National Museum Of Jewish History Opens

Our friend Stu Bykofsky has a nice column in the Philadelphia Daily News about the new National Museum of American Jewish History on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.
Here's part of what he says:

The building's front, facing Independence Mall, is glass the color of a fluorescent light. The rear is the color of a clay pot. The "glass building" is light and spacious, with sparse exhibits, in contrast to the chock-a-block displays in the darker terra-cotta building.
A claustrophobic exhibit recreates life in immigrant tenement ghettos in the early 20th century. The cramped housing, poor sanitation and barbaric cruelty of sweatshops fanned activism, carried mostly by Russian Jews, resulting in political and trade-union demands for a better life.
Among the lilies, there is the occasional weed.
In "Choices and Challenges," attention is given to American Jews' out-of-proportion representation in the civil-rights struggle, which most Jews celebrate. On display, but not celebrated, are Jewish mobsters such as Dutch Schultz and Arnold Rothstein.

Click here to read the full column.