Jewish Museums.  In the early twenty-first century, CAJM has a membership of about 75 professionally staffed museums and more than 100 Holocaust centers.  Far from being cabinets of curiosities or warehouses of a dead civilization, Jewish museums in America are a vibrant part of contemporary culture.  Along with evocative exhibits, they are filled with history, literature, and dance, rhetoric, music, film, and theater--not to speak of Torah and current affairs. Indeed, American Jewish museums are cultural centers, public forums, studios, workshops, discovery places, and sites of serious scholarship.  Not only are they venues of public events, but Jewish museums across the country are also commissioning and hosting extraordinary artworks, installations, and performances.  Furthermore, Jewish museums are increasingly becoming venues for non‑Jews to encounter Judaism, and are exploring many aspects of inter‑group relations.  However, according to anecdotal evidence, most visitors to Jewish museums nationwide are Jews, except in areas with concentrations of evangelical Christians, such as Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Jewish museums, according to Shneer, ?? have been the site of social positioning? (Shneer, n.d.: n.p.).  Through exhibits that extol the distinctiveness of Jewish culture and history, these museums show how Jews have maintained a distinct identity in America. Other exhibits emphasize the differences between Jews and other groups as a means to show the success of the American Dream and the immigrant story. Thus, contemporary American Jewish museums wrestle with questions of identity, sameness, and difference.

Native American Museums. Today, over 170 tribal museums and cultural research centers exist nationwide and many non-Native institutions have developed comprehensive consultation practices in an effort to represent a more accurate and relevant Indian history. These institutions have increased in number in recent years due, in part, to tribal concerns associated with and addressed in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). There also has been a significant increase in tribal activity related to heritage programs. 

They are clustered in southern California, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and a steady line of them in the northern borders states from Washington all the way to Maine. Tribal museums are all along the Missouri River and are at southern points in Florida, Louisiana and Texas. From coast to coast tribal libraries, archives and museums are a testament to the greater presence of Native people in this country.

Tribal museums are engaged in a whole variety of cultural programs and activities.  They are educating their communities on traditional ways of life, serving as a point of pride and destination for visitors and community members alike, managing and interpreting tribal culture from tribal perspectives, encouraging the revitalization of traditional craft, language and cultural performance.  Many are doing this work with limited staff and budgets and still you continue to produce and to grow and many of you need more space, staff and resources.