A congressional commission that will advise Congress on whether the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in downtown Philadelphia should join the Smithsonian Institution was sworn in and held its first meeting on Tuesday.
The chairman of the commission, Philip Darivoff, chairman emeritus of the Weitzman, told JNS on Monday that bringing the museum into the Smithsonian fold would promote teaching Jewish history from a Jewish perspective.
“Too many people in America learn about Jews from people who don’t like Jews,” Darivoff said. “We think having a Smithsonian museum could make a great deal of sense.”
Former U.S. President Joe Biden signed the law to establish the bipartisan commission in 2024 after the House and Senate approved it unanimously earlier that year.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) appointed Darivoff to chair the group, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) selected Dara Horn, a novelist and non-fiction author, as vice chair.
If the Weitzman were to join the Smithsonian, an independent federal trust that includes 21 museums, it would be unusual both for being in Philadelphia while nearly all of the institution’s other museums are in Washington, D.C., and for being one of only a few such museums dedicated to a particular minority group.
It would also be the first such museum dedicated to Jewish Americans. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is a federal institution but not part of the Smithsonian, and it is not a Jewish museum.
Darivoff and Horn noted that the Holocaust should not be the one experience that American museum-goers have of Jews.
“There’s one museum in Washington, D.C., that’s about Jews,” Horn said. “It’s not about America, and it’s about dead Jews. And also you can go through that museum and not learn very much at all about who Jews are.”
“Jews have no agency in that story, or very little,” she told JNS. “We pick the place in Jewish history where Jews have the least agency, and we’ve made that the thing that we want people to know.”
“Before someone learns about how Jews were murdered, they should learn about who Jews are and what was the civilization and the culture that the Nazis were trying to extinguish,” Darivoff told JNS.
Horn, whose 2021 book “People Love Dead Jews” explores, in part, failures of U.S. education on the Holocaust, told JNS that having the Weitzman join the Smithsonian could help address contemporary antisemitism and situate Jews as an “integral” part of the American story.
“This isn’t just about, like, ‘Oh here’s some Jewish Americans who made huge contributions to this country,’ although those stories are fascinating and interesting,” she said. “It’s also about the ideas of Jewish civilization—that most Americans don’t realize come from Jewish civilization—that are so important in American life and history.”
“If all you think about in terms of American Jews is hate-crime statistics, there’s a bigger story here too about possibilities for the future,” she told JNS.
Darivoff pointed to the Weitzman’s location in Philadelphia across the street from Independence Hall and one of the icons of the American founding.
“The Liberty Bell has an inscription on it lifted from Leviticus, and that inscription is, ‘Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,’” he said. “There is an awful lot of Jewish American history in the neighborhood.”
The commission is tasked by law to send a report to Congress and the U.S. president within two years on issues including the potential transfer of collections, the financial implications of transferring the Weitzman to the Smithsonian and the impact the merged museum might have on combating Jew-hatred.
Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) swore in Darivoff, Horn and the six other commissioners on Tuesday.
Other members of the commission include former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Manning, historian Tevi Troy and Michael Goldfarb, founder and publisher of the Washington Free Beacon.
“The report must be finished within two years; we’re hoping we do it sooner than that,” Darivoff said.
