Mah jongg exhibit to open

The American mah jongg craze got its start in the 1920s, when it was viewed as a way to experience the exoticness of Asia.

Learn of this and more at the Project Mah Jongg exhibit at Jewish Museum Milwaukee, a program of Milwaukee Jewish Federation. The exhibit is to honor the memories, legacy and charms of the game, running from June 5 to Aug. 28.

The Project Mah Jongg exhibit was designed for a larger venue, the Museum of Jewish Heritage at the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City, but a scaled down version of it is coming to Milwaukee. Molly Dubin got to talking about how to scale it down and bring it here with a curator there and the result is to open here June 5.

The game first leaped from China to the United States in the 1920s, when a businessman and then competing game companies started importing it from China. It only later became a Jewish game and Dubin says that can be traced back to a 1937 ad placed in the New York Times by German-Jewish women who were looking to play mah jongg and connect with others.

There’s nothing inherently Jewish in the game, she said. It just caught on.

The exhibit will include local artifacts, including a 1920s imported mah jongg set.

Jewish Museum Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect Ave., is setting aside space for people to play mah jongg at the museum for the duration of the exhibit. The play area will be called the “Atrium Game Gallery,” with reservations available on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.  The fee will be $10 per person for members and, for non-members, $10 per person plus admission.

The museum is also offering a lecture on June 23, “Mah jongg, Rickshaw, and Confucius: Central-European Jewish Refugees’ encounter with Chinese Culture in Wartime Shanghai 1938-1950.” It is offered Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. and will be delivered by Weijia Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of German and director of the Global Higher Education MS Program. The event is free for members and $5 for non-members.

Finally, the museum has slated a tournament for Sunday, July 31, 1-4 p.m. Save the date!