Europe

The European Day of Jewish Culture has officially matured, at least by Jewish standards: this Sept. 2, it turns 13.

The event — a continent-wide celebration around an annual theme — has grown in both scope and participation over the past dozen years. This year’s theme is “The Spirit of Jewish Humor,” a particularly appealing topic and one rich with material.

There are certain ideas that New Yorkers take as articles of faith. We think of ourselves as the world’s savviest, able to pinpoint the genuine and bypass the second-rate.

But as I’ve spent more time in Europe over the past several years, my assumptions have been upended, one after another, by the way my Continental friends and relatives actually see their turf. Along the way, I’ve made a mental list of these truisms – a catalog of classic mistakes that New Yorkers (or any well-informed American travelers) make abroad.

Here are the top four:

The headline writers are calling the cold spell across Europe in recent weeks a new “Ice Age.”

Every year for the past decade, the entire continent of Europe has spent the first post-vacation weekend in September celebrating 2,000 years of Jewish culture, from its most ancient aspects to its modern incarnations. There are bagels in Brussels, lectures in Lyon, concerts in Krakow, screenings in Sofia.

It’s the European Day of Jewish Culture: a grassroots, pan-cultural and pan-religious event whose aim is to recover and delve deeper into the richness of the continent’s Jewish heritage.