“The Television Project: Picturing a People” Exhibition
The Jewish Museum
This event has ended.
Picturing a People, the first exhibition in the long term series The Television Project, considers how Jews have been portrayed and have portrayed themselves on American television from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition features clips from programs including: The Ed Sullivan Show, Northern Exposure, The Twilight Zone, The Goldbergs, The Simpsons, My Name is Barbra, and ABC News’ Eichmann Trial coverage, and related works of art, artifacts, and ephemera.
As the inaugural episode of The Television Project, Picturing a People looks at sociologically or politically important programming with significant artistic merit in terms of writing, directing, performing, and production.
Examples include writer and actress Gertrude Berg’s The Goldbergs, a popular comedy-drama based on the home life of a Jewish family in the Bronx, and ABC News’ coverage of the Eichmann Trial, among others. The Goldbergs originally ran on radio, then aired on television between 1949 and 1956 and addressed serious contemporary issues that impacted Jewish families. The televising of the Eichmann Trial offered American and international audiences stark details of the atrocities of the Holocaust and provided an unfiltered look at a prominent and powerful Nazi war criminal who claimed he was “only taking orders.”
With a similar mix of ephemera and video compilations, future installations of The Television Project will use television programming to consider the representation of Jews in comedy, anti-Semitism, Jews and the advertising revolution, and Jewish masculinity and femininity.
Media
Schedule
from September 25, 2015 to February 14, 2016