Steve Marcus creates art at the intersection of cannabis culture and counterculture to take Jewish art to new heights.
Jews have been a distinct tribal people for approximately 4,000 years. In that time, the Jewish people created a lot of music, visual art, and literature. Although I’ve never read much of the Bible, Google tells me that Ecclesiastes 1:9 famously said: “There is no new thing under the sun.”
Well, Steve Marcus’ Psychedelicatessen: A Powerful Dose of Art exhibition seems pretty new.
In it, Marcus playfully mixes Hasidism and rabbinic history with 1960s counterculture and underground comics. Who would’ve thought you could tie an Orthodox Jew’s tzizit string to a roach clip and turn a mezuzah into a one-hitter? Or that a museum would display those items? But coming from the counterculture himself, Marcus’ art offers proof that, for some, cannabis culture and psychedelics are as much a part of Yiddishkeit—which is Yiddish for Jewish life—as Torah and Hanukkah.
This winter and spring, the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, in Portland, has been hosting Marcus’ Psychedelicatessen. Or, more appropriately, they’ve been dosing visitors with this playful vision of Jewish identity.
The Exhibition Experience
“The artist exposes the essence of the thing he portrays,” said Rabbi Menachaem Mendel Schneerson, “causing the one who looks at the painting to perceive it in another, truer light, and to realize that his prior perception was deficient.” Change the gendered ‘his’ to ‘the viewer,’ and the Rebbe is spot on.
I was born Jewish and raised outside of the religion. There, in that secular space far from synagogue, my family quoted Seinfeld, slurped matzo ball soup, and trash-talked conservative politics, and I never met any Jews who connected Jewish identity to such ’60s icons as the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead the way Psychedelicatessendoes. Even during my own wild, rebellious youth, I never associated my people with cannabis or psychedelics beyond my own significant consumption of both.
On my first day at work at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in 2026, a docent gave a guided tour of the gallery. Marcus’ tripped out, colorful giclée prints expanded my narrow perception of what makes something Jewish.
Like a productive mushroom trip, my preconceptions dissolved. Stale notions went up in smoke. Instead of Tevye, the poor Jewish milkman in Fiddler on the Roof, dancing through my mind as he had since elementary school, Marcus used the Grateful Dead to rearrange my neural pathways.
Psychedelic Judaica
On one poster designed in the style of a 1970s Fillmore East concert poster, Marcus placed a Star of David inside the Grateful Dead’s skull logo.
On another poster, Marcus rebranded the iconic Zig-Zag rolling paper logo as “Ram-Bam.” Two French Jews, Maurice and Jacques Braunstein, founded the Zig-Zag Rolling Paper Company in 1855. Zig-Zags are so deeply woven into popular culture that the logo inspired the cover of Dr. Dre’s groundbreaking album The Chronic, and Afroman drops the brand name in his song “Crazy Rap” along with a Colt 45 reference.
In place of the smoking soldier Zig-Zag Man mascot, Marcus placed the 12th-century Sephardic Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, one of the most influential Torah scholars known simply as Maimonides, in the center. He’s smoking what you can assume is a joint.
Psychedelicatessen makes familiar objects new again and ancient references modern.
Marcus turned two Shabbat candle holders into glass bongs. The Museum displays them in the same glass case as the mezuzah one-hitter. If you don’t know, mezuzahs are small decorated vessels that Jewish people attach to their doorpost to remind them of their covenant with God. Mezuzahs contain scrolls with printed Torah verses. Marcus removed the sacred scroll to make room for the sacred smoke, transforming this ancient object into a pipe, which you hit from the top.
Is that sacrilegious? Is it comical? Marcus mashes up the sacred and intoxicating to create what the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIA describedas “a culture of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy”. The same goes for the tzitzit he attached to the roach clip. Tzitzit are the knotted fringes that observant Jews wear to remind them of God and the 613 commandments. Psychedelic Judaica like these challenge tradition and stereotype, but they’re also supposed to be funny. There’s nothing sacrilegious about laughter, right?
Like this: After visiting famous rabbis’ graves in Europe in 2023, Marcus created a series called “Rabbinic Trips,” where Ken Kesey’s grandson Craig printed spiritual leaders’ portraits on real LSD blotter paper. Kesey famously authored the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but he also led the Merry Pranksters, the rag-tag wild bunch of proto-hippies who drove a painted school bus across America and conducted group trips known as “acid tests.” Along with Marcus’ Shabbos bongs, this rabbinic blotter art is one of the exhibition’s most inventive highlights.
Who Is Steve Marcus?
As if ordained for this work, Marcus was born in 1969, during the infamous Summer of Love.
The man now known as “The King of Kosher Pop Art” started life in a largely non-Jewish neighborhood, among Italian and Irish families. In public elementary school, he endured what we now call antisemitic microaggressions from his non-Jewish classmates and Catholic altar boy friends. Kids threw pennies at him. Some threatened to beat him up on the playground, even blaming him for killing Jesus in third grade. “You killed him!” the kids said. “You killed Jesus!” “I was like, ‘I didn’t kill anybody!’” he remembered. “Who could they be talkin’ about?” Upset, he told his father, who explained the situation and history.
