Greenberg, who has a doctorate in history from Cornell University, oversaw the Chicago Historical Society and its Lincoln Park museum during an especially vibrant time in which the budget nearly doubled and a successful $30 million capital campaign was completed. During his seven years in Chicago, the city’s museums in general have become energized by exciting exhibits and growing interest from the public.
Q: What kind of person does it take to run a major metropolitan museum today?
A: I think this has changed enormously in the last 10 to 15 years. There was a time when they were simply people who had been curators, but if you look around the museums of Chicago and elsewhere, there is less and less of that. The reason is that museums have become big, complicated, non-profit businesses. They require, therefore, someone with real understanding of management, finance and marketing, as well as a deep appreciation for the subject of the institution. I think if you look at the kinds of people in charge in Chicago recently, you see some of that coming to the front with the way the searches are being conducted. You’ve got John McCarter at the Field Museum, whom I admire enormously, and he’s someone who’d not worked before in a museum before taking this job. I’m an example of that, too, because I’d never worked in one before, but I did have other experiences that helped. David Mosena at the Museum of Science and Industry is similar. I think you’re going to see more of this in the future. People who head up museums are going to be people with good management and business sense with a great passion for the subject, though not necessarily great expertise. That’s a good thing. These really are big, complicated, multimillion-dollar businesses.
Q: What significant changes occurred in the Chicago Historical Society museum during your seven years there?
A: When I came, I said there were three things that were really important to accomplish. The first was to connect the CHS with the entire city of Chicago and its varied communities as best we could. We did that through our neighborhood projects, and a variety of other ways, that really involved everyone. The second thing was to use technology, or what were the newest aspects of the visual capabilities on the World Wide Web, to enhance the ability of the museum to pursue its education mission. We’ve done that with an award-winning Web site, digitization of our collections and a wide range of other endeavors that I think have transformed the institution. The third thing I thought was important that we needed to do was to enhance CHS’ ability to serve the research community. Unlike some of the other museums in Chicago, we are really an institution that contains both a library and archives, as well as a museum, and so it was very important to me to serve the research community. We did that with a big capital project that, among other things, integrated the research center within the institution that provided a new reading room and very soon a public, online access catalog that will make links to our collections completely available to the public electronically.
Q: What are some challenges that remain for the CHS museum?
A: The big challenge that remains for us, as well as all museums, is to hold on to the audience that we already have and, at the same time, to expand the audience–not just people coming through the door but people using the Web and doing research too. There is still a long way to go in expanding and diversifying the audience.
Q: Did you have a favorite CHS exhibit?
A: My favorite was the “Abraham Lincoln: Last Great Hope on Earth” exhibit because I found it such an incredibly powerful evocation of his life. I had a wonderful time with it. It gave me a chance to be a historian. I loved doing tours of that exhibit and lecturing about Lincoln. It was really a blast.
Q: There is grumbling among Chicago museum officials that financial support from the Illinois state legislature is inconsistent, at best. Do you agree?
A: I really think the museums should get more support from Springfield. The principal reason for that is that the City of Chicago supports them very, very generously, but something like half the visitors to our museums come from outside the city. That makes it perfectly reasonable to think that state tax dollars ought to support the museums, which, after all, support the state and not just the city. If you look around the country at the way other states support their museums, like the new science center in Columbus, Ohio, you see all the money being provided by the state. That’s true in St. Louis and Minneapolis too. The visionary view of what the state ought to be doing would say that the museums of Chicago are of enormous benefit to the state of Illinois, and the state thus has some real obligation to help them to continue to thrive.
In the case of Chicago, we also happen to be all old and venerable institutions, and that means we’re in old and venerable buildings. Where we really need help is with capital improvements. The Field Museum has 11 acres of roof, and that’s a lot to repair and keep in good shape. The state should help. The MSI was built for the Columbian Exposition, after all, and the museums need help, and I’m not talking about fancy, glitzy stuff. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that the state ought to provide that support.
Q: We seem to be in the era of “big shows” for Chicago museums–Titanic, Sue, Monet, etc. Is there a danger in this?
