The Instagram account Shtetl Baby has a page filled with a variety—well, to stay on theme, the whole Megillah—of Judaica. You might see an iPhone photo of a Brooklyn book dealer surrounded by towers of religious tomes and a stray dreidel, or antique embroidered challah covers courtesy of the Jewish Museum. You’ll almost certainly find a sprinkling of the great Flatbush Jewess Barbra Streisand. And much of what is posted is available to buy, whether a 1984 hardback edition of The Sephardic Kosher Kitchen by Suzy David (with a cover that boasts a nostalgic print of tiny flowers, just like grandma’s wallpaper), a metal dish inscribed with the Hebrew word for “egg” (which a commenter referred to as “parevecore”), or Shabbat candle holders from 1968 with an engraved illustration of a young woman lighting her own holy Friday night candles. (The darling phrase inscribed across it? “Mazal tov on your Bas Mitzvah.”) 

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The account, which has quickly gained a cult following of over 3,000 Judaica devotees, is run by Allison Roberts, who works in marketing and public relations for visual arts. Roberts started Shtetl Baby back in October 2021 as a scrapbook-like ode to Jewish culture, posting everything from a breathtaking portrait of Jewish-Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein to a New York Times clipping about the charitable aspects of the Jewish holiday Purim from 1895. Soon, Roberts also began posting some of the beautiful objects (an amulet from 1700s Holland) and books (the 1981 edition of Stanisław Lem’s Golem XIV) that she found along the way. As Roberts began to post these more tangible curios, people began to ask her if she would list these items for sale. A life-long book lover, Roberts’s first listings included a series of Jewish children’s books from the 1960s and a cooking book with illustrations that “looked like Matisse cut-outs.” 

Over the years since, the account is not only a beloved sales platform–many of Roberts’s items sell instantly–but has also become a fascinating history lesson in Jewish design and art. “Being in the design world and furniture world each group has a clear aesthetic, you can very tell when a chair is French or Italian or from Scandinavia,” she says. “Long before this project, I was thinking about what makes a chair Jewish or what is Jewish interior design or architecture. That isn’t really mentioned so I’m partially trying to fill that voice for myself.” 

So what exactly does Jewish design look like? While it continues to span a diverse range of styles and traditions, as the username suggests, much of Roberts’s Judaica curation is partially focused on the Ashkenazi Jewish experience of shtetls, a type of small town or village that Jews were allowed to live in across Eastern Europe that dates back to the 13th century. Much of that Eastern European shtetl-dom was eventually transplanted to New York’s Lower East Side as generations of Jews began to immigrate in the late 1800s and 1900s; largely to escape pogroms, a wave of anti-Jewish riots and massacres that swept through Europe and led to their forced resettlement.