Steve’s father was very active in the synagogue. To pass Jewish tradition to Steve, he made sure Steve stayed active, too. After class, Steve attended Hebrew school two days a week. But Jewish or not, Steve was as naturally rebellious as he was artistic. “I always had a rebellious spirit,” he told the Yiddish Book Center in 2021. Naturally, he rebelled against Hebrew school. Instead of outgrowing his antiauthoritarian impulse, he built a life around it.
In his teens, he got into punk rock and metal, and he dressed himself in combat boots, chains, studs, and anarchy signs. He eventually grew out his hair, wore a leather jacket, and pins featuring the names of his favorite bands. Soon after his bar mitzvah, he started smoking weed, too. “I hitchhiked across the country,” Marcus told Up Mag, “from Manhattan to Mexico, just on some free wheelin’, sun shining, hair growing shit.” By the time he was riding a Harley, his dreadlocks reached his knees, and he wore a chain wallet with biker-type clothes. But during his stoned, teen-punk phase, he also cultivated his creativity.
He had several creative people in his family. His grandmother was an artist. His parents encouraged his interest by always enrolling him in art classes. With his punk-rock haircut and chains decorated with padlocks, he started interning at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and later worked as the studio assistant to Polish-American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of the influential Holocaust graphic novel Maus.
From his childhood love of Bugs Bunny and Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, he graduated to underground comics by R. Crumb, 1970s rock poster art, and Raymond Pettibone’s 1980s punk rock drawings for bands like Black Flag. “I was hardcore and wild as a young guy,” he said. Those influences shaped his drawings. So did New York City itself. “I’m from here, right? So, what’s the iconography and the language that affects me? It was from subcultures: graffiti, hip hop, punk, hardcore.”
As a teen, he sold his first piece of art for $25, to none other than Al Goldstein, the infamous owner of an East Coast porn magazine empire. From that first smut publication, he built a portfolio that landed him animation work with MTV, drawings in commercial publications like The New York Times and Esquire, and in proudly fringe venues like High Times, all while contributing illustrations to the underground comic world.
New York City’s low cost of living during the 1980s allowed motivated artists like him to create both art and careers. “If you were entrepreneurial,” Marcus said, “you had some hustle, like under the table, debajo la mesa, metukhl ha shulhantype of vibe, then you could really make it happen.” He did.
He became a very active force within the cannabis reform movement, where he created posters for two High Times Cannabis Cups, and artwork for everyone from Cannabis Action Network to the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. He painted Ken Kesey’s Jeep in Oregon. He collaborated on comics with Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg and hung out with LSD guru Timothy Leary.
After 20 years making art for popular culture and this fringe cosmos, he found inspiration in the New York of his youth.
The touchstones of New York life that he’d attached to—hot dogs, bialys, fresh pickles from the barrel—were disappearing. “The people, the places, whatever, it’s almost like a haunted house, they’re all gone,” he told Up Mag. Naturally, they ended up in his art.
Then his young father died suddenly of a heart attack, when Marcus was 39. “Basically, that really hit me in a really deep way,” Marcus told the Yiddish Book Center. It also inadvertently led him back to his Judaism and launched a new chapter in his artistic life.
“Definitely was pretty far away from Jewish life,” he remembered. “I still identified as a Jew and told people I was a Jew but wasn’t really doing too many Jewish things.”
Marcus decided to say kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the deceased. Devout mourners recite kaddish three times a day, for 11 months, at a synagogue. Only the most devout maintain this daily commitment. Marcus wasn’t religious, yet his father’s Judaism and his love for his father moved him deeply. “There is no other man in this world that wants me to do better than him, except for my father,” Marcus said. “I realized, I can’t say something three times a day, one day short of 11 months for a guy that was there for me for 39 years of my life?”
Once Marcus started kaddish, he never missed a day. “It was a very transformational experience,” he said, “because I was basically involved with music and art—really just sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, basically, to say it like that. Now I’m involved with the Hassidim in Brooklyn.” Meaning, the Harley Davidson-riding, cannabis culture artist guy suddenly found himself among Orthodox men in black hats, white shirts, and long rabbinical beards. “It couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.”
After those 11 months, many people expect mourners to return to their previous conventional lives, and never return to that level of religiosity again.
After spending so much time among the Hassidim, learning the history, Hebrew, and religion, he started to ask himself: What next? After kaddish, would he just quit and go back to eating bacon burgers and working late on Friday nights? All the things he’d learned, all the people he’d met. “I had to be honest with myself,” he said. His family had raised him to do certain things right, or you did them again. Some things you don’t get to do twice—like kaddish. His family had also taught him to be genuine with people, not phony. He knew the answer to what was next: This is a new way of doing things. “From there, I just went very deep into it,” he said. “I started to make that change.”
This transformation was beshert, which is Yiddish for something that’s meant to be.
