The Transgenic Bagel: Guidelines for a Jewish Girl born in Boston (1997) is an elaborate, gamelike, interactive artist’s book that evolved from one of Rapoport’s earliest Web Art pieces, The Transgenic Bagel (1994).

While Rapoport often used her artwork to explore her own psyche, this project is uniquely autobiographical in that it directly addresses her upbringing and Jewish identity.

The Transgenic Bagel is a parody on a gene-splicing theme. The state-of-the-art bagel technology allows the reader-consumer to alter personality upon eating a recombinant bagel. The gene-splicing theme is based on the assumption that Noah’s Ark comprised the first gene pool. Each animal that resided in this virtual ark had the character trait associated with a Biblical personality from the book of Genesis. As an adolescent Jewish girl, I wished to repress the Biblical traits so I could be accepted into my Boston WASP environment. Here, the reader can decide to select the opposite of these Jewish trait genes in order to conform to a WASP personality.