A: I think there is a tremendous, tremendous impulse in the museum world, and not just in Chicago, to do blockbuster exhibits. But that’s true in other aspects of our leisure activities too. Small movies don’t always succeed like the big blockbusters. Well, museums are businesses, too, and these big blockbuster exhibits are very important ways to, first of all, expand the business and, over time, expand the audience. The trick is to transfer the audience you get for a huge exhibit, as we did for Norman Rockwell at the Chicago Historical Society this spring, into more of the day-to-day kinds of things that we do throughout the year. It is dangerous, though, for museums to become so commercialized that all they do are the exhibits that bring in big audiences. That wouldn’t be a good thing. There are some exhibits like the one at the Art Institute on African art that don’t necessarily bring in large audiences, but, to the audience that cares about them, are very, very important. It’s a balancing act between the long-range mission of the institution and the desire of the institution to bring people to the door. Blockbusters pose a danger, but it’s a risk I feel museums have to take.
Q: We also seem to be getting more exhibits that appear totally inappropriate in the museums they’re shown. I’m thinking of the Bears, “Star Wars” and motorcycles in the Field and Michael Jordan in the Museum of Science and Industry for starters. Is there a danger in all this crossover? Are the museums “dumbing down” too much to get people into the building?
A: Yes, and there is a tremendous danger in this. I think there is something going on in the museums in Chicago and, interestingly, it is that we’re all crossing disciplinary boundaries. We did the Rockwell exhibit, for instance. Well, it is arguably a history exhibit, but it’s also an art exhibit. The Field Museum did the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is that a natural-history exhibit? No. The important thing is to get these great exhibits into the city of Chicago, and I don’t worry too much about crossing the boundaries. That’s not a bad thing, but we do have to do things that are serious because museums are serious institutions with important collections. The Field Museum has one of the best collections of natural history in the world. The CHS has the single best collection of Chicago history anyplace in the world. Well, we have to continue to make use of those existing collections intelligently and thoughtfully. It’s important not to dumb down, but every once in a while something a little lighthearted isn’t all bad. The very first exhibit at CHS when I arrived wasn’t one that I planned, and it was on the history of men’s underwear. It was fine. It’s just a balancing act.
Q: You will become CEO/president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Tell us about the organization.
A: This was the organization that Steven Spielberg founded after he made “Schindler’s List” to record the testimony of Holocaust survivors. It’s been in existence for five or six years. To date, 51,000 interviews have been done with the survivors, and they range from three to five hours in length. They’re all on digital video and, if you watch them all from beginning to end, it would take you 13 1/2 years–and the interviews are still taking place. The mother of Hadassah Lieberman [wife of Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman] is one of the survivors in the database. It is a huge database with very, very important historical information. In addition, there is indexing and cataloging going on of all the material. At the moment, we believe this is the single largest database in the world outside of the United States government. Clearly, the time is coming when all the interviews will be done, when all the survivors who’ve agreed to be interviewed will have been interviewed. The second piece of what the foundation is going to do is to use this material for educational purposes by providing resources about the horrors of racism and anti-Semitism in the 20th Century.
Q: What will be your role and responsibilities, and how will they differ from those at the CHS?
A: As the CEO, I will do many similar things that I did at CHS. There are 140 employees in L.A. and there are offices in London, Berlin, Budapest and Jerusalem. There’s a big staff, a big budget and a lot of management involved that’s got to be done. In addition, I think they wanted someone who was himself a scholar and a historian because the archive is going to be an extremely important scholarly resource to be made available in research centers around the world. Part of my job is going to be to make sure that it is structured in a way that there is maximum utility for people writing the history of the Holocaust. And, of course, as is true with all non-profit organizations, another important part of my job will be raising money. It’s a very expensive effort, and I’m very excited about it.
Q: What has Steven Spielberg told you about his vision and commitment to Shoah?
A: Before I was hired, I obviously had the opportunity to meet with him, and one of the reasons I took the job was that he imparted to me his passion for this subject and its significance. When I talked to him about what he thought, he said that, of everything he’s done, this is the one thing that he really hopes will live beyond him. He considers it the most important thing he’s done in his life. That was very persuasive to me as a measure of his commitment to the effort. The other thing that we talked about was the need to find ways to use this material not to just educate people about the Holocaust, but to educate them about the other catastrophes and horrors of the 20th Century as well. When we met, I felt we were really on the same wavelength. I will have a lot of contact with him because he cares so much about this project.
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This is an edited transcript.
