Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Worlds of Consumption) 3030889599, 9783030889593

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WORLDS OF CONSUMPTION

Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America Edited by Paul Lerner Uwe Spiekermann Anne Schenderlein

Worlds of Consumption

Series Editors Hartmut Berghoff Institute for Economic and Social History University of Göttingen Göttingen, Germany Jan Logemann Institute for Social & Economic History University of Göttingen Göttingen, Niedersachsen, Germany

This series brings together historical research on consumption and consumerism in the modern era, especially the twentieth century, and with a particular focus on comparative and transnational studies. It aims to make research available in English from an increasingly internationalized and interdisciplinary field. The history of consumption offers a vital link among diverse fields of history and other social sciences, because modern societies are consumer societies whose political, cultural, social, and economic structures and practices are bound up with the history of consumption. Worlds of Consumption highlights and explores these linkages, which deserve wide attention, since they shape who we are as individuals and societies. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14382

Paul Lerner  •  Uwe Spiekermann Anne Schenderlein Editors

Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America

Editors Paul Lerner Department of History University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA, USA

Uwe Spiekermann University of Göttingen Göttingen, Germany

Anne Schenderlein Dahlem Humanities Center Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany

Worlds of Consumption ISBN 978-3-030-88959-3    ISBN 978-3-030-88960-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America “With chapters ranging from the conspicuous consumption of wearing fur coats to the plebian traffic in second-hand goods, Jewish Consumer Cultures offers original, provocative essays on the relationships between Jews and commercial modernity that offer fresh insights into this important topic. It is a must-read for Jewish studies scholars and readers.” —Roger Horowitz, Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, and author of Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food “The essays in Jewish Consumer Cultures make some crucial points for our understanding of the past. Consumption matters. How people spent their money and what those purchases meant to them reveals much about their social, political and cultural lives. What they did with the resources at their command and how they decided what to buy dovetailed with how they saw themselves set against the contexts of their Jewish and German lives. These essays also point to the distinctiveness of Jewish consumption. The specific pressures and opportunities faced by Jews in their various places of residence influenced their choices and those choices in turn reflected their ideas about what it meant to live as Jews in the modern world.” —Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University “This innovative anthology offers multi-varied perspectives on the interrelated topics of Jewish economic activity and consumption and their role in shaping diverse communities in Europe, North America and Israel. Groundbreaking research sheds new light on the relations between dynamic consumption and identity transformation. Chapters skillfully explore how creative enterprises and conscious marketing contributed to the formation of our material cultures today.” —Elana Shapira, editor of Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism

Contents

1 Jews, Consumer Culture, and Jewish Consumer Cultures: An Introduction  1 Uwe Spiekermann, Paul Lerner, and Anne Schenderlein Part I Jews, Retail Cultures, and Modern Commerce in Europe and North America  41 2 Beyond the Bright Side of Consumer Culture: Jewish Peddlers and Second-Hand Dealers in Germany, 1800–1938 43 Uwe Spiekermann 3 Advertising in the German-Zionist Press in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century: A Case Study 67 Olivier Baisez 4 Consuming Temples on Both Sides of the Atlantic: German-Speaking Jews from the Department Store to the Mall 87 Paul Lerner 5 Stanley Marcus: Fashioning a City111 Nils Roemer vii

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Part II Jewish Consumer Cultures 131 6 Buy Me a Mink: Jews, Fur, and Conspicuous Consumption133 Kerry Wallach 7 Mrs. Blumenthal Builds Her Dream House: Jewish Women and Consumer Culture in Postwar American Suburbs159 Aleisa Fishman 8 The Jewish Consumer Culture of British Mandate Palestine195 Hizky Shoham Part III Jewish Questions, German Questions, and the Politics and Meaning of Consumption in the Modern World 221 9 “For Humanity’s Sake”: American Jewish Boycotts of Germany Before and After the Holocaust223 Anne Schenderlein 10 The Art Market in Photography: Modernity, Jews, and Wiedergutmachung?253 Michael Berkowitz 11 Does Consumer Culture Matter? The “Jewish Question” and the Changing Regimes of Consumption273 Gideon Reuveni Index297

List of Contributors

Olivier  Baisez  Études Denis, France

germaniques,

University

Paris-8,

Saint-­

Michael  Berkowitz Hebrew & Jewish Studies, University College London, London, UK Aleisa  Fishman  United Washington, DC, USA

States

Holocaust

Memorial

Museum,

Paul Lerner  Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Gideon  Reuveni The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Nils  Roemer Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA Anne Schenderlein  Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany Hizky  Shoham Graduate Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Uwe Spiekermann  University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany Kerry Wallach  German Studies, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, USA

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Antisemitic cartoon satirizing advertising as a Jewish form of communication, 1904. (Source: Kikeriki, November 27, 1904, p. 3) 4 Fig. 1.2 Decorating the Jewish home: Advertisement for a patented Hanukkah candle holder, 1905. (Source: Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (Cologne) vol. 18, no. 49, 1905, p. iii) 9 Fig. 1.3 Illustration of matzah production in Austria-Hungary, 1889. (Source: Das interessante Blatt, April 11, 1889, p. 7) 11 Fig. 1.4 Evidence of a Jewish consumer sphere: Advertisement for a kosher margarine, 1909. (Source: Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (Cologne), vol. 22, no. 3, 1909, p. 30) 12 Fig. 1.5 Promoting the Jewish state by advertising goods from Jewish settlers in Palestine, 1897. (Source: Berliner Tageblatt, December 19, 1897, p. 15) 13 Fig. 1.6 Visions of a Jewish middle-class community in the Land of Israel. (Source: Der Welt-Spiegel, August 23, 1906, p. 3) 14 Fig. 1.7 Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, June 2017. (Photograph by Paul Lerner)16 Fig. 1.8 Clothes make the man: Antisemitic cartoon of Jewish integration via consumer goods, 1871. (Source: Kladderadatsch, vol. 24, no. 14–15, 1871, p. 57) 17 Fig. 1.9 Attracting Jewish customers: Advertisement for Palmin cooking fat, 1909. (Source: Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (Cologne), vol. 22, no. 4, 1909, p. ii) 18 Fig. 1.10 Hamantaschen from the Parkway Deli & Restaurant, Silver Spring, Maryland, May 2016. (Photograph by Uwe Spiekermann) 23

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4

The “Peddler” as a cipher of heterogeneous commercial and cultural functions in emerging consumer societies 45 A common narrative: The peddler as a fashion broker. (Source: Harper’s Weekly, November 9, 1912, p. 13) 48 Comparative advantage of Jewish peddlers: Integration of multiple aspects of the occupation 50 Specialization and substitution: The transition of peddling in Germany from the 1870s on 51 The intertwined worlds of Jewish commerce in antisemitic cartoons: The urban shop keeper. (Source: Fliegende Blätter 65, no. 1631, 1876, p. 134) 52 The intertwined worlds of Jewish commerce in antisemitic cartoons: Rural peddlers. (Source: Fliegende Blätter 88, no. 2227, 1888, p. 126) 53 “Stop the specter of Jewish haggling!”: Antisemitic poster presenting peddling as a danger to consumers, 1939. (Source: Völkischer Beobachter, March 5, 1939) 59 The Brühl, Leipzig Fur District, ca. 1920s. (Source: Leipzig Jewish Community Collection, Leo Baeck Institute, Photograph F9629. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute) 136 Fox stole by C. A. Herpich & Söhne, ca. 1920s. (Courtesy of the Claus Jahnke Collection) 145 Bess Myerson as the “Lady in Mink,” 1954. (Source: Author’s private collection) 148 Myra Levy’s ad in the Nassau Herald, April 2, 1954 175 ABC Photographers ad in The Voice, Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow, April 1959 176 Richard Meisler ad in The Scroll, Wantagh Jewish Center, December 1959 176 Mazola vegetable oil ad that states, “American bagels—doughnuts—fried in Mazola oil have a wonderful taste.” (Source: The Jewish Morning Journal, December 30, 1920) 280 “Andy Cohen drinks Toddy!” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 14, 1928 281 Gold Medal Flour Yiddish Cookbook, published in Minneapolis in 1921. (Source: Harvard Library, https://iiif.lib.harvard. edu/manifests/view/drs:23012778$1i)283 “Zionists! Make your children happy on the Hanukkah holiday!” Jüdische Rundschau, December 9, 1927, 701 289

CHAPTER 1

Jews, Consumer Culture, and Jewish Consumer Cultures: An Introduction Uwe Spiekermann, Paul Lerner, and Anne Schenderlein

In 1913, Fritz Lamm (1876–1942), a lawyer who specialized in social welfare and youth issues in Berlin’s Jewish community, presented the results of a household budget study of Jewish poverty, which had been underwritten by the local pauper commission. As expected, the study revealed the abject conditions that many Jews lived in and the scarcity and general lack of economic resources that marked their lives.1 The mostly orthodox Jewish families in the study generally spent less money on consumer goods than gentiles in the same economic class, and there were some notable differences in their spending habits. The Jewish families

U. Spiekermann (*) University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany P. Lerner Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Schenderlein Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_1

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devoted a greater share of their budgets to rent (they were more likely to live in the expensive metropolises) and to food. Indeed, the subsidies provided by the pauper commission were aimed at not merely keeping their recipients at subsistence levels, but at enabling them to lead Jewishly observant lives, above all, by allowing them to keep kosher, especially during the high holidays and around Passover. Jewishness or Judaism was thus linked to specific patterns and practices of consumption, even amid severe economic hardship. Lamm’s study turned the need for affordable housing and clothing into political issues and sites of Jewish philanthropic intervention. It also brought attention to the plight of the Jewish poor, who defiantly and proudly maintained orthodox ways of living and consuming even at significant cost amid dire economic circumstances. Consumption in modern capitalist consumer societies may be inflected by religious and cultural differences, but it is also determined by market access and class position. This situation suggests one of the challenges for scholars of consumer culture: how do we balance structures and rational economic drives with beliefs and practices? And how do we assess the relative impact of these factors on individual and group decision-making, on consumer preference, and on style, taste, and practice? Jewish history and the study of Jewish cultures raise questions and introduce tensions that lie at the heart of modern consumer society. Conversely, the study of consumption and consumerism sheds fresh analytical light on Jewish history. This volume lies at the intersection of the two fields, offering a variety of perspectives on Jews as both consumers and creators of commercial and retail cultures. Its authors analyze Jewish economic niches, distinctive Jewish patterns and styles of consumption, and the meaning and symbolism of ritual objects that embody the tension of being both spiritually transcendent and grounded in market economies. Jewish Consumer Cultures sheds light on the centrality of economic activity and consumption to acculturation processes, migration, Zionism, settlement in Palestine, antisemitism, marginalization, and the reshaping of Jewish religious and familial life in modernity. It links consumption practices to the broader experience of Jews in modern Europe and North America. Centering on Germany and the United States (and to some extent, Israel), the book reflects the unique economic mobility of Jews in those places and their intensive involvement in the development of the modern German and American (and of course Israeli) commercial spheres.

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The Economic Turn in Jewish History This volume would not have been possible a decade or so ago. Only recently have historians, cultural studies and literature scholars, and sociologists and anthropologists begun to investigate relationships between Jews, consumer culture, and Jewish consumer cultures. We bring together some of the new and fascinating work in this area.2 But why is this trend in research so recent, when consumerism and consumer culture have attracted enormous amounts of scholarly attention since at least the 1980s?3 As several scholars have observed, recent years have witnessed an economic turn in Jewish historical studies, as historians began devoting increasing attention to Jews’ economic activities, the economic sphere as a site of Jewish-gentile contact, and the economic dimensions of Jewish emancipation, acculturation, and persecution.4 Doing so required facing a number of problems. For one, linking Jews with specific economic domains—banking, finance, big retail, advertising—is historically fraught in the extreme, given the long history of antisemitic economic calumny and propaganda. Based on traditional anti-Judaism, manifested in medieval and early modern pogroms and in hate-filled tracts like Martin Luther’s 1543 Von den Juden und iren Lügen (Of Jews and Their Lies), Jewish presence in the market sphere was restricted, questioned, exaggerated, and turned into scandal.5 When Werner Sombart argued in the early twentieth century that capitalism was a Jewish phenomenon, he gave age-­ old stereotypes the luster of academic credibility. A long line of antisemites have subsequently portrayed Jews as pulling the economic strings behind societies and governments, and have cooked up conspiracy theories and racial explanations for the extraordinary success of some Jewish-owned enterprises.6 At the same time, the flip side of the handful of enormously wealthy Jewish bankers and financiers, the penurious Jewish rag trader or the peripatetic junk dealer, became ubiquitous in modern imaginary as signs of Jewish marginality, difference, and pathology.7 Core activities of modern consumer societies like peddling, advertising, auctioning, or financial advising were linked to Jews and encoded as “Jewish,” despite the fact that gentiles were often trendsetters and dominant actors in all of these sectors. Significantly, the emergence of modern consumer cultures paralleled the rise of modern antisemitism, and the two developments became—and remain—intertwined. New forms of mass media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries facilitated the spread of antisemitic images, and

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advertising and political propaganda grew out of the same techniques and technologies.8 Readapting older anti-Jewish tropes, modern antisemites racialized notions of Jewish difference and represented duplicitous economic behaviors like usury, trickery, and counterfeiting as expressions of Jewish racial characteristics. This fraught situation, indeed a concern with recycling and giving voice to such calumnious claims, surely acted to deter generations of scholars from engaging with such topics and created taboos about linking certain kinds of economic behavior and activities with Jews (Fig. 1.1). Furthermore, the field of Jewish history, at least until the 1980s and 1990s, has a long history of emphasizing intellectual and religious developments over studies of society, culture, and the economy.9 Having originated in “Wissenschaft des Judentums” and in the heady nineteenth-century crucible of Jewish religious reform and Christian anti-Judaism, Jewish studies as an academic field still bears traces of its founding. Its attention to rigorous source criticism, texts, and religious tradition in the “giants” of Jewish thought from the Medieval period through the Haskalah left little space for analyses of the changing social and economic milieus of the Jewish past. Thus, even as social, and then cultural and gender history transformed the historical profession, Jewish history was slow to reflect these changing approaches and concerns. Key advances have been made by such historians as Jerry Z.  Muller, Jonathan Karp, and Derek Penslar, whose influential works opened up the

Fig. 1.1  Antisemitic cartoon satirizing advertising as a Jewish form of communication, 1904. (Source: Kikeriki, November 27, 1904, p. 3)

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field in the 1990s and 2000s. Muller, for example, took on the “special relationship” of Jews and capitalism in a series of essays, which trace the topic back through theological and philosophical texts and analyze it in treatments of intellectual “giants,” like Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart.10 Still, for all of their conceptual clarity and thought-provoking conclusions, Muller’s investigations remain chiefly in the realm of intellectual and discourse history, and he says little about “real” economic and social life or the relevance of such ideas for the majority of ordinary people in or outside of the business world. Studies by Penslar and Karp have shown the centrality of economic topics to Jewish identity and European perception and representations of Jews.11 For all of their insights and analytic precision, their works likewise generally operate on the level of discourse, which they scarcely link to economic-historical concerns or the study of consumption or consumer cultures. A subsequent generation of studies by Marni Davis, Paul Lerner, Adam Mendelsohn, and Hasia Diner, among others, trace Jewish business activities, particularly retail and consumer industries as well as the discursive construction of Jewishness in the economic sphere, but they still shed relatively little light on the practices and experiences of Jewish consumers or on the existence of distinct Jewish consumer cultures.12

From the Economic Turn to Consumer Culture Studies The “economic turn” in Jewish history paved the way for this volume because it created the conditions for a dialog between Jewish studies and the booming field of the history of consumption.13 This convergence has opened up new perspectives on Jewish consumer cultures, many of which are on display in these pages. Indeed, Jewish Consumer Cultures surveys and contributes to the growing literature in this area, which has dealt with such diverse topics as the emergence of coffee as a Jewish drink in early modern Germany, the Jewishness of smoking, and the development of rhinoplasty and cosmetics as new branches of consumer culture in the nineteenth century.14 Shopping has been shown to have played a crucial role in the everyday lives of Jews (and other modern social actors), and consumption has proven central in the formation of Jewish identities.15 Indeed, consumption sparked a great deal of discussion in Jewish circles in Europe, the United States, and Palestine/Israel at least in the nineteenth

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century. Many community officials and rabbis criticized (excessive) consumerism or saw it as a threat to the Jewish values of modesty and humility, a notion that paralleled a long-standing identification of consumerism as a false god or a secular, materialist alternative to Western religiosity.16 In general, however, there was no inherent contradiction between modern Judaism and modern consumer societies, which have intertwined in ways fascinating to unravel. The products Jews bought and consumed figured prominently in often heated debates on modernization, secularization, and assimilation on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.17 Most Jews enjoyed the opportunities afforded by growing wealth and increased buying power, becoming, in the eyes of some observers, model bourgeois consumers. In light of the growth of Jewish consumer culture studies, this is an appropriate moment to survey this new field, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and outline areas for further research. Consumption is an essential human activity that affects every facet of personal and public life. Its analysis does not constitute a discrete field of research, but is more or less interwoven into all historical analysis. In contrast to consumption, the term “consumer culture” is more limited. Focused on the interaction of individuals, groups, and material goods via markets, it is predicated, first, on a surplus of (potentially available) goods. Second, consumer culture requires a social and economic environment in which continuous consumption is critical to social stability. Finally, consumer culture depends on an environment in which everything is commodified and can take on significance beyond its original purpose, where, as several theorists have argued, we communicate and create identities and solidarities largely through acts of purchase and display.18 Analyzing consumer cultures therefore requires multifaceted, interdisciplinary approaches. Although based on satisfying basic human needs by consuming material goods, consumer cultures are characterized by promises of gratification far beyond such basic consumption. Material goods are always combined with desires, promises, and aesthetics, and markets are not only arenas of exchange, but also arenas of intensification.19 Consumer cultures tend to commodify everything, penetrating traditional ideas of subjectivity and identity. An influential essay by the historian Leora Auslander models the innovative use of sources needed to get at elusive questions like whether Jews exhibited unique tastes or styles of consumption.20 Using Nazi confiscation and restitution records to compare French and German bourgeois

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Jews in the interwar period, Auslander indeed finds distinctly Jewish patterns, but she also shows how those patterns differed in the two national cases. She concludes that Jews in Paris showed a preference for historicist art, furniture, and antiques that reflected French national norms and a taste for the early modern, whereas their counterparts in Berlin exhibited more eclectic tastes and were more likely to surround themselves with modern furnishings. Her nuanced model reveals the operation of Jewish difference in the realm of taste and consumption in two distinct contexts, taking into account national differences and the different experiences and positions of French and German Jewry. Elsewhere, she develops these distinctions in the realm of the everyday, revealing the haptic and sensory dimensions of Jewish consumption and daily interaction with ritual objects which, she suggests, helped form a distinctive Jewish sensorium.21 For all of their depth and nuance, Auslander’s investigations are just a beginning, and future scholars may wish to incorporate the findings of studies on the parallel development of national, regional, and local markets.22 Today’s renewed interest in the study of capitalism also suggests the need to pay greater attention to the intersections of consumption and social class, in addition to factors like generation, gender, and politico-­ cultural milieu.23 Furthermore, we need to take into account the often contradictory meanings and consequences of consumption. Consumer culture can create and sustain solidarities between community members, but it can also weaken them, and this has certainly been true throughout modern Jewish history.24

Jewish Consumer Cultures At first glance, consumer culture and religion would seem to work at cross purposes. After all, consumption is about the gratification of needs and desires through the immediate and the material, whereas religious devotion steers its subjects toward the immaterial and the eternal. Indeed, historically modern forms of consumption and commodity culture have been framed as alternative manifestations of religiosity at least since Marx introduced the concept of the commodity fetish in the first volume of Capital. As Émile Zola observed in his notes for The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), the department store “tends to replace the church. It marches to the religion of the cash desk, of beauty, of coquetry, and fashion. [Women] go there to pass the hours as they used to go to church: an occupation, a place of enthusiasm where they struggle between their passion for clothes and the

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thrift of their husbands; in the end all the drama of life with the hereafter of beauty.”25 In the novel itself, Zola describes the department store owner Mouret (who he based on Bon Marché founder Aristide Boucicaut) as a kind of prophet: “His creation was producing a new religion; churches, which were being gradually deserted by those of wavering faith, were being replaced by his bazar…. [I]f he had closed his doors there would have been a rising in the street, a desperate outcry from the worshippers whose confessional and altar he would have abolished.”26 The theme of the department store as an alternate site of religious devotion runs deep in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. It can be found in the structure of the department store, which took goods out of the dusty cabinets, where earlier shops shamefully stashed them, and placed them on display on veritable altars to be gazed upon and adored. This theme was also evident in department store architecture, such as the cathedral-like spires of the Wertheim store in Berlin, as well as in contemporary language and the ecstatic devotion and guilt-filled dynamics attributed to the most zealous (female) consumers by contemporary observers.27 Yet religion and consumer culture have learned to coexist, notwithstanding nineteenth- and twentieth-century complaints about the commodification of Christmas and other holidays. This is especially clear in the United States, where religious observance and consumer culture have become deeply intertwined.28 Religions, indeed, are based not only on ideas about divinity and ethics, but also on specific rituals that are observed and practiced through material culture. In the Jewish case, holy arks and Torah scrolls with often ornate crowns and breastplates can be found in every synagogue, as can siddurim (prayer books), tanakhim (books containing the text of the Torah and the writings of the prophets), and symbolic markers like eternal lights. The Star of David, like the kippa, tzitzit (four fringes or tassels worn under the shirt), or shtreimels (fur hats worn by adult men in certain orthodox groups) serve as visual markers of Jewishness. The mezuzah marks the doorpost outside and throughout many Jewish homes. Inside Jewish homes, one will perhaps also find specific candelabras, kiddush cups, and spice boxes. Holidays and feasts are normally linked to a set of ritual objects, for instance, the seder plate on the Passover table, challah covers for Shabbat, hanukkiot for Hanukkah candle lighting, the shofar blown on Rosh Hashana and at the end of Yom Kippur, and the succah where Succoth meals are consumed. These items are at once ethereal and material. They are linked to devout and spiritual practices, but they are simultaneously material objects obtained through

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gift or purchase, whose specific provenance often adds to the meaning and depth of the ritual. Thus, they stand at the intersection of material culture, consumer culture, and Jewish religious practice. Although emblems of identity and tradition, these objects are far from static. Designs, styles, and ways of obtaining and using them have all changed significantly across time and space. The Star of David, perhaps the best known marker of Jewishness, was used by all monotheistic religions in the early middle ages and became a specific Jewish symbol no earlier than the eighteenth century, when it served as an antipode to the Christian cross.29 Jews in different parts of the diaspora established quite different material worlds of worship and religious practice. Traditions, such as wedding celebrations, the bar and later the bat mitzvah, and food regimes were repeatedly redefined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fig. 1.2).30 Increasing wealth and better housing conditions, on the one hand, and cheaper production methods and more efficient retailing, on the other, enabled a growing number of Jews to decorate their homes with religious objects. Such indoor spaces were of particular importance given Jews’ minority status and their general reluctance to display otherness in public.

Fig. 1.2  Decorating the Jewish home: Advertisement for a patented Hanukkah candle holder, 1905. (Source: Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (Cologne) vol. 18, no. 49, 1905, p. iii)

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A key area of religious consumption involved food, both with regard to specific ritual foods like challah, matzo, and wine as well as concerning kashruth, the laws that govern the suitability of foods and their preparation more generally.31 Traditional Jewish communities depended on the availability of ritual foods and kosher food, and the dictates of kashruth played a crucial role in the everyday geography of diasporic Jewish life and in domestic structures, family and gender dynamics, and household purchases. The strict rules of kosher food production caused many intense debates in science and in the public sphere.32 Shechita (ritual slaughtering) continues to ignite periodic controversies. Such practices helped root Jews’ ostensible otherness in the minds of majority gentile populations.33 While the laws of kashruth are based on fixed biblical injunctions and inviolable rabbinic principles, different Jewish communities have settled on different practices and interpretations, and Jewish religious authorities have periodically had to adjust them in response to changes in food production and household technologies.34 In some contexts, kashruth, once a marker of a despised minority, became a signifier for high quality products and a guarantor of cleanliness and food safety.35 Separated from its religious origins, Jewish food became a market success in many Western countries, a symbol of reliability, healthfulness, and purity, or a trendy, ethnic marketing niche.36 The bagel even became an important element of global fast-food business.37 Jewish-branded products, for instance Manischewitz wine, were able to cross the borders of social and ethnic milieus. In 1924, one ad could still claim “Wherever our people are to be found, the name ‘Manischewitz’ is well known, and with the demand for Manischewitz Matzo there is also a great demand for the other products of this firm—Manischewitz Matzo Meal, Cake Meal and Matzo Farfel.”38 In subsequent decades, however, consumption of Maischewitz wine in African-American communities outpaced that by traditional Jewish clients.39 Other products, like falafel and hummus, became embroiled in Arab-Israeli conflicts and controversies about land, culture, and identity in the Middle East and beyond.40 Finally, Jewish food can also open a door to studying the interrelationship of home production and food manufacturing. Figure 1.3 shows the transition of Matzah, unleavened Passover bread, to a manufactured good, which was sold in urban mass-markets. Subsequently, matzah has been further transformed through the mechanization of production, new forms of packaging and marketing, the use of other flours like whole wheat, rye, and spelt, and most recently, the development of gluten-free varieties.

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Fig. 1.3  Illustration of matzah production in Austria-Hungary, 1889. (Source: Das interessante Blatt, April 11, 1889, p. 7)

While the name and ritual function of matzah was not changed by consumer culture, its taste, availability, appearance, and associations were completely transformed.41 Jewish traditions of tzedakah, or charitable giving, should also find a place in histories of Jewish consumer cultures. After the turn to the twentieth century, poor immigrants in New York City could rely on the kashruth of Jewish kitchens, where cheap meals were served by girls from wealthy families in a room with humorous signs about how to behave: “‘Don’t waste any time eating, for there are hungry ones waiting.’ ‘Don’t crowd or push; for every one will be waited on in turn.’ ‘Don’t shout at

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the waiters, for they are not deaf.’”42 Jewish philanthropy, based on religious dictates and private initiatives, was and remains a significant form of spending in U.S. and other consumer cultures.

Dreams and Reality As a minority population, European Jews historically depended on the markets of the mainstream, majority economy. Simultaneously, however, Jewish entrepreneurs became major manufacturers of consumer goods for both Jewish and larger markets. This was especially the case in Germany, but occurred to some extent in Britain, France, and elsewhere. In Germany, advertisements for such products could be found not only in Jewish community publications but also in Liberal and Social Democratic newspapers and magazines—at least until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 (Fig. 1.4). In fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German Jewish

Fig. 1.4  Evidence of a Jewish consumer sphere: Advertisement for a kosher margarine, 1909. (Source: Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (Cologne), vol. 22, no. 3, 1909, p. 30)

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entrepreneurs came to dominate many of the new leisure industries, such as hotels and cinemas, and the great majority of their customers and clients were not Jewish. Similarly, Jewish entrepreneurs became industry leaders in such areas as cosmetics, with Scherk (Berlin) and Albersheim (Frankfurt am Main) as the most prominent examples.43 The textile sector, as is well known, was dominated by Jewish entrepreneurs. Mey & Edlich (Leipzig) and F. V. Grünfeld (Landeshut) were leading producers of shirts, hosiery, and canvas products, while Arnold Obersky (Berlin), Loewenstein & Leffmann (Cologne), and Rosenberg & Hertz (Cologne) produced and marketed practical, but fashionable underwear. Indeed, the fashion industry, which took off in this period, included many prominent Jewish manufacturers in Germany, Austria, and North America.44 Most of the department stores and big textile stores in Germany were also owned by Jewish businessmen. Still, it is important to stress that there were significant exceptions, including, for example, Berlin’s largest individual store, Rudolph Hertzog, which was established in 1839 and which was not only not Jewish-owned but which maintained close ties to the antisemitic conservative establishment. Jews were even more active in creating consumer cultures in the United States. The Immigrant Entrepreneurship project on German émigré businesses includes sixty-five German Jewish businesspeople in such spheres as entertainment, cosmetics, and retail.45 All these branches were coded and condemned as “Jewish” by antisemitic voices, although we still have little information about how the majority of American consumers saw them (Fig. 1.5).

Fig. 1.5  Promoting the Jewish state by advertising goods from Jewish settlers in Palestine, 1897. (Source: Berliner Tageblatt, December 19, 1897, p. 15)

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Another important context for analyzing the operation of Jewish consumer cultures is the Zionist movement, both in Europe and in Mandate Palestine, where the call to settle Palestine was linked with particular consumerist practices in multiple ways. Starting in 1896, the Import-­ Gesellschaft Palästina promoted a selection of products that were grown or produced in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement of Palestine).46 Wine, alcoholic beverages, perfume, agricultural products (including the famed Jaffa oranges), and wooden products signified the establishment of a solid rural society. This circumstance differed significantly from the visions of Zionist theorists, including Theodor Herzl himself, who dreamed about transplanting European lifestyles and sophistication—with its modern, efficient consumer economy—onto Palestinian soil.47 Agricultural production became the economic foundation of the new settlements, performed disproportionately by immigrants from the Russian Empire.48 The reality on the ground differed markedly from the shopping districts of major European cities (Fig. 1.6).

Fig. 1.6  Visions of a Jewish middle-class community in the Land of Israel. (Source: Der Welt-Spiegel, August 23, 1906, p. 3)

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Nevertheless, plans for and fantasies about life in Palestine and the fashioning of “new Hebrews” out of diaspora Jews were intertwined with consumerism in all kinds of ways, and specific products and modes of production accompanied Zionist visions from the start.49 After World War I, reports on Jaffa’s orange cultivation, life on the kibbutz, and the success of early Jewish immigrants included alternative ideas of community life and rural reform.50 Israel’s development after World War II, however, went in a different direction. Today, the State of Israel has by far the highest consumption rates in the Middle East, and a majority enjoys the privileges of a Western-style consumer society with glitzy new shopping centers, the latest technologies, and goods from around the globe.51 Indeed, Zionist visions of alternative modes of consumption and production were gradually marginalized, and the notion that either political or religious commitments would work as a bulwark against consumerism gave way to a culture thoroughly marked by commodification and consumer abundance (Fig. 1.7). Significantly, Jewish consumer cultures have never existed in a vacuum. They have always been critiqued and discussed by voices both within and outside of Jewish communities. Widespread antisemitic tropes stressed the alleged conspicuous consumption of the Jewish elite, denouncing it as an expression of materialism or social mimicry (Fig. 1.8).52 Both orthodox Jews and Zionists have at times criticized the materialism of modern consumption, blaming it for ethical degeneration and religious indifference.53 The values and false gods of American consumer culture have been denounced by many religious leaders. In the 1980s, the so-called Jewish American Princess came to symbolize the greed and shallowness that appeared to accompany American Jewish affluence, qualities consistently projected onto women.54 But these discourses had a long history. In the 1920s, the German psychologist and liberal politician, Willy Hellpach, harshly criticized those Jews, namely women, who publicly displayed their wealth. “This makes them conspicuous due not only to their clannish mass but also their clothing, jewelry, consumption, [and] luxury of all kinds.”55 And briefly, after the Nazi assumption of power, representatives of local Jewish communities asked their members to avoid superfluous expenditures for clothing or luxurious accommodations.56 Throughout the twentieth century, conspicuous consumption (a concept coined by the Norwegian American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1899) lingered as a danger for the majority of Jews.57

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Fig. 1.7  Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, June 2017. (Photograph by Paul Lerner)

Again, Jews were subjected to constant scrutiny for their economic behavior and spending habits. In various portrayals of their economic conditions by others, they tended to occupy the extremes of wealth and poverty, signifying pathological abnormality. In the United States, Jewish immigrants were often rejected because their former lives and even facial expressions were supposedly marked by “a ceaseless fear and anxiety, or at least suspicion, of everything around [them].”58 These newcomers, it was argued, could not be integrated into an advanced consumer society. “Jewish” peddlers were both respected and blamed for their wit and verbal finesse in talking up their cheap products,59 while stereotypes around “Jewish” bankers and merchants loomed large in right- and left-wing criticism of modern capitalism and consumer cultures. It should be noted, however, that such judgments could be directed at other groups too. In the United States, Irish Catholics, among other groups, faced similar criticism. These observations suggest the need for further research on the defensive quality of Jewish consumer cultures and for comparative studies

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Fig. 1.8  Clothes make the man: Antisemitic cartoon of Jewish integration via consumer goods, 1871. (Source: Kladderadatsch, vol. 24, no. 14–15, 1871, p. 57)

that analyze Jewish consumption and its criticism alongside that of other ethnically and religiously marginalized groups. With their increasing affluence in American and European societies, Jewish consumers emerged as a distinct group to target with marketing, including by non-Jewish-owned firms. While the production of ritual objects and kosher food remained dominated by Jewish businesspeople, the growing world of products offered many opportunities to spend money. In the United States, in particular, Jewish women established styles of consumption that were picked up on by the marketing specialists of American corporations. Note, for example, the opportunities that the following description from New York in 1917/18 manifests: “Her life is now a whirlwind of pleasures: from the morning car ride to ‘shopping,’ then

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lunch with friends; from there to the ‘garden party’ and then the opera, followed by dinner at a posh hotel. At the end of the social season, the young beauty nearly collapses from exhaustion and has to help her battered nerves with a trip to Europe.”60 While Jewish (and gentile) millionaires became an important targets for customized marketing strategies as early as the late 1880s, it was another decade or two before more general efforts to capture middle-class Jewish consumers began (Fig.  1.9).61 Historians have yet to devote significant attention to the growing interest that non-Jewish businesspeople began to show in Jews as consumers with the onset of market segmentation in the interwar period. Future studies in this area could shed light on the needs and desires of Jewish customers. This work could also illuminate the commodification of faith in early twentieth-century societies and the emergence of the market as an important field for the construction of Jewishness and the terms of Jewish ritual.

Fig. 1.9  Attracting Jewish customers: Advertisement for Palmin cooking fat, 1909. (Source: Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (Cologne), vol. 22, no. 4, 1909, p. ii)

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Jews, Migration, and Consumption Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Jews experienced massive demographic upheaval, a transformation comparable only to the diaspora following the Roman war of the first century and the expulsion from Spain in the late fifteenth century.62 The United States attracted large numbers of Jewish immigrants, first from Central Europe and then Eastern European Jews , who were fleeing pogroms and repressive societies and seeking economic opportunities. The United States offered a political, social, and especially an economic environment, in the words of economist Carmel Chiswick, “unlike any other in the millennia-long experience of the Jewish people.”63 Despite the presence of antisemitism and other forms of xenophobia in their new home, the liberal legal framework and the absence of financial and legal discrimination against immigrants opened up immense opportunities in the U.S. marketplace.64 American capitalism and Jewish immigrants formed, it seemed, a symbiotic relationship.65 Immigration eventually led to integration, Americanization, and acculturation, as many Jewish observers themselves believed: “Like our foreign immigrants generally, these Polish and Russian Jews are eager to Americanize themselves, and without any systematic introduction they quickly pick up and add to their vocabulary many English words and expressions.”66 Such statements were based on a structural acceptance of American consumer cultures. Historian Hasia Diner understands Ashkenazi Jews, especially peddlers, as door-openers into a new world of consumption: “Peddling forced new immigrants to become students of culture, autodidactic anthropologists, who learned languages and ways of life brand new to them.”67 These people, according to Diner, acted as cultural and commercial innovators. They were crucial to the establishment of modern consumerism, and even “smoothed out Jewish-Christian antipathy in the new world.”68 In some ways, this narrative evokes the so-­ called German Jewish symbiosis in the late nineteenth century, or indeed the tremendous affinity that German Jews showed for Bildung, that is, education and cultivation, including a strong appreciation of literature and other manifestations of German high culture.69 Of course, actual Jewish experiences were less rosy than images of streets paved with gold. The majority of Jewish immigrants started out in extreme poverty and crowded, unhygienic tenements in major American cities and were only gradually able to transcend these dire circumstances.70 Ashkenazic and Sephardic immigrants also became important agents of

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Americanization, when mass migration mainly from Russia changed the fabric of American Jewry significantly. Local rabbis and many Jewish benevolent societies played a particularly important role in the integration of newcomers.71 The United States offered a new world full of compromise and contradiction. Not atypical was the story of a young orthodox girl sent to a host family to be trained as a servant. Although the agreement stipulated that she be supplied with a small set of cooking utensils, these were not provided. The girl, unable to speak English and thus unable to prepare kosher food, subsisted on crackers and water for three days before she was found by her agent in a sickly state.72 Cultural and economic marginalization persisted, even amid the rapid increase in Jewish immigration and the formation of well-organized communities. As an early twentieth-century article put it, “The immigrant easily finds these communities, and once there he is at home.”73 Eventually Eastern European Jews became acclimated to and integrated in U.S. consumer culture.74 They followed a unique trajectory that began with working-­class jobs in the employ of their Ashkenazi and Sephardic co-­ religionists. As these employers identified and developed profitable niches, namely in the expanding consumer goods industries, many Jewish immigrants began to earn higher wages than other immigrant groups and to develop a quite remarkable upward educational and occupational mobility in the second third of the twentieth century.75 By that time Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Austria-Hungary became important makers of American popular culture.76 Simultaneously, however, American Judaism was to a great extent shaped by the commercial environment.77 As the Yiddish expression goes: Siz tayer tzu zayn a yid, that is, being a Jew is expensive. Living a Jewishly observant life was and indeed still is quite expensive because, in the words of historian Jonathan Karp, “time devoted to the acquisition of Jewish education, skills, religious rituals, and practices constituted opportunity costs subtracting from what might otherwise have been earned at work.”78 And there was the added expense of buying kosher food and maintaining separate sets of dishes for milk and meat as well as Passover, not to mention the philanthropic imperative and, in more recent periods, synagogue dues and day-school tuition, among other costs. As many Jews assimilated into the American middle classes and moved away from traditional forms of observance, Jewish holidays became increasingly important as markers of memories, and experiences and occasions like the bar or bat mitzvah played a correspondingly greater role in Jewish identity and practice, and

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so in turn became entangled in American consumer culture, gift giving, and leisure practices, not to mention notions of conspicuous consumption.79 Likewise, the trip to Israel for a bar mitzvah or as a rite of passage exhibits the ongoing intertwining of Judaism and consumerism.80 Indeed, as several historians have argued, learning to consume like Americans represented the path to inclusion and success for many Jewish immigrants. Andrew Heinze’s path-breaking 1990 study demonstrates that the mass production of branded goods, middle-class fashions, standardized homes with the requisite appliances, automobiles, and typical holiday destinations helped define what it meant to be a Jew and an American.81 The path into the American middle class was fraught with difficulties, disruptions, and anxieties for Jewish men and perhaps especially for Jewish women, who faced criticism from inside and outside the established Jewish community.82 Market societies are competitive and driven by conflict. Jewish immigrants not only had to learn to handle the machinery of commercial innovation and the creatively destructive power of design and fashion. They also had to learn to fight in the marketplace. Unfair practices and counterfeiting were not uncommon inside and outside Jewish communities—and immigrants seem to be an even easier target for trickery and betrayal. After the turn of the century, “unethical” business behavior became a public topic and was answered by collective action. The New York City kosher meat boycott of 1902 saw more than 100,000 Jewish families fight against exorbitant prices. Supported by unions and benevolent societies, Jewish women organized and questioned the market position of kosher butchers.83 They grasped the opportunities of a liberal consumer culture, establishing not only a culture of resistance in the marketplace but also institutions like consumer cooperatives, cooperative bakeries, and butcher shops.84 Such consumer activism drew on notions of Jewish solidarity and self-help from Europe. But the immigrants were able to adopt these credos to the specific conditions of American consumer culture and developed new forms to protect their rights in the public sphere of consumption. The relative success of such struggles even led to more advanced ideas of consumer boycotts, for instance to wage an economic struggle against Nazi Germany in 1933. And beyond.85

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Hybridity and Transnational Approaches When Jewish immigrants arrived on American shores, they did not come empty handed. Capital, educational skills, and a capacious work ethic were important preconditions for economic success. But the newcomers also brought their material culture und their traditions, which in turn helped shape American culture. This phenomenon was never fixed or stagnant but always interacted with both local tendencies and transnational forces. Broad sectors of consumer industries, namely clothing, furniture, specialized luxuries, the movies, and beauty products, were largely created or dominated by Jewish entrepreneurs, because new firms in these sectors required only limited capital and offered opportunities open to Jewish immigrants, especially those from Eastern Europe. Female entrepreneurs like Helena Rubinstein and Estee Lauder became pioneers of the modern cosmetic business and defined the beauty ideals of millions.86 Toys from Mattel and Hasbro, or the iconic Barbie doll, shaped the consumer culture and life experiences of toddlers, children, and teenagers.87 American consumer culture more broadly, including marketing techniques, retail formats, product design, and consumer research were all shaped by the transnational flow of people, ideas, and styles. Indeed, American consumer culture was, to a striking extent, reinvented during the 1940s and 1950s by a large number of prominent European and mostly Jewish experts in consumption. The so-called Vienna School of market research transformed corporations’ perception of consumer desires. Psychology and even psychoanalysis, another Central European import, became an important element of designing, packaging, and presenting goods. Skilled and academically trained immigrants enlarged and changed more traditional ways of marketing and advertising.88 Malls reshaped the American, suburban landscape, inspired in part by Central European notions of urban space. New currents in architecture transformed Americans’ shopping and leisure experiences.89 As we have already seen, Jewish food cultures were brought to the United States as elements of religious practice and identity.90 Of course, Jewish cuisine was influenced not only by kashruth but also by regional culinary traditions from Central and Eastern Europe and other sites of emigration. Latkes (Hanukkah) and Hamantaschen (Purim) were prominent examples for regional food innovations in Europe, which were brought to America and ultimately marketed to non-Jewish customers as well (Fig. 1.10). Other foods coded as old-country Jewish imports were,

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Fig. 1.10  Hamantaschen from the Parkway Deli & Restaurant, Silver Spring, Maryland, May 2016. (Photograph by Uwe Spiekermann)

to a great extent, shaped by a convergence of ethnic marketing and Jewish nostalgia in the American context.91 In short, Jews both transformed and were transformed by American (and European) consumer cultures, and participation in consumer culture at large framed the terms of admission into middle-class American society. Jewish consumer cultures operated both to reassert and negate Jewish difference and as such can be read as rich sites and spaces for the negotiation of Jews’ participation in mainstream societies and cultures.92 Despite the multiplicity of topics treated in this volume, we are aware that it is no means comprehensive. The essays are geographically limited, and we regret not being able to incorporate work on Jewish consumer cultures in Eastern Europe, in French, British and other Western European contexts, or in Latin America, among other places. There is also a great deal more to be said, furthermore, about the perspectives of consumers themselves, about the gendering of consumption and the experiences and

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roles of women, who starting in the nineteenth century became the group most closely identified with acts of consumption, targeted by department store displays and advertising campaigns, and the shoppers, cooks, and household managers for most families. Another way of looking at Jews and Judaism is in terms of the different regimes of time that govern their lives, the weekly and annual cycles of holidays and sabbaths, the prayers and rituals that structure their days, weeks, and months, and indeed, which traditionally imposed different strictures on men, women, and children. There would also be a great deal more to include about economic history, and one could draw on the perspective of the empirical social sciences. New methods influenced by anthropology and philosophy could contribute enormously to this subject, incorporating, for example, structural approaches to analyze consumer goods as systems of signification or the flat (or object-oriented) ontology movement, which focuses attention not only on humans’ impact on objects but also on the agency and ontological status of things and how they act on and shape human subjectivity.93 Nevertheless, we believe this volume is a good start, offering a sampling of important and fascinating new research on Jewish consumer cultures in modern Europe and North America, showing the analytical potential of this line of inquiry, and identifying areas that require further research.

Case Studies The essays in this volume grew out of a conference that explored the roles consumption played in Jewish lives and the roles Jews played in different consumer cultures in Europe and North America throughout the modern period. Its chapters explore these questions in a variety of geographical and historical settings, using diverse approaches and a wide array of sources. The first group of essays are bound together by their thematic focus on Jews in the retail sector in connection with the making of modern commercial life in Germany and the United States. Uwe Spiekermann examines the well-known figure of the Jewish peddler along with second-hand dealers in Germany. Despite the central role that peddling played in Jewish emancipation and despite the great number of Jews who earned their livelihoods as peddlers, Spiekermann demonstrates that peddling was not a “Jewish” business. In fact, the great majority of peddlers in German lands were not Jewish. Spiekermann illuminates the historical circumstances responsible for the close association of Jews and peddling, as well as the

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images surrounding this linkage. He sketches the specifics of Jewish peddling and second-hand trading through 1938, when the Nazis prohibited Jewish involvement in these activities. Olivier Baisez looks at advertising in the German-Zionist periodical, Jüdische Rundschau. He traces changes over time by comparing the number and types of ads the magazine published in the years 1903, 1913, and 1924, in order to see if one can detect the development of a specific German-Zionist consumption regime, apart from the consumption habits of the general German Jewish population. At the center of this essay are questions of belonging and Zionist identity, mediated through the advertising of goods, services, and even prospective marital partners that represented people’s concrete desires or the taste one ought to have, when seeking identification and acceptance by a certain group. He finds a steady increase in advertisements for goods and services as the infrastructure of the Jewish settlement in Palestine grew. Moreover, as Zionist consciousness, if not concrete plans to move to Palestine, intensified in Germany, it remained closely linked to specific consumption practices. Paul Lerner’s chapter treats two contexts, pre-Nazi Germany and the United States during and after World War II, looking at the activities of Jewish shapers of consumer culture in both settings. In the former, primarily through the lens of the so-called Jewish department store, Lerner finds that department stores along with other branches of consumer culture were coded as Jewish in German literature and media, in contrast to older forms of “traditional” German craft and retail. In the latter case, however, the (mostly) Jewish émigrés from German-speaking Europe who planned shopping centers, malls, and amusement parks, or who authored advertising campaigns and thus profoundly shaped American consumption, were seen as “European,” as bringing European sophistication and styles to the American heartland. He concludes with reflections on mid-­ twentieth-­ century debates about consumer capitalism and democracy, noting that some Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe ultimately renounced America for the fascistic potential of its culture industries. The link between department stores and Jewish immigrants to the United States is also at the center of Nils Roemer’s essay. Roemer explores the history of the Neiman Marcus fashion retail empire as it developed under the chairmanship of Stanley Marcus, the son of the founder Herbert Marcus in Dallas, Texas. Through the figure of Stanley Marcus, and drawing on his autobiography, Roemer shows how Marcus’s influence went beyond the department store itself, creating and reshaping Dallas urban

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culture. Marcus not only brought the latest European fashions to the city—parallel to the architects and designers Lerner discusses—but also furthered progressive political thought and action. Marcus’s retail activities and political interventions were inspired by his Jewish background and sensibility. The second part of the volume looks at different ways in which consumer goods and practices were imbued, imagined, or created as “Jewish.” Kerry Wallach’s essay takes fur as its subject, a highly fraught material with a long history that was associated with Jewish religious and cultural life. Arguing that production is an important angle in understanding consumption, Wallach considers the important role Jews played in fur production and the fur trade on both sides of the Atlantic. While fur products like the shtreimel were exclusively Jewish and acted as a marker of male Orthodoxy, fur coats and accessories frequently served writers and artists as signifiers for a certain type of Jewish woman. Drawing on literary texts, films, and television shows from Europe and the United States from Kafka through the Mad Men, Wallach analyzes the phenomenon of fur as a visible sign of Jewishness with negative and positive connotations. In her chapter, Aleisa Fishman shows how consumer goods were used to uphold and create Jewish identity in postwar American suburbs. Her main protagonists are middle-class Jewish women in Nassau County, New York, a paradigmatic American suburb. Like their non-Jewish contemporaries, these women faced the challenges that dispersed suburban life created for community-building. With consumption, Jewish women created a suburban existence like that of their non-Jewish neighbors. At the same time, they also consumed in distinctly Jewish ways, buying ritual foods and objects, and patronizing particular stores. In this way, they utilized consumer culture to maintain Jewish traditions and enhance Jewish identity even as they joined the American middle class in shaping postwar suburbia. Moving from postwar America to Mandate Palestine in the interwar period, the essay by Hizky Shoham illustrates the importance of Western consumer cultures in the Yishuv and their interplay with Jewish traditions and identities. Investigating what made a consumer culture Jewish and using the tools of anthropology, history, and cultural studies, Shoham’s analysis encompasses not just the products made by Jews, which were promoted in “buy Jewish” campaigns that sought to strengthen Jewish nationalist identity and secure Jewish agriculture in Palestine. Rather, Jewish rituals such as Purim celebrations or bar mitzvahs became commercialized, marking certain consumer objects, hitherto neutral, as Jewish,

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and thus creating a distinct Jewish consumer culture on the site of the future State of Israel. If “buy Jewish” campaigns aimed to create Jewish community, “buy Jewish” could also mean not buying things that ran counter to Jewish communal values. This is what Anne Schenderlein examines in her essay on American Jews’ boycotting of products from Germany. Schenderlein traces the meaning and function that boycotting Germany had for different groups of Jews in the United States from the time of official anti-Nazi boycotts in the 1930s to more private boycott actions after the Second World War and the Holocaust, showing how the refusal to consume can be just as important as consumption itself for solidifying communal identity and making political statements. Germany also plays a key role in Michael Berkowitz’s essay on photography and the art market. Noting the overrepresentation of Jews in all spheres of photography for the medium’s entire history, he adds a unique perspective by focusing on high-end consumption and the entanglement of Jews in elevating the medium of photography in the postwar art world. In the spirit of Wiedergutmachung (West Germany’s financial restitution to victims and survivors of the Holocaust), German art museums and collectors even became interested in collecting the works of Jewish photographers in particular, thus fueling the art market in photography. Closing this volume is Gideon Reuveni’s broadly framed essay, which brings to light different cases from Europe, Israel, and America of how consumption can reveal otherwise hidden facets of the Jewish experience. For minorities like Jews, consumer decisions can serve both as a means to integrate themselves into a majority society as well as a way of creating or maintaining a separate identity. Sometimes, products belonging to the culture of one minority group can for various reasons become attractive to people who have nothing to do with this culture, as Reuveni illustrates with the example of the preference of some non-Jews for buying foods labeled as kosher. Reuveni shows the intertwining of consumerism with the Jewish question—or the tension between assimilation and the preservation of identity—over several centuries. He attends to the ways in which Jewish communities’ different historical and social circumstances in the three discreet contexts led to different consumption regimes and consumer practices. * * *

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The individual essays in this volume draw their own conclusions, and it would be reductionist to try to distill them into one overarching argument. Instead, we end this introduction with brief reflections on the methodological issues and the future areas of research that the essays provoke. We note, first, that to speak of Jewish consumer culture raises all sorts of methodological red flags. Just as we must think in terms of multiple Jewish cultures, we must also consider multiple Jewish consumer cultures. Jewish life encompasses a broad spectrum of practices, rituals, cuisines, and more that vary greatly across regions, historical periods, and religious communities. And then there are different styles, tastes, and preferences. Scholars of Jewish consumer cultures must remain vigilant that they do not essentialize or homogenize their subject and that they not take for granted which practices or products, let alone individuals, can be identified as Jewish. Similarly, they must be attentive to the ways in which Jewishness functions in discreet contexts. When are patterns of Jewish consumption specific to Jews and when do they reflect broader patterns exhibited, say, by any immigrant group or religious minority? When does a historical subject’s Jewishness explain her or his consumption choices? How do gender, nationality, race, age, and so on factor into those decisions? Second, as the historical profession justifiably becomes increasingly transnational and global in orientation, consumption studies must expand their scope accordingly. A continuing challenge for the study of Jewish consumer cultures, as for any historical study, is to balance the global and the local, the general and the particular, in order to ask, as Gideon Reuveni urges, when certain practices reinforce Jewish identity and solidarity and when they undermine it. Put in different terms, this means balancing the focused study of local or individual acts of consumption with an eye toward the broader economic processes that produce goods and bring them to the stores and online retailers that make them available.94 Scholars in other branches of consumption studies have begun to link work on consumption with empire and colonialism, and we see the beginnings of that analytical tendency in new works on Zionism and Jewish settlement in Palestine as well as on capitalism in the modern world more generally. Third, Jewish studies and Jewish history have in recent years begun opening up to spatial approaches. Applying the categories of space and place to the study of Jewish consumer culture has allowed scholars to look at Jewish settlement patterns and neighborhoods or to the shaping of modern urban experiences around retail and leisure, the intertwining of

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architecture and commerce, and other ways in which Jews as consumers and creators of consumer culture uniquely experienced and shaped the pleasures and challenges of urban modernity in Europe and the United States. Space as a category has much to offer Jewish history, Jewish studies, and the history of consumer culture, and we hope new work interrogates Jewish consumer cultures from this perspective.95 Fourth, as implied in the concept of consumer culture, and as several of the essays in this volume point out, consumption as a category includes both physical objects and intangible phenomena, both stuff or things and the music, news, literature, or beauty carried by or embodied in those things. Critical theory, of course, grappled with this distinction and with the consequences of the mass production and distribution of the latter in the twentieth century. Pierre Bourdieu’s studies brilliantly correlated class and taste through rigorous empirical analysis of middle-class consumption practices in France, but his approach has seldom been duplicated in other contexts and cultural spheres.96 Decades later, we still lack a theoretical framework for differentiating the consumption of culture from the consumption of stuff. Among an ethno-religious group where, as we have seen, material objects often carry spiritual meaning, attending to these distinctions seems all the more crucial. Finally, as we have argued throughout this introduction, studies of Jewish consumer cultures have a great deal to contribute to both Jewish studies and to the study of consumer culture. We hope that future studies in this area will remain attentive to both perspectives. If the consumption of goods has become central to how we imagine our lives and present ourselves, how we express our values and political choices, how we differentiate ourselves from some groups and affiliate with others, and indeed, how we exist on this earth, then it seems likely that consumer culture will remain a vigorous and dynamic area of research for decades to come. We have only begun to scratch the surface of the deep historical interconnections of consumption and Jewish history.

Notes 1. [Fritz] Lamm, “Wirtschaftsverhältnisse unterstützter Familien,” Concordia 20 (1913): 273–77. Similar conditions were found in New  York; see Maurice Fishberg, “Die Armut unter den Juden in New-York,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4 (1908): 113–18; Caroline Goodyear, “Household Budgets of the Poor,” Charities and the Commons 16, no. 4 (1906): 191–97.

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2. Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roember convened a pioneering conference on Jews and consumer culture at University College London in 2006. Some of the papers from that conference along with other material were published in their edited volume Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture (Leiden, 2010). See also Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Cambridge, 2018). 3. See esp. Frank Trentmann, The Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century through the Twenty-First (New York, 2016); Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Consumerism Won in Modern America (New York, 2002); Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (New York, 2006); Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Decoding Modern Consumer Societies (New York, 2012); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993); Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008); Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA, 2006); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2003). 4. Above all, see Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, eds., Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History (Philadelphia, PA, 2015). Also: Cornelia Aust, “Jewish Economic History,“ Oxford Bibliographies 2015, https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199840731-­0106; Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev, eds., The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life (New York, 2011); Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 2009); Adam Teller, “Culture and Money: The Economic Dimensions of Cultural History and What It Can Teach Us,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 278–87; and Rebecca Kobrin, “Destructive Creators: Sender Jarmulowsky and Financial Failure in the Annals of American Jewish History,” American Jewish History 97, no. 2 (2013): 105–37. 5. Good examples of an intellectual history of antisemitism are David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013); Fritz Backhaus, Raphael Gross, and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Juden. Geld. Eine Vorstellung (Frankfurt am Main, 2013); Nicolas Berg, ed., Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900: Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig, 2011); William David Rubinstein, “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 10 (2010): 5–35. For some empirical evidence, see Uwe Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland 1850–1914 (Munich, 1999).

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6. Examples of such antisemitism: Eduard von Hartmann, Das Judentum in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Leipzig, 1885); Hermann Ahlwardt, Der Verzweiflungskampf der arischen Völker mit dem Judentum (Berlin, 1890); Theodor Fritsch, ed., Handbuch der Judenfrage, 26th ed. (Hamburg, 1907). 7. See above all, Derek J.  Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Rachel Shulkins, “Imagining the Other: The Jew in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington,” European Romantic Review 22 (2011): 477–99. 8. Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin, eds., Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1996.) 9. See Arno Herzog, Jüdische Geschichte in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1997); Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley, 2004); Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004). See also Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni, “Introduction: Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture,” in Reuveni & Roemer, eds., Longing and Belonging, 1. 10. Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ, 2010). See also Jerry Z.  Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews Revisited,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 58 (2015): 9–23; and his earlier studies on Marx, Weber, Simmel, and Sombart in Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought (New York, 2002), 166–207, 229–57. 11. Penslar, Shylock’s Children; Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (Cambridge, 2008). See also Adam Teller, “Economic Life,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Economic_Life, which includes helpful reading suggestions; Maristella Botticini, “Jewish Diaspora,” in Joel Mokyr, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (Oxford, 2003), iii: 204–207. 12. Marni Davis, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (New York, 2012); Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015); Adam Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York, 2015); Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migration to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT, 2015). 13. For additional literature, see Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann, “Taking Stock and Forging Ahead: The Past and Future of Consumption History,” in Decoding Modern Consumer Societies, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (New York, 2012), 1–13.

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14. Robert Liberles, Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany (Waltham, MA, 2012); Sander L.  Gilman, “Jews and Smoking,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London, 2004), 278–85, 384–85; Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union (Bloomington, IN, 2006); Annelie Ramsbrock, The Science of Beauty: Culture and Cosmetics in Modern Germany, 1750–1930 (New York, 2015). 15. Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (New York, 2006); Joelle Bahloul, “On ‘Cabbage and Kings’: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Post-Colonial French Society and Cuisine,” in Food in Global History, ed. Raymond Grew (Boulder, CO, 1999), 92–106. 16. “Walter Rathenau über die Frau,” Die jüdische Frau 1, no. 2, May 22, 1925, 6; Martin Buber, “Das Zion der jüdischen Frau,” Die Welt 5, no. 17, 1901, 3–5. See also Kerry Wallach’s essay in this volume. 17. Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni, “Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture,” in Longing, Belonging, ed. Roemer and Reuveni, 1–22. As an example, see Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven, CT, 2008). 18. Roxanne Howland and Joyce M.  Wolburg, Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture (London, 2015), 51; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1982), Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things; Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Ulrich Wyrwa, “Consumption and Consumer Society: Contribution to the History of Ideas,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge, 1998), 431–47; Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2005): 373–401. 19. See Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, 2007). 20. Leora Auslander, ““National Taste?’ Citizenship Law, State Form, and Everyday Aesthetics in Modern France and Germany, 1920–1940,” in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford, 2001), 109–128, here 121–128. See also Leora Auslander, “‘Jewish Taste?’ Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford, 2002), 299–318; and Ibid.,  “The Boundaries of Jewishness or When Is a Cultural Practice Jewish?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8 (2009): 47–64. For a treatment of Jewish taste in turn-of-the-century Vienna, see Elana Shapria, Style

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and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin-de-Siécle Vienna (Waltham, MA, 2015). 21. Leora Auslander, “Jews and Material Culture,” in Cambridge Modern Jewish History, ed. Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels (Cambridge, 2012, viii: 831–57). 22. Global historians would also refer to the creation of a western commercial sphere, based on similar technologies and commodities; see, for instance, Jonathan Daly, The Rise of Western Power: A Comparative History of Western Civilization (London, 2014). 23. For example: Jürgen Kocka, Geschichte des Kapitalismus (Munich, 2014); Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2017); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015); Jürgen Kocka and Marcen van der Linden, eds., Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Global Concept (London, 2018). 24. See Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Cambridge, 2017). 25. Quoted in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 177. 26. Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise (Oxford, 1995), 427. 27. See, for example, Peter Stürzebecher, Das Berliner Warenhaus (Berlin, 1979), 25; Alarich Rooch, “Wertheim, Tietz und das KaDeWe in Berlin: Zur Architektursprache eines Kulturraumes,” in Das Berliner Warenhaus: Geschichte und Diskurse / The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse, ed. Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger (Frankfurt am Main, 2013), 167–98. 28. Leigh Schmidt, “The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870–1930,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 887–916; John M.  Giggie and Diane Winston, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture in Modern North America,” in Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Modern Commercial Culture, ed. John M. Giggie and Diane Winston (Piscataway, NJ, 2002), 1–12; Elizabeth H. Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture and Family Rituals (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York, 2001). Protests and calls for boycotts are an integral element of any consumer society; see Bill Tallen, What would Jesus Buy? Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse (New York, 2006). On Germany, see, for example, Joe Perry, Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). On the British context, see the fascinating work by Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT, 2009).

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29. Gerbern S.  Oegema, The History of the Shield of David: The Birth of a Symbol (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). 30. Etan Diamond, “Beyond Borscht: The Kosher Lifestyle and the Religious Consumerism of Suburban Orthodox Jews,” in Faith in the Market, ed. Giggie and Winston, 227–45. 31. See, for example, Leah Hochman, ed., Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States (West Lafayette, IN, 2017); and Anat Hochman, ed., Jews and Their Foodways, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 28 (2015). 32. Thomas Schlich, “The Word of God and the Word of Science: Nutrition Science and the Jewish Dietary Laws in Germany, 1820–1920,” in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (Amsterdam, 1995), 97–128. 33. Robin Judd, “The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2003): 117–50; Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 (Ithaca, NY, 2007). 34. The importance and continuity of normative religious laws was emphasized by David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (New York, 2007). 35. Sue Fishkoff, Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority (New York, 2010); Roger Horowitz, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (New York, 2016). 36. John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (Northvale, NJ, 1993); Gil Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (Hoboken, 2010). 37. Jeffrey A. Marx, “Eating Up: The Origins of Bagels and Lox,” in Tastes of Faith, ed. Hochman, 77–114. 38. “A Jewish Product with an International Reputation,” Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, April 11, 1924, 8. 39. Horowitz, Kosher USA, chap. 6. 40. Shaul Stampfer, “Bagel and Falafel: Two Iconic Jewish Foods and One Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jews and Their Foodways, ed. Anat Helman, 177–203; Dafna Hirsch and Ofra Tene, “Hummus: The Making of an Israeli Culinary Cult,” Journal of Consumer Culture 13 (2013): 25–45. 41. For this and additional case studies, see Michael Wex, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It (New York, 2016). 42. “Give Good Meal for Seven Cents,” Wausau Daily Herald, March 20, 1908, 6. 43. See Benno Nietzel, Handeln und Überleben. Jüdische Unternehmer aus Frankfurt am Main 1924–1964 (Göttingen, 2012). 44. Historical analysis of fashion has only just begun to analyze the industry in terms of its links to Jewish consumer culture. Leonard J.  Greenspoon,

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Fashioning Jews: Clothing, Culture, and Commerce (West Lafayette, IN, 2013), with examples from the United States, Austria, and Germany; Eric Silverman, A Cultural History of the Jewish Dress (London, 2013); Roberta S.  Kremer, ed., Broken Threads: The Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry in Germany and Austria (London, 2006); Uwe Westphal, Berliner Konfektion und Mode: Die Zerstörung einer Tradition, 1836–1939 (Berlin, 1992). 45. Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, http://immigrantentrepreneurship.org/. 46. [Berliner] Volks-Zeitung (1896), no 581, December 11, 4. 47. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 8th ed. (1896; Berlin, 1920). 48. [Carl] F[riedrich] Heman, Das Wiedererwachen der jüdischen Nation (Basel, 1897), esp. 43–44. 49. See, for example, Doreet LeVitte Harten and Yigal Zalmona, eds., Die Neuen Hebräer: 100 Jahre Kunst in Israel (Berlin, 2005); Orit Rozin, The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel (Waltham, MA, 2011); Anat Helman, “Was There Anything Particularly Jewish about the First Hebrew City?” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. Barbara KirschenblattGimblet and Jonathan Karp (Philadelphia, 2008), 116–27; Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Hizky Shoham, “Buy Local’ or ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 469–89; Deborah Bernstein and Badi Hasisi, “‘Buy and Promote the National Cause’: Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestine Society,” Nations and Nationalism 14 (2008): 127–50. See also Hizky Shoham’s chapter in this volume. 50. See, for instance, A. Bonne, “Neue Probleme im Lande der Bibel,” Die Umschau 32 (1928): 976–980. For a recent historical study, see Aviva Halamish, Kibbutz: Utopia and Politics: The Life and Times of Meir Yaari, 1897–1987 (Brighton, MA, 2017). 51. Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum, eds., Consumption and Market Society in Israel (Oxford, 2004). 52. Werner Sombart, Die Zukunft der Juden (Leipzig, 1912), 40. 53. David Biale, “Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” in Longing, Belonging, ed. Reuveni and Roemer, 23–38, here 23–24. 54. Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish princesses don’t sweat: desire and consumption in postwar American Jewish culture,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany, NY, 1992), 329–359. 55. Adam Röder, “Die ‘Judenfrage’ in Willy Hellpachs ‘Politischen Prognosen’,” Der Morgen 4 (1928/29): 393–399, here 397.

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56. “Öffentliches Auftreten,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 11 (1932/33): 219. 57. “Worte der Mahnung,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 12 (1933/34): 263. See Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; New York, 1965). 58. “Americanization of the Jews,” Lead Daily Call, May 21, 1903, 3. 59. Andrew Heinze, “Jewish Street Merchants and Mass Consumption in New York City, 1880–1914,” in East European Jews in America, 1880–1920: Immigration and Adaption, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York, 1998), iii: 1063–78. 60. Helene Hanna Cohn, “Die New Yorker Jüdin,” Neue jüdische Monatshefte 2 (1917/18): 499–506, here 505. 61. Darcy Buerkle, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 15 (2006), 625–36. 62. See Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York, 2016); Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration Since 1800 (Philadelphia, 1948). 63. Carmel U.  Chiswick, How Economics Helped Shape American Judaism (Bonn, 2010), 1. 64. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America (New York, 1981); Susan A.  Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., Central European Jews in America, 1840–1880: Migration and Advancement (New York, 1998); Lenderhendler, Jewish Immigrants; Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York, 2009). 65. Rebecca Korbin, ed., Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012). 66. “Rabbi Joseph and the Jews,” Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], August 13, 1888, 8. 67. Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT, 2015), 202. 68. Ibid., 208. 69. See, for example, Stefanie Schüler Springorum, “A Soft Hero: Male Jewish Identity in Imperial Germany through the Autobiography of Aron Liebeck,” in Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender and History, ed. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner (Bloomington, IN, 2012), 90–113. 70. See, for example, Annie Pollard and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New  York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York, 2012); Tobias Brinkmann, Von der Gemeinde zur “Community”: Jüdische Einwanderer in Chicago 1840–1900 (Osnabrück, 2002).

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71. “Argument for Reform,” The Courier-Journal [Louisville], June 28, 1904, 2; Tobias Brinkmann, “The Road from Damascus: Transnational Jewish Philanthropic Organizations and the Jewish Mass Migration from Eastern Europe 1860–1914,” in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Jakob Vogel, and Bernhard Struck (New York, 2015), 152–72. 72. “The Agent’s Bothers,” Evening Star [Washington], Jan 28, 1905, 30. 73. Elias Tobenkin, “Free Information Concerning Adopted Country the Greatest Need of Newly Arrived Immigrants,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1909, 33. 74. It should not be forgotten, however, that Americanization was enforced by the gentile majority during and after World War I, see “Americanization Day for Jewish Immigrants,” The Wichita Beacon, January 25, 1919, 1. 75. Barry R.  Chiswick, “Jewish Immigrant Wages in America in 1909: An Analysis of the Dillingham Commission Data,” Explorations in Economic History 29 (1992): 274–89. Some important differentiations were made by Daniel Bender, “‘A Hero … for the Weak’: Work, Consumption, and the Enfeebled Jewish Worker, 1881–1924,” International Labor and Working-­Class History 56 (1999): 1–22. 76. See J[ames] Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (Princeton, 2003); Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s encounter with American Sports (Indiana, IN, 2005); Paul Buhle, ed., Jews and American Popular Culture, 3 vols. (Westport, CT, 2007); Jenna Weismann Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York, 1994); David Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity—Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand (Waltham, MA, 2012). 77. Carmel U. Chiswick, Judaism in Transition: How Economic Choices Shape Religious Tradition (Redwood, CA, 2014). 78. Jonathan Karp, “Rev. of Chiswick, Judaism in Transition,” American Jewish Studies Review 39 (2015): 473–475, here 473. 79. See, for example, Hizky Shoham, “‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger;’ A Historical Anthropology of the Israeli Bat Mitzvah,” Jewish Culture and History 19 (2018): 275–92; Hizky Shoham, “The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel: from Initiation Rite to Birthday Party,” AJS Review 42 (April 2018): 133–57. 80. Shaul Kelner, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York, 2002). 81. Andrew R.  Heinze, Adapting to Abundance. Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990). 82. Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston, 1999); Riv-Ellen Prell, “The Economic

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Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared,” American Jewish History 103 (2019): 485–512; Val Marie Johnson, “‘Look for the Moral and Sex Sides of the Problem’: Investigating Jewishness, Desire, and Discipline at Macy’s Department Store, New York City, 1913,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009): 457–485; Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York, 2001). 83. Paula E.  Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70 (1980): 91–105. For a vivid description, see “Meat Boycott Growing,” Saint Paul Globe, May 25, 1902, 4. 84. Examples of such consumer activism can be found in “Cheaper Meat in Elizabeth,” Courier-News [Bridgewater, NJ], Jul 17, 1907, 8; “District Attorney Moore—To Address Jewish Women,” Buffalo Evening News, May 19, 1917, 4; “Jewish Kehilah Pledges Loyalty,” Hartford Courant, April 24, 1918, 2. 85. Jeffrey Podoshen, “Distressing Events and Future Purchase Decisions: Jewish Consumers and the Holocaust,” Journal of Consumer Marketing 26 (2009): 263–76. See also Anne Schenderlein’s essay in this volume. 86. Marie J.  Clifford, “Helena Rubenstein’s Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display,” Winterthur Portfolio 38 (2003): 83–108. 87. Andrew Heinze, “Advertising and Consumer Culture in the United States,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia, February 27, 2009, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ advertising-­and-­consumer-­culture-­in-­united-­states. 88. See Kerri P. Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience (New Brunswick, 2015). 89. See Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, eds., Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York, 2010); Joseph Malherek, “Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (2016): 1–14; Jan Logemann, Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism (Chicago, 2019). See also Paul Lerner’s contribution to this volume. 90. See Kathleen Loock, “‘Dearer than diamonds:’ Die Bedeutung der Esskultur in jüdisch-amerikanischer Einwanderungsliteratur der Jahrhundertwende,” in Über den Tellerrand geschaut: Migration und Ernährung in historischer Perspektive (18. bis 20. Jahrhundert), ed. Mathias Beer (Essen, 2014), 127–151 (although based on very few sources). 91. See Alan M.  Kraut, “Ethnic Foodways: The Significance of Food in the Designation of Cultural Boundaries between Immigrant Groups in the

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U.S.,” Journal of American Culture 2 (1979): 409–420; David A. Gerber and Alan M.  Kraut, “Traditions and Invented Traditions,” in American Immigration and Ethnicity: A Reader, ed. David A.  Gerber and Alan M. Kraut (New York, 2005), 300–18; Donna R. Gabacchia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, 1998), 69–71; Hochman, ed., Tastes of Faith; Ted Merwin, Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York, 2015). 92. For a useful analytical framework, see Sharon Gillerman, “A Kinder Gentler Strongman? Siegmund Breitbart in Eastern Europe,” in Jewish Masculinities, ed. Baader, Gillerman, and Lerner, 197–209. 93. Daniel Miller, Stuff (London, 2012); Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1988); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999). 94. In addition to works cited above, see Sarah A.  Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT, 2010), for an example of this kind of work. 95. Michal Kümper et al., eds., Makom Orte und Räume im Judentum. Real. Abstrakt. Imaginär. Essays (Hildesheim, 2007); Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds., Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place (Aldershot, 2008); Barbara Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012); Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, eds., Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York, 2017). 96. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1987).

PART I

Jews, Retail Cultures, and Modern Commerce in Europe and North America

CHAPTER 2

Beyond the Bright Side of Consumer Culture: Jewish Peddlers and Second-Hand Dealers in Germany, 1800–1938 Uwe Spiekermann

In her most recent book Roads Taken, Historian Hasia Diner argues that nineteenth-century peddlers opened “the pages to a crucial new chapter in modern Jewish history.”1 She is referring to the migration experience and the remarkable upward mobility of German and later eastern European Jews in the United States and other western settler countries. This Whiggish kind of Jewish history is not what will be presented in this chapter, although the German example would offer a lot of material for such an endeavor. Rather, this article will use peddling in general and second-­ hand dealing in particular as keys to analyzing both the development of Jewish economic performance and the changes in distribution and consumption in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yes, successful Jewish business activities in the consumer sphere developed out of a long tradition of Jewish peddling. In the 1860s and 1870s,

U. Spiekermann (*) University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_2

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however, most Jewish traders and merchants moved to more profitable and stationary businesses, shaping the German path to a modern consumer society. Nonetheless, peddling remained an important and immensely underestimated element of German consumer cultures even after the foundation of the German Empire and during the Weimar Republic. Partly in contrast to the United States, the story of Jews in retailing was not only about their rise and integration as successful and wealthy businessmen. Jews continued to be a relevant factor in “traditional” retail sectors too. The Jewish heritage of and continuous presence in peddling and second-hand dealing was crucial to the commonly held notion of the supposed “Jewishness” of modern consumer cultures, including of the circulation of money and materials. Such stereotypes ultimately led the Nazi regime to forbid Jews from peddling and second-hand dealing in 1938.

Second-Hand Goods and the Emerging Consumer Society in Germany It makes sense to start with some more general remarks on the historiography of consumption and on why this article considers not only (Jewish) peddling as such but also the selling of second-hand goods, one of the most revealing and more challenging aspects of researching consumer cultures in the long nineteenth century. Analyzing Jewish second-hand dealers allows deeper access to the fabric of modern consumer societies than an exclusive focus on the bright facades of buying and selling can. It is often argued, particularly in the case of Jewish immigrants to the United States, that Jews could understand the “democratic symbolism of mass-­ marketed luxuries in America.”2 But there was probably more to it than that: Jewish second-hand dealers were able, perhaps earlier and more successfully than gentile traders, to understand the circular system of modern consumer societies and to meet the diverse and sometimes contradictory structural needs of their customers.3 Peddling in the early nineteenth century evinced innovation and novelty—the focus of current research in the history of consumption. Yet, it also included older, more familiar kinds of goods as well as many alternative forms of exchange that still exist.4 Figure  2.1 depicts the complex network of commercial and cultural functions embodied by peddlers at the time. These men and women linked urban centers, villages, and the

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Fig. 2.1  The “Peddler” as a cipher of heterogeneous commercial and cultural functions in emerging consumer societies

still dominant countryside. They served all kinds of social strata with a broad range of very different kinds of goods. They offered not only new but also used goods, buying the last from so-called consumers. Consequently, the trade combined very different forms of payment, including cash, credit, and barter. This circumstance tells us a lot about the limits of modern consumer markets and the hybrid functions of its actors. After all, the “survival” of the second-hand trade and its later commodification to serve collectors and nostalgia demonstrates the “inability of the first-hand market … to meet growing demand for a wide range of durable goods.”5 A second benefit of focusing on second-hand dealers is that they remind us that consumption is not just an exchange of money for value but can instead entail an exchange of goods. Consumption is not abstract but deals with material goods. It is the result of human activity, of verifiable exchanges between people. With time, goods develop their own identity and shape those who purchase and sell them.6 This is especially important in the Jewish case, for which the association with money and capital was very prominent.7 Durable consumer goods, however, are not consumed

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but used. A slice of bread is eaten, but a shirt can accompany us for many years. Even disposable items are collected and recycled. The peddler and his more specialized successors were crucial to the hidden realm of rags and scraps, which has always been an integral part of consumption cultures. Although historical research (partly with reference to antisemitic discourse) is dominated by the close connection of Jews and abstract capital, peddlers and second-hand dealers offer another important perspective for understanding the role and perception of Jewish business activities. New and cheap products, used and dirty goods, and direct consumer– retailer relation established an important additional perspective in judging the minority’s economic presence during the long nineteenth century. Consequently, this story, in contrast to many books on peddling from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, is not about the decline of peddling and the second-hand trade.8 Peddling did not vanish but was transformed from the 1860s and 1870s onward. Its broad array of economic and cultural functions was taken over by specialists. The bright lights of modern consumer societies illuminated only some, albeit important, aspects of modern consumer cultures. To understand the rise and functioning of consumer societies, and the position of Jewish actors in this process, it is necessary to look at a different realm as well. Collecting used goods was and continues to be a sine qua non of modern, efficient, and ecological consumer cultures.

Fashion Brokers and Agents of Modernity? Peddlers in a Changing Economic and Social Environment In Germany during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, peddlers were “the itinerant middlemen between estates and villages on the one hand and towns on the other.”9 This structure was augmented by the immigration of Jews from Polish regions, who often turned to peddling to survive. Although strictly regulated and sometimes even forbidden by local and state laws, the business thrived due to its benefits for consumers, producers, and peddlers alike. In Bavaria, for instance, where Jews had been legally excluded from peddling since 1813, no fewer than 2535 Jewish peddlers were still active in 1819–1920.10 In some ways, their peddling was indispensable, as both state officials and retailers knew. Peddling was a central topic during the difficult process of early Jewish emancipation. The visible overrepresentation of Jews in peddling was a

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consequence of earlier state restrictions on what trades they could practice. Even so, peddling was no “Jewish” business. Although we are missing detailed statistics, we know that the clear majority of peddlers were gentile. The opposite impression resulted from not only antisemitic discourse but also the segmentation of peddling, with Jewish peddlers overrepresented in more trade-related sectors. From the eighteenth century, as cottage industries produced ever more goods, they worked as or used peddlers to sell fabrics, dry goods, and metalware.11 Early manufacturers and factories distributed more sophisticated and fashionable consumer goods with the help of itinerant traders.12 Textiles, glassware, dry goods, books, and even watches were sold this way.13 Finally, we have a third group of peddlers who worked closely with merchants and retailers to distribute coffee, tobacco, and sugar, for example. This diverse group of peddlers with unique assortments of products meant that a fairly complete array of durable consumer goods and cheap luxuries was available in the countryside. The same way of doing things was standard in many towns as well.14 And let us not forget that second-hand dealing was always part of the exchange matrix. Most Jewish peddlers were part of the group related to merchants and retailers, whereas peddling based on self-production and the cottage industry was nearly exclusively gentile. This circumstance formed an important element in a widespread discourse on the ostensibly relative backwardness and lack of “productivity” of Jewish itinerant business already in the early nineteenth century.15 Physiocrats and early economic liberals were guided by the idea that peddlers and tradesmen were unproductive middlemen because they were not making things or using the land to produce and extract value—and policymakers and economists favored an increase in productive employment in agriculture and crafts. Consequently, their conception of productivity informed debates on Jewish peddling in the first half of the nineteenth century.16 Joseph von Utzschneider (1763–1840), a leading liberal Bavarian state official, supported restrictions on Jewish peddling with such an argument: “As long as door-to-door sales are not destroyed, the Jews will not decide to earn their living in bourgeois factories or by the plough like other honest subjects.”17 But a consumerist argument also lurks in this attempt to direct people toward “productive” work. Jewish peddlers were seen as heralds of luxury and excess (Fig. 2.2): “Across the whole country, these people propagate enslavement to a highly pernicious luxury; the entire nation sees only what is foreign [to it].”18 Utzschneider did not succeed in abolishing Jewish

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Fig. 2.2  A common narrative: The peddler as a fashion broker. (Source: Harper’s Weekly, November 9, 1912, p. 13)

peddling in Bavaria because other liberal representatives viewed peddling through the lens of social policy: It provided support for poor rural Jews.19 But these same liberals shared with him ideas about the supposed backwardness and harmful consumption-related practices of the lower orders in general and itinerant traders in particular. From their perspective, second-­hand trade based on barter presented new opportunities for inappropriate consumption, fraud, and theft. “This bartering trade in the houses of the rural people often leads to nothing but the gradual emptying of their masters’ grain silos and flour containers, setting coffee grinders in motion instead and causing secret attempts at the lottery.”20 Such debates could not stop nineteenth-century Germany’s economic transition to a modern consumer society, but they played a role in the establishment of a differentiated distribution network. The rise of the shop as the decentralized local site for buying and selling was surely the most important institutional innovation. At the same time, however,

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peddling reached new heights after freedom of trade was established in 1869–1870.21 The number of itinerant trade licenses, the most reliable quantitative source on peddling in this period, rose from 137,000 in 1870 to more than 227,000  in 1882.22 Although peddling faced new legal restrictions in the late 1890s, nearly 250,000 peddlers were active in Germany before World War I.23 This was more than the number of employees in the all-important chemical industry, and peddlers still sold more goods than the department store, that new “Jewish” symbol of modern consumerism.24

From Peddling to a Variety of Retail Businesses Was there something specific about “Jewish” peddling? For one, Jews did not serve customers on Saturday. But more important was probably that Jews integrated all manner of businesses. In contrast to their gentile competitors, Jewish peddlers were normally not bound to one kind of product range, to one form of payment, or to specific markets (Fig. 2.3).25 Their greater flexibility enabled them to follow trends earlier and to serve the needs and desires of customers better than gentile competitors could. Emancipation and economic freedom, however, changed German Jewry fundamentally:26 Historian Avraham Barkai identified four general trends: “first, regular commercial activity increasingly replaced pawnbroking and peddling; second, a temporary increase in Jewish craftsmen; third, the disappearance of Jewish beggars and a decline in the number of servants and day laborers; and fourth, an increase in the number of professionals.”27 This upward economic mobility resulted in an increasingly bourgeois Jewry. Most bid farewell to the heritage of peddling and second-hand dealing. In 1928, the Jewish Encyclopedia offered a quite simple summary: “The majority of door-to-door salesmen became urban shopkeepers.”28 But this was only one important aspect of a far more complex transition that shaped German consumer society in fundamental ways (Fig. 2.4). Yes, many Jewish peddlers became shopkeepers. But the international differentiation of these sites of buying and selling was more pronounced. Garment stores remained a backbone of Jewish retail activity, but we must add bazaars, hundreds of shop-based junk dealers, and the new institutions of the chain store and the installment business. More importantly, and often overlooked, there was a substantial transition and differentiation in itinerant retailing. Mail-order houses and itinerant auctions emerged in

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Fig. 2.3  Comparative advantage of Jewish peddlers: Integration of multiple aspects of the occupation

the 1870s; commission agents and salesmen took over functions from peddlers; and a more specialized trade in rags and scraps was established at the junction of consumer markets and production. The department store eventually merged core principles of all shop-based and some itinerant business institutions, although the installment business had a much a higher turnover and far greater economic significance for the majority of Germans than the “consuming temple” did.29 Old and new forms of business co-existed until the 1930s. Jews were active in all of them; however, with the exceptions of bazaars, department stores, and perhaps garment stores, gentiles dominated retailing by far. In public discourse, on the other hand, businesses associated with credit, cheap goods, and advertising were often depicted and denounced as “Jewish.” This transition led to a twofold and intertwined Jewish presence in the consumer sphere.30 On the one hand, there was the new advanced world of shop-based consumption, linked to new forms of displaying and

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Fig. 2.4  Specialization and substitution: The transition of peddling in Germany from the 1870s on

advertising goods. On the other hand, the traditional world of peddling continued to exist, constantly reconfigured by new technologies and trends (Figs. 2.5 and 2.6). Peddling was no longer done on foot. Larger and faster transport facilities emerged, including railroads, carriages, bicycles, and vans, all of which permitted more frequent customer visits. Peddling was connected to most of the new business forms, especially the mail-order business.31 Peddlers, formerly independent, often became seasonal staff for larger producers, wholesale firms, and retailers. Finally, there was the peddling, particularly in urban areas, of fashionable articles and bargains.32 Ads that promoted peddling emphasized its profitability, but it rarely generated more than a subsistence income. This became even more striking during World War I, when the number of peddlers temporarily increased due to the growing number of disabled soldiers.

