Biography|James S. Snyder — He Took His Literature and Art History Degree in This Yard

People meet James S. Snyder as the American who ran Israel's national museum.

The paper trail starts here, in Harvard Yard, on 14 June 1973.

Harvard that day conferred 4,298 degrees under clear skies.

Derek Bok handed 1,393 undergraduate degrees in Tercentenary Theatre, the grass between Widener Library and Memorial Church.

Snyder was in the Class of 1973.

He had read English literature and art history in the same college.

Harvard Magazine later listed him, without fuss, as Snyder '73.

He was born in 1952 in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, a mill town south of Pittsburgh.

Haaretz, writing while he still ran the Israel Museum, used that town as the origin line.

The Yard is not a workplace.

It is the place where the modernist who later directed the Israel Museum and the Jewish Museum first sat with literature and pictures at the same table.

Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame gave the principal address the day before the degrees.

The ceremony itself was the older ritual: names, a lawn, a library wall.

Snyder left Cambridge for a one-year internship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

That year became twenty-two.

The internship is the hinge.

Without the degree in this yard, the museum jobs that followed have no first address.

Photo: Andrew Haggard, CC BY-SA 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons