When Bette Midler and Jerry Seinfeld perform November 13 at the opening gala for the 100,000-square-foot National Museum of American Jewish History, they will more likely tickle the audience with gentle Semitic jokes than with New Jersey ones. But when visitors tour the museum on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, they’ll encounter frequent references to the Garden State.
“New Jersey connects the great Jewish population centers of New York and Philadelphia,” says museum treasurer Phil Darivoff, a Short Hills resident and a managing director of Goldman Sachs. “The history and influence of Jews in this country begins in this corridor.”
Among the museum’s New Jersey artifacts are a sewing machine owned by Newark retail magnate Louis Bamberger, items from the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural College and the surrounding nineteenth-century Jewish farming community of Woodbine, and vintage images drawn from postcards of vacationers on the beach in Atlantic City.
“America gave the Jews the gift of freedom that they didn’t enjoy in the countries they were fleeing,” says Darivoff. “Because a very large number of Jews who came to this country got off boats on the Hudson and Delaware rivers, which define New Jersey’s borders, the state was among the first to provide that freedom.”
And that, as Midler and Seinfeld would probably agree, is no joking matter.