Forshpeis is Yiddish for appetizer, or bite, and the new one-room show is literally a small bite or taste of the 10,000-artifact Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana the museum recently acquired.

Visitors are ushered into the show by the giant, apron-clad preserved-cucumber mascot for Ladies Choice Kosher Pickles. Most of the displays talk about the foods and food traditions Eastern European Jews brought to America (like seltzer, named for the Niederselters, German springs where it was originally obtained and here represented by antique seltzer bottles) or the ways American food companies tried to cater to the Jewish-American market (including a 1924 Jell-O cookbook published in Yiddish—despite the fact Jell-O is made from pig, an animal Jews who keep kosher can't eat). The show reveals how vegetable-based Crisco shortening opened up a world of new dairy-based recipes to kosher cooks who previously only had meat-based schmaltz, or chicken fat, to work with, prompting the boast that Crisco was a product "the Hebrew race has been waiting 4,000 years for."

As the first mainstream food company to seek kosher certification, Heinz became so accepted in the Jewish community that the company was forced to pay for an "annual pre-Passover" advertising reminder—reproduced in the exhibit—that its products, though kosher, were actually not kosher for Passover.

The most interesting items in "Forshpeis!" show the interplay between American Jews and the country's many other minority or immigrant groups, like the button advertising St. Pat's Kosher Deli, and other buttons—from the the '60s Black Power era—declaring pickle and pastrami power, and the poster featuring an Asian man from the famous "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's real Jewish Rye" ad campaign.

This exhibit will probably be most informative to non-Jews (I don't imagine there are too many members of the tribe who will be enlightened by its definitions of borsch, gefilte fish and blintzes). At the same time, perhaps because of its small size, this exhibit leaves other only slightly less obvious questions unanswered: the connection between the technical food definition of schmaltz and its popular use to describe the overly sentimental, for instance.

But if the subject of why Maxwell House has always given away Passover Seder Haggadahs, or prayer books, comes up at my mother-in-law's Seder next year (as it did this), "Forshpeis!" has supplied me with the answer. (It's because the company was trying to promote America's first coffee that was kosher for Passover, all you fellow goyem who need to impress.)