The Jewish Art collection includes painting and sculpture, photography, works on paper and artist books, as well as digital and mixed media.

[5] The Magnes Collection's museum, with exhibition and event spaces, is located at 2121 Allston Way in downtown Berkeley; the building, previously a printing plant, was given a "utilitarian but sparkling" renovation by Pfau Long Architects of San Francisco, with a "sleek and transparent" interior including custom case work by Pacassa Studios of Oakland.

Beginning as one room above the Parkway Movie Theater off Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland, the museum eventually expanded and relocated to the former Burke Mansion (by architect Daniel J. Patterson) at 2911 Russell Street in Berkeley.

The Fromer's collecting activities ranged from salvaging Yiddish LP records from dumpsters and collecting libraries of Yiddish books from Jewish chicken farmers in Petaluma, California, to retrieving Judaica poised to be discarded as Jewish life in various regions was diminishing, among them Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, India, and Central Europe.

[9] Since re-opening in 2012, the Magnes has acquired two major collections which have resulted in multiple exhibitions: an extensive body of work by Arthur Szyk, a Polish Jewish artist and political caricaturist whose subjects span some of the most profound events of the 20th century, acquired in 2017,[10][11] and in 2018, the archives of photographer Roman Vishniac, comprising over 30,000 images, audiovisual materials, correspondence, and memorabilia, a gift from his daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, which marked the largest donation the Magnes has yet received and the third most valuable gifted collection ever received by the University of California, Berkeley.