Capital Jewish Museum's LGBTJews Exhibit is About Pride and Preservation

Newsweek

11-06-2025

Leaders of Jewish institutions rarely need a reminder that antisemitism, like other forms of discrimination, still exist. But when Washington, D.C.'s Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum launched its new exhibition, "LGBTJews in the Federal City," in May, they had no idea that a deadly attack would unfold on their doorstep.
On May 21, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, two Israeli embassy staffers attending an event at the museum, were shot and killed. The suspect, Elias Rodriguez, 31, allegedly told police as he was apprehended: "I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza."
In contrast, Lischinsky and Milgrim were at the museum to attend an annual interfaith event held by the American Jewish Committee for young people in diplomatic service, to promote peace and understanding despite differences of beliefs and opinions, specifically focused on humanitarian diplomacy. Rodriguez was charged the following day with murder of foreign officials, amongst other serious federal offenses.
"Such acts of terror attempt to instill fear, silence voices and erase history—but we refuse to let them succeed," Dr. Beatrice Gurwitz, executive director of the museum, said in a statement after the shooting. "The Capital Jewish Museum was built to tell the centuries-old story of the greater Washington region's vibrant Jewish community. We are proud to tell these stories of Jewish life. In our work, we share Jewish stories in the service of building bridges and opening dialogue in our beautiful city."
Building those kinds of bridges is what the museum is especially proud of, and what its new exhibit represents. Shortly before the killings, Newsweek spoke with Gurwitz in conjunction with WorldPride 2025 for a previously planned story about the new exhibit. While the quotes in this story are from before the shooting, the tone of "LGBTJews in the Federal City" reinforces Gurwitz's sentiment about the importance of resisting fear and not being silenced, and is consistent with how they addressed the attack afterward.
"There's going to be debate and disagreement embedded in [what to exhibit]," Gurwitz told Newsweek. "And then the other thing that we take seriously as an institution is doing our best to capture those debates right. There is never one opinion. There is never one approach. And I think that we have a responsibility to not only document Jewish political engagement, but also showcase the ways that people have come at it from diverse perspectives over time."
And for much of these debates, no matter the issue, it's the backdrop of Washington, D.C., that gives it its weight and national implications, said Jonathan Edelman, collections curator.
"No matter what city people were living in when they fought for their rights, people gathered in Washington."
Jewish Allies march in the DC pride parade, 1990s.
Jewish Allies march in the DC pride parade, 1990s.
Gift of Bet Mishpachah with thanks to Joel Wind & Al Munzer, Lillian & Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum Collection
Telling a Complicated History
"I feel like my whole curatorial practice for the last 30 years has been leading to this moment," Sarah Leavitt, director of curatorial affairs for the Capital Jewish Museum, told Newsweek. "I think, increasingly, stakes are really high and it's really on us as museum professionals to really be doing part of that work to tell America's story in a much more complicated way. And that includes to tell, in our case, a local Jewish story in a complicated way."
The exhibit—with hundreds of artifacts provided by the community, a large portion of which came from the local LGBTQ+ Bet Mishpachah synagogue—maps LGBTQ+ history and its intersection with Jewish history in Washington, D.C., through images, archival protest campaign posters, Washington Blade archives, a panel of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and oral histories produced with the Rainbow History Project.
"A big part of this exhibition and this collecting effort is to capture more of this history, especially LGBTQ history, which has either been erased intentionally by people trying to protect themselves, or by people who don't believe that history should be preserved," Edelman said.
As a recent transplant to D.C. while in graduate school, he found that "in every aspect of the Jewish community, there were large amounts of out LGBTQ people," unlike where he grew up in the Midwest. "I want everyone to see themselves in this exhibit and see that LGBTQ history is Jewish history."
As an intern at the museum in 2019, he had the germ of an idea which has now flourished into this exhibit. The collection puts particular emphasis on two key aspects of queer life in Washington, D.C.: the Lavender Scare moral panic from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s and the AIDS epidemic in the '80s and early '90s, as well as the impact it had on recent LGBTQ+ history in D.C. and the Jewish community.
A photograph of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky is displayed outside the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum on May 29, 2025 in Washington, DC.
A photograph of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky is displayed outside the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum on May 29, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
'What Happens Here Matters'
"Washington has a specific story with the Lavender Scare—the purge of homosexuals from the federal government, which we're kind of seeing again right now. This is not a new story," Edelman said.
During the height of the anti-Communist movement of the mid-20th century, thousands of queer federal employees were either fired or forced to resign because of their sexual orientation. One of these fired workers, Frank Kameny, became an influential activist in the gay rights movement. He would go on to form the influential Mattachine Society of Washington in 1960 and, in 1965, organized protests outside the White House advocating for gay rights and the reinstatement of federal works. The story of Kameny, a Jewish man, is one of the many told about this period.
