What shapes us? What family stories become our core stories? What pieces of ourselves are formed and reformed from our heritage? What We Hold features individual audio segments from over seventy teens, each reflecting on the people, moments, and voices that have imprinted on their identities. These compelling recordings offer a rare window into personal reflections of youth today.

The Art of Rube Goldberg was organized by Jennifer George, the granddaughter of Rube Goldberg, who lives in New York, and this exhibition makes its only California appearance at The Contemporary Jewish Museum. Accompanied by a delightful coffee-table style catalog including interactive cover, the exhibition includes original drawings of his beloved machines, photographs, toys, films, newspaper clippings, and more.

Contraption: Rediscovering California Jewish Artists  is a group show that presents the work of sixteen California-identified artists of Jewish descent—both historical and living—whose work refers to the machine either literally or metaphorically. Some of the artists are rarely seen now. Among the living artists, there will be large-scale mechanical installations by Bernie Lubell and Sheri Simons, as well as ceramics, drawings, sculpture and paintings by Ned Kahn, Bella Feldman, Howard Fried, and Annabeth Rosen. This original exhibition was co-curated by Chief Curator Renny Pritikin and Mark Dean Johnson, Professor of Art at SFSU.

Allison Smith's collaboration with Christina Zetterlund looks at craft and design history to explore issues of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchies of power.

Kutiman, a young Israeli musician and composer, utilizes found audio and video from the Internet as the source of his own work. In 2016 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art worked with the artist as he developed the piece titled offgrid, comprised of twelve monitors that play a 38 minute-long video and music composition by Kutiman on a loop. These minutely edited snippets of music played by soloists found on the Internet are displayed on twelve monitors that periodically join in or go silent.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum commissioned artwork by Sacramento-based artist Dave Lane to be placed in its soaring lobby space. The massive sculpture, entitled Lamp of the Covenant, is a 90-foot-long, six ton work suspended high over the heads of visitors. Attached to an enormous oval of steel are antique objects: world globes, light bulbs, tools such as nineteenth century apple peelers and blow torches, and various other objects that suggest the unfolding marvels of the cosmos.