The Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History just can’t stop making big announcements these days.
In 2024, it announced it was seeking congressional approval to become a Smithsonian institution. Last year, it revealed that it was adding two new permanent exhibits — one on contemporary antisemitism and another about teaching the biblical creation story to kids.
Now, the museum is making perhaps its biggest announcement yet: It is in the process of raising $100 million, with $50 million already in hand. The money will go toward reimagining the museum’s core exhibition, according to a news release.
“The Weitzman’s core exhibition has walked visitors through the arc of American Jewish history,” said Dan Tadmor, the museum’s president and CEO. “Now we are rethinking how we engage today’s audiences, using technology, media and interactive storytelling to create a museum experience that is more immersive, more family-friendly and more deeply connected to the questions Americans are asking today.”
Weitzman leaders announced the campaign — called The Weitzman Reimagined — ahead of a museum gala at The Plaza in New York City on May 28. At that event, they honored Stuart and Jane Weitzman — the luxury shoe designers whose eight-figure gift saved the museum from bankruptcy in 2021 — with the prestigious, annual, Only in America Award, “given to Jewish Americans who have made enormous contributions to our world,” per the release.
The description fits the Weitzmans as shoe designers; they sold their Stuart Weitzman company to Coach Inc. in 2015 for $530 million. But now it also applies to their contribution to their eponymous museum. That eight-figure gift that came after COVID closures has led to all this.
In May 2022, Stuart Weitzman sat down with Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. He had made his donation less than six months earlier. In that conversation, he talked about a trip to Sweden with his daughter to visit the Nobel Prize Museum.
“When I took my daughter to the Nobel Prize Museum, she was a teenager, and I had this goal in mind to feel proud of our accomplishments. And we got to the United States and couldn’t find (Albert) Einstein,” Weitzman recalled.
“So, we asked. ‘Oh, he’s in the Jewish section,’” he continued.
“In Europe, it didn’t matter who you were, even a Rothschild. You were not French. You were Jewish,” Weitzman explained. “Fortunately, in this country, it was all immigrants, so we all became American. And I wanted my kids to appreciate that.”
Now, they will have a place where they can.
The National Museum of American Jewish History opened 50 years ago in a building shared with Congregation Mikveh Israel in Old City. But the museum opened in its current location — on Independence Mall — in 2010.
That was also the last time the museum’s core exhibition was updated, according to Tadmor. Since then, quite a bit of American Jewish history has unfolded.
Antisemitic incidents in the United States have been rising since around 2015, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting pushed synagogues across the country to lock their doors and begin investing millions in security. A Jewish elected official from the Philadelphia area — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — is now considered a contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
The year 2025 saw a series of violent, antisemitic incidents: the arson attack on Shapiro’s governor’s residence in Harrisburg; the shooting deaths of two Israeli Embassy employees outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Molotov cocktail attack on a Run for Their Lives march, supporting the hostages of Hamas during Israel’s war with the terrorist group, in Boulder, Colorado. These incidents then led the American Jewish Committee and other groups to propose a national agenda for the Jewish future — calling for increased funding for nonprofit security grants, more transparency from social media companies and other measures — to lawmakers in D.C. in May.
“You can’t have a museum that has nothing to say about contemporary antisemitism,” Tadmor told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
But what it will eventually say is a different question. The Weitzman is already planning to unveil a separate exhibit on contemporary antisemitism this summer. But as Tadmor told Philadelphia Jewish Exponent in November, that exhibit will focus on testimony from regular American Jews about their experiences. It will not feature the grand sweep of history over the last decade and a half.
“It’s not Tree of Life; it’s not the Capital Jewish Museum shooting,” he said.
In his interview with the Inquirer, Tadmor mentioned some key questions that will shape the reimagining.
The first has to do with the timeline: Should it go back through all 3,000-plus years of Jewish history? Or should it begin with the Jewish arrival in America in 1654?
The second relates to content: “Do you want to talk about, besides Jewish history, Jewish values? And if so, which values? You can imagine that in itself is six months of deliberation — I would add Talmudic deliberation. What part does Israel play? What part does Zionism play in the nation’s Jewish museum, which is unequivocally Zionist, and how do you tell the story?” Tadmor asked.
Those questions still need to be answered by the advisory committee that Tadmor will form. But the CEO does, at least, know which qualities he wants to see in the new exhibit.
“You walk into a space, what are we trying to tell you? What’s the most important thing? What’s the second most important thing?” he asked in the Inquirer interview.
“A good museum takes you through an emotional journey, not only a cerebral journey. A good museum gives you some spots, probably not more than five or six, in which you laugh or cry or contemplate,” he added.