Meet the artist

Barbara Shaw

Barbara Shaw brings Jewish humor home from Jerusalem, with Yiddish-savvy gifts like the Mensch Mug, Kvetch Notepad and Schlep Tote made in her workshop there.

Based: Jerusalem, Israel
Craft: Jewish gifts and textiles

Barbara Shaw wants you to take home a piece of Jerusalem. She grew up in Sydney, Australia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and came to Israel in 1986 with training in fine art, archaeology and business. When she went looking for bold, well-designed Jewish gifts and couldn't find what she wanted, she decided to make her own. The first thing she sold was a dishtowel printed with a fig leaf and the verse about each person sitting under their own fig tree.

She started with bold kitchen textiles, one seamstress and her son, who had just finished school. The line has since grown into ceramics, serving ware, glass, stationery, baby gifts, a Yiddish line and t-shirts, all made ethically in her Jerusalem workshop with local designers. Her humor runs through the catalog, from the Mensch Mug to the Kvetch Notepad to the Schlep Tote, and her shop on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem's German Colony carries it all.