Hannah Wilke moved away from feminizing the masculine forms of Minimalist art toward gradually putting her own body into her art as she did in Venus Pareve. The artist's title for these self-portraits ironically combines two notions: Venus, the classical goddess of love and the Western world's symbol of idealized beauty, and the Hebrew reference for kosher-neutral food ingredients. Anything but neutral, this work challenges stereotypes of the artificial differences between Jewish and non-Jewish women. In confronting this spurious dichotomy, Wilke proclaimed herself a Jewish Venus.