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Fig. 2.5  The intertwined worlds of Jewish commerce in antisemitic cartoons: The urban shop keeper. (Source: Fliegende Blätter 65, no. 1631, 1876, p. 134)

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Fig. 2.6  The intertwined worlds of Jewish commerce in antisemitic cartoons: Rural peddlers. (Source: Fliegende Blätter 88, no. 2227, 1888, p. 126)

From the Core to the Niche: Consumerism and the Relative Decline of the (Jewish) Second-Hand Market In the early twentieth century, peddlers still worked as rag and scrap traders, offering cheap remnants to bargain hunters and poorer people.33 Genre images focused on the visible end of the second-hand market, showing the supposed greed and poverty of Jewish traders. But again, we have to free ourselves from widespread public images of dirty and cheap commodities. The rise of the rag and scrap trades was part of the emerging specialization of the trade industries, which resulted in incomes higher than ordinary peddling offered.34 Itinerant dealers of old clothes, old

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metal, and scrap first established shops in the early nineteenth century. Again, Jews were pioneers. In larger towns, second-hand dealers often outnumbered urban peddlers. In 1825, one year after economic emancipation, Frankfurt am Main had five Jewish peddlers but fifty businesses for old clothes, old metal, and scrap.35 Selling used goods did not mean working in an old-fashioned way. In early nineteenth-century Vienna, for instance, travelers could rent all the items they needed to make their accommodations comfortable: Furniture, clocks, beds, and more.36 Again, it is not true that the “rag trade became obsolete with the rise in the standard of living of the masses and the introduction of Singer’s sewing machine and modern methods of mass production of ready-made clothing.”37 On the contrary, in 1882 nearly 7000 firms were active in the junk trade (Trödelhandel) in Germany, although no numbers are available for the rag and scrap trade.38 Later business census data offer at least a sense of the size of these advancing industries. In 1907, nearly 12,000 firms employed close to 20,000 people in second-hand trades, and the size of this sector doubled by 1925 (Table 2.1). For the most part, people engaged in this branch were not nostalgic genre figures; however, such images dominated both sentimental and antisemitic genre postcards.39 The rise in numbers for this industry resulted from the deep transition and internationalization of the rag and scrap trade since the 1890s. Used goods became a global commodity. In 1894, approximately 40,000 tons of rags were exported from Germany, a number that tripled by 1913.40 Strongly shaped by Jewish businessmen, the second-hand trade served not only paper, iron, and steel production but also international relief efforts and, of course, the purchase of cheap, Table 2.1  Number of firms and employees in Germany’s peddling, scrap, and second-hand industries, 1907–1933 1907

1925

1933

Sector

Firms

Employees

Firms

Employees

Firms

Employees

Peddling Junk Rag Scrap

47,421 7590 11,871 –

48,371 12,096 19,531 –

94,248 9859 10,685 1688

111,415 14,541 29,501 8658

52,731 4822 4968 1607

58,931 6541 11,546 5562

Source: Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vol. 30 (1909), p. 84; vol. 47 (1928), pp. 107–8; vol. 54 (1935), pp. 124–25

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respectable, and fashionable used goods by customers of more modest means. Although representatives of second-hand dealing and the rag and scrap trade tried to improve their public image, they remained less respectable in the public eye because of their trade’s close association with garbage and waste disposal, dirt and bad smells. This was one reason second-hand dealers and peddlers remained an important visual element in antisemitic discourse. For antisemites and their middle-class supporters, such working Jews represented economic backwardness, self-exploitation, fraud, and betrayal. Although peddling still seemed to have some relevance to rural districts and to the distribution of production from still relevant cottage industries, they argued for severe restrictions on Jewish second-hand dealers. To them, these poor and “dirty” people represented the “true” Jew whose more successful coreligionists were “tricking” Germans on a broader scale, infecting them with “un-German” notions about bargains, fashionability, and buying on credit. The interesting point here is that these discourses about peddling and second-hand dealing were often mirrored by German- and Austrian-­Jewish intellectuals, rabbis, and other men of stature. Theodor Herzl already argued in his 1896 treatise The Jewish State that the Jewish people were shaped by the frameworks of legal restrictions and capitalism.41 He held that Jews were forced to be traders, bankers, and capitalists by the system, and that this would change in the new Jewish state. Peddlers were not happy with their fate, in his view, and there would be no place for such trade in a new Jewish homeland. Instead, Herzl privileged “department stores in which one finds everything.”42 Such large-scale enterprises were rational, efficient institutions of the new world, desirable and attainable, whereas small-scale retailing and peddling represented the ways of consumption to be cast off. This assessment fit well with German Jews’ self-­image as representatives of “international European civilization.”43 They shared rather similar narratives of Jewish and gentile peddlers as everyday pests, as unnecessary manifestations of what was supposed to be a commercial past.44 For visionary writers like Herzl, overcoming peddling and junk dealing, which were denounced as “subsistence livelihoods,” was perceived as a realization of true Jewishness, of enjoying the pleasure of bourgeois life, which included advanced consumption.45 After having seen Georg Hirschfeld’s drama Überwinter, one critic noted: Only one thing about it is truly and beautifully portrayed: how the thousand-­ year-­old burden of earlier, eternally living, eternally hounded generations

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weighs down on the modern Jew’s shoulders, so to speak, like the pack of a peddler, how his spirit has not yet escaped the seemingly everlasting ghetto.46

With the passage of time, Jewish peddlers became an expression of the lonely and alienated Jew in the diaspora.47 In the early twentieth century, Jews from different factions of the community were asking whether better education or training in agriculture and crafts could open prospects for impoverished peddlers to lead a better, more productive life.48 Such self-­ reflections in the German-Jewish community were heavily shaped by the influx of Eastern European and often Orthodox Jews to Germany. While most observers had some compassion for the “walking and creeping Jewish misery”49 and the daily suffering endured by these traders, some favored rigid economic measures to end Jewish peddling.50 Similar sentiments were voiced about junk dealers. The Jewish Encyclopedia characterized their situation as “depressed.”51 The transition of the majority of German peddlers to bourgeois wealth seemed to have changed the balance between East and West. Whereas German dealers in the mid-nineteenth century were much poorer than their Galician counterparts, Galicians arrived and lived in Germany in great poverty fifty years later, becoming dependent on subsidies from Jewish benevolent organizations.52 More severe, however, was a kind of naturalization of the social: Junk dealing, it was pointed out, constricted the Jewish trader’s view of people. On the job, he learned how to exploit the embarrassment and the need of others. “It is only too easy for some of the dirt from the objects the peddler deals with to stick to him, too.”53 Of course, internal Jewish discourse also included some proud statements about the ceaseless activity of peddlers and second-hand dealers, and their importance to the economy.54 But in the first three decades of the twentieth century, bourgeois Jews distanced themselves from Jewish itinerant traders to a striking degree, perceiving the latter as “miserable” and “despised,” on the bottom rung of a proud German Jewry.55 These bourgeois Jews believed that their education, wealth, tastes, and consumer habits were advanced and modern, while the peddler shamed and irritated them. In the United States, by contrast, the second-hand and recycling industries were perceived as modern and innovative, led by dynamic businessmen.

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Symbolic and Real Exclusion: The Aryanization of Second-Hand Trade in the 1930s After World War I, many German peddlers and second-hand dealers extended their commercial activities to the scrap business. But in contrast to the United States, where the waste material industry was probably 90 percent Jewish-owned, German-Jewish second-hand dealers faced exclusion: The business eventually became racialized and restructured by National Socialist repression and exclusion.56 This represented a final stage of the naturalization of the social.57 Discourses became bitter reality. Peddling and second-hand dealing grew in scope again from the end of World War I to 1924, which marked the end of Germany’s hyperinflation.58 Then the number of peddlers declined remarkably, while specialized trades increased in importance. The Great Depression, however, hit both sectors severely, although the official numbers significantly underestimate unofficial economic activity. Jewish second-hand dealers suffered tremendously from this economic downturn. In Frankfurt am Main, for instance, a Jewish lending bank supported 260 people in 1931, 69 of them traders and peddlers (and 43 salesmen).59 The Great Depression once again triggered political demands to regulate business, specifically department stores, consumer-cooperatives, one-price stores, and peddling, and to control advanced commercial business practices, like sales, free gifts, and loss leaders. Although such ideas were promoted predominantly by right-wing parties and the Nazi movement, they were also supported by communists and many socialists. As in the 1890s, negative ideas about Jewish firms and business practices were put on the public agenda. In this period of economic hardship, the harsh preindustrial treatment of peddling was often replicated. Questions of this time returned to the public agenda: “Can one strike the Jews dead or send them to Palestine?”60 The answer at this point was still no, but the Nazi movement aimed to bring about different answers. The popular discourse on peddlers and second-hand dealers was used to denounce German Jewry in general. In the discourse, such traders represented “true” Jews. They appeared as poor, dirty, and greedy, as interlopers from the East seeking to benefit from “German” wealth and credulity.61 After the Nazi seizure of power, second-hand, rag, and scrap dealers faced growing problems, which intensified after the state began to manage raw materials in early summer 1934.62 While the state could regulate shop-based enterprises quite easily, it had more difficulty overseeing

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and directing the still 25,000 to 30,000 second-hand, rag and scrap dealers, approximately half of whom were Jewish. Nonetheless, with the start of the Four Year Plan in 1936, the Nazi state took over the collection, use, and re-use of used goods and raw materials. The number of dealers declined rapidly because Hitler Youth volunteers took over door-to-door collection, and municipalities established businesses to support the economic plans of the regime. The German state started scrap collection in 1936 with only non-Jewish scrap dealers.63 What it promoted as an “exertion of the German people”64 for economic independence from foreign powers also aimed to train the German people to use and reuse consumer goods in a rational way. Scrap collection involved an important element of control because only approved German dealers and representatives of the state and NSDAP, especially the Hitler Youth, were allowed to engage in it. Jewish second-hand dealing and peddling was forbidden in 1938, but this discriminatory measure was not the end of the story (Fig. 2.7). The psychological link between trading in used goods and waste disposal gained a material existence, for instance, in the forced labor of unemployed Jews at the Berlin waste disposal facility in Schildow-Blankenfelde in 1939.65 Nazi henchmen and ordinary people had already forced Jewish citizens to sweep and scrub sidewalks after the German occupation of Austria in March 1938, and to purify streets and other public from the remnants of terror after the so-called Night of Broken Glass on November 9–10, 1938.66 Eventually, the large-scale auctions of Jewish property all over Germany and in the occupied territories became integral to the exploitation and annihilation of European Jews, while following the immanent logic of a long-lasting discourse on Jewish peddlers and second-­ hand dealers.67 Historians such as Hasia Diner and Adam D. Mendelsohn have emphasized the important contribution of Jewish peddlers to the economic success of Jewish immigrants in the United States, the British Empire, and elsewhere. The German case, however, offers a more complex and quite different perspective: At first glance, peddlers turned into successful and wealthy businessmen as well. Parallel to their western coreligionists (and many German peddlers as well), they established successful shops and department stores, and turned to more specialized, often middle- and high-income sectors of the second-hand, rag, and scrap businesses. As Fritz Stern once noted, however, “German Jews throve visibly—and suffered invisibly.”68

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Fig. 2.7  “Stop the specter of Jewish haggling!”: Antisemitic poster presenting peddling as a danger to consumers, 1939. Note that the man is holding a bag labeled Ramsch for unusable junk, and he is standing in front of an “Aryanized” store that is now “German” and boasting “set prices” and “quality.” (Source: Völkischer Beobachter, March 5, 1939)

Their social and economic transformation was accompanied by lasting public discourses on the productivity of peddling and trading—productivity understood in moralizing terms that questioned the honesty and sustainability of Jewish wealth. Moreover, these discourses were not exclusively antisemitic. At the same time, the still important presence of Jewish citizens in peddling (and the immense rise of gentile peddlers in the late

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nineteenth century) remained a permanent motif of public discourse on itinerant trade in general and second-hand business in particular. Although used goods became even more important in late-nineteenth-century consumer society, trading in them was perceived as second-rate and shabby. The reuse and recycling of consumer goods was linked to dirt, bad smells, and society’s lower strata—and the traders involved became relative outsiders in a veritably prosperous nation. By the turn of the century, even wealthy bourgeois Jews shared such perspectives and thus distanced themselves from Jewish dealers, that is, from poor migrants from Eastern Europe. After World War I and the hyperinflation, such discourses and the material reality of peddling and second-hand retailing helped sustain older antisemitic stereotypes, which were used to justify antisemitic policies, regulations, and eventually terror and annihilation. Yet, the history of German peddling and second-hand trade also points to a different narrative on the relationship of Jews and modern consumer cultures. That history was not only about success and integration, about capital, money, and credit. It was also a history of the grimier sides of modern consumerism, namely of the use and reuse of materials, of recycling consumer goods, and of the people involved in such trades. Although Jews never dominated these branches, they became discursively linked to the alleged dirt and bad smells of such dealing in ways that their opponents and enemies exploited.

Notes 1. Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT, 2015), 200. 2. Andrew R. Heinz, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990), 6. 3. See Laurence Fontaine, ed., Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York, 2008); Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damm, eds., Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 (Houndmills, 2010). 4. See Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford, 2003). 5. Jan Stobart and Ilja Van Damme, “Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: Themes, Topics and Debates,” in Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade, ed. Stobart and Van Damme, 1–15, here 7; see also Gary Cross,

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Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York, 2015). 6. Laurence Fontaine, “Die Zirkulation des Gebrauchten im vorindustriellen Europa,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, no. 2 (2004): 83–96, here 83. 7. See Fritz Backhaus, Raphael Gross, and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Juden. Geld. Eine Vorstellung (Frankfurt am Main, 2013). 8. Nachum Gros, ed., Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1975), 263; Laurence Fontaine, History of Pedlars in Europe (Durham, NC, 1996), 140–63. Fontaine stressed a transition to specialized peddling and to the new profession of salesman, whereby this was only one dimension of broader changes in the trade, which was surely not “dying out” (3) during the nineteenth century. 9. Gross, ed., Economic History, 262. 10. Arthur Cohen, “Die Münchener Judenschaft 1750–1861: Eine bevölkerungs- und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Studie,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Judentums in Deutschland, no. 1 (1930–1931): 262–83, here 278. 11. On peddling, see Uwe Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland 1850–1914 (Munich, 1999), 37–41, 382–400. 12. Hannelore Oberpennig, “Gewerbliche Warenproduktion und ländlicher Wanderhandel im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 71 (1999): 169–86. 13. Michael Schmidt, “Handel und Wandel: Über jüdische Hausierer und die Verbreitung der Taschenuhr im frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 83 (1987): 229–50. 14. See the data in Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft, 39 and 393. 15. Jonathan Karp, “Can Economic History Date the Inception of Jewish Modernity?” in The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev (New York, 2010), 23–42. 16. This has to be distinguished from early antisemitic smears against Jewish peddling such as in Judenspiegel: Ein Auszug aus dem von Hartmut von Hundet-Radowsky aufgestellten Schand- und Sittengemälde (Ulm: Daniel Wagner, 1821), 27–32, although there was some overlap. 17. J[oseph] v. Utzschneider, “Vortrag über die Jahrmärkte und den Hausierhandel in Bayern,” Kunst- und Gewerb-Blatt des polytechnischen Vereins für das Königreich Bayern 7 (1821): 139–43 and 145–48, here 148. 18. Ibid., 140. 19. See v. Schmitt, “Vortrag des Referenten des dritten Ausschusses, den Hausier- und unberechtigten Handel der Juden betreffend,” Verhandlungen der zweiten Kammer der Ständeversammlung (Munich, 1819), v:137–56; “Bemerkungen über des Herrn von Utzschneider gemachte Motion, den

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Hausierhandel der Juden betreffend,” Allgemeine Handlungs-Zeitung, April 4, 1819, no. 67, 269–70 and 273–74; “Bürgerthum,” Der Staats-­ Bürger, July 17, 1821 (vol. 4, no. 5), 17–20. 20. Verhandlungen der zweiten Kammer der Ständeversammlung (Munich, 1819), v:219 (Schulz). 21. Although deregulated, peddling was still strictly observed by the German states. See “Der Hausirhandel und der Betrieb der Wander-Gewerbe,” Kunst- und Gewerbe-Blatt 41 (1863): 604–22. On the close link between peddling and theft, see Chr. Rochlitz, Polizeilicher Schutz und Trutz, oder Anleitung sich möglicherweise gegen Raub, Diebstahl und Betrug zu schützen, nebst einem Wörterbuche der Diebessprache, 2nd ed., (Erfurt, 1864), 117–19. 22. G[ustav] Sch[moller], “Die Zunahme der Handlungsreisenden und Hausierer in Deutschland 1870–1882,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, n.s., 7 (1883): 1033–35, here 1033–34. 23. A good overview of the debates at the turn of the century: Richard Rössger, “Eine Untersuchung über den Gewerbebetrieb im Umherziehen,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 69 (1897): 1–55, 204–69. 24. See Uwe Spiekermann, “Das Warenhaus,” in Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 207–17. 25. On the U.S. situation, see Adam D. Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York, 2015), 9–17. Jews’ ability to integrate can be also analyzed in the context of global trade networks; see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost world of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT, 2008). 26. For an overview, see Marion A.  Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford, 2005), 130–43; Ulrich Sieg, “Das Judentum im Kaiserreich (1871–1918),” in Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, ed. Arno Herzig and Cay Rademacher (Hamburg, 2007), 122–37. 27. Panikos Panayi, Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (Milton Park and New York, 2013), 45. 28. “Deutschland (Wirtschaftsgeschichte),” Jüdisches Lexikon, vol. II (Berlin, 1928), cols. 125–31, here col. 129. 29. Jan Logemann and Uwe Spiekermann, “The Myth of a Bygone Cash Economy: Consumer Lending in Germany from the Nineteenth Century to the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Entreprises et Histoire 59, no. 2 (2010): 12–27; Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 92. The latter draws a direct line between the two forms of retailing, stressing

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that the department store “institutionalized the circulation of the itinerant peddler.” 30. On visual culture, see Beata Hertlein and Wolf-Heinrich Kulke, “‘Preisend mit viel schönen Reden.’ Die Darstellung des Juden als Trödler, Hausierer und Kleinhändler,” in Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, ed. Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger (Heidelberg, 1999), 187–93. 31. See the advertisements in Berliner Tageblatt, May 10, 1908, 35, and October 20, 1912, 26. 32. See the advertisements in Berliner Tageblatt, November 29, 1914, 30, December 8, 1914, 16, and April 20, 1915, 16. 33. Advertisements regularly addressed peddlers and rag traders. See, for instance, Berliner Tageblatt, July 30, 1905, 21, and November 20, 1906, 12. 34. Fabius Schaich, “Die russischen Juden in Deutschland,” Ost und West (1905): cols. 719–30, here 722. 35. Josef Unna, “Statistik der Frankfurter Juden von den Anfängen bis zum Jahre 1866 (Fortsetzung),” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 8 (1930): 226–28, here 228. We find the same pattern in Munich, albeit on a statistically less significant level; see Werner Cahnmann, “Die Münchener Judenbeschreibung von 1804,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, n.s., 7 (1937): 180–88, here 183–84. 36. Joh[ann] Pezzl, Beschreibung und Grundriß der Haupt- und Residenzstadt Wien, 3rd ed. (Vienna, 1809), 131. On the British second-hand clothing trade, see Elizabeth Ewing, Everyday Dress, 1650–1900 (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), 90–94. 37. Gross, ed., Economic History, 267. 38. Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft, 704. 39. Search for the German term “hausierer” (peddler), for instance, at Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur, Bildarchiv Marburg, https://www. bildindex.de. 40. Hermann Stern, Die gegenwärtige Entwicklung und die gegenwärtige Lage des Lumpenhandels in Deutschland (Borna-Leipzig, 1914), 114. On the ambivalent nature of used goods, see Sonja Windmüller, Die Kehrseite der Dinge: Müll, Abfall, Wegwerfen als kulturwissenschaftliches Problem (Münster, 2004). 41. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 8th ed. (Berlin, 1920), 18. 42. Ibid., 54. 43. Mathias Acher, “Zum westjüdischen Kulturproblem: Antwort,” Ost und West (1904): cols. 379–86, here 382. 44. This was a typical motif of cartoons, for example, Fliegende Blätter 91 (1890): 103. 45. “Die Not der Hausierer und ihre Berater,” Die Welt 18 (1914): 264.

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46. “Georg Hirschfelds ‘Ueberwinter,’” Berliner Tageblatt, November 8, 1913, 1. 47. Abraham Schwadron, “Das Dogma von der ewigen Galuth: Eine Kardinalfrage der zionistischen Ideologie,” Der Jude 4, no. 3 (1919/20): 97–103, here 99. 48. “Die Judenfrage im kuenftigen Europa. III. Der wirtschaftliche Kern der Judenfrage,” Ost und West (1919): cols. 297–314, here 306; “Ahlem,” Ost und West (1901): cols. 127–32, here 128. 49. Fabius Schaich, “Die russischen Juden in Deutschland,” Ost und West (1905): cols. 719–30, here 722. 50. “Die Judenfrage,” col. 314. 51. “Trödelhandel,” Jüdisches Lexikon, vol. 4.2 (Berlin, 1930), col. 1058. 52. “Wanderung durch Krakau, Galizien, Bukowina, Moldau und Wallachei (Fortsetzung),” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 7 (1843): 701–2, here 701. 53. Isidor Kracauer, Aus der inneren Geschichte der Juden Frankfurts im XIV. Jahrhundert: Judengasse, Handel und sonstige Berufe (Frankfurt am Main, 1914), 35. 54. Leo Rosenberg, “Vom ostjüdischen Handel,” Der Jude 3, no. 7 (1918/19): 305–23, here 308. 55. Both quotations from Arthur Cohen, “Die Münchener Judenschaft 1750–1861: Eine bevölkerungs- und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Studie,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Judentums in Deutschland 2, no. 1 (1930–1931): 262–83, here 277; Max Mandell, “Die ökonomische Funktion des Antisemitismus,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 11 (1933): 232. 56. Editors of Fortune, Jews in America (New York, 1936). 57. This was not typical of the German situation. For the United States, see Carl Zimring, “How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trade, 1870–1930,” Environmental History 9 (2004): 80–101; Carl Zimring, Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005); Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999), esp. 68–109. 58. On developments in retailing overall during the interwar period, see Uwe Spiekermann “Rationalisierung, Leistungssteigerung und ‘Gesundung’: Der Handel in Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen,” in Unterm Strich: Von der Winkelkrämerei zum E-Commerce, ed. Michael Haverkamp and Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg (Bramsche, 2000), 190–210. 59. “Jüdische Leihkasse e.V.,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 10 (1932): 183. 60. “Oeffentliche Sitzung der Kammer der Abgeordneten,” Allgemeine Zeitung 1819, no. 126, 503–4, here 504 (Behr).

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61. A striking example of this argumentation: Hans Buchner, Warenhauspolitik und Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1930). 62. This and the information that follows comes from Susanne Köstering, “Pioniere der Rohstoffbeschaffung: Lumpensammler im Nationalsozialismus, 1934–1939,” Werkstatt Geschichte 17 (1997): 45–65. 63. Walter Köhler, “Altmaterialerfassung,” Der Vierjahresplan 1 (1937): 132–35, here 133. For a more general perspective, see Uwe Spiekermann, Künstliche Kost: Ernährung in Deutschland,  1840 bis heute (Göttingen, 2018), 386–93. 64. Wilhelm Ziegler, “Aufgaben und Erfolge der Altmaterialwirtschaft,” Der Vierjahresplan 2 (1938): 671–75, here 671. See also Heike Weber, “Towards ‘Total’ Recycling: Women, Waste and Food Waste Recovery in Germany, 1914–1939,” Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 371–97, esp. 384–95. 65. Susanne Köstering, “‘Millionen im Müll?’ Altmaterialverwertung nach dem Vierjahresplan,” in Müll von gestern? Eine umweltgeschichtliche Erkundung in Berlin und Umgebung 1880–1945, ed. Susanne Köstering and Renate Rüb (Berlin, 1993), 114–21, here 117. 66. See Alexander Brakel, Der Holocaust: Judenverfolgung und Völkermord (Berlin, 2008), 36; Uta Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf, eds., Nie mehr zurück in dieses Land: Augenzeugen berichten über die Novemberpogrome 1938 (Berlin, 2009), pt. I. On the close link between dirt and Jewishness in antisemitic discourse and measures, see Martin Weißmann, “Organisierte Entmenschlichung: Zur Produktion, Funktion und Ersetzbarkeit sozialer und psychischer Dehumanisierung in Genoziden,” in Soziologische Analysen des Holocaust: Jenseits der Debatte über “ganz normale Männer” und “ganz normale Deutsche,” ed. Alexander Gruber and Stefan Kühl (Wiesbaden, 2015), 79–128. 67. See Frank Bajohr, “Arisierung” in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1997); Alex Bruns-­ Wüstefeld, Lohnende Geschäfte: Die ‘Entjudung’ der Wirtschaft am Beispiel Göttingens (Hannover, 1997); Susanne Meinl and Jutta Zwilling, Legalisierter Raub: Die Ausplünderung der Juden im Nationalsozialismus durch die Reichsfinanzverwaltung (Frankfurt am Main, 2004); Christiane Fritsche, Ausgeplündert, zurückerstattet und entschädigt: Arisierung und Wiedergutmachung in Mannheim (Ubstadt-Weiher, 2013). 68. Fritz Stern, “The Burden of Success: Reflections on German Jewry,” in Dreams and Delusions: National Socialism in the Drama of the German Past, by Fritz Stern (New York, 1989), 97–118, here 100.

