ASSIMILATION
Culture or the way in which we as human beings categorize difference amongst ourselves (color, beliefs, gender, etc) is my primary subject matter.
Often we humans are caught between two cultures. When I was growing up, there was a vast difference between the culture inside the home (religious and Jewish) and outside the home (secular and not Jewish.) A satisfactory balance between the two was very difficult to establish. Take food for example. Would we eat what the outside culture ate? Would we eat as our mother, and her mother and her mother's mother ate? Would we break that chain eating as our friends ate? Each aspect of human activity became a conscious cultural decision.
Each of these images deals with an aspect of this cultural difference. The Assimilated Menorah combines a sacred candle holder with a secular (cartoon) iconography. The Ten Commandment Scarf is a beautiful decorative scarf design that might be worn and collected as the Hermes scarves of yore. However its icons are Jewish. The Seasonal Candies illustrates that with the introduction of the color blue now we can have packages of blue and yellow candy at holiday time This would be something in the world outside of the home that validated the culture inside the home. The Jewish Valentine addresses the union of two distinct cultures trying to overcome difference of category. The card reads:
I am Gentile. You are Jewish. That you love me is my true wish. Like this posy my heart is true. I would get on a train for you.
Queen of David shows a Jewish Queen in an imaginary deck of cards. The cards represent fate or chance. One must play the cards one is dealt. One cannot choose their hand. My Aunt Eva, the authority of all that is forbidden or allowed played her hand by defining the rules so that all inside the home knew how the rules were to be followed. Her goal was perpetuation of the difference between inside the home and outside the home.
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