[1] In late 2024 the museum announced that it would suspend operations for at least a year due to ongoing financial struggles, shutting its doors at end of day on December 15.

"The CJM plays a unique role in San Francisco, and we must scale back to allow ourselves the time and resources needed for re-imagining and rebuilding," said Kerry King, the museum’s executive director, stressing that the closure is not intended to be permanent.

It curates and hosts a broad array of exhibitions each year in collaboration with other institutions, with the intent of making "the diversity of the Jewish experience relevant for a 21st-century audience.

Lane, who calls himself an outsider artist and is not Jewish, says the work is meant to evoke time, space and the dialogue between man and God.

[11] The museum's main building is the former Pacific Gas & Electric Jessie Street Substation, which was originally built in 1881 and was rebuilt in 1907 by Willis Polk after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

[12][13] The building's tilted, dark-blue stainless steel cube, constructed by A. Zahner Company,[13] slices into the old substation's brick, making visible the relationship between the new and the old.

Critic Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times praised Libeskind for a "careful balance of explosive and well-behaved forms" and gallery designs that abandon the architect's characteristic slanted walls.