CHAPTER 3

Advertising in the German-Zionist Press in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century: A Case Study Olivier Baisez

Goods … are the visible part of culture. They are arranged in vistas and hierarchies that can give play to the full range of discrimination of which the human mind is capable. The vistas are not fixed; nor are they randomly arranged in a kaleidoscope. Ultimately, their structures are anchored to human purposes. —Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods, 1979

A reader opening a new issue of a German-speaking Zionist periodical during the first three decades of the twentieth century was likely to stumble across an entire page of printed advertisements of all sizes for all manner of things. The ads displayed brand names, the last names of shop-owners, the dates and locations of various events, and more—all

O. Baisez (*) Études germaniques, University Paris-8, Saint-Denis, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_3

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targeting the reader as a potential customer. This circumstance would not surprise readers from later generations, accustomed as we have become to huge amounts of advertising, but shortly after 1900, advertising was still rather new in that quantity and diversity.1 In fact, the expansion of advertising and branding in the print media dates back to the last decades of the nineteenth century, which had witnessed the soaring of circulation numbers and the emergence of mass culture in both the Americas and Europe.2 As David Ciarlo puts it in his study of the “images of empire” in Imperial Germany, In 1870 the desire to pay for thousands or millions of images to be circulated among the public to stimulate sales might have been technologically possible, but it was commercially risky, socially unacceptable, and culturally peculiar. By 1911 it was ordinary. On the eve of the First World War, the stirrings of a mass consumer society had already profoundly altered not only the tenor of economic life but the cultural landscape as well.3

The founding in 1908 of a professional association of advertisers, the Verband deutscher Reklamefachleute, marked advertising’s arrival as a field of professional activity. Its first appearance as an academic discipline came in 1914 with the pioneering creation of a department of advertising at the Mannheim business school.4 The question of printed advertising and its effects on consumer cultures,5 that is, the ways in which advertising contributes to the formation of a “consumer imaginary,”6 is a broad and complex one.7 In this chapter, I restrict myself to asking whether a German-Zionist consumption regime that set Zionists apart from the consumer habits of German Jews can be inferred from print advertising in the early twentieth century.8 I base the following analysis on a comprehensive counting of the advertisements printed in 1904, 1913, and 1924 in the pages of the German-­ Zionist periodical Jüdische Rundschau. Running into the thousands of items, the corpus starts in 1904, the year Theodor Herzl died, seven years after he had founded the World Zionist Organization, but an otherwise rather ordinary year in world affairs. The material analyzed reaches to 1924  in the Weimar period in order to apprehend relevant advertising trends over a period of time that bypasses the conventional turning point of 1914, one that covers much of the “invention of the consumer” from the 1880s to the 1920s.9 Also, I wished to avoid making what is often a

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fruitless comparison between just two periods. I chose 1913 as the third year because the seemingly logical 1914 was anything but ordinary. Besides counting the advertisements and classifying them into categories according to the types of goods or services they promoted, I noted the addresses of the advertisers, hoping to use that information to sketch a geography of advertising and, by inference, of consumption. In so doing, I follow in Gideon Reuveni’s footsteps, yet my approach is both narrower and more systematic than what he used in his 2008 study. I have proceeded from a quantitative analysis of all the ads printed in three volumes of a particular German-Zionist publication, whereas Reuveni browsed for ads through the Jewish press during the Weimar period in a quite eclectic way.10 More generally, this article may be seen as in line with the agenda of the series “The European Jewish Press—Studies in History and Language,” edited by Susanne Marten-Finnis and Michael Nagel. As well as studying the press as a mirror for Jewish life, this series acknowledges the press’ role in “generating and shaping Jewish consciousness.”11 Although the Jüdische Rundschau presented itself as a “universal Jewish newspaper,” it was the official organ of the German Zionist Federation (Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland) or ZVfD. As such, it intended to be for the German Empire that which Die Welt represented for the world Zionist movement: a newspaper of record and a mouthpiece for the Zionist platform, as outlined in the Basel program from 1897. The Jüdische Rundschau was published from October 1902 to November 1938, initially once a week, then twice a week from 1919 onward. In the context of consumer cultures, there are mainly two reasons this particular newspaper deserves attention.12 First, it was one of the highest circulated Jewish publications in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century, the others being “liberal” or “assimilationist” journals like the venerable weekly Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (established in 1837) and the monthly Im deutschen Reich (founded in 1895)—both merging in 1922 to become the weekly Central-­ Verein-­Zeitung. In 1926, the Jüdische Rundschau passed the 10,000 copies mark.13 A little less than ten years later, in 1935, it reached 37,000 copies,14 a number which Im deutschen Reich had already hit by 1913.15 Such a wide gap reflected the fact that Zionists were in the minority among German Jews during the monarchy and in the Weimar Republic.16 Nonetheless, the Jüdische Rundschau was far from a niche publication. It makes more sense to examine advertising in such a broadly distributed newspaper than to follow a niche strategy of examining the monthly

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reviews Palästina and Altneuland, which were devoted to the practical issues of Jewish settlement in Palestine and included only a small number of advertisements, mostly from Jewish publishing companies and other Jewish publications. Up to 1912, when its publication stopped (before resuming in 1927), Palästina had printed only a dozen advertisements of this kind. The short-lived Altneuland, published from 1904 to 1906, seemed to be more eager to promote practical work in the Jewish colonies, as far as I can tell from the advertising it printed, and it also featured advertisements for agricultural machinery, building supplies, and loans offered by a Zionist bank, the Anglo-Palestine Company. Second, the Jüdische Rundschau assumed a resolutely more “modern” layout than its non-Zionist counterparts. Not only did it print in Roman letters, as opposed to the more traditional Gothic style of its competitors, but it also devoted much more space to advertising. Thus, it was more open to the world of daily consumption.17 In comparison, the main “liberal” periodicals printed significantly less advertising. As a monthly review, Im deutschen Reich had a very sober, book-like design. The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was formally more akin to the Jüdische Rundschau, but it published few advertisements, often only a handful at the bottom of the last page. For the Jüdische Rundschau, it was not unusual to publish editions in which advertising took up half of the ten or twelve printed pages.18

On the Advertisers’ Side: The Ascent of Concrete Palestine One of the most striking differences between the three different years under examination here is the spectacular increase in the number of different places where the advertisers were located, as can be deduced from the addresses most of them provided. This increase was by a factor of approximately 6.5 between 1904 (27) and 1924 (over 180). At the same time, the relative weight of Berlin, the German empire’s capital and metropolis, remained extremely high (even though it fell from 81 percent of the total amount in 1904 to 48 percent in 1913, before it bounced back and reached 72 percent in 1924). Geographically speaking, the Jüdische Rundschau as an institution and most of its advertisers were Berliners. More precisely, the western and southern boroughs of Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, and Schöneberg account for the lion’s share, which is

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anything but surprising given the fact that those were both nice upmarket residential areas and among the localities in Berlin with the highest per capita share of Jewish residents.19 Beyond that conspicuous fact, the locations that the addresses of the various advertisers occupied on the map were largely within the German Empire. A strong congruence is observable between the area the ZVfD and the Jüdische Rundschau served for and the origin of the advertisers. Going into detail, it appears that the Prussian provinces as a whole always came second after Berlin, reflecting Prussia’s geographic stretch (almost 350,000 square kilometers before the Versailles Treaty, a little more than 290,000 after 1920, which amounted to a little less than two-thirds of Germany’s total area before and after 1920), economic dominance (two-thirds of net national income in 1913),20 and demographic weight, especially with regard to Germany’s Jewish population (roughly two-thirds of the German Empire’s Jewish population lived in Prussia).21 In 1904, 87 percent of the advertisers with an address came from within the borders of the Reich. They comprised 81 percent in 1913, and even 95 percent in 1924 (despite the fact that the Reich had become significantly smaller after the international peace treaties following the First World War). In this sense, the Jüdische Rundschau really was a Zionist medium for Germany, as the ZVfD intended. Another difference between the three years under examination deserves attention. In 1904, there were only five foreign countries represented by advertisers: the Netherlands, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia, and Switzerland. The situation was the same a decade later, except for the presence of advertisers from Palestine. There had already been advertisements for wines and liquors from the Jewish settlements in 1904, but they had remained something of a rarity then. In 1913, wines as well as lace from Palestinian workshops were repeatedly advertised. In the issue dated April 11, 1913, for instance, the wholesaler W.  Bernhard, with an address in Berlin and another in Posen (Poznań), advertised wines from the Mosel and Rhine valleys, from the Tokaj wine region of Hungary, and “Palestinian wines.”22 In the same issue, the Verband jüdischer Frauen für Kulturarbeit in Palästina (Jewish Women’s Association for Cultural Work in Palestine), which had an office in the Burgstrasse in Berlin, between the old city core and the Scheunenviertel, a neighborhood considered Jewish, announced the availability of “Palestinian lacework” at the Hermann Tietz department store on the Leipziger Strasse, one of the main shopping streets in downtown Berlin.23 Bezalel brand furniture ought to be mentioned too. An advertisement for furniture and decorative objects “made in Palestine”

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announced that these goods were available at Wertheim’s department store, also on the Leipziger Strasse. The attraction of goods “made in Palestine” for German Zionists was probably a mixture of economic patriotism and exoticism.24 Ads for tours operating from Jaffa also show that, by 1913, Palestine had become more concrete than an abstract and faraway “land of our fathers” or “land of the Jews.” It now appeared not only on the mental map of German Zionists (or non-Zionists, for that matter) but also on the physical map. The March 21, 1913, issue featured an ad from a travel agency, Emanuel Sachs, praising its group tours to inland Palestine on either wheels or horseback, its special tours for students, and round-trips to Jewish settlements and Jewish historic sites.25 This internationalizing trend in the paper’s advertising continued in 1924. Not only did seventeen foreign countries appear in the ads (six of them did not even exist before the end of World War I), but now Palestine was by far the most frequently referenced foreign location. This development shows concretely how Palestine became part of the German Zionists’ consumer culture and consumption practices. A Berlin Jew could choose to display his commitment to the Zionist project of a Jewish Palestine not only as a “shekel” contributor, not only by attending meetings, but also, more simply, as a consumer. Or as a patient: in the January 11, 1924, issue, Dr. Saad, a leg specialist with a consulting room in Wilmersdorf, specified that he had practiced in Palestine earlier, probably because such a background was thought likely to appeal to patients with Zionist leanings.26 By 1924, dress shops like Rochlitz in Charlottenburg explicitly targeted “travelers to Palestine” and advertised boots, socks, gaiters, rucksacks, waterproof coats, and aluminum tableware.27 Although the great shipping companies operating from German ports were wholly absent from the Jüdische Rundschau in 1904, the HAPAG (Hamburg-America Line) made its appearance in September 1913. Eleven years later, in 1924, the major shipping companies (White Star Line, Hertling, Warmuth, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Cunard, Siemers) were among the regular advertisers. Their increased presence may also have been a side effect of the tight restrictions on immigration to the United States imposed by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and toughened still further by the Immigration Act of 1924, which hit the shipping companies hard and probably prompted them to advertise more. It is worth noting, too, that in 1913, Palestine was not explicitly mentioned in the HAPAG advertisement. As with many other

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lines and cruises, HAPAG simply featured “cruises to the Orient.” The picture was significantly different in 1924. There were still numerous advertisements of that very general sort, but also some that were much more specific, for example: Hertling Brothers Inc., International Shipping and Furniture Transport, Berlin-Charlottenburg. Sophie-Charlotten-Str. 15/Tel: Wilhelm 99, 44, 6196. Shipping to all corners of the Earth. Palestine is our specialty. Modern storage units. Insurance, COD [cash on delivery], cheapest cargo rates; special accommodations for overseas packing.28

Although HAPAG’s general director Albert Ballin came from a Jewish family, one that had been in the overseas emigration business since the mid-nineteenth century, its ads in the Jüdische Rundschau did not differ much from those of rival shipping companies, whether before or after Ballin’s suicide in 1918.29 Obviously, he did not try to capitalize on his Jewish background with potential customers who might have seen it as an advantage. In fact, it seems that, with few exceptions like Hertling or the mysterious Russian-Baltic Lloyd,30 neither HAPAG nor its competitors specifically targeted Jews or Zionists. At the same time, tickets were probably sold mostly by agents and middlemen who dealt directly with migrants from Eastern Europe.31 The shipping companies put identical advertisements in highly circulated German periodicals such as the weekly Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, for instance, albeit far less often. Nevertheless, a cursory browse through the pages of major newspapers of the time—Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung—seems to reveal a lesser presence of advertising for shipping companies than in the Jüdische Rundschau. Perhaps those advertisers targeted Jews and Zionists, after all: not by means of specific advertisements aimed at this particular group, but through disproportionate advertising in the main German-Zionist title. If that were the case, it might mean that these companies saw Jews as more likely to make use of overseas transport and shipping. Thus, Palestine had become a concrete destination, fully integrated in various consumption acts: eating and drinking, furnishing, warehousing, shipping, and traveling. It was even a place one could choose to send one’s children to. In 1924, a Hebrew secondary school (Realschule) in Haifa repeatedly advertised throughout the year, highlighting both its quality and the healthy climate.32

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Another novelty in 1924, as compared to 1904 and 1913, was the use of the Hebrew language in advertising. In the two first volumes under examination, Hebrew remained limited to a few traditional set expressions (‫ כשר אל פסח‬or kosher al pessah, for example). In 1924, advertising in Hebrew, or bilingual advertising in Hebrew and German,33 was still rather rare, but the Hebrew alphabet was far more conspicuous in the ad section. This development, too, can be seen as a sign of Palestine materializing in the consumer experience of German Jews, in that instance as a Hebrew-­ speaking country. It would be misleading, though, to focus solely on Palestine and on its growing presence in the advertising pages of the Jüdische Rundschau. Ads for many places and destinations appeared that had very little to do with Zionism or even Jewishness and much more with the suggestion of a virtual world of consumption reflecting the kind of lifestyle that the readers might have longed for—or, at least, were supposed to long for. Numerous bathing and seaside resorts were frequently advertised, with locations ranging from the Baltic Sea coast to the Black Forest and the Alps, and from the East Frisian Islands to Upper Silesia, including those places frequented by the European bourgeoisie and aristocracy, such as Bad Nauheim or Wiesbaden in Hesse, Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia, or Badenweiler in Baden. On the whole, German and Swiss boarding schools and rest homes greatly outnumbered Jewish establishments in Palestine. In 1924, the most frequently advertised institution was a Childrens’ convalescent home [in] Wolfratshausen near Munich at the foot of the Alps. Religiously observant. Open all year. Under medical supervision. Schooling for pupils from all schools with state-licensed teachers. Particularly suited for children who require extended treatment. Superb rates of cure especially in the fall and winter months. Brochures available on request from B. Lewin, Munich, Kaufinger St. 34.34

Let us now focus more on the potential consumers that advertisers targeted through the Jüdische Rundschau. That advertising both reflects and shapes the mental world of a given society, of groups within that society, and of individuals within such groups, is now a well-established fact in the history of consumer culture. Shifting from advertisers to their potential customers also requires widening our scope because the advertising section contained not only business ads but also other kinds of notices.

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A Portrait of the German Zionist as a Consumer From the diverse ads, announcements, and notices that the Jüdische Rundschau printed, it is very clear that the paper functioned in part as a community bulletin, providing news about the activities of various Zionist associations. At the same time, it functioned as a Zionist propaganda tool, trying to extend its reach beyond the rather small community of Zionists or “national Jews.” That propaganda work can be seen, for instance, in the repeated reminders about a Zionist’s duty to proselytize and to recruit new subscribers. Such items referenced incentives such as free issues of the paper: “A Zionist has many duties. That doesn’t change the fact that every reader is required to bring us a new subscriber for the new year. The health of the Jüdische Rundschau is an index of the strength of German Zionism. It is progressing, but it must make much faster progress. Anyone who subscribes now will receive the December issues free.”35 Every German Jew who might be turned away from mainstream “liberalism” was seen as a win for the Zionist side in the competition for the legitimate representation of Jewish interests (Eroberung der Gemeinden or simply Gemeindearbeit, in the German-Zionist idiom). And, of course, the Jewish press was not the least of the fields where “liberals” and Zionists contended with one another. In 1904, the Jüdische Rundschau featured a more or less weekly column under the heading “Golusblüten” or “blossoms of exile,” where particular excerpts of the Jewish but non-Zionist press were matter-offactly copied and shown as instances of the absurdity of the assimilationists’ attempts at being even more German than the Germans. The obvious intention was to ridicule the paradoxes of a German-Jewish identity that Zionists considered to be nonsensical: “Church organ with 4 registers, ideally suited for use by a small church, is being offered at a very reasonable price. The board of the Community Synagogue Dortmund, Ad. Elias.”36 It should be noted, though, that this kind of inner-Jewish strife, which seemed to play such an important role before the outbreak of the First World War, had almost disappeared from the paper by 1924. Perhaps Zionists felt strong and established enough then, despite their persistently small numbers, to stop taking digs at the mainstream “liberals.” The internal communal function of the newspaper seems to have been even more important, however, judging from the number of advertisements that fall into that category. Already in 1904, and even more so in 1913 and 1924, the ads featured betrothal, wedding and birth announcements, as well as obituary notices. Fourteen such advertisements are to be

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found in the 1904 volume, 120 in 1913, and 376 in 1924. The advertisements concerning donations to the Jewish National Fund, the Keren Hayesod, or, less systematically, particular Jewish charities (hospitals, for instance) went up even more markedly. The “small ads” section also grew in importance over time: people or companies wanting to buy or sell something, find or offer a job, increasingly placed advertisements in the Jüdische Rundschau. From around sixty in 1904, their number climbed to around ninety in 1913 and soared to over 400 in 1924. This spectacular increase owed much to changing lifestyles in the 1920s, to the improvement of the overall economic situation after the hardship of the war and postwar years,37 and to the related development of a “new” category of advertisements, those offering or searching for positions in childcare, housekeeping, or as a lady’s companion. In the two earlier volumes under examination, the “small ads” concerned mostly private lessons (often in Hebrew, but also in other languages), translation jobs, and situations as a secretary, accountant, or salesperson. Of course, as in other newspapers, there were also ads placed by people looking for a partner, for a potential wife or husband—or just for a holiday romance. Most of the time, the person offered as a partner was a woman who either seemed to be speaking for herself or whom a male relative was trying to marry off to a fellow Zionist. Advertisements of the last kind were obviously placed by Zionists turning to other Jews with the same “correct” political beliefs and convictions (Gesinnung). “University educated female, 30  years old, attractive youthful appearance, with a nice home, 7000 marks annual income, increasing, with financial assets, thrifty, seeks marriage with like-­ minded, well-educated person, wealth not required. Serious inquiries to M. R. 30.”38 Another remarkable trend, compared to the previous volumes, was the increase in Zionist and Jewish bodies offering jobs. Already in the autumn of 1913, the Zionist federation of Switzerland advertised a job as a party functionary, while the Jewish National Fund sought a secretary general.39 Zionist federations were not the only organizations to advertise in the Jüdische Rundschau. So did vocational, especially agricultural, schools. For example: “Seeking Chaluzah [a (female) pioneer], who can independently manage the affairs of a traditionally run agricultural training institute. Reply to the Misrachi-Central Bureau, Berlin, Monbijou-Pl. 1 or Benno Cohn, Frankfurt a. M., Uhlandstr. 28.”40 As an official bulletin, the Jüdische Rundschau informed its readers about Jewish events, including regular services in Berlin’s synagogues.

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The local community placed detailed timetables, generally at the beginning of an advertisement section. Balls, public celebrations of religious holidays, and also sporting events were advertised as well. The nature and style of such events, like dancing parties, concerts, shows at the movie theater, but also a “Jewish rowing regatta” on a lake near Berlin,41 “summer fencing games,”42 or even a “thé gymnastique” hosted by the Jüdischer Frauenbund für Turnen und Sport (Jewish Women’s Association for Gymnastics and Sport),43 highlight the deep social embeddedness even of militant Zionists in German-Jewish society and in the way of life they professed to break with. Indeed, many German Zionists, especially among the younger ones, embraced the idea of a clean break with European bourgeois society and considered a “return to the soil.” However, despite the undeniable conflict opposing the first and the later generations of German Zionists, with the latter giving decidedly more weight to “Palestine” as a goal in life,44 those who effectively broke with their European way of life remained the exception rather than the rule. Until the Nazis came to power, emigration to Palestine was overwhelmingly meant for Jews from Eastern Europe, not Germany, even though German Jews wrote about it at great length.45 In that respect, German Zionists did not differ greatly from the bulk of German Jews who embraced a modern bourgeois lifestyle while retaining or inventing a distinctive Jewish identity.46 The difference was that Zionists insisted on an ethnic definition of this identity. It is important to stress that most commercial advertisers (that is, who had something to offer, not just to announce) placed advertisements in the Jüdische Rundschau on a very regular basis. There was a remarkable continuity from one issue to the next (probably encouraged in the form of longer-term deals at discounted prices for frequent customers). The jewelers Singer & Halberstädter, for example, advertised their creations throughout 1904, often on the paper’s front page. So did the insurance companies Victoria zu Berlin in 1904 and Basler in 1913. In 1924, shipping companies were among the most regular advertisers, as were piano makers and tuners, dry cleaners, bookshops and publishers, and a stonemason. This was also true of many hotels, guest houses, and restaurants. For the most part, those advertisements where reprinted week after week, probably leaving a lasting imprint on regular readers’ minds. Insurance companies advertised very often. Sometimes they explicitly targeted a Zionist audience, and not only for the purpose of selling contracts. In 1924, the famous Allianz company, founded in 1890 and in the life-insurance business since 1922, placed advertisements that featured the

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signatures of Richard Lichtheim and Dr Bruno Kirschner and contained a call for applications: “Allianz Insurance Concern is currently seeking industrious and talented gentlemen, well established in all circles and with many connections as civil servants, sales agents, or silent partners for the acquisition of life insurance under most favorable terms. At this point only written inquiries. Central Office Groß-Berlin of the ‘Allianz’ Lebensversicherungsbank A.-G.  Taubenstraße 10.”47 This is a clear instance of targeted marketing and recruitment. The names Lichtheim and Kirschner, who were most probably known to many readers of the Jüdische Rundschau, functioned as a mark of quality and trustworthiness. Richard Lichtheim, in particular, had been a leading figure in German Zionism since the beginning of the 1910s, and was a prominent spokesman for the “second generation” of German Zionists. In other words, a company whose founders and owners had nothing to do with Judaism whatsoever nonetheless put forward the names of prominent Jewish employees in order to widen the firm’s appeal for a Jewish consumer audience. A much smaller insurance company also targeted potential Zionist customers, promising them preferential terms and conditions: “The Insurance Office for Zionists is Victor Cahn. (Ceres Assekuranz Treuhand A.-G.), Markgrafenstraße 56, Dönhoff 56505651, 4730. All categories. All societies. Rebates and preferential terms for Zionists. Team members sought for very highly compensated positions.”48 That Jews were a particularly foresighted people, and therefore likely to take out an insurance policy, was a common notion at the time, and German Zionists considered it in their plans to successfully organize Jewish settlement in Palestine.49 On the whole, I propose to organize the advertisements printed in the Jüdische Rundschau into three main categories, in order to understand better how advertising in such a medium might have related to Jewish consumer cultures and practices in Imperial and Weimar Germany. First, there were the goods and services directly linked to the Jewish religion: ritual items and food, of course, but also teaching in religious matters, synagogue schedules, and job offers for cantors. Occasionally, the advertising pages also offered a glimpse of conflicts between members of the Jewish-Zionist community in Germany. The owner of a guest house, for example, advertised that his removal from the list of kosher restaurants was due only to a personal incompatibility between him and the kashrut overseer. He assured readers that he continued to serve strictly kosher meals.50

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Second, there was a wide range of goods, services, and activities that, in absolute terms, had nothing to do with being a Jew or a Zionist, but which revealed a lot about who the readers of the Jüdische Rundschau were and how they lived. The ads drew an implicit portrait of the typical reader as an urban Bildungsbürger or white-collar worker whose way of life did not differ much from that of non-Jewish members of the educated middle-class. Some of the products and services advertised were icons of the modern lifestyle: typewriters, automobiles, transatlantic ocean liners, gramophones, pocket watches, winter sports gear, electrical equipment, and so on. Regular advertisements for sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, cosmetic products, and dry-cleaning indicated that businesses were targeting not only men but the whole household. Of course, as Gideon Reuveni has rightly pointed out, the fact that such iconic items were being advertised should by no means be interpreted as evidence that the reading public of the Jüdische Rundschau, no more than the German Jewish public in general, could afford them or the lifestyle they hint at. Nonetheless, they are relevant as an indication of the horizons of German Jewish consumers. Third, in the middle between those two opposite categories, there were a great number of advertisements in various fields of activity where religious identity played a secondary but crucial role. Most of the delicatessens, guest houses, and restaurants that advertised in the Jüdische Rundschau featured a clearly visible kosher label. Taking meals outside one’s home, staying in a boarding house, or spending one’s holidays at a hotel in a spa town were anything but specifically Jewish attributes. At the same time, those were consumption situations where the individual had to choose between acting like any other citizen of his social class or instead acting deliberately as a Zionist Jew. The pocket watches mentioned above were a case in point. Owning one was a status symbol back in 1904, but owning one with Hebrew letters on the dial, instead of numbers, could be seen as a political statement.51 In showing how to be a different consumer, while supporting a rather conventional way of life, advertising in the Jüdische Rundschau played its role as a means to educate the consumer, or more precisely the Zionist as a consumer and the consumer as a Zionist. This interrogation on the meaning bestowed by a group—or an individual as a group member—on given objects and acts of consumption clearly relates to Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the habitus as a nexus between an individual’s social situation and their perception, interpretation, even construction of reality.52 At the same time, the equivocal relationship of “national Jews” and Zionists to German society and culture, which was

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much more entangled than a binary presentation in terms of “half in, half out” might suggest, is probably best described by Till van Rahden’s concept of “situational ethnicity,” insofar as it “emphasizes the high degree to which ethnicity can be bound to a concrete social situation.”53 As far as we can tell from advertising in the Jüdische Rundschau, the Jewish religious calendar had a significant influence on consumption practices. In the weeks preceding major holy days, some categories of advertising increased significantly: baked goods and groceries before Passover, wish cards before Rosh Hashanah, and obviously candles and candlesticks before Hanukkah. Even if Zionists tended to interpret those feasts in a national and secular way (with Hanukkah becoming the anniversary of the Maccabean revolt), they probably behaved rather traditionally as Jewish consumers. Advertising was also subject to other, more common seasonal variations, however. The most spectacular example was the increasing number of advertisements for vacation destinations from the spring through midsummer. This was high season for hotels, guest houses, summer camps, and sanatoriums for ailing children, as well as boarding schools, which during vacation were open for visits and applications. In almost every issue of the Jüdische Rundschau, the reader would come across text boxes from the editorial staff asking him or her to give priority to their advertisers when purchasing goods or services. These notices also reminded readers to refer to the Jüdische Rundschau in conversations with shop-owners or salespeople. This kind of recommendation was not only an exchange of friendly services between newspaper and advertisers, but is to be seen also in the light of the Zionist leadership’s effort to define what it meant to be a “good Jew” and “good Zionist.” Going beyond the sharing of political principles, it had very practical implications for an individual’s everyday life and consumption choices. This crucial point found expression outside the advertising section too. In 1904, the Jüdische Rundschau printed a list of antisemitic holiday resorts, urging readers to do hotel managers the favor they seemed to be asking for by not patronizing their establishments.54 Such lists had already been circulated by Die Welt in 1902 and 1903,55 and were published again in the Jüdische Rundschau at least twice in 1905 and 1906.56 In this instance, being a Zionist meant taking a stand against antisemitism. Often enough, Zionists blamed “liberal” Jews for accepting the hostility of Germans toward them, or for not fighting hard enough against it.57 Choosing not

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to be a customer, as much as choosing to buy something, was perceived as a meaningful gesture that could define one’s identity as a Zionist.

Conclusion All too often, studies of the press and media focus on editors, authors, and articles, while neglecting the other functions of a newspaper beyond its informational “content.” Advertising, for all its conspicuousness, is one of those rather neglected functions. Yet, it fully belongs to the chain of consumption, upstream from the actual buying and consuming of goods and services. For today’s historians, the Jüdische Rundschau’s advertising pages offer a pathway to the rediscovery of purchasing wishes and suggestions in a period when widespread access to consumer goods was still considered rather novel. Moreover, the study of consumption and of advertising unveils both internal distinctions within a given target audience (here: Jews, German Jews, and Zionists) and an individual’s position within society as a whole. It allows us a glimpse not only into the kinds of goods and services that readers of the paper were supposed to desire for themselves or for their families, but also into the ways they could obtain those goods and services and into the meaning an act of consumption might have for them. Moreover, one can infer from the advertising in the Jüdische Rundschau that consumer activism on an individual scale, with consumers buying or being prompted to buy as members of a group with particular aims (in this case as nationally conscious Jews) and to favor sellers deemed compatible with those aims, is no invention of late-twentieth-century “ethical consumerism.” Consumption in the broad sense, including advertising upstream from actual purchasing and use, thus figured as a conveyer of multiple identities for “national Jews” and Zionists after the breaking down of long-standing traditional modes of expressing one’s belonging to the Jewish community. Advertising in a newspaper like the Jüdische Rundschau could be used for political ends because the advertised goods, services, and events were part of how the advertisers, editors, and readers understood themselves and their entwined identities, personal and collective. It is not only certain objects that can encapsulate a culture’s or a society’s zeitgeist but also, in a less immediate way, their being advertised in specific contexts. Nonetheless, no such thing as a specifically German Zionist “consumption regime” can be deduced from the quantitative approach I tried here.

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I would rather speak of ways and opportunities to occasionally consume as a German Zionist. Such practices occurred within a broader context and “consumption regime” that did not differ much from what non-Zionists might have experienced as consumers or potential consumers targeted by advertising. There was no fully fledged “regime,” but rather an intermittent deviation from the consumer norms among acculturated Jews in Germany. Of course, a more comprehensive comparative study of both the Jewish and non-Jewish press of late Imperial and Weimar Germany might yield another result and qualify the present conclusion. Broader quantitative analysis, extending over a longer period and into the 1930s, is needed in order to sharpen this portrait of the typical German Zionist newspaper reader and consumer from a sociological point of view.

