Since 1984, The Contemporary Jewish Museum has distinguished itself as a welcoming place where visitors can connect with one another and where new perspectives on Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas thrive. The CJM makes the diversity of the Jewish experience relevant for a twenty-first century audience. Through its innovative exhibitions and programs that educate, challenge, and inspire, it's a place to experience art, music, film, literature, debate, and—most importantly—people. The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s architecture fuses a historic power station, originally built in 1881, to a soaring blue steel geometric superstructure. Its building embodies the past and present, the utilitarian and the abstract, the traditional and the contemporary. From the ground, few realize that the building’s unusual shape is derived from the Hebrew letters, chet and yud, which together spell chai, the Hebrew word for “life.”