The Magnes Opens for the Fall 2025 Semester

The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley opens on Thursday, August 28, for the fall 2025 semester with a new exhibition, Flowing through Time and Tradition.

Exploring the theme of water, the exhibition uses the Magnes’s extensive holdings to examine how this vital element has shaped Jewish lives across centuries. It traces water’s role in sustaining life, building communities, and influencing Jewish identity and spirituality.

Organized around four compelling themes: Believing, Sustaining, Cleansing, and (Dis)Placing. Flowing through Time and Tradition features 65 objects—including sculptures, textiles, photographs, paintings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts—that span from the 16th to the 20th century.

The museum will present a series of monthly Gallery Tours and curator-led Beit Midrash Study Sessions inspired by the art and objects in the new exhibition. Both will begin Sunday, September 21, 2025.

Along with FLowing, The Magnes has the following additional exhibitions on display this academic year:

Time Capsules: Exploring the Permanent Collection is both a retrospective and an examination of the role of cultural heritage collections in imagining the future of Jewish memory. This installation showcases a selection of 10 exhibitions from the museum’s first 10 years at UC Berkeley.

The inaugural installation from the Roman Vishniac Archive, An Archive of Archives: Roman Vishniac’s Exhibition History | New York, 1971-72 shares some of Vishniac’s most iconic images documenting Jewish life and communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. 

The museum will be open to the public Sundays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm and open late on Thursdays from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. Admission is free.

The Magnes is located one block from UC Berkeley and one block from the Downtown Berkeley BART station at 2121 Allston Way in Berkeley.