‘Rabbinic trips’: NY exhibit blends groovy psychedelic counterculture, Jewish tradition
Times of Israel · LC · trust 46/100
NEW YORK — In August 1969, as hundreds of thousands flocked to the Woodstock music festival, a New York City rabbi drove to the site, hoping to engage with Jewish hippies.
At the festival, the rabbi set up a sign advertising “P.O.T. — L.S.D.” In small print below, the placard said, “Put on tefillin. Let’s start davening,” referring to phylacteries and Jewish prayer.
The Jewish visual artist Steve Marcus heard the possibly apocryphal story while studying at yeshiva. The anecdote inspired an illustration by Marcus showing a grinning man, sporting a Star of David and sidelocks and flashing a peace sign, reflecting Marcus’s mix of psychedelic-era counterculture and Jewish tradition.
The image is part of a trippy new exhibit in New York City by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Center for Jewish History. The exhibit, called “Psychedelicatessen: A Powerful Dose of Art by Steve Marcus,” blends 1960s and 1970s counterculture with Jewish themes, based in Marcus’s youthful psychedelic bent and midlife turn toward Jewish observance.
The free show at YIVO and the Center for Jewish History’s shared building in downtown Manhattan opened this month and runs through December. The exhibit displays 30 original works by Marcus, from images reminiscent of 1960s psychedelic poster art and album covers to reworked comic strips and caricatures.
The playful images include homages to the Daf Yomi daily Talmud study practice, the Slivovitz brandy associated with Ashkenazi Passovers, and historic rabbis like Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides — all with a psychedelic flavor.
Marcus said he hopes the exhibit will invite visitors of all persuasions to engage not only with the art, but with each other, in line with his own personal experiences.
He described a recent chance encounter when he was walking in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with a friend, a tattooed MMA fighter, and ran into another friend, an Orthodox rabbi. He introduced the unlikely pair to each other.
“Now, I’ll hear from my [fighter] friend, ‘Hey, I just ran into your rabbi.’ And my rabbi will let me know, ‘Hey, I ran into your friend,’” he said. “Art and creativity should bring people together. Global hegemony is terrible — it’s the differences that make the world a less boring place.”
In a similar vein, Marcus’s art career has connected him with a range of collaborators, from established museums and rock stars to psychedelic pioneers and subversive poets.
His hand-drawn works hang in several permanent museum collections, including The Jewish Museum of Florida and The Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History in Vilnius, Lithuania.
He has created art for and collaborated with the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, the counterculture novelist Ken Kesey, who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and Timothy Leary, a psychologist who helped popularize LSD in the mid-20th century.
Marcus has also created artwork for The New Orleans Jazz Museum and The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Born in 1969, Marcus grew up in a secular home in the Bronx. He attended Hebrew school, but the family wasn’t religious and didn’t keep kosher, he told The Times of Israel during a tour of the exhibit.
A Grateful Dead fan, Marcus described how, during the summer he turned 19, he hitchhiked and rode buses across the US to Mexico, from Manhattan to the southern tip of Baja California.
“I had many amazing experiences, like getting a ride with a van full of hippies going to see the Grateful Dead at Laguna Seca Raceway in California,” he said of the more than 2,700-mile road trip. “It was a great place to catch a ride in almost any direction, though I had a few scary experiences. Overall, it was an incredible journey.”
His approach to Judaism shifted 18 years ago when his father died of a heart attack on Rosh Hashanah.
“It rang my bell. I started saying [the mourner’s] kaddish every day, three times a day. I gave my parents a lot of worry when I was growing up and my dad stood up for me, even when no one else did. The least I could do was to say kaddish every day,” he said. “Around five and a half months into it, I felt that I wanted to know more and so I ended up studying at a yeshiva. I’ve been learning ever since.”
Those experiences came together in artwork like the “P.O.T. — L.S.D.” illustration, which, at first glance, seems a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Summer of Love. The image shows a bearded man wearing red-tinted glasses, a sizable Star of David, and sandals, sitting cross-legged against a wavy purple and white checkered background.
Marcus heard the story of the Woodstock rabbi at his yeshiva, Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
There doesn’t appear to be documentation of the double entendre being used at the Woodstock festival, but at least one member of the Chabad Hasidic movement deployed the phrase during the Vietnam War era.
Rabbi Nosson Gurary, who manned a Chabad House in Buffalo, New York, used the slogan during those years to inspire Jewish students to find Judaism.
Other works at the exhibit also made use of wordplay and double meanings.
One work, “Public Service Warning,” was inspired by the Jewish artist Lorraine Schneider’s famous 1965 poster, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”
Marcus’s re-imagined poster, in shades of cotton-candy pink, citrus yellow, and lime green, reads, “Schmaltz is not healthy for children and other living things.”
It’s Marcus’s humorous take on the laws of kashrut. Because dairy can’t be used in meat dishes, kosher cooks traditionally used schmaltz, or rendered chicken and goose fat. Yet, as Marcus points out, most doctors would agree that, because schmaltz is high in cholesterol, it’s not heart-healthy.
One of the most playful mashups in the exhibit is “Terrapin Hora,” referring to a type of turtle and a traditional Jewish dance.
Marcus’s image shows a Hasidic man dancing with a giant turtle against a kaleidoscope of colors. It’s a nod to “Terrapin…
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