Community Days: Blacklisted

Please join us for a Community Day! The entire Museum, including special exhibition Blacklisted: An American Story, will be free to the public.

Upcoming Community Days: April 5, May 28, June 10, July 11, August 20

Step into one of the most charged moments in American history. Blacklisted: An American Story explores the Hollywood blacklist and the federal government’s loyalty investigations that upended thousands of lives during the Red Scare. Through powerful personal stories, rare artifacts, and film clips, the exhibition reveals how fear, politics, and identity collided—and what was lost when dissent was silenced.

Blacklisted: An American Story, on loan from Jewish Museum Milwaukee, incorporates film, personal narratives, objects, costume, and photography to examine the shifting definition of what it meant then—and what it means now—to be a patriotic American, and who gets to decide. The Capital Jewish Museum expands on the original presentation about the Hollywood Blacklist to include a look at the Red Scare’s impact on federal employees in the nation’s capital.

This special exhibition is made possible in part by Lead supporters Richard Small Alper, the Nussdorf Family, and David Bruce Smith, Grateful American Foundation; Major supporters Marcella and Neil Cohen, Bob and Kate Giaimo, and Howard Morse and Laura Loeb; and Additional supporters Cooley LLP, Linda and Eli Frank, the Karchem Raizes Family, Samuel Lehrman, Wilma Probst-Levy, Silver Diner, Pat and Robert Silverman, John Tolleris, and Bob Tracy and Martha Gross.

Exhibition donors as of March 1, 2026.