Impact case study database

:**

The Jewish Museum London is recognised by the Arts Council as an important museum ‘of strategic significance nationally’¹.

In 2013, Bale and Feldman were approached by the museum to provide advice and expertise on ideas for exhibitions to tackle antisemitism, exploring its history and contemporary prevalence, and to transform public debate about 21^st century Jewish culture. Two universal themes were selected, blood and money, resulting in the hugely successful exhibitions Blood: Uniting & Dividing (between 05/11/ 2015 and 28/02/2016)³ and the award-winning Jews, Money, Myth - originally scheduled between 19/03/2019 and 17/07/2019, but extended to 17/10/2019 ‘due to popular demand’⁴.

Blood and Jews, Money, Myth stand apart in the museum’s programmes as thought piece exhibitions which dealt bravely with complex and uncomfortable subjects, both developed for adult audiences, and both framed around big ideas.

The ambition behind Blood led to significant rewards for the Jewish Museum London. It generated unprecedented critical acclaim with extensive positive coverage in national and international media including The New Statesman, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times, The Lancet, Jewish News, the Italian magazine Cultura and Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad (which featured an interview with Bale). It inspired discussions on Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme, and Radio 4’s Saturday Review programme.^6a David Aaronovitch, in a double-page review in The Times, focused on the deep truth the exhibition offered to our society, that ultimately ‘all of us have much the same blood and that very little actually divides us biologically or deterministically from each other. … It’s not often an exhibition in a smallish museum makes such a big point.’^6b. Blood attracted over 11,000 people and sold over 600 exhibition booklets, generating thousands of pounds in revenue for the museum^6c. In a highly innovative approach to public engagement, the NHS used the exhibition to attract new blood donors; a task of critical importance with donors having fallen by 40 per cent in the previous decade. This was the first time the NHS had set up a mobile unit as part of a museum exhibition^6d and was a huge success with up to 60 people registering as donors^6e. The NHS now has a website where organisations can request a blood donation point at their event - Blood donor events - NHS Blood Donation.

The success of the exhibition led to its adaptation for the Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow (exhibited between 15/05/18 and 31/10/18) and POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews, European Museum of the Year in 2016, where it ran between 12/10/17 and 29/01/18.

For POLIN, the exhibition was a new departure, being its first devoted to a subject that is universal and simultaneously deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and rituals. As in London, the exhibition at POLIN was hugely successful, seen by almost 45,000 people (smashing the target of 25,000), making it the most popular temporary exhibition in the Museum's history and attracting almost twice as many visitors as the second-most popular show in the period 2016-18. More than 3,800 people took part in concerts, film screenings, workshops for children and adults, lectures and 250 tours guided by curators. It was covered in 628 media pieces, with the advertising value equivalent of this reporting calculated to be ~£1.1million (or GBP1,000,000)^7b. The Jewish Museum London and POLIN commissioned new work from prominent contemporary artists, Tom Piper and Alan Farlie, Bogna Burska, Dorota Buczkowska and Eliza Proszczuk, creating work and increasing exposure for both museums and artists. The POLIN exhibition featured the first showing of Anish Kapoor’s work in Poland^7c. Bale spoke about his work with the Jewish Museum London at a conference for museum professionals, “Museums and their Publics at Sites of Conflicted History”, held at POLIN before the exhibition ( Museums and Their Publics at Sites of Conflicted History).

Blood similarly achieved critical success for the Galicia Jewish Museum and significantly enhanced the museum’s international reputation. In order to host the exhibition, staff developed essential new skills that hugely improved the capacity of the Museum. It was the first time they had taken on an exhibition featuring items over several hundred years and with such an international spread. This required cooperation with individuals and institutions across Poland and Europe, a logistical and financial challenge.. ‘We needed to learn a lot about displaying, taking care of, transporting and generally handling rare historical items.’ The exhibition ‘was important in terms of proving that we can handle complex, object-based exhibitions.’ It was the most successful travelling exhibition they had ever hosted, with very positive reactions from the more than 30,000 visitors. It resulted in an increase in social media engagement, and enhanced their technique, experience, network and reputation.⁸

Blood’s tour in Poland was an important outcome for the Jewish Museum London, ‘garnering attention from the international Jewish museum community and generating confidence from funders and stakeholders’⁵. Its success was consolidated with Jews, Money, Myth, deemed by the Jewish Museum’s director, Abigail Morris, as the exhibition which ‘best exemplified’ the museum’s ‘philosophy’². This also featured an ambitious artwork programme, with new commissioned pieces by Doug Fishbone and Turner-prize winner Jeremy Deller, installations by Roee Rosen and Ryan Gander, alongside loans from Israel, Europe and North America and a rare appearance of Rembrandt’s first masterpiece Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629), lent from a private collection.

Jews, Money, Myth attracted approximately 22,000 people and was of sufficient importance to be covered in major global publications including the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Die Welt, and The Times of Israel, in addition to national media such as The Times and The Guardian and in specialist press (e.g. The Art Review)^9a. It ‘reached 290 million people through press and media’² and numerous comments in the visitor book attest to its international appeal Daniel Finkelstein praised the expert job it performed in ‘weaving together modern political attacks with ancient prejudices, showing how the latter give rise to the former’, helping make sense of the simultaneous existence of antisemitism on both the far right and the far left. ‘Over the past year I have had many friends asking me to explain to them the origins of antisemitic prejudice and, in particular, how it could have spread to the left. The next time I’m asked I will recommend a visit to Jews, Money, Myth’^9c. There is interest in the London show from museums in Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Krakow, Warsaw and Sydney. Described by the judges as ‘brave, fascinating and timely’, it won the prestigious Museums Association Museums Change Lives award 2019.

At the point when these two exhibitions were initially planned, no-one could have anticipated the renewed contemporary relevance that the issue of antisemitism would have by the time they were shown. Whilst the timing was completely serendipitous, both Blood and Jews, Money, Myth had a profound but positive impact on the tens of thousands of visitors at a time of rising antisemitism.

On the basis of the responses to these exhibitions, Birkbeck developed an educational short course on identifying and tackling anti-Semitism, ‘Facing Antisemitism: Politics, History Culture’. The Labour Party was the first major institution to sign up. The TUC also enrolled select staff on the course, The TUC, with support from Birkbeck, has developed its own materials informed by the course which it will roll out to members.¹⁰ Furthermore, Bale and Feldman were invited to contribute to the Runnymede Trust’s Our Migration Story project, with Bale contributing a piece about the poetry and life of a medieval Jewish poet, Meir of Norwich. Our Migration Story won The Royal Historical Society Public History Prize for Online Resources in 2018 and The Guardian University Award 2019 for Research Impact^11a, and then informed discussions in Parliament^11b. Bale was also invited to contribute to an episode of Channel 4s hugely successful "Britain's Most Historic Towns" which considered medieval antisemitism in Lincoln (recorded 03/20; shown 11/20)^11c.

Overall, for Morris, ‘We have transformed the Museum and have become recognised for our outstanding, award-winning exhibitions and education programmes’¹.