The Jewish Museum of Florida Is Building a Bartender Machine During Art Basel Week — and Letting You Talk to an AI Clone

The Jewish Museum of Florida opens The Wondering Jew: Chagall, the École de Paris and the Worlds They Inspired on November 18 — and during Art Basel Week, the museum is adding two installations that push the exhibition into the present.

The exhibition's title reclaims the antisemitic trope of the "Wandering Jew" by changing a single letter — turning an image of punishment into one of curiosity and creation. It begins with Marc Chagall and the Jewish artists of the École de Paris, who carried their languages, memories and traditions to a new city, and asks what we carry when we move, what survives, and what new worlds we build from it. The story runs through Miami Beach too: in the 1920s, as the Paris artists were making their names, Jewish families were building a new community south of Fifth Street, and the synagogue buildings that now house the museum opened in 1929 and 1936. An interactive immigration map invites visitors to place their own family's migration story alongside the artists' journeys.

Joseph Herscher — the artist behind the Joseph's Machines YouTube channel, with more than 1 billion views across platforms — will build a working bartender machine at the museum during Art Basel Week. The machine will be the centerpiece of a museum brunch on Sunday, December 6, from 10 AM to 1 PM. Herscher, who follows in the tradition of Rube Goldberg (the Jewish American cartoonist whose drawings imagined complicated ways to complete ordinary tasks), has brought his machines to Sesame Street and Jimmy Kimmel Live! and leads workshops for children around the world. He will also lead student workshops in December.

Miami-based interdisciplinary artist Dahlia Dreszer — born in Colombia, raised in Panama, whose use of AI in art was the subject of a Time interview — will present Clone Dahlia at the museum. The Knight Foundation-funded installation uses a holographic display to let visitors converse with a digital version of herself. Her work explores identity, memory, cultural inheritance and the experience of navigating between cultures, drawing on her Latin American and Jewish heritage. Presented within The Wondering Jew, Clone Dahlia carries the exhibition's questions about migration and reinvention into the present.

Both installations mark an important moment for the museum under new CEO Howard Lipman and Chief Curator and Experience Officer Ali Shrago-Spechler. "The Wondering Jew is a beautiful expression of what we hope this museum can be in its next chapter — a place that brings people together through art, history and stories that still matter," said Lipman. Shrago-Spechler, a South Florida native who earned a Fulbright Award in Germany researching stages built by Nazis for propaganda, added: "With The Wondering Jew, we reclaim an antisemitic trope and transform it into the power to tell our own story."

The Wondering Jew opens November 18. Art Basel Week brunch with Joseph Herscher's bartender machine: Sunday, December 6, 10 AM–1 PM. Jewish Museum of Florida, 301 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. Adults $12; students and seniors $10; free on Saturdays. jmofl.org.