Library Of Congress Exhibit Celebrates Three Centuries Of U.S. Jewish Heritage

A larger-than-life image of conductor Leonard Bernstein greets visitors to a major new exhibit at the Library of Congress, followed by portraits of 1945 Miss America Bess Myerson, 1930s boxing champion Barney Ross, an unnamed girl protesting child labor in 1909, 19th-century statesman Judah P. Benjamin and 18th-century matriarch Abigail Franks.

Those and other figures dominate the entrance hall to"From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America," an exhibit that runs through Dec. 18 and features 185 objects of American Judaica, most from the library's vast Hebraic repository but with contributions from other collections.

Some are small but with potent messages, such as a postcard photograph of the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, falsely accused of killing a girl in Atlanta. Some are large and colorful, including a World War I poster in Yiddish urging Jewish immigrants to help win the war by not wasting food. Others are medium-size and fanciful, like the image of a 1904 boychik (dandy) so taken with American fashion that he has lost all appearance of Jewishness.

And some are national icons: Irving Berlin's"God Bless America" and Emma Lazarus's poetic lines on the Statue of Liberty:"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Here you see them in the writer's own hand.

Film clips, theater posters, baseball cards, caricatures, sermons, maps, prayer books, illuminated documents, liturgical objects, paintings, advertisements -- all types of media span the categories of religion, the arts, politics, sports, entertainment, the home and social activism.

"What's so stunning about the exhibit is that the Library of Congress has such an extraordinarily rich collection of Judaica Americana," said Pamela S. Nadell, professor of history and director of Jewish studies at American University.

Nadell said she had never known about some of the objects displayed, including a cartoon of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in New York, in which 146 immigrant workers -- a majority of them Jewish -- were killed because of locked doors and inadequate escape mechanisms. The cartoon, signed by"Lola" (Leon Israel), shows a demonic figure reaching toward some victims while others' faces glide on smoke streams toward heaven.