NJAHS Thanks Max and Melissa for their wonderful tenure at NJAHS, as Collections & Exhibitions Manager and Program Development Associate.
Max’s ten year tenure at NJAHS ends December 31. He was credited for developing NJAHS Digital Collections available on-line and helped create the MIS Map Room at Building 640 as part of his Masters project in Museum Studies at USF. Several years later, Melissa came to work at NJAHS from her father’s former law practice in Emeryville and was a recent graduate in History from UC Santa Cruz. The two met at NJAHS and recently married in 2020. We wish them all best in their new endeavors at the Japantown Taskforce.
NJAHS welcomes Lilith Benjamin as our new Collections Manager. Lilith whose paternal great-grandmother immigrated from Japan, grew up in Idaho and attended undergraduate school at Boise State University where she graduated from the Honors College with distinguished Honors in English Composition in 2015. During her undergraduate education she worked for the Idaho State Historical Society as a docent at their four and a half acre Old Idaho State Penitentiary Historic Site and fell in love with museums. She then graduated from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto with a Masters of Museum Studies in 2019, during her graduate work she also interned at the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco.
Outside of work Lilith skates in roller derby where unlike with historic collections she does not have to be gentile. She previously skated for the Toronto Roller Derby Vipers and the Toronto Roller Derby Smoke City Bandits, where she has thus far gotten lucky in avoiding any broken bones. When not skating or caring for the NJAHS collection Lilith can be found under a pile of her and her partner’s two cats, Kasumi and Shuri.