In 2010, he started studying Torah and Talmud at a world-renowned yeshiva in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Learning is intense. Yeshiva presents a lot of information, but it’s important to him to absorb it. “We’re not obligated to understand, in a way,” he said. “We’re asked to do it.”
His great-grandparents had kept kosher and were religious. After becoming secular and assimilated himself, Marcus reconnected with their past. He started eating kosher foods. He learned Hebrew and put his family’s kiddush cup and other Judaica back into use. “They say that at some point everybody returns,” he told the Yiddish Book Center, “and so it’s been an interesting thing. In Hebrew, they say Chozer B’teshuva. It’s like somebody who’s a returner. So I’m a returner.”
A New Direction In Jewish Art
With his new outlook, Judaism provided material he hadn’t previously recognized as material. His cannabis and comic book work merged with his unborn identity to create a whole new genre, which he liked to call “pop Judaica” and “kosher folk art.”
“I’m learning this. I’m living this,” he said. “I’m gonna start to make Jewish art. I’m not culturally appropriating anything, ’cause this is me. At the same time, I get to be an ambassador, to get to inform the Jewish people to the world. To represent that Jewish culture’s cool, or whatever, and make it accessible to the religious and to the secular, and to the non-Jewish world as well. And make it in a way that’s accessible to everybody.”
That pivot required reaching a whole new audience.
Since then, Poland’s Galicia Jewish Museum exhibited his Jewish Kosher Pop Sk8 Art exhibition in 2023-2024. The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIA ran his Built to Last exhibition, celebrating hot rods and life on the open road. Now the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is showing his psychedelic work.
The name Psychedelicatessen plays equally on the counterculture and Jewish deli culture, with references to knishes, pastrami, mustard, and the iconic New York-based Dr. Brown’s Soda.
No matter how powerfully psychedelics dissolve users’ sense of convention, Judaism built new parameters in Marcus’ creative practice. For one thing, he stopped drawing on the Sabbath. “I’m shomer shabbat,” he said, meaning, he respects the restrictions around work on the Biblical day of rest. He also follows Jewish law, known as halacha, in his drawings and sculptures.
For instance, in his 2019 show Through the Hat, his sculpted small human figures only showed busts, not full bodies. And in his drawing of Hasidim on motorcycles, he didn’t include a desert sun beyond the riders. “And in Jewish law, we’re not allowed to create two-dimensional drawings of the sun, the moon, or the celestial bodies,” he told the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires. Apparently, no rabbinic rules prohibit turning shabbat candle holders into bongs or pinch-hitting a mezuzah—and thank goodness, because this exhibit is awesome.
Cultural References and Accessibility
Do you have to be a certain age to appreciate what blotter is, or who Kesey is? It would help.
If you grew up in the ’60s, you probably know the art of R. Crumb. If you grew up in the 1980s or ’90s, you likely know of the Dead—if not their music, then at least their skull and dancing bear motifs. If you don’t know underground comics, then it won’t mean as much to you that Marcus put the 19th-century Polish Rabbi, The Chofetz Chaim, on R. Crumb’s 1967 comic, Mr. Natural. It will just be a colorful, orange, yellow, and red image.
If you only vaguely know the Dead, then you might not know that when Marcus drew a rabbi and a turtle dancing the hora—which is the popular circular dance people do at Jewish weddings and B’nai Mitzvah—on one poster that includes the cryptic phrase “Terrapin Hora,” he is referencing the Grateful Dead’s ninth studio album, Terrapin Station. Even if you don’t know the references, you can still engage with the images, colors, and dancing text themselves.
Marcus isn’t worried. To him, you don’t even have to be Jewish, or read Yiddish, to enjoy this exhibition. It’s meant to provide Chizuk, which is Hebrew for a little uplift or reinforcement.
When he did his own series based on underground comic Gilbert Sheldon’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers series, he translated the English dialogue in the bubbles into Yiddish. “Even if you can’t read it, it’s hilarious,” he said. “You just look at it and you know, this is some funny shit.”
What This Exhibition Leaves Behind
I don’t speak Yiddish. I can’t read Hebrew. I no longer even smoke, but the spirit of Psychedelicatessen comes through all of those who hit Marcus’s creative bong, and the effects resonate on a visual, comic, and universal level.
For a countercultural, lapsed Jew like me, the exhibition was also kind of disappointing. I’ve hopped trains. I’ve camped in a van for a month. My friends and I searched for illicit substances in the parking lot of a 1994 Grateful Dead concert. Had Timothy Leary and free-love, road-tripping hippies moved in the same orbit as Passover and pastrami sandwiches in my youth, maybe I wouldn’t have quit studying for my bar mitzvah and left Judaism behind for decades? Who knows.
Looking at Psychedelicatessen, I wondered: What would my dear grandmother think of these Shabbat candle holders being turned into glass bongs? She’d love it. She had a great sense of humor, and she used to be a communist.
“That whole rock ‘n roll life,” Marcus said, “it doesn’t really age so well, so it’s good to, like, do Jewish art, as well. It’s a nice thing that matches a nice white beard.”
Photo credit: Andrea Lonas, care of OJMCHE.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