"To me, it's so important that my generation understands what people before us had to go through and what they fought for beyond the story of Stonewall, beyond Harvey Milk," Edelman said. "Washington was such an epicenter in its own way and had its own unique aspects."
While the exhibit does focus on D.C., it's the national implication these stories have that's most salient, despite rarely getting the attention better-known people and events in queer history do, like the 1969 Stonewall riots, an uprising after repeated police brutality against LGBTQ+ people; or Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S. who was assassinated in 1978.
"D.C. has such important national resonance. And I think maybe, the rest of the country ignores that at their peril," Leavitt said. "What happens here matters for real. And the work that happens in the federal government every day, it matters. And again, that's not always a march toward justice. I mean, a lot of terrible things have happened at the federal level as well. But it's not just Frank Kameny, who we know devoted his entire life and career to opening up the federal government to gay workers, but there are so many other people as well who are marching with him."
"This exhibition is so much more than the sum of its parts because it really helps emphasize why D.C. was such an important place for the LGBTQ movement and how that change rippled out across the country," Gurwitz said. "You see how the emergence of gay culture in D.C., the particular threats to gay people in D.C., help mobilize all of the different kinds of change that happened in D.C., which then has a national impact."
Exhibition space at the Captial Jewish Museum
Exhibition space at the Captial Jewish Museum
Capital Jewish Museum
The Sheer Scope
Unsurprisingly, given its significance as a turning point for the movement, the exhibit also focuses on the AIDS epidemic. "When you look at the AIDS crisis, this is something that people in our generation, some people know about, but a lot of people don't," Edelman said. "I sat in this home with this one [older] man, where he was flipping through pages of photographs from the 1996 display of the AIDS quilt on the National Mall. And there were a lot of pictures of specific quilt patches, not just the big, broad photos. And I asked him why he took all of these, and he said, 'These are all my friends and former lovers who I lost.' It was dozens of people. And I don't think we understand the scope of that."
One thing the trauma of the AIDS epidemic did do was force institutions to reevaluate how LGBTQ+ people are seen. One way this manifested was a critical debate about the inclusion of gay victims of the Holocaust in Jewish institutions during this era.
"There was a movement in the 1980s to make sure that the Holocaust Museum tell[s] the story of non-Jewish gay victims of the Holocaust," Gurwitz said.
"There were Jewish advocates advocating to tell these stories and ultimately Elie Wiesel wrote a letter and said you have to tell these stories. This needs to be part of it. I think that is such an important testament to the importance of our cultural institutions in sharing history in a way that shapes our understanding of the past." In 1989, Wiesel, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and Holocaust survivor, was awarded the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ rights organization. At the ceremony, Wiesel said: "Those who hate you hate me. Bigots do not stop at classes, at races, or at lesbians and gays. Those who hate, hate everybody."
The Holocaust Museum in D.C. opened on April 26, 1993, a day after the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. And the stories of homosexual victims of the Holocaust were included.
US President Barack Obama hands to gay rights activist Frank Kameny a pen which he used to sign a presidential memorandum regarding federal benefits and non-discrimination June 17, 2009 in the Oval Office of the...
US President Barack Obama hands to gay rights activist Frank Kameny a pen which he used to sign a presidential memorandum regarding federal benefits and non-discrimination June 17, 2009 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. More
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty
A Blessing of Memories
"I think it resonates so deeply because it's recent history," Gurwitz said about most of the LGBTQ+ history on display at the exhibition. "And it is significant change over time. We can all find moments that we remember, that trigger our own experiences and allow us to see that we have been part of this evolution. So, I think it is actually tremendously moving for people who come in the door."
"The information...is rich and interesting and pulls in local context, national context, international context, Jewish stories, non-Jewish stories. There is so much to engage with and to learn that even people who feel like they know this history will have something to learn in this exhibition, and that's extraordinarily gratifying."
It's the context of these stories being told through the prism of diverse perspectives that makes "LGBTJews in the Federal City" particularly poignant after the events of May 21. "May their memory be a blessing" is a traditional Jewish expression of condolence after someone dies. Capturing those memories, the lives lived and tragically cut short, like Lischinsky and Milgrim, are what make the work of institutions like the Capital Jewish Museum vital. As Leavitt said about the exhibit before the shooting, she hopes the exhibition is "one way for people to see their story, whatever their identity is."
LGBTJews in the Federal City will be on exhibit until January 4, 2026.