to make use of some of the mentoring on offer.
Jane Finnis runs the very successful Culture 24 website, set up by Chris Smith when he was culture secretary ten years ago. At 44 and with two small children, she feels she is nowhere near fulfilling potential, but where can she go to do that?
“When you’re running an organisation like this it’s very rare to get professional feedback, particularly when you’re at the top of a little tree” she says. “It’s tough, and it’s good to have some recognition from people I have respect for. You don’t realise how few opportunities there are for women to get training and mentoring, and that that’s included in this scheme that is very exciting. Women are used to being advocates for the things they feel passionate about, and I they need to apply some of that advocacy skill to themselves.”
That’s a theme of which Jenni Murray has recently become aware. Her son, currently in Australia, wanted her help in creating a CV. “I realised I didn’t know where to start. And when he turned to his Australian mates they came up with something completely different from what I would have.
“The truth is that the British don’t know how to show off, they don’t shout about themselves, and British women are ten times worse - they don’t want to push themselves forward. It’s something we have to get over.”
Fifty Women to Watch…
Bridget Nicholls
Director, PESTIVAL, Southbank.
Claire Whitaker
Director, Serious.
Daisy Heath
Head of planning, National Theatre.
Delia Barker
Senior officer, dance, Arts Council England, London Region.
Emma Stenning
Executive director, Bristol Old Vic.
Emma Underhill
Director and curator, UP Projects.
Freda Matassa
Freelance museum consultant and art collections manager.
Gail Parmel
Artistic director, ACE dance & music.
Geraldine Collinge
Director of events and exhibitions, Royal Shakespeare Company
Helen Macnamara
Deputy director, future planning, Department for Culture Media and Sport
Hermione Way
Founder of newspepper.com and techfluff.tv.
Indy Hunjan
Director, Kala Phoo.
Jane Finnis
Director, Culture24.
Jacqui O’Hanlon
Director of education, Royal Shakespeare Company.
Jenni Lewin-Turner
Director and creative producer, Urbanflo Creative Consultancy.
Carol Bell
Head of culture and major events NewcastleGateshead Initiative.
Juliana Farha
Founder and Managing Director, Dilettante Music Limited.
Julie Tait
Director, Kendal Arts International.
Kate Bellamy
Head of strategy & communications, National Museum Directors’ Conference.
Kate McGrath
Director, Fuel.
Laura Sillars
Programmes Director, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).
Liz Pugh
Producer, Walk the Plank.
Lucy Worsley
Chief curator, Historic Royal Palaces.
Maria Balshaw
Director. Whitworth Gallery, Manchester.
Maria Oshodi
Artistic Director, Extant.
Maxine Miller
Library and information manager, Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).
Cathy Woolley
Participation producer, Southbank Centre.
Melanie Abrahams
Director, Renaissance One and Tilt; guest curator, Bluecoat.
Moira Buffini
Writer-in-residence, National Theatre.
Nike Jonah
Senior diversity officer, Decibel project manager.
Pim Baxter
Deputy director and director of communications and development, National Portrait Gallery.
Purni Morell
Head of studio, National Theatre.
Rachel Holmes
Head of literature and spoken word, Southbank Centre.
Rachel Millward
CEO and creative director, Birds Eye View Film Festival.
Rebecca Dawson
Vision 2010 project manager, Arts Council England.
Roanne Dods
Director, Rose Orange.
Ruth Daniel
Co-founder and director, Un-Convention and Fat Northern Records.
Claire Cunningham
Independent choreographer and performer.
Ruth Gill
Head of interpretation, Historic Royal Palaces.
Ruth Gould
CEO, DaDa – Disability & Deaf Arts.
Sally Goldsworthy
Director, Discover.
Sarah Munro
Artistic manager, Tramway.
Seonaid Daly
Producer, Glasgow Film Festival.
Sharnita K Athwal
Director, Shaanti Live: Music: Play!
Owner, The Hockley Bar & Kitchen.
Sharon Watson
Artistic director, Phoenix Dance Theatre.
Siobhán Bales
Managing director, bgroup.
Sophie Thomas
Founding director, thomas.matthews communication design.
Theresa Heskins
Artistic director, New Vic Theatre.
Clare Hudson
Founder and managing director, In4merz.com;
managing director, Hudson PR.
Vanessa Reed
Co-director, PRS For Music Foundation.
