Judah L. Magnes Museum

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The Judah L. Magnes Museum is a Jewish museum in Berkeley, California. It was founded in 1962 and named not for its founders, Seymour and Rebecca Fromer, but for Judah L. Magnes, an Oakland native who became a Jewish activist. Judah Magnes was a co-founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a well-known rabbi, political activist and speaker.

The Museum has a large collection of art and ritual objects, as well as containing the Blumenthal Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Western Jewish History Center. Not only does the WJHC document the history of the Jewish community in the thirteen western United States, with a special focus on the San Francisco Bay Area, but it also has a large collection of original records, papers, correspondence, and photographs that documents the history of the Museum, from its beginning to the present. The Center also contains copies of all the museum's publications and a detailed archive of its exhibition history.

The space available for the Museum has grown over time. It started in one room over top of the Parkway Movie Theater off Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland and eventually expanded to its present site in the former Burke Mansion down the road from the Claremont Resort and Spa in Berkeley. The Magnes has grown to be the third-largest Jewish museum in the United States, with plans to expand to a new facility in downtown Berkeley in 2009.

The exhibit My America opened at the Magnes on June 5th, 2006. The exhibit was on tour from the Jewish Museum in New York. Known for promoting the avant-garde since the Museum's inception in the early sixties, the Magnes also recently launched the REVISIONS series of installations, including such artists as Ann Chamberlain, Naomie Kremer, Larry Abramson, Jonathon Keats, Amy Berk, and Shahrokh Yadegari, as guest-curated by Lawrence Rinder.

In September 2007, the Magnes opened the exhibition They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust. Mayer July was the resulting project of a collaboration between Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor of performance studies and folklore at NYU, and her father, Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in Poland in 1916. With Barbara's encouragement, Mayer taught himself to paint while in his seventies and produced a series of sixty-five paintings chronicling life in the Polish town of Opatów before the Holocaust.