Notes 1. See Kevin Repp, “Marketing, Modernity, and ‘the German People’s Soul’: Advertising and Its Enemies in Late Imperial Germany, 1896–1914,” in Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Pamela E. Swett et al. (Durham, NC, 2007), 27–51; Christiane Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland 1890–1914: Wahrnehmung, Professionalisierung und Kritik der Wirtschaftswerbung (Berlin, 2000); Peter Borscheid and Clemens Wischermann, eds., Bilderwelt des Alltags: Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1995); Dirk Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in Deutschland (Berlin, 1993). One of the first successful books on the topic was Victor Mataja, Die Reklame: Eine Untersuchung über Ankündigungswesen und Werbetätigkeit im Geschäftsleben (Leipzig, 1910). Three further editions appeared by 1926. 2. See Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, MD, 1998); Jean-Yves Mollier et  al., eds., Culture de masse et culture médiatique en Europe et dans les Amériques, 1860–1940 (Paris, 2006). 3. David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 4. 4. See Günter Silberer and Gunnar Mau, “Anfänge und Geschichte der Werbewirkungsforschung,” in Marketinggeschichte: Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik, ed. Hartmut Berghoff (Frankfurt a.M., 2007), 231–56, here 233. 5. For bibliographical orientation on the subject, see Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar, “Régimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth-­ Century German History,” German History 19, no. 2 (2001): 135–61;

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Heinz-Gerhart Haupt, “Pour une histoire de la consommation en Allemagne au XXe siècle,” Le Mouvement social 206, no. 1 (2004): 3–16. 6. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 20: “After the fin de siècle, the emerging forces of commercial mass culture offered a new, more powerful vision of Germany’s future by explicitly illustrating a new comprehensive identity for Germans. By the First World War, advertising appeared on every conceivable surface. Indeed, one of the most important dynamics of commercial imagery … was its ubiquity; collectively, it formed a ‘consumer imaginary.’” 7. Scholars have long associated consumption with shopping or purchasing. Since the 1980s, the scope of consumption studies has broadened to encompass the whole life cycle of any given commodity, from its initial conception and its manufacture, distribution, advertising and sale to its purchase and use and then its “afterlife” as waste or something recycled. See the pioneering studies of Arjun Appadurai (The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York, 1986)) and the French historian Daniel Roche (Histoire des choses banales: Naissance de la consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles, XVIIe–XIXe siècle (Paris, 1997)). More recently: Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford, UK, 2012); and its review by Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, “Où va l’histoire de la consommation?,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 59, no. 3 (2012/13): 150–57. On the history of consumption, francophone readers should also attend to Anaïs Albert, “Consommation de masse ou consommation de classe? Une histoire sociale et culturelle du cycle de vie des objets dans les classes populaires parisiennes (des années 1880 aux années 1920)” (PhD diss., Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, 2014). 8. The concept of “consumption regimes,” which relates consumption to broader processes in society, was coined by Victoria De Grazia in her book Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005). It has been used notably in the historiography of American-European relations, along with the paradigm of Americanization. See also Per Lundin and Thomas Kaiserfeld, eds., The Making of European Consumption: Facing the American Challenge (London, 2015). 9. Haupt, “Pour une histoire de la consommation,” 7. 10. Gideon Reuveni, “Anzeigen in der jüdischen Presse der Weimarer Epoche,” in Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte: Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen (Bremen, 2008), i:359–73. 11. More than twenty volumes have been published since 2006, all by Edition Lumière in Bremen, https://editionlumiere.de/programm. html#juedischePresse.

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12. See Michael Nagel, “Jüdische Rundschau,” in Dan Diner, ed., Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 2012), 253–55. 13. John F.  Oppenheimer et  al., eds., Lexikon des Judentums (Gütersloh, 1971), 897–98. 14. Jehuda Reinharz, ed., Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus, 1882–1933 (Tübingen, 1981), xlvii. 15. Alphonse Levy, “Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens am Schlusse seines zweiten Jahrzehnts,” Im deutschen Reich 19, no. 2 (1913): 50–54. 16. At the end of the 1920s, the ZVfD claimed to have 20,000 members, whereas the Jewish population in Germany totaled some half a million. See Steven M. Lowenstein and Michael Meyer, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, vol. 3, Aufbruch und Zerstörung, 1918–1945 (Munich, 1997), 91. 17. On the development of the Jüdische Rundschau and the self-perceptions of its editors, see the special anniversary issue of April 17, 1935 (nos. 31–32), esp. pp. 17–20. 18. This seems to indicate that advertising played a great role in the journal’s funding structure. On the origins of the Jüdische Rundschau and its initial financial difficulties, see Yehuda Eloni, Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus: Von den Anfängen bis 1914 (Gerlingen, 1987), 153–61. 19. Of course, the Spandauer Vorstadt and the Scheunenviertel in the borough of Berlin-Mitte, north of the old city core, were also known as “Jewish neighborhoods,” but those areas were rather downscale and came to be associated with the poor immigrants from Eastern Europe that settled mostly there. 20. See Josef Ehmer, Bevölkerungsgeschichte und Historische Demographie, 1800–2000 (Munich, 2004), 18; Karl Helfferich, Deutschlands Volkswohlstand, 1888–1913, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1914); and Walther G. Hoffmann and Josef H. Müller, Das deutsche Volkseinkommen in ausgewählten Bundesstaaten, 1851–1913 (Tübingen, 1959). 21. See Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, iii:31. The 1925 census listed 564,379 inhabitants as belonging to the Jewish community, 0.9% of the total population; 55% of German Jews—or Jewish Germans—lived in ten major cities; roughly a third (172,672) lived in Berlin only, where 4% of the population was Jewish. Frankfurt was the city with the second largest Jewish community in Germany. See Rüdiger vom Bruch and Björn Hofmeister, eds., Deutsche Geschichte in Quellen und Darstellung, vol. 8, Kaiserreich und Erster Weltkrieg, 1871–1918 (Stuttgart, 2000), 155–56; as well as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen

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Staaten, 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003), 499; Arno Herzig, Jüdische Geschichte in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1997). 22. Jüdische Rundschau, April 11, 1913, 155. 23. Jüdische Rundschau, April 11, 1913, 153. On the department store and its importance, see Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850–1939 (Aldershot, 1999); Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger, The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse (Frankfurt a.M., 2013); and Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015). 24. On the development of “Hebrew” objects, as opposed to merely “Jewish” ones, and the associations they triggered, see Michael Berkowitz, ed., Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond (Leiden, 2004). 25. Jüdische Rundschau, March 21, 1913, 122. 26. Jüdische Rundschau, January 11, 1924, 22. 27. Jüdische Rundschau, August 29, 1924, 500. 28. Jüdische Rundschau, January 4, 1924, 8. 29. Lamar Cecil, chiefly known for his biography of Wilhelm II, has also published Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany, 1888–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1967). 30. See Jüdische Rundschau, August 5, 1924, 450. 31. See Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York, 2016); Tobias Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, 1886–1914,” Central European History 43 (2010): 47–83. 32. Jüdische Rundschau, February 26, 1924, 110. The same advertisement was printed in eighteen other issues in 1924. 33. Two different wine and liquor wholesalers from Berlin and Dresden advertised on the same page of Jüdische Rundschau, March 14, 1924, 150. 34. Jüdische Rundschau, August 5, 1924, 450. 35. Jüdische Rundschau, December 19, 1913, 549, among many other instances. 36. Jüdische Rundschau, February 19, 1904, 74. Another interesting instance was about “the only Christmas-tree burning in Berlin, which happened in the borough of Tiergarten, and in the course of which part of the Jewish flat-owner’s beard went up in pious flames.” See the issue from January 22, 1904, 39. 37. The year 1924 is commonly considered the first of the so-called golden twenties in Weimar Germany, meaning the interlude of apparent stability, prosperity, and normality between the crises of hyperinflation and depres-

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sion. See Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2014), 223–57; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, iv:284–347, 472–83. 38. Jüdische Rundschau, July 11, 1913, 292. 39. Jüdische Rundschau, November 7, 1913, 489; Jüdische Rundschau, September 26, 1913, 419. 40. Jüdische Rundschau, April 4, 1924, 199. 41. Jüdische Rundschau, July 11, 1913, 287. 42. Jüdische Rundschau, May 16, 1924, 291. 43. Jüdische Rundschau, November 7, 1913, 489. 44. See Reinharz, Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus, xxxi– xxxiv, and 106 (for the famous Posen Resolution). 45. Increased migration numbers from Germany to British Mandatory Palestine were also made possible by the so-called Haavara Transfer Agreement of August 25, 1933, negotiated by the leadership of the Zionist Organization and the National Socialist government. See Francis R.  Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, UK, 2008). 46. See Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991); Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2004); and Daniel Azuélos, L’entrée en bourgeoisie des Juifs allemands ou le paradigme libéral (Paris, 2003). 47. Jüdische Rundschau, March 7, 1924, 133. 48. Jüdische Rundschau, March 14, 1924, 151. 49. See, for example, Davis Trietsch, “Die Gartenstadt,” Altneuland, November, 1905, 349–62; and Felix A.  Theilhaber, “Ein Beitrag zur Lösung der Geldfrage im Zionismus,” Die Welt, May 27, 1910, 512–15. 50. Jüdische Rundschau, July 18, 1913, 304. 51. Jüdische Rundschau, November 18, 1904, 390. 52. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979). 53. Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison, WI, 2008). Rahden offered his concept in response to David Sorkin’s use of “subculture” in the latter’s seminal study, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York, 1987). 54. Jüdische Rundschau, July 1, 1904, 274–76. 55. Jüdische Rundschau, June 13, 1902, 9; May 19, 1903, 13; July 17, 1903, 11; and July 24, 1903, 13. 56. Jüdische Rundschau, July 14, 1905, 342–43; and July 13, 1906, 424. 57. The liberal monthly Im deutschen Reich published such a list only once, and much later, in May 1921 (pp. 184–85).

CHAPTER 4

Consuming Temples on Both Sides of the Atlantic: German-Speaking Jews from the Department Store to the Mall Paul Lerner

This essay focuses on Jews not as consumers, but as creators of consumer and commercial culture. In particular, it seeks connective threads between developments on different continents and in different periods which are thus seldom treated together: Jews as department store entrepreneurs and innovators in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, and Jewish émigrés’ role in the formation of American consumer culture in the post-World War II era—two “golden ages” of modern consumerism, although of a very different sort. Concerning the pre-war German context, I draw on research I and others have conducted on the history of department stores to show ways in which these institutions were represented, imagined, and experienced as a Jewish phenomenon.1 In the postwar American context, Jews also played a pronounced role in the

P. Lerner (*) Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_4

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development of consumer culture, but in ways that innovated and changed the consuming landscape far beyond the department store. In this case, I argue that their Jewishness was essentially invisible. Indeed, the participation of Jews, especially Jewish émigrés from Central Europe, in crafting the form and content of U.S. consumer culture, the malls, shopping centers and amusement parks, the advertising campaigns and product packaging, and the focus groups and consumer satisfaction surveys that together constituted American consumer culture in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s was not discussed at the time; nor has it received a great deal of attention in the last several decades, even as scholarship on American consumption and consumer culture, including its ethnic and religious dimensions, has grown explosively.2 To the extent that observers noted that outsiders and émigrés were playing such a significant role in creating key institutions and modes of American consumerism, those figures and their productions were seen not as Jewish, but rather as European, as bringers of European styles, culture, and sophistication to the American landscape and marketplace. Ultimately, this essay will try to transcend simple binaries between European and American consumer culture, revealing previously unappreciated mutual influences and cross-fertilization across the twentieth century, long-term processes in which Jews and other émigrés played a pronounced role. In particular, I ask how German-speaking émigrés, victims and refugees of German fascism, assessed the political possibilities and dangers of consumerism in the United States. Did the American consumer juggernaut help stabilize democratic politics, or as many contemporaneous theorists argued, did it aestheticize and marketize political choice and thus reproduce in America the conditions that led to fascism in Europe? But first let us turn first to the department store and its golden age in Europe. As many scholars have claimed, department stores were highly visible parts of a broader transformation in European and North American life that began in the later nineteenth century and which reached full steam around the turn of the twentieth century.3 These stores were lightning rods; they symbolically stood at the center of what can be called a “consumer revolution”—a set of dramatic economic, social, and cultural changes which altered people’s relationship with goods, changed how they spent their time, and reconfigured how the genders related to each other. Along with the other elements of modern consumer culture—the illustrated daily press, the advertising industry, later phonograph recordings, and ultimately, radio and other forms of mass culture—the department store was just one part of this broader transformation, but it was

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among its most conspicuous sites and symbols, and as such, it was enveloped in controversy from the start. This “revolution” culminated in the creation of what social scientists often call a consumer society, succinctly defined by the historian Jean-­ Christophe Agnew as “a society-wide structure of meaning and feeling organized primarily around acts of purchase.”4 We might round out that definition by noting that in such a system, patterns of consumption, rather than position in production, are determinative of social position. Indeed, a consumer society maybe be seen as a social formation in which consumable objects play a disproportionate role in creating meaning or shaping individual and group experiences.5 When compared to France, Britain, and the United States, Germany experienced this transformation somewhat differently. For one, department stores and the other trappings of modern consumerism came later; it was not until the late 1880s and early 1890s that the first full-blown department stores emerged out of the dry goods and fancy goods emporia of the Tietz and Wertheim families.6 Germany, to be sure, experienced comparatively later industrialization, the later completion of its rail networks, the correspondingly belated emergence of a middle class with buying power, and the persistence of cultural taboos and laws against certain kinds of commercial activity, such as merchants dealing in goods from multiple retail categories. Furthermore, while French, British, and American department stores sprang up in major cities like London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, German Kaufhäuser first appeared in more modest provincial sites like Gera, in East-Central Germany and Stralsund (on the Baltic Sea) and only reached Berlin in the 1890s. The fully realized department stores then appeared in Germany later, as a phenomenon the stores expanded more rapidly (like the German economy) than elsewhere, so that by the early 1900s, German department stores outnumbered their French and British counterparts.7 Significantly, the spread of German department stores was accompanied by controversy; while this was also the case in other countries, I argue that the German reception of the department store and its explosive rise was uniquely intense and fraught. The emergence of department stores was greeted with a groundswell of works of fiction, drama, and visual art, in addition to commercial treatises and anti-department store propaganda that together comprised a dense cultural thicket, and many of these works were filled with darker themes, a morbid sensibility that coexisted with the excitement that accompanied the appearance of the new stores.

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Significantly and related to these other themes, German department stores were nearly all Jewish-owned. Jews and images of “the Jew” lay inevitably at the center of the raging controversies around consumer culture and the department store in Germany from the 1880s through the Nazi period and even beyond. The great majority of department stores in Germany, four of the five major pre-1933 chains and perhaps ninety percent of individual stores, were in fact owned by Jewish entrepreneurs, but beyond these empirical realities, writers, cultural critics, political agitators, and shoppers associated department stores with Jews in a variety of ways, conceiving of the department store as expressing essential Jewish characteristics and blaming its alleged abuses on Jews’ corrupt and fraudulent nature.8 Werner Sombart, one of Germany’s most prominent economic thinkers, brought the appearance of scholarly rigor to these debates. In his influential studies of capitalism and luxury, Sombart argued that Jews demonstrated a unique, historically and racially determined, aptitude for commercial capitalism and were thus the bearers of economic modernity. Sombart characterized the department store as a quintessentially modern development, an embodiment of the anonymous, objectifying forces of capitalism and marketing which, he feared, were displacing traditional retail practices based on personal connections and loyalty.9 Department stores, furthermore, thrived through constant expansion, which as Sombart and many others characterized it, threatened the traditional German economic and cultural emphasis on stability and constancy. The cultural tension around the department store’s need for growth can be seen represented in Margarete Böhme’s 1911 novel W.A.G.M.U.S., in which the store run by entrepreneur Israel Manasse and later his son Josua Müllenmeister—who converts to Christianity and takes his non-­ Jewish wife’s surname, lest antisemitism interfere with his business plans— expands and innovates ceaselessly, taking risks, overwhelming smaller businesses and annexing their buildings. “The house,” Böhme writes, “grew and grew, grew monstrously [ins Ungeheuere], grew still more, without coming to rest, without stopping.”10 Meanwhile, the gentile shoemaker, Manasse’s erstwhile friend Ribbeck, stubbornly clings to his old ways, emphasizing craft over business and tradition over growth, even as his business slowly withers in the face of new commercial realities. In the novel, Josua Müllenmeister, much like Mouret, the protagonist of Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, operates his business through constant expansion and innovation, culminating in the construction of his new flagship

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emporium, the W.A.G.M.U.S. (Warenhaus Aktien-Gesellschaft Müllenmeister und Söhne, that is, Müllenmeister and Sons Department Store, Inc.), an enormous and bold new retail palace that required extraordinary amounts of capital and represented a tremendous risk. As Josua’s son Friedrich points out, Wagmus could be broken down into the words wagen (to risk/dare/bet) and müssen (must). Böhme draws a sharp contrast between the Jewish department store proprietor’s risky expansion and the conservative shoemaker, and this opposition mirrors the broader polarity, the discursive construction of the risk-taking, entrepreneurial Jew and the solid, tradition-bound gentile. In this sense, department stores reflected the conditions of the commercial capitalist system which rewarded risk and innovation. And the stores were consequently seen as bearing traits similar to their Jewish directors: restless, constantly moving and changing, overflowing boundaries, an affront, in short, to established businesses based on craft, skill, and rootedness in the local environment. Furthermore, the Böhme passage captures another prevalent theme in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century department store debates, namely the idea that department stores and modern forms of retail were powerful, nearly unstoppable forces. The new stores, many critics observed, were sprouting and spreading like fungi.11 And the stores themselves, in the eyes of many contemporaries, exerted a powerful pull on passersby, shoppers, and indeed, on German economy and society. Operating with less nuance and scholarly exactitude than Sombart, the purveyors of Germany’s antisemitic press filled their pages with endless debates about whether all department stores, or only the Jewish-owned ones, deserved to be reviled and boycotted, and the Nazis, as is well known, targeted department stores in their 1920 party platform and in many of their subsequent writings and actions.12 But it was not just department store opponents and antisemitic propagandists who asserted the “Jewishness” of the department store. Neutral and even sympathetic voices, gentile and Jewish alike, matter-of-factly treated the stores as “Jewish” and represented their owners with what contemporary observers understood as typically Jewish features and characteristics. Major Berlin stores, for example, advertised in the Jewish press with explicitly Jewish symbols, noting that they stocked kosher foods or books aimed at Jewish readers, such as an abridged Babylonian Talmud, in the case of the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens).13 The Consuming Temple, my 2015 book, began from the simple realization that Jews created most of the department stores in pre-Nazi Germany,

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indeed, that these vast commercial enterprises, employers of thousands, major pieces of prized real estate, sites of architectural innovation, tourist attractions and leisure destinations were largely Jewish-owned and that few if any scholars had much to say about this striking fact. Having followed the robust and still growing historical literature on consumer culture in other national contexts, it was clear that the department store was bound up with crucial changes in daily life, economic structure, urban organization, architecture and construction, goods distribution, and so on, in the modern period. This suggested that a handful of Jews (and several significant non-Jews like Rudolph Hertzog and Rudolph Karstadt) stood at the forefront of changes that profoundly altered modern life and experience. Hence I wondered: did people (other than antisemites) think of department stores as “Jewish” in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany? Were they remembered as such later? How did Jewish ownership of department stores intersect with other themes in emergent consumer culture, in economic and business history and in German and European society and culture? What does it mean to call something “Jewish”—can a business or business niche be “Jewish” in a more meaningful way than just pointing out its ownership by Jews? One fruitful approach to these questions involved casting the net widely and collecting novels, plays, images, advertisements, commercial studies, in-house newsletters, and so on, and isolating the recurrent motifs in these disparate sources. These motifs resonated with major themes in Jewish history and in the representation of Jews in German culture including the notion of Jews as mobile economic actors and agents of economic circulation; Jews as sexually abnormal, indeed as hyper-sexed and as threatening to German women; Jews as bringers of modernity and modernism in economy, society, and the aesthetic realms; and finally, Jews as non-­ Christians, who were substituting the secular religion of greed and materialism for German Protestant traditions. Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise was first published in 1883 and remains the most influential fictional portrayal of a department store novel. In his notes for the book, Zola observed: “The department store tends to replace the church. It marches to the religion of the cash desk, of beauty, of coquetry, and fashion. [Women] go there to pass the hours as they used to go to church: an occupation, a place of enthusiasm where they struggle between their passion for clothes and the thrift of their husbands; in the end all the drama of life with the hereafter of beauty.”14 And in the novel itself, Zola describes Mouret, the protagonist, based on Bon

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Marché founder Aristide Baucicaut in similar terms: “His creation was producing a new religion; churches, which were being gradually deserted by those of wavering faith, were being replaced by his bazar…. [I]f he had closed his doors there would have been a rising in the street, a desperate outcry from the worshippers whose confessional and altar he would have abolished.”15 Thus in an “age of wavering faith,” that is, amid the secularizing currents of the modern era, the department store appeared to fill the void left by declining church attendance and religious faith. Acts of purchase replace religious ritual; the ethereal god is replaced with material goods. Reflecting on Baudelaire’s notion that the modern metropolis caused a kind of “religious intoxication,” Walter Benjamin observed in the Arcades Project that “the department stores are temples consecrated to this intoxication.”16 Similarly, for French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, writing in the 1960s as the French grappled with the vertiginous economic and social changes of de  Gaulle’s modernization campaigns and a sudden influx of consumer goods, consumption had become the burning theological question of the time: “Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation.”17 In other words, these theorists from across the twentieth century highlighted the ways in which acts of consumption took the place of the moral dilemmas of the pre-modern world, replete with the dynamics of guilt, morality, and redemption. Why do we today feel guilt and remorse when we buy things? Indeed, acts of purchase—for those with sufficient wealth—stoke fears of covetousness that brush up against our biblical injunctions; on the other hand, buying or treating ourselves to things is a kind of therapeutic act in our world, a reward to ourselves or others for good behavior or productivity. Parallels between modern consumption and religion were concretely embodied in the department stores themselves. Previously, churches were among the only urban spaces unaccompanied women could safely and honorably frequent. Now department stores, along with new amusement parks, became acceptable, although not completely unproblematic, alternative spaces, ersatz domestic spheres for taking care of errands, seeking entertainment or following fashion trends. The Wertheim department store on Leipziger Strasse, the firm’s flagship branch constructed in the 1890s on Berlin’s central commercial artery, was nicknamed “the Cathedral” for its grandiosity; indeed, it clearly evokes medieval architecture with its soaring buttresses which guided the eye skyward, ennobling

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and sacralizing the commodity. Architect Erich Mendelsohn, himself the designer of several major department stores in the 1920s, compared the medieval gothic cathedral to the modern department store as the structures which best embodied the spirit of their times.18 In architectural terms, department stores can also be compared to railway stations and to museums and to exhibition halls. All of these structures can be seen as modern, iron and glass equivalents of the cathedral, but the department store, above all, stood at the center of the metropolis, atop transportation and public transit grids, and at the heart of new sites of middle-class leisure and entertainment. The notion of the department store as a secular temple intersects with its “Jewishness” and indeed with broader themes around German experiences of and encounters with early mass consumption. The German department store was often portrayed not just as a cathedral, an altar for the worship of the commodity or a so-called “cathedral of consumption,” then but specifically as a Jewish temple. Take, for example, the 1909 novel, Warenhaus Berlin by Erich Köhrer, which offered a thinly fictionalized account of the KaDeWe, once Continental Europe’s largest and most elegant department store, which opened its doors in 1907 and was founded by Adolf (Abraham) Jandorf, a Jewish businessman who operated five other, primarily working-class retail emporia throughout the capital city.19 The novel recounts protagonist Friedrich Nielandt’s ascent from being a purveyor of dry goods into a veritable “department store king” and it treats his ambitious plans to create the eponymous Warenhaus Berlin. The proposed new department store’s location, consistent with the actual KaDeWe on Berlin’s Wittenbergplatz, alarmed city officials because of its proximity to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The novel shows how Berlin building regulators feared that the department store might block the church—also a concern before the KaDeWe’s real life construction20—that “the church’s sanctity would be desecrated if the doors to a department store opened right across from its main entrance.”21 The church then provides a backdrop for subsequent events. For example, Köhrer writes that on the day of Department Store Berlin’s grand opening, “as the chimes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church’s bell tower trailed off into the clear winter air, the sea of lights of the new house flamed up.”22 The juxtaposition of the Christian church and the Jewish temple of commerce, which was in this case a monument to greed and corruption, frames the novel’s climactic events which unfold in a highly allegorical manner. Furthermore, the church itself, a memorial

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commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to commemorate his grandfather, Emperor Wilhelm I, hearkened back to an imagined traditional Germany of throne and altar that lay starkly at odds with the new, commercial and consumer-oriented modernity furthered by the department store. The appearance of the department store near the cathedral can be read as reflecting a larger tension in a society that was responding to rapid changes by looking backward, attempting to revive discarded traditions just as they were on the verge of anachronism. The climactic event is a fire which Nielandt sets after learning of his wife’s infidelity. Symbolically, I would argue that the fire resolves the tension, the provocation of the Jewish department store next to the cathedral in the center of the metropolis. Köhrer describes the fire in quasi-biblical terms. “It was,” he recounts, “as though the earth reared up in a mighty rage. A huge fist [of flame], glowing red, raised itself up, stretched the tower up into the heavens and then tore it down deep into the ground with an abrupt lurch… The store’s entire interior collapsed in on itself with dull claps of thunder.”23 While the fire at the end of Sigfrid Siwertz’s 1929 novel The Great Department Store was likened to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, here the allegory more closely resembles the Tower of Babel. Nielandt’s hubris, the majesty and grandeur of his colossal department store, which like in the biblical tale, resembled a city, calls upon itself destructive divine wrath.24 Yet again, the church provides a backdrop, a screen for observing the department store’s destruction. “The church stood there like a black silhouette against the burning horizon. In its windows the eerie beauty of the furious blaze was reflected magically.”25 But with the store’s destruction, the provocation of the Moloch, the secular temple of greed next to the church is resolved, dictating the novel’s peaceful, poetic ending on a lovely Sunday morning no less: “A thick, yellow shower of sparks rained down like a fluttering veil of majestic beauty out into the dark night,”26 writes Köhrer. Most of the scholarship on department stores, particularly in the French, British, and American contexts, emphasizes the excitement and revolutionary appeal of these new stores. To be sure, for many urban denizens, beginning in later nineteenth century, the latest shopping emporium, display-window exhibition, or special department store event—sales, fashion shows, art exhibits, new product presentations, and so on—elicited tremendous enthusiasm. With amenities like cafes, newspaper reading and letter-writing rooms, hair salons, banks, and travel agencies, the major

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department stores were meant to be a leisure destination worthy of devoting a whole day; their aisles and departments akin to a city within a city, ideal for meandering, sauntering, and taking in the attractions. “Everything under One Roof” was a common motto and advertising tag line, an expression which self-consciously flaunted the contrast to traditional German commerce in which merchants only dealt in one type of good, over which they had expertise, often developed over generations. Brashly breaking taboos, the department store marked a social provocation, a perceived threat, not only to existing businesses and economic practices, but to prevailing gender roles and social norms at a time of tremendous economic and cultural upheaval. Unlike traditional specialty shops, which consumers generally entered for the purpose of making a specific purchase, department stores welcomed casual browsers ohne Kaufzwang, that is, without pressure to make a purchase; they sought to attract as many people as possible and keep them in the stores for as long as possible. The stores’ success, as many contemporaries observed, was based on volume. The Tietz’s principle of “high volume, small margin/profit” (Grosser Umsatz, kleiner Nutzen) which was imitated by the firm’s competitors, dictated that goods needed be sold quickly and cheaply and emphasized the need for rapid turnover, even if wares had to be marked down to below cost.27 Above all, then, the department store’s success depended on attracting customers, bringing them in in massive numbers and counting on the cheap prices and attractive displays to stimulate the buying urge. Kauflust, literally, the desire or drive to buy, became a leitmotif in department store representations of all kinds, an explanation for the stores’ power to attract teeming crowds of customers, excited throngs pressing up against the spectacular display windows. In the eyes of department store opponents, including defenders of the interests of small shopkeepers, the stores baited and trapped unsuspecting customers: they incited Kauflust through trickery and deception, through false advertising claims touting inferior products, and they preyed on naïve consumers and circumvented ethical business practices, making it impossible for upright businesses to compete. That these claims contradicted economic realities—indeed, a department store’s success often translated into greater prosperity for all surrounding businesses and stores generally exchanged defective goods and stressed ethical conduct—did nothing to diminish their influence or rhetorical power. Nor did the fact that department stores accounted for only a relatively small share of total retail in pre-World War II Germany quell the intensity of anti-department store propaganda.28

