Daniel Libeskind, by happenstance or design, has practically become the official architect of Jewish museums worldwide, but that trajectory was near its beginning when he received the commission, in 1998, for San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM). His Jewish Museum Berlin [RECORD, January 1999, page 76] and Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, in Osnabrück, Germany, were not yet complete, and his Danish Jewish Museum barely conceived. While those European institutions would rise in the dark shadow of the Holocaust, he and the museum determined that the CJM’s building should, instead, celebrate California’s far brighter Jewish history.

But the CJM is a curious institution that “doesn’t fit into any particular category,” admits its director, Connie Wolf. “It’s not, strictly speaking, a museum of art, or of history, or of the Holocaust, or of Judaica.” Its stated mission is to explore Jewish culture, history, and tradition through the prism of contemporary art and ideas. Like a kunsthalle, it has no permanent collection. And when founded, in 1984—occupying cramped quarters in a Financial District office building—it also had no architectural identity.