Deborah R. Weiner is responsible for several iconic exhibits in Baltimore-area history museums.
She co-created the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s “The Synagogue Speaks: A History of the Lloyd Street Synagogue” and “Voices of Lombard Street: A Century of Change in East Baltimore” exhibits, with the latter becoming a JMM staple that closed in 2023 after 16 years on display. And more recently, she has curated exhibits at the Baltimore Museum of Industry and the Baltimore Streetcar Museum.
She hasn’t always been a museum curator and historian, though. Weiner spent her 20s as a community organizer in her hometown of Chicago, advocating for affordable housing and development in low-income neighborhoods. It was only in her 30s that she decided to go back to school and turn her lifelong love of history into a career.
Now 66, Weiner lives in Baltimore City with her dog.
Weiner’s family did not belong to a synagogue while she was growing up in Chicago, and her engagement with Judaism was largely restricted to holidays and visiting her grandparents. Later in life, she became more interested in American Jewish history. One of her first projects, which she later adapted into the book “Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History,” was her college dissertation on Jewish communities in West Virginia, a place that she notes most people would not think of when thinking of areas with large Jewish communities.
“I wanted to look at Jewish communities that arise in places where there aren’t a lot of Jews, because the suburb I grew up in wasn’t very Jewish at all,” Weiner explained. “I think [the project was] related to my background, trying to find out more about how these communities sustain themselves and how they interact with their non-Jewish neighbors.”
After graduate school, Weiner acted as a research historian at the Jewish Museum of Maryland for 11 years. This period was when she created some of the exhibits she is most known for, including “Voices of Lombard Street,” which she co-curated alongside current Baltimore Museum of Industry Executive Director Anita Kassof.
The process of museum curation is a very research-heavy one. In addition to looking through primary sources and prior research about an exhibit’s subject, a curator must figure out how to illustrate said subject through the usage of images and objects. It’s an extra dimension that helps to bring a topic, such as the history of the Lombard Street neighborhood, out into the real world and turns it into something visitors can physically engage with. A key part of her job as a curator is working with designers, who are responsible for the exhibit’s aesthetics.
“It’s not the same as writing a newspaper article, where you may have one picture that illustrates the subject,” she said. “You’re trying to integrate the pictures and the objects with the writing that you do to tell a compelling story.”
More recently, Weiner has done freelance curation work for other museums. One of her favorites is her work for the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, which she describes as a hidden gem.
“They have actual streetcars people can ride on, but they hadn’t had a professional museum exhibit before,” she said. “It was very enjoyable to bring that story to life.”
While not all of her curation work focuses on Jewish history, the books Weiner has written center around it. In addition to “Coalfield Jews,” she is also the co-author of “On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore,” which she wrote with Emory University history professor Eric L. Goldstein; and author of “The History of Levindale,” a comprehensive history of the Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital over its 134 years of operation.
Weiner said that her favorite part of studying history is going down research rabbit holes and becoming invested in specific topics. But not everyone is capable of doing the immense amounts of research required of a curator, so the most rewarding part of her curation work is being able to make that research accessible to everyone.
“You often find out that things were much more complicated than you thought they were,” she noted.
Weiner is still hard at work curating museum exhibits and trying to expand her repertoire. Recently, she started work as a content development consultant at the Over-the-Rhine Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, a history museum focused on urban life that is run out of a historic tenement house. She consulted on the development of an exhibit focused on a Jewish immigrant family. She’s also been developing self-guided walking tours for the Baltimore National Heritage Area.
“I just want to continue to work on projects that interest me,” she said of her future. “I like the variety. I don’t want to be confined to just one topic.”
