When deciphered, the jagged lights on the sloping lobby wall of the new Contemporary Jewish Museum that opened here on Sunday form four Hebrew letters that spell out pardes. That word has the same Persian root as the English word paradise. It alludes to a park, a garden, an orchard, and thus invokes the pastoral promise of Eden as well.

This is the kind of esoteric symbol much beloved by the museum’s architect, Daniel Libeskind. In the heart of downtown San Francisco, his $47.5 million building, with its skewed blue-steel structures jutting out of a landmark 20th-century power plant, may not live up to the word’s impossible promise, but it will certainly gain attention for the institution.

Like so many other new museums, the Contemporary Jewish Museum is dedicated to a hyphenated American identity, in this case one that has flourished in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a Jewish population of 200,000 that ranks third among United States metropolitan regions. Jews lived in San Francisco from at least its early boom days, when they streamed in with other settlers during the Gold Rush. So their sense of belonging is not tentative; they are comfortably at home in a Western pardes…

And while other identity museums celebrate the particular, this one actively avoids anything that might seem too particular, seeking instead to leap into aesthetic or cultural realms in which Judaism is an element or influence. The museum, like its audience, is interested in assimilation, even in the ways in which the larger culture assimilates Jewish ideas and associations. It focuses not on the substance of Judaism, its laws, or history or ritual objects, but on perceptions of them.

Edward Rothstein
New York Times