The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

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Karen S. Franklin

Karen S. Franklin is Director of Family Research at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and a consultant to the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She is a past chair of the Council of American Jewish Museums and the Memorial Museums Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). A past president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, she has also served on the boards of the American Association of Museums and ICOM-US.

Articles by this author

Jewish Museums in the United States

American Jewish women have played an outsized role in the foundation of Jewish museums all over the country. Barred from traditional spaces of power in the early twentieth century, many women—adjacent to power as Rebbetzins, philanthropists, and secretaries of libraries and other Jewish organizations—leveraged their connections to found new kinds of cultural institutions: museums.