What’s With All the Israeli Folders? (Origami Showerthoughts #3)

What’s With All the Israeli Folders? (Origami Showerthoughts Compilation #3)

by Marcus

The origami showerthoughts strike again! Last one ran long so I tried to keep this one a little shorter. Hope there’s still something to pique the imagination, as always.

 

Why Are There So Many Origami Artists from Israel?

The worldwide origami community has three centers, organized roughly along cultural and linguistic ties: the Anglosphere (the US and UK), the Sinosphere (Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam) and the Hispanosphere (Spain and Latin America). So where on earth did the Israeli origami community come from? They have sizable conventions, a body of published works, and they’ve produced such important origami figures as Ilan Garibi and Gilad Aharoni. But I have no idea where this comes from. I can accept the existence of, say, Israeli classical musicians, because a lot of European Jews were classical musicians before immigrating there. But origami doesn’t feel like it has the same history. So I genuinely want to know: what do Israelis see in origami? And–to address the elephant in the room–given the last two years of genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the Israeli government, do any of them plan on speaking a single word condemning it?

 

I Don’t Care What Anyone Says, This Is A Great Superpower

So a while ago, somebody made this post on r/shittysuperpowers:

I want to be clear: this is not a shitty superpower in any sense of the word. This is a genuine superpower! Especially if you can eat the models. That may sound like an overly broad interpretation of the prompt, but it’s clearly stated that knowing what the food tastes like matters to the realism of the model. So if you remember enough details about the dish, at some point the origami food would be completely indistinguishable from the real thing, right? Then if you can eat the paper versions of the food, you’ve unlocked something truly astonishing: you’ve given human beings the ability to consume cellulose, entirely through the power of folding. Now that’s a good superpower! I leave extrapolating the consequences to better speculative fiction writers than myself.

 

The Extended Crease Severity Spectrum

A common struggle in learning origami is dealing with partial creases for the first time–specifically, remembering not to crease them all the way through the paper. I’ve had plenty of struggles both doing these right and teaching them. But the negative effects of extending a partial crease actually vary with the complexity of the model! They’re bad in simple models because of how exposed they are, and they easily become distracting to the eye. As models get more complex, though, such exposed surfaces become less frequent and extra creases become less visible, less distracting. But in even more complex models, they become a bigger issue again for a completely different reason: they can be confused for other landmarks and mess up the proportions of a model late down the line if you’re not careful. An interesting (and very non-linear) issue that more people should be aware of.

 

They’re Turning the Jumping Frogs Gay

So back in 2023, I wrote “The World’s Strangest Paper Size,” about my experiments folding a leftover paper strip cut off of a piece of American letter paper–2.5 by 8.5 inches. Well, it turns out I wasn’t actually the first person to do this! The first would have been the late Gay Merrill Gross, a British origami pioneer and designer of a large number of simple models. One of her diagrams, recently made available on OrigamiUSA, concerns a jumping frog made from a business card. At the end of the instructions, Gross points out that if you don’t have a business card handy, you can get the same proportions by folding an “endstrip” in half. What’s an endstrip, you may ask? It’s the rectangle obtained by cutting a square off a piece of letter paper and using the thin rectangle piece left over. Darn it! Someone got there first. (I still have one over with the deer, though. That’s a Marcus original.)

 

Size Matters

There are only two kinds of showpieces: the really small kind and the really big kind. Either the paper is more than 30 cm. square and everyone’s impressed at how complicated it is, or it’s less than 7 cm. square and everyone’s impressed at how small the details are. But there’s a weird gray area between those two where nothing really counts as a showpiece. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two most common origami paper sizes–15 cm. and 25 cm.–fall into that gray area.

 

Become Undiagrammable (pt. 2)

Eric Joisel once said that an origami model can’t be perfectly described in diagrams. The soul of a designer, the indelible mark they make on their own creations, is something that can’t be written down and copied. Having now drawn a few of them, that’s only partially true. I’m fully within my power to make diagrams so detailed and descriptive that you could fully copy my version of a model. But I’m also within my power to say this: I don’t want to. I want you to only be able to fold imperfect versions of my models. That way I have the best versions of them by default! Was Joisel thinking that when he wrote diagrams? Perhaps not. Or perhaps he was simply too cowardly to say it out loud. I’ll let you decide that for yourself.

 

Don’t Call Me a Master

I’m really just tired of people using the phrase “origami master.” It always conjures up a particularly annoying image: the wizened Oriental sage, hiding atop a mountain and full of mystic secrets that he refuses to share with the rest of the world. That couldn’t be further from the truth in origami. Folders are more than happy to share their knowledge with each other and with newcomers, because that’s how origami progresses as an art. And no, this doesn’t contradict the last showerthought. I can share stuff but I also have boundaries.

 

The Almost-Tautonym Of Foil Paper

I was curious about the etymology of the word “foil” and I googled it on a whim one day. Foil (in the sense of a thin sheet of metal) ultimately derives from the Latin word folia, meaning leaf. Not too surprising. But before coming to English it passed through Old French as fueille, which apparently referred to any thin sheet-like material. This could include a literal leaf, or a sheet of metal, or indeed, a piece of paper. So in a way, does “foil paper” really mean “paper paper?” That’s probably a bit of a stretch, but I’m the world’s biggest shill for foil paper so I’ll choose to believe that it’s true.

 

A Shopping Analogy

Trying to shop for origami paper is just like trying to shop at a big Asian grocery store: you’re surrounded by so many materials from so many different cultures but you don’t know how to use like 90% of it. So you stick to the same things over and over, eternally frustrated at your own inability to branch out. Yeah, that’s the entire showerthought.

 

On the Entirely Serious Problem of John Montroll Disrespect

It truly baffles me how more people don’t know about the general edge division methods. I recently came across a model published in 2025 (and presumably designed not long before) that required you to divide the paper in 15ths and guess what their strategy was? Divide the paper in 16ths and then cut a strip off of the end! Just looking at that made my head spin a little. You’d think we had come a little farther from methods we were using back in the 60s but I guess I’m wrong. To keep people on their toes, I’m not going to say the name of the model or the designer, but they obviously haven’t read Origami Polyhedra Design by John Montroll because it explains all of those methods, clear as day. Just more proof, I suppose, that we in the origami community don’t appreciate Montroll's polyhedra books nearly as much as we need to. Someday this’ll probably be its own essay but I’m content simply putting this little piece out there for now.