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Women’s behavior in department stores was a source of particular concern to many observers, reflecting widespread unease about where women spent their time, as noted above, and indeed, how they spent their (or their husbands’) money. Critics claimed that department stores exerted a nearly irresistible, hypnotic effect on female shoppers. Indeed, the stores’ lure, the mesmerizing impact of advertising and display, also preoccupied psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, who diagnosed epidemic kleptomania and “magazinitis” around the turn of the century and blamed many women’s seemingly irrepressible drive to steal on the temptations of the department store environment and the weaker female constitution.29 Kleptomania was considered so unavoidable that in a contemporaneous Austrian play “The Department Store Incident,” (Zwischenfall im Warenhaus) a wealthy man secretly purchased a major department store so that his wife could indulge her stealing habit without legal consequences.30 These dynamics can even be observed in psychiatric case histories from the time which contain reference to shoppers’ fears of possession by department store demons, malicious spirits who compelled them to return to the stores again and again.31 In a parallel discourse, political agitators used religious and supernatural imagery to characterize the stores as having seductive, even satanic powers and a parasitic effect on the German body politic. “What would today’s times be without department stores?” asked Walter Schultze in a 1932 text, “We need the department store. It belongs to us and we to it. We need those places in which everything is alive, where it pulsates from the first to the last hour of the day. What is it, then, which makes the department store so magnetic for us? The answer is its magic, its mysterious fluid…there lies the spirit of the department store which seizes us whenever, wherever we find ourselves in it.”32 Schultze here captures the sense of enchantment, the mysterious allure, the magnetism, indeed the feeling of endless possibility and mobility provided by the department store. In other depictions, this almost supernatural notion of the department’s stores magical allure intersected with ideas of the store’s tremendous powers, indeed, their ability to arouse consuming desires and push (female) customers into purchases, or event acts of theft. Indeed, desire for goods, the basis of a department store’s economic viability, was a culturally controversial, at times unseamly force, sexually coded and associated with the power of the Jewish male merchant over the German consumer. Common tropes that ran through anti-department store materials often depicted the stores as beasts, monsters, or vicious predators. In

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anti-department store propaganda, the store commonly appears as a Moloch greedily devouring unsuspecting customers, a behemoth preying on traditional German businesses and a vampire or “economic demon” as a 1928 work by a Nazi economist termed it.33 “The Devil in the Department Store,” a 1935 story by the satirist Thomas T. Heine at once exemplifies and mocks these assumptions, explaining one store’s ability to lower prices ceaselessly and devour competitors as the result of a Faustian bargain.34 Although written by a Jewish satirist, himself on the run from the Nazis, the Heine story reflects (and in this case subverts) many of the themes that reverberated through the antisemitic and anti-department store literature: the image of the deceitful Jewish entrepreneur and anxieties about Jewish power over German women and ultimately over the German economy. * * * This brief survey of the cultural reception of the department store has tried to show that consumer culture in pre-Nazi Germany aroused all sorts of controversies and tensions around capitalism, gender roles, and Jewish visibility. Department stores and other new forms of retail were at once exciting diversions and engines of major economic and social change and therefore potentially destabilizing to German ways. The Nazis, while channeling the tools of modern consumer culture for their own propaganda, nevertheless struck a resonant chord when they condemned its entanglement in global (and Jewish) commercial capitalism and rose to power as champions of the allegedly threatened German artisan and small shopkeeper. For all intents and purposes, the story of the Jewish department store in Germany reached its end by the early 1930s, and by 1939, the last Jewish-owned businesses had been taken out of Jewish hands.35 From this point on, the department store’s Jewishness only functioned as a metaphor or sign of a reviled past. Indeed, by the late 1930s most of the figures who had played such a crucial role in shaping modern German consumer culture—the entrepreneurs, advertising professionals, buyers, salespeople, display-window decorators, architects, and so on—had lost their economic livelihoods. Thousands emigrated. But what happened to them in emigration? While significant scholarly studies of German Jews and the department store business in the United States exist, most of these works concern themselves with Jewish émigrés who had arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and had established themselves in American social and economic

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life long before the Nazis came to power.36 Conversely, studies of German-­ speaking exiles and émigrés have generally focused on the arena of high culture, on writers, composers and academicians, and on Hollywood, occluding many key, but less celebrated individuals.37 In this spirit, the remainder of this essay is devoted to a cohort of exiles and émigrés who worked in the sphere of modern commercial and consumer culture in pre-Nazi Europe and again in the United States. Research into the history of the mall and Madison Avenue advertising—taken together perhaps the quintessence of postwar American consumer culture, and indeed, suburban Americana—has brought up such figures as Victor Gruen, Rudy Baumfeld, Ernest Dichter, and Joseph Binder, individuals whose lives and careers connect pre-war European artistic and intellectual currents with postwar American commerce and culture, who link, in other words, consuming temples on both sides of the Atlantic, the urban department store of pre-war Europe and the new suburban-based consumption of postwar America.38 How, then, did victims of and refugees from European fascism view American consumer culture? Did they see it as a democratizing force or, were they more likely to perceive it as a danger, as a threat to democracy in the spirit of the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture?39 We now turn to several German-speaking Jews who were active in forming German and Austrian consumer culture and then, fleeing in the 1930s for safer American shores, continued their activities, finding employment in various branches of the burgeoning American consumer and commercial economy, benefiting and indeed accelerating America’s extraordinary postwar prosperity. Indeed, those who fled fascist Europe for the United States arrived in the early stages of a period of unprecedented economic growth which lasted into the 1970s. The American standard of living after World War II was the highest in the history of the world. Average American incomes reached levels that nearly doubled that of the next wealthiest countries (Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Sweden), and American households were flush with a kind of security and material abundance that was unimaginable to most people around the world.40 The expanding American commercial sector created job opportunities for immigrants and refugees, many of whom had studied art, architecture, and design in the hubs of European artistic innovation. We begin with Victor Gruen. Gruen has begun to attract increasing scholarly and public attention, inspired, I would suggest, by the apparent demise of the

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institutions he helped create, the mall, and broader changes in how Americans shop and spend their leisure time, in an age of e-commerce and urban redevelopment.41 Today, Gruen is best known for designing the first enclosed, climate-controlled American mall, the Southdale shopping center in Edina, MN (a suburb of Minneapolis), which opened in 1956 and which he worked on together with his partner Rudy Baumfeld. Gruen had a long and varied career in the United States, designing multiple department stores and other retail establishments, shopping centers and amusement parks, and he got his start in New York as a producer of Broadway shows. Above all, Gruen is often credited, not charitably it bears pointing out, with creating the “Gruen effect” or “Gruen transfer,” a manipulative retail strategy that aims to bedazzle customers with a store’s brilliant array of goods so that they will be drawn consciously or unconsciously to buy and to buy beyond their means or their rational sense.42 Scholars of postwar U.S. consumer culture have considered this a development of the 1950s, but looking at early periods of retail, as I have done above, reveals that it was a much older phenomenon. In fact, the Gruen effect can be seen as Kauflust by another name, a cornerstone of critiques decrying early department stores. Critics accused the stores of arousing consuming desires (in women customers and passersby) through techniques of advertising and display, a critique which surfaced again and again in department store discourses in the pre-World War II period, as we have seen, and was linked to a kind of panic around female desire and its limits. What is striking about Gruen’s story is not only that the originator of the mall and of the credo of American consumer culture was foreign born, but that he hailed from a socialist and modernist milieu and that his sensibility was formed in the heady crucible of interwar Vienna. Born Viktor Grünbaum in Austria in 1903, Gruen studied architecture and design at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, seat of German Werkbund innovator Peter Behrens, and was influenced by the competing visions of architects and urban planners Camillo Sitte, Otto Wagner, and Adolf Loos. Grünbaum came of age in post–World War I “Red Vienna,” a hotbed of innovative urban planning and modern design and a city transformed by the governing Social Democratic Party’s ambitious public housing construction program for the city’s working classes.43 Indeed, Grünbaum was drawn to Social Democratic circles, like so many of Viennese Jews, and even after he started working architecture jobs during the days, he performed in political cabaret at night, mocking the Austrian bourgeoisie and satirizing the Church and right-wing movements. Grünbaum’s peculiar trajectory from

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the Jewish-socialist, modernist world of interwar Vienna to the American suburb already suggests one of my tentative conclusions. What we generally think of as American consumer culture was to a great extent shaped by German-speaking émigrés, a great many of whom were Austrian and Jewish and whose sensibilities were formed in an intensely urban, left-­ wing, and modernist atmosphere. This observation, the path from the urban to the suburban, or from the Viennese Ringstrasse to the American freeway has potentially broad historiographical implications, given that scholars of postwar consumer culture routinely assume that the United States, flush with the glow of postwar prosperity, developed and then exported its unique brand of hyper-­ consumerism to (often reluctant) Europeans, along with Marshall Plan investments and American mass culture, advertising, and marketing techniques.44 What if American consumer culture itself was to a great extent shaped by European émigrés, so that instead of speaking of the Americanization of European culture, as conventional historiography would have it, we should rather think in terms of the Europeanization of America thanks to a cohort of German-speaking Jewish émigrés? I certainly do not wish to take my conclusions that far in this essay, rather, I would use this phenomenon to challenge and deconstruct notions of what is American and what is European (in the realm of consumer and retail practices and broader cultural forms) and see a constantly evolving process of cross-fertilization and interaction. Further, I would point to the role of Jewish émigrés in transmitting certain ideas and styles from the Central European context to the American landscape.45 How can we square the mall, that icon of soulless American suburbia, with interwar German and Austrian urban modernism? A more historical approach reveals that the mall was originally experienced, even celebrated as a transplanted urban, pedestrian-centered experience into the altered spatial geography of the expanding American city. As a review put it on the occasion of the opening of Southdale: The Southdale environment is quite unlike that of any other shopping center. There is nothing suburban about it except its location. For Southdale uncannily conveys the feeling of a metropolitan downtown…Southdale [is not] a copy of downtown. Rather, it is an imaginative distillation of what makes downtowns magnetic: the variety, the individuality, the lights, the color, even the crowds…46

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This passage about a suburban Minneapolis shopping center could have come from one of the many early twentieth-century panegyrics to the KaDeWe and its impact on the Berlin urban environment.47 Southdale’s central atrium was one of its key architectural features and one that influenced subsequent mall construction in the United States and beyond. Even though it was an enclosed space, lighting changed with the progress of the day, making it seem like the outdoors, and frequent public events, such as concerts, fashion shows, even the taping of the television quiz show “Truth or Consequences,” gave it the appearance of a town center. Of the Northland shopping center outside of Detroit, critics noted its European influence; one author rhapsodized that it evoked the strains of a Viennese waltz and European design traditions.48 In Columbus, Indiana, a town about forty miles south of Indianapolis known today for its extraordinary concentration of modern public art and architecture, Gruen Associates constructed the Courthouse Center and Commons, a combined enclosed shopping and administrative center and recreational area. Lead architect Cesar Pelli described the complex as “the American equivalent of the Italian Piazza.”49 Thus, places that are often derided today as emblematic of American suburban ennui and disaffection were once regarded as sites of European sophistication and glamor. Scholars sympathetic to Gruen tell us that although he reveled in American abundance, he did not see consumer satisfaction as an end in itself, rather as a means for advancing social and cultural reform and that he understood the shopping center as a way of drawing people together and overcoming the atomization of modern life amid urban sprawl.50 His great enemy was the automobile; hence, the mall concept banished autos to the perimeter—its multiple floors kept the shops within walking distance—creating ersatz public spaces around retail, but also entertainment and shared experience. In other words, Gruen retained some of the socialism and public mindedness he had imbibed in Vienna, and he came to regret that his malls had precisely the opposite effect by helping segregate American cities and squash urban vitality. Hence, his decision to return and spend the last years of his life back in Europe reflected, above all, his disappointment in the development of American consumer culture and his resignation to the power of the car and social stratification, an admission of sorts that American consumer culture ultimately undermined democratization and equality. From Gruen’s impact on the built environment and urban landscape of postwar American retail, let us move to another figure who had an equally

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profound effect on consumer culture in the United States, the psychologist Ernest Dichter. Four years younger than Gruen, Dichter was also born into a Jewish family in Vienna, although unlike the comfortable childhood of Grünbaum, whose father was a successful lawyer, Dichter hailed from modest circumstances, and his father, a traveling textile salesman, struggled to make ends meet. Dichter did not study design or architecture, although he did support himself by working as a window dresser in Vienna, rather he focused on psychology and moved in Freudian and post-Freudian circles, studying also with philosopher Moritz Schlick and statistician Paul Lazarsfeld, later the creator of public opinion research in the United States.51 Dichter arrived in New York in 1938 and with help from Lazarsfeld, soon established himself as a marketing consultant, eventually founding the Institute for Motivational Research, which occupied a palatial setting in Croton-on-Hudson outside of New York City. If Gruen, Baumfeld, and others created the American suburban vernacular in glass and concrete, Dichter is one of the key shapers of American advertising culture. Importing Freudian ideas and European attitudes toward sexuality, Dichter urged advertisers to play on consumers’ sexual desires and the pleasures associated with acts of consumption. An early adapter of the modern test-subject approach, Dicther employed scores of social scientists and opinion researchers in his filmed studies of subjects’ responses to goods and visual and audial stimuli. In her best-selling 1963 book the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan documented Dichter’s cynical manipulation of educated women consumers in his ads for household appliances, detergent, and other labor-saving devices for the home, and journalist Vance Packard took him to task in his 1957 exposés of the advertising industry, Hidden Persuaders.52 Jean Baudrillard also took on Dichter, treating him as more or less the poster child for capitalism’s consumerist credo in his path-breaking critique of consumerism of the 1960 and 70s.53 Among the many advertising campaigns Dichter is still remembered for count the Esso “put a tiger in your tank” commercials, Frito Lay’s “Bet you can’t eat just one” ads, and the early marketing of the Barbie Doll. Little is made of Dichter’s Jewish identity or his political affiliations in the existing literature, but one scholar has remarked that the experience of European fascism—Dichter left Austria in 1937 for Paris and arrived in the United States in 1938—shaped his views on consumer culture.54 That is, he viewed properly channeled consumption as a kind of therapy or self-­ realization program. If people could achieve happiness and fulfillment

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through acts of consumption, he theorized, support for dictators and demagogues would wane. Hence, consumer culture and material abundance emerge as guarantors of democracy and bulwarks against fascism, in a sense, the opposite conclusion drawn by Gruen. Dichter and Gruen are just two of the many figures a more comprehensive study would include. A fuller picture of the impact of German-­ speaking émigrés on American consumer culture would require attention to Hollywood, which exceeds the scope of the current essay. One could also turn to public relations, public opinion research, graphic arts and product design, and other segments of this country’s multi-faceted postwar consumer culture.55 For the purposes of this essay, however, it suffices to point to the key role of modernism, socialized public space, psychoanalysis, anti-Fascism, and other originally European ideas in shaping key tendencies in American consumer culture from the 1940s through the 1960s. Yet, as I have suggested above, when these ideas made their way to the American context, they were perceived and celebrated as European and not as Jewish, which has worked to conceal the Jewish dimensions of this story. Thus, the entanglement of Jews with modern forms of consumer culture stretches from the late nineteenth century and extends through the postwar world. These entanglements, however, were largely invisible to mid-twentieth-century American consumers and commentators who looked to Europe as the source of taste and sophistication.56 Significantly, it was German-speaking Jews, and to an extraordinary extent Austrians, who were conspicuous, major agents for this transatlantic circulation of ideas and practices.57 To begin to explain the overrepresentation of Austrians, one might look carefully at the context of interwar Vienna, hotbed of modernism in architecture and design, birthplace and seat of organized psychoanalysis and home to a large Jewish population, a population with one foot in retail and the other in the arts and culture, and a demographic which was perhaps especially attuned to the interrelationship of urban geography and ethnic difference.58 Moreover, Austrian émigrés came to the United States later, remained somewhat apart from their German counterparts and of course had had a different experience of the rise of fascism and Nazism. Whatever the explanation, these preliminary observations tell us that Jews remained key shapers of modern consumer culture far beyond Germany’s Jewish department stores in both time and place. While in the pre-war German context, Jewish entrepreneurs, advertising professionals, and designers were often represented as un-German agents of Americanization, in postwar America—where

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consumer culture was received without much controversy until the late 1960s—German-speaking émigrés were commonly embraced as Europeans, as bearers of European aesthetic standards and planning and design sophistication, much like the reception their counterparts in science and medicine enjoyed.59 German-speaking Jews not only produced key pillars of German and American consumer culture, they also helped create critical perspectives on that culture, first in the European interwar period and then in emigration, especially in the 1960s when émigré intellectuals like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse became youth heroes for their psychologically inflected condemnation of capitalist conditions and commercial culture; as a cohort, German-speaking Jews both developed the possibilities and saw the darkest potential of modern consumerism and the culture industry.

Notes 1. The discussion that follows draws above all on Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015). 2. One exception is the commentary on Jews and commercial real estate and in particular Jewish mall developers in North American cities and suburbs in more recent times. 3. Among the many important studies of department stores in this period in Europe and North America, see, in addition to sources cited below, Jeffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot, UK, 1999); Gudrun M. König, Konsumkultur: Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900 (Vienna, 2009); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1992); Alarich Rooch, Zwischen Museum und Warenhaus: Ästhetisierungsprozesse und sozial-kommunikative Raumaneignungen des Bürgertums (1823–1920) (Oberhausen, 2001); Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger, eds., Das Berliner Warenhaus: Geschichte und Diskurse / The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse (Frankfurt a.M., 2013); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, IL, 1986). 4. Quoted in Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 3. 5. For key works on consumer culture in the United States, see, among many others, Lawrence B.  Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009); Celia Lury, Consumer Culture, 2nd

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ed. (Malden, MA, 2011); Daniel Miller, Stuff (London, 2009); and works cited below. On German-speaking émigrés and American culture more broadly, see Jan-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America (London, 2006); Ernest Wilder Spaulding, The Quiet Invaders: The Story of the Austrian Impact upon America (Vienna, 1968); Matthias Boeckl and Otto Kapfinger, eds., Visionäre und Vertriebene: Österreichische Spuren in der modernen amerikanischen Architektur (Berlin, 1995); and Hennig Engelke and Tobias Hochscherf, “Between Avant-Garde and Commercialism: Reconsidering Émigrés and Design,” Design History 28 (February 2015): 1–14. 6. Hermann Tietz, der grösste Warenhaus-Konzern Europas im Eigenbesitz: Ein Buch sichtbarer Erfolge (Berlin, 1932); Erica Fischer and Simone Ladwig-­Winters, Die Wertheims: Geschichte einer Familie (Berlin, 2004). 7. See above all Siegfried Gerlach, Das Warenhaus in Deutschland: Seine Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg in historisch-geographischer Sicht (Stuttgart, 1988). 8. Lerner, Consuming Temple; Heidrun Homburg, “Warenhausunternehmen und ihre Gründer in Frankreich und Deutschland,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 33 (June 1992): 183–219. 9. Werner Sombart, “Die Reklame,” Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur, March 6, 1908, 281–86; “Das Warenhaus: Ein Gebilde des hochkapitalistischer Zeitalters,” in Probleme des Warenhauses: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Erkenntnis der Entwicklung des Warenhauses in Deutschland, ed. Verband deutscher Waren- und Kaufhäuser e.V. (Berlin, 1928). 10. Margarete Böhme, W.A.G.M.U.S., (Berlin, 1911), 17–18. 11. Lerner, Consuming Temple, esp. Chap. 1. 12. See, among others, Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhäuser im dritten Reich (Cologne, 1956). 13. Lerner, Consuming Temple, 6. 14. Quoted in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 177. 15. Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford, 1995), 427. 16. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 61. 17. Jean Baudrillard, Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, 1998), 195–96, emphasis in orginal. Also see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1997). 18. Renate Palmer, Der Stuttgarter Schocken-Bau von Erich Mendelsohn: Die Geschichte eines Kaufhauses und seiner Architektur (Tübingen, 1995),

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28–30. Also see Mendelsohn’s letter to Luise Maas (September 29, 1914), in Erich Mendelsohn: Briefe eines Architekten, ed. Oskar Beyer (Munich, 1961), 33–34; Lerner, Consuming Temple, Chap. 4. 19. Erich Köhrer, Warenhaus Berlin: Ein Roman aus der Weltstadt (Berlin, 1909). On the KaDeWe, see Osborn, ed., KaDeWe; Antonia Meiners, 100 Jahre KaDeWe (Berlin, 2007). 20. Lerner, Consuming Temple, 199. 21. Köhrer, Warenhaus Berlin, 39. 22. Ibid., 39. 23. Ibid., 138. 24. Sigfrid Siwertz, Das große Warenhaus, trans. Alfons Fedor Cohn (Berlin, 1928). 25. Köhrer, Warenhaus Berlin, 144. 26. Ibid., 144. 27. R.  Hartmann, “Großer Umsatz, Kleiner Nutzen,” in Tietz, der grösste Warenhaus-Konzern Europas, 57. 28. Uwe Spiekermann, Warenhaussteuer in Deutschland: Mittelstandsbewegung, Kapitalismus und Rechtsstaat im späten Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a.M., 1994), 8–9; Detlef Briesen, Warenhaus, Massenkonsum und Sozialmoral: Zur Geschichte der Konsumkritik im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 2001), 78–79. 29. See, among others, Paul Lerner, “Consuming Pathologies: Kleptomania, Magazinitis, and the Problem of Female Consumption in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany,” WerkstattGeschichte 42 (Summer 2006): 46–56. 30. Richard Kläger, Zwischenfall im Warenhaus: Komödie in drei Akten (Vienna, 1933). 31. See Lerner, “Consuming Pathologies.” 32. Walter E. Schulz, “Warenhäuser,” in Tietz, der grösste Warenhaus-­Konzern Europas, 5–6, emphasis in orginal. 33. Hans Buchner, Dämonen der Wirtschaft: Gestalten und dunkle Gewalten aus dem Leben unserer Tage (Munich, 1928). 34. T. H. Heine, “Der Teufel im Warenhaus,” in Die Märchen (1935; [East] Berlin, 1978). 35. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Final Sale in Berlin: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930–1945, trans. Jane Paulick and Jefferson Chase (New York, 2015). 36. See, for example, Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of the Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (New York, 1982), Lina B.  Forgosh, Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist (Waltham, MA, 2016). 37. For an exception, see Alison J.  Clarke and Elana Shapira, eds., Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (London, 2017). Among the many

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works on German-speaking émigrés in the United States, see Erhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Gerd Gmünden, Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema (New York, 2004); Jean-­Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (London, 2006); and Friedrich Stadler and Peter Weibel, eds., Vertreibung der Vernunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1995). 38. Major works on U.S. consumer culture in the twentieth century include Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York, 2002); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989). 39. See, for example, Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst, MA, 2004). 40. Horowitz, Anxieties of Abundance, 50. 41. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle,” The New  Yorker, March 15, 2004, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/15/the-­ terrazzo-­jungle; Josh Sanborn, “Why the Death of American Shopping Malls is about More than Shopping,” Time, July 19, 2017; and in a more academic vein, Joseph Malherek, “Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (November 2016): 219–32. 42. Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (Barcelona, 1995). 43. See, for example, Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-­ Class Culture, 1919–1934 (Oxford, 1991); and Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge, MA, 1999). 44. Above all, see Victoria de Grazia, Invisible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Kuisel, Seducing the French; and Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994). 45. This insight came in part from conversations with Jeffrey Fear. See Fear and Paul Lerner, “Introduction. Behind the Screens: Immigrants, Émigrés, and Exiles in Mid-Twentieth Century Los Angeles,” Jewish Culture and History 17 (2016): 1–21, esp. 8–9. See also Clarke and Shapira, eds., Émigré Cultures. 46. Quoted in Wall, Victor Gruen, 99. Also see Victor Gruen, “Southdale: It’s Always Spring in This Roofed Market Square in the Suburbs,” Interiors 116 (May 1957): 96–101.

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47. For example: Leo Colze, Berliner Warenhäuser (Berlin, 1908); and Max Osborn, ed., KaDeWe: Kaufhaus des Westens, 1907–1932: Festschrift anläßlich des 25jährigen Bestehens (Berlin, 1932). 48. Quoted in M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 131. 49. Quoted in J.M. Dixon, “Piazza, American Style: Courthouse Center and the Commons, Columbus, IN,” Progressive Architecture 57 (June 1976): 64. 50. See Hardwick, Mall Maker, esp. 139. 51. On Dichter see, among others, Kenneth Lipartito, “Subliminal Seduction: The Politics of Consumer Research in Post–World War II America,” in Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann, The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (New York, 2012), 215–36; Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, eds., Ernst Dichter and Motovational Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (London, 2010); and Daniel Horowitz, “The Birth of a Salesman: Ernest Dichter and the Objects of Desire,” unpublished manuscript, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE, https://www.hagley.org/sites/ default/files/HOROWITZ_DICHTER.pdf. 52. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1959). See also Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). 53. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects (1970),” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings (Stanford, CA, 2001), 10–28. 54. Horowitz, “Birth of a Salesman.” 55. See, for example, Clarke and Shapira, eds., Émigré Cultures. 56. See Nils Roemer’s contribution to this volume for a discussion of the ways Stanley Marcus brought French styles to postwar Dallas. 57. On the Austrians, see, among others, Matthias Boeckl, ed., Visionäre und Vertriebene: Österreichische Spuren in der modernen amerikanischen Architektur (Vienna, 1996); and Ernest Wilder Spaulding, The Quiet Invaders: The Story of the Austrian Impact upon America (Vienna, 1968). 58. Lisa Silverman, “Leopoldplatz, Judenstadt and Beyond: Rethinking Vienna’s Jewish Spaces,” East Central Europe 42 (2015): 249–67. 59. On Jewish émigré psychoanalysts and their prestige in American psychiatry, see Sander Gilman, “The Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis: Who Won?” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 293–313.

