National Museum Of American Jewish History CEO Resigns
Exterior of the National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia. Image by Getty/Paul Marotta/Contributor
By PJ Grisar May 21, 2019
Ivy L. Barsky, the chief executive of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, has resigned. She will leave the institution in June, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Barsky was named CEO in 2012, two years after the museum opened a new $150 million building. (The museum, founded in 1976, was historically housed in the same building as the city’s Congregation Mikveh Israel.) At the start of her tenure, the museum was struggling to attract sufficient crowds to keep up with its increasing expenses.
To cut costs, Barsky executed layoffs, rearranged departments and put forward a strategic plan that emphasized high profile programming, resulting in major exhibitions on, among other subjects, Leonard Bernstein, the photography of Richard Avedon and the role of baseball in American Jewish life.
In 2017, with yearly losses mounting, Barsky conducted another round of layoffs, froze salaries, closed the museum’s café and took a cut of $25,000 from her previous salary of $324,000.
Barsky claimed at the time that the cuts would save the museum $1.3 million annually. That fiscal year, the institution saw a $1.8 million deficit.
Despite the cuts, Barsky had a strong vision for the museum. During her tenure, she supervised the creation of a curriculum for Jewish American history using the museum’s collection; that curriculum was taught to Jewish educators through seminars via another Barsky initiative, the museum’s National Educators Institute.
In a statement, Barsky said it was “a great privilege” to lead the museum. She did not announce her future plans.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture intern. He can be reached at [email protected]
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
