Museums & Galleries in East New York

If you and a friend are considering going to the Brooklyn Museum—or seeing Deborah Harry—anytime in the next year, you’d be wise to spend $35 to snag today's Groupon: a one-year Family and Friends membership to the Brooklyn Museum. Since admission to the Brooklyn Museum is normally $10 per person, if you and your art-loving friend go just twice in the next year, today's Groupon more than pays for itself. This membership is good for two adults plus up to four kids under the age of 18.Follow @Groupon_Says on Twitter.

From a stone mosaic that lined the floors of a fifth-century synagogue to the final rhyme spit out by a Jewish hip-hop artist, the span of The Jewish Museum New York's collections is as diverse as it is long. What began in 1904 with 26 artifacts has blossomed into a collection of 27,000 paintings, sculptures, and multimedia exhibits that dovetail into a collage of Jewish culture and identity from across centuries and continents.

The centerpiece of the museum is Culture and Continuity: A Jewish Journey, a permanent exhibit teeming with artifacts, videos, and art that collectively celebrate Jewish identity and the culture's ability to persevere through sometimes tragic circumstances. Artists—from 20th century French master Édouard Vuillard to contemporary American painter Kehinde Wiley—enliven the galleries in rotating exhibitions.

The centerpiece of the museum is Culture and Continuity: A Jewish Journey, a permanent exhibit teeming with artifacts, videos, and art that collectively celebrate Jewish identity and the culture's ability to persevere through sometimes tragic circumstances. Artists—from 20th century French master Édouard Vuillard to contemporary American painter Kehinde Wiley—enliven the galleries in rotating exhibitions.

Interactive exhibits such as the Archeology Zone bring kids within earshot of ancient times as they don ancient costumes and weigh, magnify, and analyze vessels just like anthropologists or careful ancient housewares shoppers. Family activities include holiday-themed art classes and workshops, and The Wind Up series invites adults into the museum for an after-hours menagerie of cutting-edge music, film, and theatre. After a day of soaking up history, attendees can nosh at Lox at Cafe Weissman, a certified-kosher cafe whose stained glass windows shine a light on the edible portion of the Jewish journey.

Drink your heady fill of culture and antiques with today's side deal. For $10, you get a single admission to The American Antiques Show, an $18 value, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in the Flatiron District. Plus, when you redeem your Groupon at the show, you'll be graciously handed a voucher for two-for-one admission to the American Folk Art Museum (one adult ticket is normally $9) in Midtown Manhattan. The American Antiques Show runs from Thursday, January 21 to Sunday, January 24 with different hours every day, which you can check out here.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Times Square winds visitors through twisted halls housing more than 500 artifacts of whimsy, horror, curiosity, and intrigue. Along self-guided tours of the Odditorium, groups of awestruck wanderers interact gaze upon a two-headed cow, an albino giraffe, and the skeleton of a giant crocodile while perusing more than 20 themed galleries. Pickled heads stare out of jars and medieval torture devices such as dot-matrix printers hang from the ceiling while an authentic hunk of the Berlin wall stands in remembrance of the time it got to meet David Hasselhoff.

Outside, beneath the marquee, guests witness the antics of performers swallowing swords, breathing fire, and pushing the limits of the human body. Back inside, guests navigate Ripley’s laser maze, contorting and slithering through a room crisscrossed with green lasers. The playhouse of eccentricities—a birthday-party hot spot—and its Odd Shop stock enough insect candy and one-eyed stuffed canines to feed a pet clown for months.

Unlike more traditional museums, Discovery Times Square does much more than simply display artifacts. The space, located in the building once occupied by the New York Times printing presses, encourages visitors to learn through interactive, sensory exhibits. Past shows have taken guests inside the Titanic’s final wreck site, Da Vinci’s ingenious inventions, and the vast collection of riches and bandages owned by King Tut. The Discovery Times Square shop features games, DVDs, and other Discovery Channel products, as well as sweet treats from the DC Cupcakes Café and Georgetown Cupcake.

Reflecting the diverse scope and scale of science itself, the exhibits at the New York Hall of Science range from massive NASA rockets to holographic depictions of the infinitesimal atom. Originally built for the 1964 World's Fair to showcase technological advancements, the center has since transformed into an interactive museum that, since 1986, has seen more than 7 million visitors. Today, more than 450 interactive exhibits invite visitors of all ages to explore the world by watching living microbes thrive and evolve in a miniscule zoo, discovering the powerful mathematics hidden in everyday objects, and testing their understanding of physics and Plutonian trash talk on a mini-golf course inspired by the cosmos.