At this gathering, attendees will work together with the leaders of the Jewish Museum of Chicago to envision the Museum’s ideological and practical framework, exploring questions such as what it means to build an institution while upholding a core set of liberatory, anti-zionist, and non-hierarchical values. 

This session, held in conjunction with the current Comfort Station exhibition, Lights and Perfections, is open to all and will begin with a candle-lighting for the 7th day of Hanukkah. Small nosh provided. 

Please RSVP to jewishmuseumchicago@gmail.com to confirm participation.

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In relation with December Exhibition –

Lights and Perfections

work by Casey Carsel

December 2, 2023 – January 14, 2024

Lights and Perfections emerges from and expands upon the images, objects, and words that Jewish communities have historically designated as protective and powerful, and the stories invoked therein. How do the symbols and the amulets that house such stories hold and move a people’s identity, and what histories might they reveal here and now? How do they envelop a community’s fears, its resources, its wider world? 

Casey began this series while they were a Fulbright Creative Writing Grantee (2021–22) in Ukraine and, subsequent to the full-scale invasion, in Poland. During that time, they were preoccupied by the shapes in which Jewish histories remain present despite the death, destruction, and forced disappearances of the past centuries. Moved through and around by contemporary inhabitants, they sought to discover how those histories inflect the stories we (us, them, everyone) tell about ourselves, and how they are rewritten in the telling. 

The exhibited works were made possible with the support of the Fulbright Program as well as a New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship.