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As anyone who has so much as visited Israel in the last six decades knows, the Jewish state is highly caffeinated. Whether they are taking a business meeting in a Tel Aviv café or bonding with brothers-in-arms on a desert dune, Israelis are never without their restorative, sipping the stuff early and often.

But how best to drink it? Herein lies the bitter fight tearing Israeli society apart.

On the one hand are the finjan folk, believers in the beaked, long-handled pot traditionally used to brew coffee by the peoples of the region and also known, with slight variations, as a cezva, a raqwa or an ibrik. No matter what you call it, the principle remains the same: scoop coffee and sugar into the pot, pour water, bring to a boil. Which is where the finjan folk get weird. For coffee to live up to its true essence, any of them will tell you, it must be boiled no fewer than seven times; anything less, and you might as well drink day-old decaf. There is, of course, no evidence to support this theory.

Like most other occurrences of the number seven in Jewish folklore, the myth of the seven boils based more in custom than science. But while this lengthy method of brewing may have little do with coffee, it has everything to do with companionship, assuring that for many long moments, the anticipating drinkers would huddle around the campfire and exchange pleasantries as they watch their drink bubbling to perfection.

Could there be a better beverage for soldiers, guarding remote outposts on long, brisk nights? From the nation’s very birth, the finjan became as much a symbol of the renewing Jewish nation in its ancestral homeland as the Galil assault rifle, the Merkava tank, or the Davidka, the famed homemade mortar that was credited with so many of the Israeli army’s gains during the country’s War of Independence. So popular was the finjan, that Chaim Chefer, the poet laureate of the Palmach, the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, wrote a poem about the small pot: “The wind blows coolly,” it goes, “the fire flickers, the song is blooming.” Moshe Wilenski, the era’s most famous Israeli composer, put Chefer’s words to music. The refrain is meant to be belted out loud: “the finjan spins around and around and around, the finjan spins around and around.” Every Israeli child knows this song by heart. When Israelis think of the sepia-toned heroism of their nation’s struggle for independence, the country’s finest hour, they think of a primitive coffee-making device.

The Israeli army has changed much since the days of the Palmach, replacing its antiquated rifles with hi-tech weapons, but the finjan is still strong with men in uniform. Every self-respecting fellow reporting for reserve duty—most Israeli men continue to serve between one and three months for at least three decades after their mandatory service ends at age 21—is likely to have, somewhere in the recesses of his dufflebag, a tin full of coffee, some sugar, and a battered finjan.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that coffee was conscripted: legend has it that after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the armies of the Holy League discovered sacks full of mysterious green beans left behind by the defeated Turks. These, in turn, were awarded to the King of Poland, who gave them to the heroic officer Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki. As savvy in business as he was on the battlefield, Kulczycki soon realized that his strange beans made for a magical brew, set up shop, and changed Viennese culture forever.

The story, compelling as it is may be, is apocryphal. Vienna’s first coffee shop was opened by a Greek merchant who had nothing to do with the King of Poland or the vanquished Ottoman Empire. But those Israelis looking for suitably caffeinated forefathers could raise a steaming cup to the man known to us today only as Jacob the Jew, an entrepreneur who, in 1650, inaugurated The Grand Café in Oxford, the first institution of its kind in England.

Within a century or so, the lion’s share of financial, intellectual, and social life in the world’s largest empire was discussed in coffeehouses, where—as the Abbé Prévost, the renowned French novelist, famously put it—one had “the right to read all the papers for and against the government,” making coffeehouses no less than the “seats of English liberty.” It didn’t take long for London to sort out its drinking infrastructure: There were separate coffeehouses for nautical insurance agents and coffeehouses for professional wits, tables reserved for Whigs and other tables, a safe distance away, only for Tories.

Which brings us back to that other group of Israelis. Whereas the finjan folk swear by their finely ground Turkish coffee, often laced with cardamom and cooked meticulously over a fire, their nemeses, the espresso people, vow that a cup isn’t perfect unless it was pulled from a chrome-plated Gaggia machine into a pre-heated cup. They often scoff at the very mention of Turkish coffee, still commonly referred to by Israelis of both persuasions as botz, or mud, an eloquent description of the soggy grounds collected in the bottom of the cup.

These men and women see themselves as Jacob the Jew’s true heirs. Not only do they consider their method of preparation far superior to the finjan’s primitive capabilities—after all, what are seven boils compared to more than seventeen bars of pressure pushing water onto tightly packed coffee grounds?—but they are also quick to take pride in their coffeehouse culture at large, a culture of trendy cafés serving dark and viscous espresso shots to a well-groomed clientele that gulps at its leisure, munching on flaky pastries  as it finalizes big business deals. It is a very different culture than the army’s. It is, like England’s coffee houses of old, a culture of commerce and contest, not camaraderie.

Occasionally— could it be any different?—these two worlds collide. Even the staunchest sipper of espresso may find himself holding the finjan’s long handle and counting to seven, and even the most fastidious finjanist may find herself craving a double skim macchiato from time to time. (There is also a third group, consisting of people who drink instant coffee—which, regardless of brand, is referred to in Israel as Nescafé—but with this being a day of atonement and all, we shall spare them the opprobrium they so richly deserve). But the very existence of these two coffee camps betrays more than a mere divergence in personal preferences. It speaks of a schism between the Israel of then and the Israel of now, the nation of fighters sharing a cup and a song and the nation of software engineers negotiating their start-ups, the boundless promise of the land and the strict confines of the city.

Like every other struggle, this one, too, has its apparent victors. As a recent exhibit at Shenkar, Israel’s premiere school of design, demonstrates all too well, when young Israelis think of coffee nowadays they look to the porcelain and ceramic of France and Italy, not the banged-up tin cups soldiers used to carry around. They look more to Alessi than to the Palmach. One student even created an espresso cup resembling a miniature, stout finjan, resting on ceramic stalks reminiscent of flames. The finjan ethos, wild and glorious, was reduced, in this elegant design, to a brilliant and white demitasse. The designs in the exhibition, beautiful as they may be, tell a subtle and sad story: gone are the days when Israelis would huddle together, the wind blowing coolly, the fire flickering, the song blooming, and the finjan spinning around and around and around.

Current Edition [Forward.com]

Publishers of prayer books—siddurim—have long struggled to engage American Jews, to heighten their alertness at synagogue, to encourage them to see prayers not as mere echoes of the past but as vital supplications whose meaning is renewed daily. One way of doing this is to flood the page with commentaries, explications, instructions, and supplementary readings; this approach, exemplified by the ArtScroll siddur, has been the dominant mode for the past 25 years. Yet too much additional reading risks turning a prayer book into a tutorial rather than a conduit to sustained reflection.

There is another way: to sweep the page clean and then reconstitute it using only the poetry of prayer and the tacit language of design. This is the quiet revolution being mounted by Koren Publishers Jerusalem, which has outfitted its popular all-Hebrew Israeli siddur with a new English translation and pared-down commentary by Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (adapted from his new British authorized siddur) and brought it to America. Indeed, when you open the siddur, you may feel a kind of liberation. Prayers that have traditionally been printed as long undifferentiated paragraphs, margin to margin, are parceled out like poetry. Different type sizes and indentations create a visual rhythm that signals structural shifts in the liturgy. The design itself instructs the reader in the shape of the service, without distracting from the words on the page.

The Koren Bible aleph on the left, and the siddur aleph on the right.

Book design’s building block is the letter. The Hebrew letters of the Koren siddur were designed specially for the original Israeli edition. If you look closely, you will find a second Hebrew typeface, designed years earlier for the Koren Bible and used here for setting longer biblical quotations. Look at the alephs to distinguish the two. The Koren Bible aleph is majestic, with three bold diagonal strokes. The Koren siddur aleph is playful, with a central bold stroke framed by two small flags, waving from thin stems. Both typefaces are beautiful without calling attention to themselves, like a well-crafted chair.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the creator of these letters is also the founder of Koren Publishers. Eliyahu Koren, who was in his 70s when he published the original all-Hebrew siddur, in 1981, described his design philosophy in its preface: “From a visual standpoint, the contents of the prayers are presented in a style that does not spur habit and hurry, but rather encourages the worshiper to engross his mind and heart in prayer.” The care and deliberation that Koren hoped to enable in others were values that defined his artistic practice and shaped his career. They would lead him to found his company and to craft both the Koren siddur and the Koren Bible, one of the all-time icons of Hebrew design.

Decades before any of these accomplishments, Eliyahu Koren was already one of the most influential designers in Israel. Born Eliyahu Korngold in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1907, he immigrated to Palestine in 1933 and set about looking for work. Koren had excelled in art school, but in Palestine he found an underdeveloped graphic-design industry that largely amounted to sign-painting. His break came when the Jewish National Fund hired him to lead its first graphics department. In this position, which he kept for 21 years, Koren oversaw the creation of many of Israel’s most prominent symbols, including its first postage stamp and, in his own design, the seal of the city of Jerusalem—a lion rampant in front of the Wailing Wall, framed by olive branches—still in use today.

His greatest project got underway in the early 1940s, when Judah Magnes, the president of Hebrew University, asked Koren to create a new typeface for the first original edition of the Hebrew Bible to be published in Israel. Koren’s art would complement the ambitious scholarly effort of Umberto Cassuto, a rabbi and Hebrew University professor who was searching for the most accurate ancient source manuscripts. But unexpectedly, and within a few years of each other, Magnes and Cassuto both died, leaving the project to founder. The Hebrew University Press, having already waited 10 years for its new Bible, simply reprinted a 19th-century edition with a few of Cassuto’s emendations.

Eliyahu Koren, working on the Koren Bible typeface

Koren decided to carry out the original effort on his own. He formed his own small publishing house and immersed himself in Hebrew manuscripts and early typefaces, looking for inspiration. He based his letter on medieval Sephardi script, while giving it a modern touch. He consulted an ophthalmologist and learned about early research into the legibility of Latin types. In every aspect of his work Koren was meticulous. When he received the cast metal type from the illustrious Deberny and Peignot foundry in France, Koren immediately spotted imperfections and sent it back. The foundry calculated the imprecision at three hundredths of a millimeter and recast the letter at its own expense. “In the final Koren design,” writes the late Israeli book historian Leila Avrin, “the letters are sharp, almost never rounded, with balanced contrasts, faintly serifed, with its few diagonals always parallel to one another. The beauty of the letter never detracts from its readability.”

Koren was as diligent as Cassuto in striving for textual accuracy. He took great care with vowels and cantillation marks, which were drawn by hand and added to the typeset page. When the Bible was finally published, in 1962, it was celebrated in public ceremonies. “Israel is redeemed from shame,” wrote Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. “This is the first Jewish Bible in the last 400 years.” Presidents of Israel would be sworn into office on it. A commemorative book published years later includes photos of the celebrations, plus two of Koren inspecting manuscripts and proofs at the start of the project, with his sleeves rolled up and his expression grave. His hair is dark. By the time the Koren Bible was published, 20 years later, it was mostly silver.

It would take until the 1970s for Koren to begin work on his siddur. His central task was the same: to create beautiful, legible letters and pages to accentuate a sacred text. But unlike the Bible, the siddur is an anthology, pieced together from Torah verses and rabbinic writings. Koren therefore set out to design a new page layout that would differentiate the text, highlighting its source material and keeping the reader alert. Koren also developed a distinct but related siddur typeface, since he felt that the one he had developed for the Bible was too sacred to reuse, except for biblical quotations. This typeface was even more legible than the first, with similar letter pairs distinguished by their shape: dalet, for instance, extends its arm horizontally, while resh angles its arm upward.

“Eliyahu Koren was a perfectionist,” Esther Be’er wrote in an email. She went to work for him as a typographer 30 years ago and remains at his company today. “He didn’t care if a project took a long time (he wasn’t business-minded) as long as he was satisfied with the outcome.” Koren died in 2001, but his methods and philosophy are still alive. To produce the Hebrew-English Koren siddur, the editor, Raphael Freeman, would lay out a section of the book—30 or 40 two-page spreads—and then sit down with Be’er, who would review them to ensure that each had the authentic Koren feel. “Nothing in Koren goes without Esther first making sure that the layout is ‘Koren-y,’” says Freeman. The font chosen for the English, Arno Pro, is contemporary but distinguished, much like the siddur’s English translation. Unlike virtually every other Hebrew-English siddur, the Koren siddur prints the Hebrew on the left-hand pages and the English on the right. This strategy, which Koren advocated during his lifetime, is both aesthetic and practical: it means that no matter which language you are reading, you start from the center and read outward.

Conservative and Reform Jews are used to coming to synagogue and seeing shelves filled with copies of Siddur Sim Shalom or Gates of Prayer—siddurim published respectively by those movements. The shelves of an Orthodox synagogue have long held a variety of prayer books, reflecting the movement’s divergent streams. But since the 1980s, the ArtScroll siddur has dominated the market, and even extended itself beyond the Orthodox world, with its commentary, glosses, and instructions; it is an ideal introductory text for the newly religious and a reference for those without access to knowledgable Jewish leaders. But scholars and rabbis have long criticized its publisher, Brooklyn-based Mesorah, for its permeating ideology: its exclusion of modern scholarship and rabbinics, its incorporation of interpretation into “translations,” its silence on the existence of the modern state of Israel, its approach toward women, its archaisms. For years some members of the Modern Orthodox community have been using the ArtScroll siddur while wishing it could be more modern.

Is the Koren siddur the answer? It does feel modern, without straying from tradition. Jonathan Sacks’s substantial introductory essay quotes Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, not to mention Auden and Blake. In his translation, Sacks dusts off the familiar prayer-book language and spurs the passive Jew to action. “Listen, Israel,” he translates the opening words of the Shema. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, an influential Modern Orthodox rabbi on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has bought 500 copies of the Koren siddur for his synagogue. “I love it. I love the translation. This is English at its best,” Lookstein says. It may be years before Koren’s success can be gauged, since buying new siddurim is an expensive decision that synagogues put off as long as possible.

Everyone has an opinion about translations, but the language of design is more obscure. Does design really matter? Last October, Koren sent out 1,800 advance proofs to American rabbis and lay leaders for feedback. “The most common e-mail,” says Raphael Freeman, “was that of people telling us how for the first time in 30 years they had actually read the translation and it had transformed their davening experience. Their eyes couldn’t help but glance over to the English and they found themselves, whilst davening in Hebrew and scanning the lines of English, having a deeper understanding of their prayers.”

Joshua J. Friedman, a former editor of The Atlantic and Boston Review, is a writer in New York City.

Frank in 1935

Frank’s objects routinely reach five-figure prices at auction, and the buyers have included A-listers like Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, and Ronald Lauder. “The market has just exploded,” reports Carina Villinger, a 20th-century design specialist at Christie’s in New York. “The refined, subdued sensibility, the absolutely magnificent craftsmanship—it’s just the taste that people with a lot of money are looking for.”

Prices could soar even higher now that Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier’s Jean-Michel Frank: L’étrange luxe du rien (The Strange Luxury of Nothingness), an in-depth monograph from Éditions Norma, has appeared, revealing Frank’s little-known life story. He was as tragic, tortured, and short-lived a trendsetter as Sylvia Plath or Oscar Wilde. Frank was plagued by drug addiction, homophobic taunts, crippling bouts of depression, and persecution by an anti-Semitic government. He committed suicide in 1941, shortly after escaping the Nazis, by jumping out of a window at his New York apartment. “He was profoundly fragile yet extraordinarily prolific,” Martin-Vivier says. “He had enormous energy and accomplished so much, in spite of these terrible forces against him.”

The historian started researching Frank for his 2005 doctorate at the Sorbonne and has now interviewed a hundred people in France, Argentina, Brazil, Tunisia, the U.S., and the U.K., including Frank family members and clients or their children. Martin-Vivier also scoured memoirs and correspondence by avant-garde artists. “Everyone Frank knew was interesting,” the author notes. The book’s essays are full of references to the likes of Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Man Ray, Elsa Schiaparelli, Cecil Beaton, Cole Porter, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel. Frank befriended and often designed for these celebrities, as well as for actors, publishers, politicians, and a couple of Rockefellers.

The subject attracted Martin-Vivier partly because other scholars haven’t yet shown much interest in Frank. The most recent monograph about him, by Le Figaro journalist Léopold Diego Sanchez, was published in 1980. The designer’s work has appeared in virtually none of the past decade’s blockbuster design shows. Frank didn’t like machine-age chrome, plastic, or mass production, and he wrote little and never theorized, so he doesn’t fit into the dogmatic modernist pantheon with Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Nor did Frank ever let loose with Art Deco chevrons and nymph forms. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London organized an Art Deco retrospective in 2003, which set museum attendance records, “but nowhere in the show or the catalog was Frank’s name mentioned,” Martin-Vivier notes. And yet, the historian adds, “he was at the absolute center of the intellectual and artistic world of his time.”

Clockwise from left: Smoking room of the Hotel Bischoffsheim, 1926; cubic armchair in shagreen, 1929; deckchair in cérusé oak with wool cushions, 1929; low table in vellum, 1927; stool in iron and leather, 1935.

Martin-Vivier’s interviewees remember Frank as thin, short, nervous, intense, and usually dressed in gray suits. (When he attended costume balls, he dressed in drag, usually white gowns.) He had a tendency to namedrop confusingly with first names only—“Coco, Elsa, Luis”—and was imperious with clients. “Voilà, my work is done, now you can start ruining it,” he’d say, upon handing back the keys to white-lacquered rooms fitted with only a few divans and low tables. He disapproved of paintings hung on his walls, even works by Picasso, Matisse, Cranach, or Rubens.

“Very charming young man, pity the burglars took everything he had!” Cocteau is reported to have said around 1925, after dining for the first time at Frank’s Cistercian-austere apartment. White leather covered the young man’s sofas, and the walls gleamed with bits of glued-down straw. In one room stood nothing but an Hermès-leather-wrapped desk (which was the only piece of his furniture to survive World War II).

Frank had grown up in stuffier yet equally posh apartments, funded by his father Léon’s stock brokerage. Léon, a scion of a German banking family, was one of 11 children who scattered through Europe and the U.S. In 1878, he moved to Paris, and a few years later he married his own American-born niece, Nanette Loewi. Anne Frank’s father Otto was one of Léon’s nephews, and one of Nanette’s cousins. Even more bizarrely, Jean-Michel’s mother was also one of his cousins.

Born in 1895, Jean (he didn’t call himself Jean-Michel until business took off in 1930) had two much older brothers. They died at the French front within two weeks of each other in the summer of 1915. Léon committed suicide a few months later, after the French government seized his bank accounts and canceled his business deals because of his German birth. Nanette survived in a depressive fog until 1928.

Her surviving son never served in the army, exempted due to “general weakness.” A high-school classmate, Jacques Porel, wrote a memoir in 1951 recalling Jean-Michel as “a sort of child-woman, ageless and sexless,” with a mauve complexion, “oriental doll looks and a falsetto voice.” He walked on tiptoe, and spouted bits of memorized poetry or play dialogue. The other students—Porel called them “deep-voiced pimply young men drunk on brutality”—teased Frank endlessly for being not only puny and effeminate but also descended from foreigners.

After briefly studying law and serving as a businessman’s secretary, Frank started living off his inheritance, going out to nightclubs almost every night, and dabbling in interior design for cousins or friends. He also traveled to chic resorts on the Riviera and in Spain and Italy. Everywhere he went, he met and charmed people who later proved useful. Martin-Vivier’s essays lay out a dizzying array of connections and fortuitous coincidences: a school acquaintance who introduces Frank to a patron who happens to know Giacometti or Picasso or the poet Apollinaire.

Assignments trickled in to his home office: apartments for editor and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard and the modernist publisher and typeface designer Charles Peignot, fashion boutiques for Guerlain and Schiaparelli. Frank had no talent for drawing or cabinetmaking (and he occasionally had to take weeks off while detoxing in sanitariums from cocaine and opium abuse). But he had the good sense to partner with a skilled craftsman named Adolphe Chanaux. By 1930, Frank had been named artistic director of Chanaux & Co., with 30 employees at a Left Bank workshop and a boutique on the ritzy Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. The company hired woodworkers, varnishers, and experts in vellum, sharkskin, and straw marquetry to realize Frank’s visions. Frank also persuaded avant-garde artists to try their hands at furnishings, and thereby earn some pocket money. Chanaux distributed screens with surrealist scenes by Dalí and carpets strewn with arabesques and paisleys by the melancholy realist painter Christian Bérard. The Cuban-born architect and sculptor Emilio Terry devised Chanaux’s lines of consoles and mirror frames shaped like palm fronds, and Giacometti contributed bronze and plaster urn lamps, clamshell ceiling fixtures, and eerie sconces held up by tiny plaster fists.

No other Jazz Age designer, Martin-Vivier points out, maintained and promoted a stable of moonlighting artists. (The closest counterpart was Myrbor, a company run by collector and patron Marie Cuttoli, which produced carpets based on images by Picasso, Dufy, Miró, Léger, and Arp.) And few other designers of the time drew on so many cultural precedents. Frank’s stools sometimes resemble African hewn furniture. His tripod tables and armchairs with crisscrossed legs look neoclassical, and his low tables with scalloped trim have Chinese ancestry. Frank, as Martin-Vivier writes, “played with the codes of design and reduced styles to shadows, essences.”

Frank was fluent in German and English (his parents’ mother tongues), so he made road trips to the U.S. and South America bringing in new business. In San Francisco, Frank’s teams lined a railroad heir’s apartment in mirrors and mica to reflect a collection of animal pelts. Nelson Rockefeller commissioned a Fifth Avenue apartment from Frank with oak paneling, Giacometti’s gilded tables and Bérard’s flowery carpets. (Eventually split between Nelson and his ex-wife Mary, the interior remained largely intact into the 1990s.)

In 1939, while the Rockefeller assignment was wrapping up, all of Chanaux’s male workers were drafted. The boutique and workshop were shuttered. Frank by that time had heard from his German cousins that the Nazis were especially vicious toward Jews and homosexuals. The designer had already tried to save Otto Frank from bankruptcy, just before that branch of the family fled to the Netherlands in 1933. (Martin-Vivier studied Otto’s 1930s letters to his mother, praising Jean-Michel’s generosity.) Just before Paris fell in June 1940, Jean-Michel escaped to Buenos Aires and set up shop at an elegant hotel. He already knew some Argentine curators and arts patrons, and by September he “had found his rhythm again,” Martin-Vivier writes. Frank started weekending at haciendas, giving design lectures, and supervising craftspeople. No one knows why he moved to New York in January 1941. Perhaps to ask the Rockefellers to help his family, or to meet up with his sometime boyfriend, an American dilettante and cameraman named Thad Lovett.

On March 8, Frank’s corpse was found on the sidewalk at Third Avenue and 63rd Street. A cousin, Milly Loewi, identified the body. The New York Times ran a 100-word obituary. The relatives in Europe didn’t hear the news until after the war. A French design magazine ran some tributes to him in 1945. But by 1963 the art magazine L’oeil headlined an article, “Jean-Michel Frank, a Forgotten Decorator.”

