To mark the centenary of the birth of Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) – the acclaimed French journalist, filmmaker and chronicler of the Shoah – the Jewish Museum Berlin presents an exhibition that makes history audible. For the first time ever, the audio archive of Lanzmann’s world-renowned documentary film Shoah (1985) will be made accessible to the public. These unique audio recordings are the heart of the exhibition, which can be explored through sound, and are complemented by objects, documents, and film footage.

The exhibition reveals the important role that Jewish women designers played in German society’s process of eman­cipation and modernization in the early twentieth century. Featuring around three hundred exhibits by more than fifty designers, this is the world’s first collective exhibition on the theme. It brings together pioneering women who battled social marginali­zation to attain prominent positions in their own domains.

Kafka comes to Berlin! One hundred years after the death of Franz Kafka, the Jewish Museum Berlin is providing new insights into his work with its exhibition Access Kafka: manuscripts and drawings from Franz Kafka’s estate come together with contemporary art by artists such as Yael Bartana, Maria Eichhorn, Anne Imhof, Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl. The focus is on universal and timeless questions concerning access.

The exhibition plays with the differing perceptions of sexuality in Judaism. Contemporary art, traditional artifacts, film, and new media illustrate a range of Jewish positions that have been discussed for centuries. From marriage and procreation, via desire, taboos, and the questioning of social norms, to the eroticism of spirituality, the exhibition presents the whole spectrum of Jewish attitudes.

The exhibition is presented in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Amsterdam.

Over a period of more than 19 months between August 1943 and April 1945, the hitherto unknown German Jewish author Curt Bloch produced a unique work of creative resistance while in hiding in the Netherlands: Het Onderwater Cabaret.

Curt Bloch’s hope is now finally being fulfilled: The exhibition presents all 95 original issues of the Het Onderwater Cabaret, accompanied by insight into the production of their covers.

The Jewish Museum Berlin is now showing the first-ever large-scale exhibition on Jewish experiences in East Germany, on display until 14 January 2024. With a focus on cultural history and drawing on documentary research, the show delves into a little-examined aspect of German-Jewish history, bringing together visual art, film, and literature, as well as multifaceted biographies and exceptional artifacts.

Artist Maya Schweizer won this year’s DAGESH Art Award for her video installation Sans histoire. The prize is awarded by the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) and DAGESH: Jewish Art in Context. In her artwork, Schweizer engages with the Jewish Museum Berlin as a site of ritualized remembrance. Reflecting on the award’s question “What Now? From Dystopias to Utopias,” her answer is open—sans histoire: both without history and without story.

With "Paris Magnétique. 1905–1940", the Jewish Museum Berlin is presenting the first major exhibition in Germany devoted to the Jewish artists of the School of Paris. Featuring around 120 works in ten sections, the exhibition charts how migrant, often marginalized perspectives from the Parisian avant-garde have influenced today’s under­standing of Western modernist art.

Following more than forty years of photographic storytelling of Jewish life around the world, Frédéric Brenner's new photographic essay, Zerheilt: Haeled to Pieces, portrays individuals – newcomers, old timers, converts, immigrants and others – who have made Berlin their home or are just passing through. Via a series of fragmentary insights into this incubator of paradoxes and dissonances, he reflects on conflicting narratives of redemption.

From 26 April 2021, the Jewish Museum Berlin will present Yael Bartana: Redemption Now. This large-scale solo exhibition of the contemporary artist investigates the power of imagination and art’s redemptive potential. For more than twenty years, Bartana has been inquiring into grand historical narratives that help to constitute national and other collective identities.

The show brings together more than fifty works, including video installations, photographs, and neon works.