JNS
“We aim to expand people’s concept of what it means to be Jewish in America,” says Kenneth Hoffman, the museum’s executive director.
Four years ago this month—in May 2021, in the middle of the COVID pandemic—the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience opened a quaint building in the city of New Orleans to tell the stories of those who moved to and made their lives in the warmer states of America. In that time, it has drawn more than 35,000 visitors locally, statewide, nationally and internationally.
The South historically didn’t draw as many Jewish immigrants, families and individuals as the U.S. coasts and major cities in the Midwest. But its traditions are rich and go back centuries, as its archives document.
“We aim to expand people’s concept of what it means to be Jewish in America,” says Kenneth Hoffman, the museum’s executive director, who began his role there in 2017.
Dave and Amy Chapman Fulton. Credit: Courtesy of Amy Chapman Fulton.
Earlier this year, the museum received a $1.25 million gift to name a new research center that opened last November. Dave and Amy Chapman Fulton—she was born and raised in Baton Rouge, La., and he also has Southern Jewish roots—donated the funds for the Chapman Family Research Center (the Center) on the building’s third floor.
It includes spaces devoted to artifact conservation and digitization, a secure vault to hold the museum’s growing archival collection, an oral history and distance learning studio, and a reading room and reference library, where the center’s staff members have already begun offering genealogy and artifact preservation workshops.
Hoffman says that in addition to viewing artifacts, books, clothing, photographs and Judaica as part of the exhibits on the main floor, he encourages guests to utilize the rest of its collections, too: “We want to empower people to be their own researchers.”
To that end, the museum continues to collect items, papers and materials from families for display and study.
He recounts the interest and wonder many feel when they get a taste of the area, “which is often overlooked in the American Jewish story. Having Southern Jews come and see something of themselves is a wonderful thing.”
He says non-Jews stop in as well; it helps that their building is blocks away from the National WWII Museum, which draws between 800,000 to 1 million visitors annually, and where Hoffman previously worked for 18 years.
He acknowledges that while the New Orleans Jewish community, which numbers about 15,000, isn’t nearly as big as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta or Miami, the city’s Touro Synagogue was founded back in 1881 after the merger of two other congregations—one dating back to 1828 and the other to 1846.
“Reach out to us, visit us,” says the museum head, who was born in Texas and grew up in Louisiana, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Tulane University in New Orleans.
In a way, he exemplifies the regional Jewish journey, noting that others are often surprised when they learn about where Jews settled and formed communities. But he’s not. After all, “when you think about it, all of America is transitory.”