The first generation of Art Deco collectors—including Andy Warhol and arts publisher Sandra Brant—rediscovered Frank in the 1970s. Society decorators like Billy Baldwin, Mark Hampton, and Pauline Metcalf declared him their idol. Baldwin, in his 1972 monograph, described a Frank-designed white bedspread as “entirely patternless, entirely colorless, and entirely breathtaking—full of the magic of texture on texture.”

“Le phénomène Frank” has stayed hot. Even his accessories fetch astronomical prices now: in 2003, three leather or vellum trash cans he’d provided for a Chicago-area mansion (they’d been in the house since 1932) sold for $42,000 at Christie’s. Convincing fakes of Frank designs are now turning up as well, says Villinger at Christie’s: “Unfortunately the value’s high enough now that it’s worth faking, even in the costly materials like sharkskin and ivory.” Martin-Vivier has also noticed innumerable Frank knockoffs, like his cubic armchairs and urn lamps, at stores like Ikea. (How horrified the designer would be to see luxe pauvre, crowded on tchotchke shelves at the mall.)

Academics and curators, meanwhile, are paying more attention to Frank. The Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval, a high end Art Deco gallery in Paris, has launched a retrospective to coincide with the publication of Martin-Vivier’s book, and next spring an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum will explore furniture and fashion by Frank’s circle. “He’s finally being taken seriously,” the expert says. “He’s being rehabilitated.”

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American design historian Mel Byars once called the work of Israeli designers the “best-kept secret” of the design world, but the past few years have finally brought them some attention. SAFE: Design Takes On Risk, a 2005 exhibition at MoMA, featured a number of Israeli projects, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum recently concluded Solos: New Design From Israel. These shows have focused on objects from furniture to emergency preparedness kits. But Israeli typographers and type designers, working with a character set unfamiliar to most of the world, have faced higher hurdles in finding a global audience.

Oded Ezer has met this challenge with a series of genre-bending experimental posters with Hebrew type that’s been abstracted, fragmented, and otherwise subjected to heavy sculptural manipulation, often pushed beyond readability even for those who can read the language. “What I’m really interested in is trying to find new possibilities for typographic expression, not only in Hebrew,” Ezer, 32, said from his studio in Givatayim, near Tel Aviv. The originality of this work, which he’s dubbed “typo-art,” has won Ezer honors in a number of high-profile international design competitions.

A 1998 graduate of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Ezer realized early on that he’d never be satisfied simply executing commercial projects. In 2000, he founded his own studio and, with a group of like-minded designers, cofounded Hagilda (“The Guild”), Israel’s first type-design cooperative. At the same time, he began a series of experimental works, looking to architecture, the sciences, and natural forms for models. He found particular inspiration in the work of artist Ed Ruscha, who also began as a commercial graphic designer, and in the posters produced during the 1980s by the Dutch design firm Studio Dumbar.

“Plastica” (2000) grew out of Ezer’s interest in applying biological forms—in this case, forms reminiscent of insects or arachnids—to type. Ezer continued to experiment in his commercial work and in a series of personal works that paid homage to Michelangelo along with three contemporary Israeli innovators—the late poet Yona Wallach, the experimental composer Arie Shapira, and the graphic designer David Tartakover. More recently, Ezer has been trying to imagine the inner lives of letterforms. His newest projects toy with the notion of how type might have looked had nature created it. While he’s clearly inspired by biotechnology, Ezer has developed his biotypographical creatures intuitively, playing with everyday materials such as wax, fishing line, and chewing gum.

Ezer shies away from calling himself an artist, which would imply a direct involvement with politics or society. “Letters may be part of culture, but I don’t deal with messages,” he says. Still, given who Ezer paid homage to earlier in his career—Tartakover, for instance, is at least as well known for helping to found Peace Now as he is for being a designer—one gets the sense that Ezer may be more of an artist than he’s willing to admit.