JUST THE OTHER DAY, I unexpectedly received a gift—and a rather handsome gift at that: an approximately 300-page, beautifully photographed catalogue of the holdings of the National Museum of American Jewish History, a once modest institution now poised on the cusp of a major transformation. Collections: Celebrating the Cultural Heritage of the Jewish People in America, explains Gwen Goodman, the museum's executive director, is designed to ‘remind you that many of the objects you have in your home are historically important and can help people—Jewish and non-Jewish—to understand our shared past…. You are the steward of the Museum of You.’

Its glossy pages filled with images of one object after another—a Yiddish typewriter, circa 1925, a set of canasta cards produced by a Chicago branch of Hadassah, circa 1960, a painted wood set of Ten Commandments tablets that once adorned a Philadelphia synagogue in 1918, the sheet music to ‘Under the Matzos Tree: A Ghetto Love Song of 1907’—there's no discernible sequence or pattern to the catalogue's organization, at least none that I can make out. One item simply follows another in quick succession. But then, that is the point, I suppose. Rather than impose order and harmony on the whole, Collections takes American Jewry's material culture—the variegated, improvisational, quirky, ad hoc mess of it all— at face value. When it comes to making sense of the objects featured in its pages, of fitting them into some larger conceptual scheme, of coming up with an overarching interpretation that will tidily accommodate card games as well as Torah arks, well, it is every reader (and ultimately, every viewer) for herself.

This state of affairs is not simply an artefact of Collections or a by-product of the empowering ‘Museum of You’ sensibility, which the National Museum of American Jewish History seems roundly to endorse. On the contrary. This state of affairs goes to the very heart of the American Jewish experience, one that seems to relish its idiosyncrasies and crotchets, indeed its very waywardness: for every American Jew who keeps kosher, there is an equal, or perhaps even greater, number who delight in the pleasures of pork; for every American Jew, male or female, who wears a yarmulke, there are many more who do not.