CHAPTER 5

Stanley Marcus: Fashioning a City Nils Roemer

The history of department stores in America is inextricably bound up with the history of nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants. Gimbels, Saks, Macy’s, Filene’s, I. Magnin, Bloomingdales, and Bergdorf Goodman are just a few of the businesses that illustrate the ubiquitous involvement of Jews in the ready-to-wear retail industry.1 In Dallas, the Sanger brothers, Leon Harris, Ed Titche, Max Goettinger, Herbert Marcus, and his son, Stanley, spearheaded the development of large retail department stores. They brought to the city a global view of trade and advocated liberal politics at a time when the emerging garment manufacturing industry in Dallas was increasing in size. By the 1950s, Dallas was the third largest producer of clothing in America.2 The social-economic position of socially marginal immigrants partly explains the appeal retail and department stores held for these immigrants. Without already established gatekeepers, newly emerging industries represented promise and opportunity. Not

N. Roemer (*) Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_5

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unlike the prominence of Jews in the movie industry, Jewish immigrants equally came to prominence in the fast-emerging retail industry.3 Stanley Marcus’s career resembles key elements of other immigrant biographies in which family networks forged successful enterprises. His family biography exemplifies an embrace of education, upward social mobility, and a high degree of entrepreneurial initiative. At the same time, these families had much that distinguished them from each other. Unlike many of his peers, Stanley Marcus descended from German and Russian immigrants, which exemplified entrepreneurial spirit with an infatuation for education and high culture.4 To delineate shared cultures, immigrant experiences and identities beyond family connections that facilitated the creation of these successful department stores proves challenging. In his “Metropolis and Mental Life,” the sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the modern city created an environment that threatened individuality by reducing humans to their respective economic and functional roles. Simmel, however, also contemplated fashion as a social practice. He identified two contradictory impulses in the consumption of fashion: the desire to fashion oneself and the social wish to belong to a higher social class.5 Lastly, Simmel reflected on the meaning of the stranger and asserted that the stranger aimed to become like everyone else, but that the act of assimilation itself would continue to mark the stranger as Other. In all three of these essays, Simmel noticed contradictory forces that provide a framework for thinking about the involvement of Jews in the retail industry. This includes Stanley Marcus, who became famous for his Neiman-Marcus (later Neiman Marcus) department stores, the first of which opened in Dallas. Fashion produced a promise of belonging to a higher social class and appealed to individuals’ desires to shape their own identities. Marcus recognized the social function of fashion. He even pondered how fashion influenced and reflected historical changes. In his Quest for the Best (1979), he idealized elegance, which he thought had been most profoundly achieved in eighteenth-century French court society. The ascent of beauty had emerged with the merchant class in Venice and Amsterdam to challenge the monopoly of royal and ecclesiastical leaders.6 Marcus’s historical narrative betrays a sense in which fashion became an instrument of self-­ fashioning and historical change. The pursuit of elegance, the formation of new social relationships, the advancement of new politics, and the promotion of cultural change appear as intertwined. Seen from this perspective, the desired recovery of the age of elegance that Stanley Marcus

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pursued within the Neiman-Marcus department store appears as an agent of social and cultural change. American and foreign consumer culture and fashion functioned as an important realm in which Jews asserted both their American and Jewish identities.7 Fashion indeed promised to transforms individuals’ identities. Assuring one’s belonging to a particular class and culture, fashion often excluded specific ethnic markers.8 This is probably most obvious in the case of Lisl Goldarbeiter, who became Miss Austria in 1929 and won the title of Miss Universe in Galveston, Texas, the same year. The success of Goldarbeiter only highlights the absence of racial barriers, however, not of racism as such. She often faced antisemitic rejections of her beauty queen status.9 Similarly, Paris and Berlin heralded and celebrated Josephine Baker, but her admirers also never failed to racialize her as the embodiment of untainted, natural African beauty.10 Beyond a shared sociological profile, it is more difficult to delineate Marcus’s personal identity. In his interviews and published autobiographical writings, Marcus narrated and invented a public persona in the service of the store. He was aware of the extent to which perceptions of him impacted his business: My own personal mystique grew along parallel lines to the Neiman Marcus mystique. Since I was so closely identified with everything that happened at the store, I was a beneficiary of its successes. As I received trade association awards, decorations from foreign governments, and other recognitions, my status as an authority figure in fashion and merchandising became a factor in my mystique. My interest in art, music and education gave my reputation a cultural coloration.11

Sources chronicle the making of the merchant prince but not his private life. His autobiographical writings were not confessional autobiographical narratives, but instead largely described the public life of a businessman. His Jewish family background and experiences with antisemitism appeared at best muffled in order to not intrude on and distract from the success story of the making of Neiman-Marcus. More visible is the extent to which Stanley Marcus transformed Neiman-Marcus into an internationally recognized haute couture retailer and the degree to which his “pursuit of elegance” promoted a new urban culture and lifestyle in Dallas. Already in 1957, the New York-based magazine Commentary credited Neiman-­ Marcus with “civilizing the state.” According to the author, William

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Schack, a regular contributor who otherwise wrote widely on Jewish art and Yiddish theater, Neiman-Marcus was the reason “it was hard to tell [the new Texas millionaires] from any ‘old money’ group in America.”12 The role of Neiman-Marcus extended beyond the individual consumer and helped shape a new urban culture. Transforming the aesthetics of display windows, lavishly decorating and furnishing the store, made the store alluring and transformed shopping into a luxurious pleasure. The annual displays and Christmas decorations became a hallmark of urban life in Dallas. His advertisement campaigns served not solely to sell goods but advanced a new urban culture. Neiman Marcus’s critically acclaimed Zodiac restaurant became a staple in middle-class leisure activities. The cookbooks of its renowned chefs found their way into clients’ kitchens much in the manner of Neiman-Marcus’s fashions. Helen Corbitt joined Neiman Marcus in 1955 to oversee the department store’s food service. Two years later, she published Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook (1957), which saw over twenty-seven printings and sold more than 300,000 copies.13 Reaching new heights in promotional events, Stanley Marcus created the store’s widely acclaimed annual Fortnights, two-week-long programs that brought international retail offerings and large community cultural events together. He also combined business and civic roles when he served as the Director of the Dallas Symphony Society, Advisory Director of the Fort Worth Art Museum, Trustee of Southern Methodist University, and Trustee for the Public Television Foundation for North Texas, among other roles.14 Stanley’s promotion of elegance in the service of a new urban culture contrasted with the civic engagement of his father, Herbert Marcus. The father had directed his civic engagement more at religious organizations and institutions. Herbert Marcus had been a founder and president of Temple Emanu-El, and he had helped create the southwestern division of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.15 Both Marcuses were listed as members in the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) from 1942 to 1948.16 Founded in 1942, the ACJ represented the first organized American opposition to Zionism, advocating the purely religious nature of Judaism and unequivocally rejecting Jewish nationalism. This kind of engagement provided a model of Jewish identity for the father, but the son moved increasingly away from this legacy. Stanley Marcus maintained that he did not practice religion and was not concerned with the existence of God.17 “I have no sense of religion… I make no efforts to proselytize and I have resisted all attempts at being proselytized. The metaphysics of

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religion I understand, but reject. The ethical concepts of religions interest me greatly. I subscribe to them and make them a part of my life.”18 He still voiced his opposition to the idea of Zionism in 1992, and he continued to serve as a leader at Temple Emanu-El after his father’s death in 1950, but in less visible roles.19 In 1954, he had been the vice-president and chairman of the Southwest Regional committee of the Dallas Friends of the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center in Denver.20 In subsequent years, Marcus never existed within the Jewish community but also not without it or against it. Despite rampant antisemitism and racism in Dallas, Stanley grew up in a fairly integrated community. He was the oldest of four boys, attended public school, and grew up surrounded by many members from both families who worked in the store that had been founded in 1907. He almost fondly recalled in his autobiography that he had been raised in a community of Jews and Christians and only experienced antisemitism temporarily at school.21 After he initially had failed the entrance examination at Harvard, he was turned down several times by various colleges once they realized that he was Jewish.22 He also faced antisemitism as a student at Amherst.23 There he was one of “seven barbarians.” The group included two other Jews (one was his roommate), two African Americans, and a Chinese student.24 Jewish and slightly flamboyantly dressed, according to the fashion conventions of the South and his family, he stood out and asked to be mailed more mundane cloths. The adjustment was to no avail and social life remained limited to activity with the other so-called barbarians as Marcus remained socially marginalized. He disliked Amherst because of the discrimination and isolation.25 Harvard, where he studied from 1922 to 1926, was no different amidst immigration reform, quota implementation, and rampant antisemitism. Like Yale and Princeton, it instituted quotas on the number of Jews accepted during the 1920s in an effort to maintain its Protestant character. Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell openly stated that too many Jews would destroy the school: “the summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”26 Marcus did not elaborate much in his autobiographical writings about these conflicts and public debates, but he recalled a few antisemitic incidents.27 Harvard proved important to Stanley’s education. In a later interview, he stated that he “had a glorious fine time” there.28 One of the most important privileges of an Ivy League education was the access to books.

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Harvard prided itself not only on the Widener Library and the Houghton Library (with its manuscripts, incunabula, and boxed letters), but also on numerous other department libraries, museum libraries, and professors’ libraries. Marcus became an infatuated lover of books and recalled that his favorite and most influential course was “History of the Printed Book,” delivered by George Parker Winship, librarian of the Harry Elkins Widener Collection. Widener’s extensive collection of rare first editions had been donated to Harvard after his untimely death on the Titanic in 1912.29 Upon graduating, Marcus formed the Texas Book Club, which had over one hundred members by 1928. The books the club published were exclusive and exemplified the best precepts of graphic design. One of the club’s books won an award of excellence from Chicago’s Society of Typographical Arts and was named one of the Fifty Books of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in New York in 1932. Marcus’s appreciation for books was not limited to aesthetics. He ardently challenged the suppression of potentially controversial books like William Faulkner’s Miss Zilphia Gant. That novel was controversial because its protagonist was a “young, secluded, masturbating woman.”30 In 1932, Marcus arranged for it to be printed by his book club. A literature professor, Henry Nash Smith, at Southern Methodist University (SMU) wrote the forward for Miss Zilphia Gant and was dismissed as a result. The president of SMU, Charles C.  Selecman, characterized the book as “being wholly foul and its sponsorship as an unpardonable act.”31 The head of the English faculty, John Owen Beaty, charged that Smith’s endorsement furthered the end of Christian education at SMU.32 Marcus’s father had been a primary fundraiser for the establishment of SMU and insisted that the trustees reinstate Smith.33 An advocate of freedom of speech, Stanley quoted Martin Luther: “I have the right to believe freely. To be a slave to no man’s authority. If this be heresy, so be it. It is still the truth. To go against conscious is neither right nor safe. I cannot, will not, recant. Here I stand. No man can command my conscience.”34 The learned reference to Luther thus served to advance his political argument, like the emerging clothing industry in Dallas would eventually serve his promotion of a new civic culture in Dallas. In his critical engagement, Stanley intertwined education with politics as much as the pursuit of elegance advanced the fashioning of a new urban culture. Aesthetics and style had already in other ways advanced a new culture for a city that had fought on the side of the Confederacy. It was only in 1896 that the city had dedicated its Confederate War Memorial, but in

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other ways, the citizenry started to orient themselves toward the country’s northern cities. Wealthy Dallasites had their clothes made to order in New York and started to incorporate the styles of northern American cities in other ways, too. New architectural structures like the Dallas Union Station, which was inaugurated in 1916, included brick and neo-classical columns derived from Chicago’s 1893 World Columbus Exhibition, known at the time as the White City. The train station testifies to a new emerging sense of the southern city of Dallas. Along similar lines, the opening of Neiman-­ Marcus in 1907 confidently sought to attract customers who had previously ordered their clothing from New York.35 Stocked with ready-made clothing of a quality not commonly found in Texas, Neiman-Marcus was instantly successful. When the flagship store reopened in 1914, the Renaissance Revival architecture used a widely popular nineteenth-­century style to promote an abundantly furnished establishment with a product selection that now included accessories, lingerie, and children’s clothing, not to mention an expanded women’s apparel department. Stanley had worked as a shoe salesman in his father’s store during the summers while he was in college. After graduating from Harvard, he joined his father permanently.36 At the store, Stanley took over all aspects of graphic design, including advertising, logo, and packaging.37 He persuaded his father to update the look of the company and employed many of the contacts he had gained through his book printing in New York. He also expanded the store’s advertisement campaigns. In order to gain recognition in Dallas, Stanley Marcus began advertising in Harper’s Bazaar in 1934, thereby also establishing Neiman Marcus as a national label.38 Harper’s Bazaar in return mentioned the Dallas store in its editorial pages. A consummate salesman, Marcus recognized the importance of image. He believed that his own personal mystique possessed greater durability than the business’ corporate image.39 He incorporated his “liberal” humanist ideals with his strong sense of responsibility for preserving what his father had stood for.40 His favorite quote was from the German writer Goethe, “What you have inherited from your father, you must earn in order to possess.”41 Yet in other ways, Stanley departed from his father. Even Minding the Store included a very clear sign of this break, when he wrote, “probably the single greatest disappointment in my business career was the failure of my father, on his own initiative, to name me as president prior to my fortieth birthday.”42 Only with his father’s death in 1950 did Stanley Marcus became company president.

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Even during the Great Depression, Dallas’ economy thrived because the discovery of oil had generated an entirely new economy.43 The Neiman-Marcus department store boomed. Stanley Marcus introduced personalized gift-wrapping and launched new national advertising campaigns.44 Increasingly confident in their market power, the store had already, during the early 1930s, sought to sell its own exclusive products. When Stanley Marcus took over, he often succeeded in convincing not only small expensive dressmakers but even large cosmetic manufacturers like Elizabeth Arden to sell exclusively to Neiman-Marcus in Dallas.45 For Dallas, however, “the Store” was more than just a store. Its nine-story Renaissance Revival headquarters in downtown Dallas on the corner of Main and Ervay Streets exuded not merely fashion or luxury but a new urban culture and style. In a 1937 profile of Neiman Marcus titled “Dallas in Wonderland,” Fortune editor Louis Kronenberger noted, “Dallas people lead you to the store in the same spirit that Parisians lead you to the Louvre.” People in Dallas came to the store not only to purchase clothing but to become educated, Kronenberger noted. Dressing was no longer a personal choice but part of a new “civic” culture.46 Two years later, Collier’s magazine quoted Carrie Marcus Neiman, who claimed that the store aimed not simply to dress women but an entire city.47 For the residents of what was then an upwardly mobile provincial city seeking to shed its backwater Texan roots, Neiman Marcus became a way through which the Southern city could slowly reinvent itself as the “White Metropolis.”48 The year after Kronenberger’s piece appeared, for instance, Stanley Marcus created his annual Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion, a program under which the store recognized a select few who had revolutionized the industry. The award brought the likes of Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Coco Chanel to Dallas.49 The publicity from these awards generated national attention. In 1939, Collier’s magazine proclaimed that, “at this moment the eyes and ears of the fashion world are focused not on Paris. Not on New York. Not on Hollywood. But on Dallas. Yes, Dallas, Texas.”50 In 1940, David L.  Cohn, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, called Dallas “a phenomenal city in a phenomenal state” and “a world detached from the continental United States.”51 Life magazine went on to feature Neiman Marcus in a photo essay shortly thereafter, and the image that Stanley had started to craft became America’s image of what Dallas was.52 The “phenomenal city” exploded in the 1940s and 1950s. National corporations relocated to Dallas, and the city became the American

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Southwest’s major financial hub. A culture not merely of prosperity but of affluence and sophistication pervaded at the height of the McCarthy scare, when an increasingly radical conservative electorate battered at the gates of Dallas’ conservative establishment. Allan Shivers, the conservative Democrat, was governor. He delivered Texas to a Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower and a new ultraconservatism began to take hold of the city. With heightened attention to communists and “un-­ American” activities came a nascent antisemitism. In 1951, John Beaty, the by now even more radical right-wing English literature professor at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University, published The Iron Curtain Over America, a virulent condemnation of the Jews and their influence over American life. The book attracted a great deal of attention and went through eight reprints in 1952 alone. To Beaty, communism was a Jewish conspiracy. Among his targets was Marcus, who served on the university’s board of trustees and whom Beaty blamed after the university’s literary quarterly, The Southwest Review, responded critically to his book.53 Marcus neglected to mention this episode, among many others, in his Minding the Store, but he, like other local businessmen, involved himself in the advancement of modern arts, which equally became controversial. Already Marcus’s father, Herbert, had annually brought the Chicago Civic Opera Company to Dallas to perform in the city. Stanley’s father had indeed had “a part in practically every major cultural enterprise Dallas citizens” had undertaken.54 In 1948, Neiman Marcus’s original downtown location began an exhibition program of major modern art masters. In February of that year, five original Paul Gauguin oil paintings and two of his primitive wood sculptures were exhibited as part of a themed fashion show celebrating the famed painter’s choice of color palette.55 In September, the local Dallas department store exhibited twelve original oil paintings by Pablo Picasso.56 The department store would continue showing works of art in all of its locations and begin developing its own corporate art collection that exists to this day. In the early 1950s, Marcus was elected president of the Board of Trustees of the Dallas Art Association. Earlier, his father had promoted the local art museum as the president of the Dallas Museum of Art for its first three years and had been co-owner of the museum building. Marcus now utilized the model of fashion as a blueprint for a new aesthetic culture. Arguing openly in the introduction for the collection of modern art, Marcus appealed to business leaders and entrepreneurs, who were “seeking and accepting new ways of doing business.” Marcus connected their

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innovative business acumen to their new fashion attire, referring to those who might be baffled by abstract art but who wear “a necktie or a sport shirt which makes Matisse seem like a stuffy old reactionary.”57 Championing modern art such as Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral, which the Dallas Museum of Art acquired in 1950, provoked controversy. It brought Stanley into conflict with the conservative Dallas Patriotic Council. Marcus rallied successfully for support in the city for the freedom of expression, but McCarthyism continued to gain ground in the city.58 Stanley continued to fuse art and fashion, when, in 1951, he acquired and exhibited the French costume designer and illustrator Marcel Vertes’s “Imaginary Portraits” in the store.59 Only a year later Vertes, who was born in Hungary, won the Academy Awards for Best Costume Design for his work on the film Moulin-Rouge (1952). Pursuing these same goals, but within the framework of Neiman-­ Marcus, eventually gave Marcus more autonomy. He began, for example, his widely popular Fortnight exhibitions which, starting in 1957, brought art and culture from around the world to the Dallas department store.60 In 1956, while traveling in Stockholm, Marcus noticed that Nordiska, a luxury Swedish department store, was having a “promotion of French goods, with their windows filled with French merchandise and the tricolor decorating their escalator well. They had a French fashion show and had imported a French chef for their restaurant,” as Marcus recalls in Minding the Store.61 Nordiska’s management had worked with the French government. Marcus sought a similar agreement with French authorities to launch the Neiman-Marcus French Fortnight. With the Fortnight, Marcus hoped to boost retail sales and to celebrate Neiman-Marcus’s fiftieth anniversary within the Dallas community. A company-wide memo from Marcus stated that the first objective of the Fortnight was “to make some substantial contribution to the future of Dallas and the southwest region.”62 Business interest converged with civic and cultural responsibility in the Fortnight. Neiman-Marcus promoted the first Fortnight to the public by having the Dallas Times-Herald change the format of their October 12, 1956, issue to a Parisian tricolor edition, and Marcus even convinced the Dallas Times-Herald editors to devote the edition to discussing the various events and people surrounding the Fortnight. The company placed an advertisement on every page or two, culminating with an iconic cowboy riding a Gallic cock poster image by artist Raymond Savignac. An additional public relations event during the two-week Fortnight involved the “twinning” of

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the cities of Dallas, Texas, and Dijon, France, as an act of bringing diverse peoples together in an effort to build a global community.63 Dozens of celebrities and diplomats arrived in Dallas via a chartered Air France plane, direct from Paris, which Marcus himself arranged. The arrival of Coco Chanel on Air France represented one of the many highlights. The most often reproduced image from this Fortnight depicted Coco Chanel in front of the Air France plane shaking hands with Stanley Marcus. To further increase national and international audiences, Marcus persuaded Vogue to run the first nationwide advertisement, complete with an A to Z insert in the American and French October 1, 1957, editions. This thirty-five-page supplement pays homage to the Fortnight sponsors, beginning with “A is for Air France,” “B is for Baccarat,” “C is for Chanel,” “D is for Dior,” and so on. Air France, the major sponsor of that Fortnight, received the most publicity from Neiman-Marcus complete with several advertisements in the Parisian Dallas Times-Herald edition and Vogue supplements. In conducting the Fortnight, Marcus enveloped the cultural institutions of the city. The Dallas Museum of Fine Art exhibited Toulouse-­ Lautrec, which was the first exhibition of the artist in America. There was an exhibit of modern French tapestries at the Dallas Municipal Auditorium, French wine tastings at various local luncheon clubs, a poster exhibition at the Dallas Public Library, French films shown at various Dallas movie theaters, and French entertainers from Paris who performed at several Dallas hotels. Even the public school system participated with essay assignments and visits to the downtown store.64 The exterior of Neiman-Marcus was given over to French programming as well; Olivier Adnet, Philippe Delacre, and Jacques Fonteray famed French tastemakers and decorators for the French Committee of Fairs and Expositions, and also decorators for the Gallerie de Lafayette in Paris transformed the windows and displays into French boutiques and salons. Replicas of Parisian street lamps illuminated the sidewalks and tricolor flags adorned each window. During the Fortnight, the Neiman-Marcus became a French-themed spectacle.65 Inside the store, a French haute couture fashion show, with mannequins from Paris, displayed the designs of Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain, Carven, Gres, Gui Laroche, Jacques Griffe, Jacques Heim, Jean Desses, Jean Patou, Madeleine du Rauch, and Nina Ricci. French decorators adapted the Neiman-Marcus restaurant, the Zodiac Room, to resemble Maxim’s of Paris. Andre Papion of Liberté in Paris flew in to cook for

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a week. Robert Gourdin, the chief sommelier from “21” in New York City provided thirty wine tastings at the Zodiac Room. The fifth floor’s Oak Room exhibited paintings by France’s most promising young artists, collected by the French magazine, Realities. The store’s fourth floor galleries exhibited Baccarat glass, Cristofle silver, French china, and Porthault linens. Eloise in Paris, the sequel to the popular children’s book Eloise, was introduced by Kay Thompson during the Fortnight events, and the children’s department was furnished accordingly. The third floor of the Neiman-Marcus store displayed rare medals, coins, and stamps. On the first floor, Renault, Citroen, and Daulphin sent cars from France for the transportation of dignitaries and to be displayed in the store. The French Fortnight generated impressive sales figures and worldwide publicity. With an initial cost of $400,000 for the Fortnight, sales were up by 25 percent already in the first few days and turned the festival into a profound business success. To Marcus, the Fortnight not only generated “direct, cold-cash business” but was a “cultural and intellectual success as well.”66 Recognizing the impact of the Fortnight beyond sales figures, Time magazine heralded it perceptively as “Dallas in Wonderland,” gauging by the celebrations’ wide impact on the city.67 Commentary recognized Neiman-Marcus in light of the Fortnight not only as a fashion center but as a “strong cultural force in its community.” To Schack, “Neiman-­ Marcus not only satisfied its customers, but laid claim implicitly to authority in certain areas of culture and even in civic matters. It became a force against provincialism.”68 Commentary, a magazine that had drifted from its former socialist orientation toward a rediscovery of Jewish heritage and a promotion of American values, might have indeed viewed Neimann-­ Marcus as a manifestation of that program, but Schack at least did not make the connection explicit. Instead, he simply depicted the department store as major cultural force. Stanley Marcus continued this pursuit in successive Fortnights’ programming, which featured many other countries over the next twenty-­ nine years and maintained a close affinity with civic leaders until the mid-1980s. Marcus had the instinct to turn the Fortnights into public spectacles. As he confessed in Minding the Store, he had a “flair for communicating with people by doing things that commanded attention.”69 For the 1964 Danish Fortnight, the arrival of the two royal Great Danes occasioned a radio show about how the two dogs, who had frequent modeling engagements, used Sheraton’s room service.70 Two years prior,

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Marcus even hired Alvin Colt a veteran set designer for Broadway and television to stage the 1963 Swiss Fortnight. Colt, who created various displays for subsequent Fortnights for twenty-three years made them ever more spectacular with extravagant displays, like a live bull in a china shop for the Spanish Fortnight in 1980 and a crocodile in a pool outside the Lacoste shop at the French Fortnight. Another highlight was the Odyssey Fortnight in 1982, which featured Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia. Monaco’s Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, Sophia Loren, Estee Lauder, Joan Crawford, and Britain’s Princess Margaret visited Dallas on the occasion.71 The pursuit of elegance and the fashioning of a new urban culture was never far-removed from social and political issues. In an unusual step, Neiman-Marcus offered scholarships in the 1940s for college-educated women from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico who wanted to pursue an education at the Tobe-Coburn School of Fashion Careers in New York City.72 Similarly, Marcus at times harnessed the power of his public standing for political causes. After the courts ordered desegregation of the school system by September 1961, he met with local business leaders and determined that it was important to educate the public well in advance by opening hotels, restaurants, and stores to African Americans. They agreed that children should not be the first to encounter desegregation, but that the adult community must desegregate beforehand. The local motto became “Don’t leave it for the children to do.”73 His support for President John F.  Kennedy invariably placed him at odds with established elites of the city. When he announced his support for Kennedy’s candidacy in the 1960s election, he lost several accounts at Neiman-Marcus.74 After Kennedy’s assassination, Marcus printed and circulated en masse the speech that Kennedy would have given in Dallas, and he published full-page advertisements critiquing Dallas’ social conditions in both of the city’s newspapers.75 Marcus singled out a failure to address social problems like slums and criticized a kind of absolutism of people who believe that they alone possess “wisdom, patriotism, and virtue.”76 He continued his outspoken support for the Democratic party in 1964, when Neiman-Marcus ordered 2000 red and white uniforms from the Ladies Garment Workers for the 1964 Democratic National Convention with “LBJ” embroidered on the pockets and a Neiman-Marcus label.77 In 1966, he publicly defended the rights of three high school boys who were not allowed to attend W. W. Samuel High School because their hair was too long. Marcus placed an ad in the paper defending them as having exercised a fashion choice, as opposed to having rebelled against authority,

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and he offered financial assistance for their court case. The boys sued the school district, lost, and took their case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the original decision against them.78 Marcus was not at all acquainted with the boys or their families but believed that their constitutional rights had been violated.79 He later remarked on the incident, “I came out of this experience battered and bruised, but unshaken in my conviction that citizens who feel deeply about civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have an obligation of citizenship to speak out loudly, if we are to preserve them.”80 He again broke social ground by using African American models in store catalogs, and in 1968, wrote his suppliers that Neiman Marcus would favor affirmative action and equal opportunity employers over those who discriminated.81 The study of Stanley Marcus and the Neiman Marcus store adds a fascinating dimension to the ongoing discussion of the impact of consumer culture on society, commerce, gender, and race. In as much as he fashioned a public persona, it eclipsed his private one. Thus, not unlike Simmel’s stranger, Marcus’s act of assimilation and his public refashioning placed his personal biography beyond the embrace of elegance, education, and liberal politics. Not until the 1974 publication of his memoir, Minding the Store, did Marcus discuss (in a highly selective fashion) his own experience with discrimination fifty years prior. Yet it would be difficult to entirely dismiss the particular social trajectory of his family, which sought its fortune in a new industry much like many other Jewish immigrants at a time when Jews continued to be socially segregated in the city. Excluded from many social clubs, Jews of Dallas had formed their own social networks, religious institutions, private schools, and even social clubs, like the Columbian Country Club, founded in 1884. Moreover, the culture of elegance helped to promote a more inclusive model of society, not based on descent or faith-based communities but on haute couture and culture.

Notes 1. Gerhard Falk, The German Jews in America: A Minority within a Minority (Lanham, MD, 2014), 9–10; Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (New York, 1994); and Hasia Diner, The Jews in the United States (Berkeley, CA, 2004), 64. 2. Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001 (Austin, TX, 2006), 52; and Leon Joseph Rosenberg, “Sanger

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Brothers—Forward with Texas since 1857,” Nebraska Journal of Economics and Business 8, no. 3 (1969): 104–10. 3. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1989); and for immigrants coming to Texas to seek new opportunities, see Natalie Ornish, Pioneer Jewish Texans: Their Impact on Texas and American History for Four Hundred Years, 1590–1990 (Dallas, TX, 1989), 272–75. 4. Stanley Marcus, Minding the Store: A Memoir (Denton, TX, 1997), 28; Stephanie Hinnershitz, “Carrie Marcus Neiman (1883–1853),” Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, updated October 10, 2013, https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry. php?rec=159; and interview of Mrs. Minnie Marcus, Dallas Jewish Historical Society, p. 3. 5. Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” International Quarterly 10 (October 1904): 130–55; Georg Simmel, “The  Stranger,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolf (New York, 1950), 402–8; and Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden, 2nd ed. (London, 2003), 12–19. 6. Stanley Marcus, Quest for the Best (New York, 1985), 4. 7. Andrew R.  Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990); Susan L. Braunstein and Jenna Weissman Joselit, eds., Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880–1950 (New York, 1990); Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York, 2000). 8. Yet exceptions did exist and ethnicity too shaped the new visual culture in which ideals of beauty, gender, and race were constructed. Stars such as Hans Albers, Josephine Baker, and Anna May Wong encapsulated new racial ideals. See Pablo Dominguez, “Film Stars as Embodiments of Gender, Nation and Race, 1918–1939,” (PhD diss., Heidelberg University, 2012). 9. “Miss Austria: Off for Galveston,” New York Times, May 12, 1929, E2; and “Miss Universe Jeered in Rumania as Too Thin: Austrian Jewish Beauty Seeks Refuge in Cathedral and Police Rescue Her,” New York Times, August 30, 1929, 2. See also Miss Universe 1929—Lisl Goldarbeiter: A Queen in Wien, dir. Peter Forgacs, 2006; and Kerry Wallach, “‘Recognition for the Beautiful Jewess’: Beauty Queens Crowned by Modern Jewish Print Media,” in Globalizing Beauty: Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne (New York, 2013), 131–50.

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10. Nancy Nenno, “Femininity, the Primitive, and Modern Urban Space: Josephine Baker in Berlin,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katherina von Ankum (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 45–161. 11. Marcus, Quest for the Best, 155. 12. William Schack, “Neiman-Marcus of Texas Couture and Culture,” Commentary, September 1, 1957. 13. Prudence Mackintosh, “Tastemaker of the Century—Helen Corbitt,” Texas Monthly, December 1999. 14. Don M.  Coerver and Linda B.  Hall, “Neiman-Marcus: Innovators in Fashion and Merchandising,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 66, no. 1 (September 1976), 123–36, here 136. 15. Handbook of Texas Online, Joan Jenkins Perez, “Marcus, Herbert,” http:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fma42. 16. Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), 79. 17. Marcus, Minding the Store, 264. 18. Marcus, Minding the Store, 264. 19. Interview of Stanley Marcus, January 28, 1992, conducted by Robert Beer, The Dallas Jewish Historical Society, Oral History Collection, AO 80.45, p. 11. 20. Script from the WBAP-TV station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story about the Dallas Friends of the National Jewish Hospital, December 9, 1954, KXAS-NBC 5 News Collection, UNT Libraries Special Collections to The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/ metadc772230/m1/1/. 21. Marcus, Minding the Store, 31. 22. Interview of Stanley Marcus, p. 5. 23. Interview of Stanley Marcus, pp. 4–5. 24. Marcus, Minding the Store, 23. 25. Marcus, Minding the Store, 38; and interview of Stanley Marcus, p. 5. 26. Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston, MA, 2005), 88. 27. Marcus, Minding the Store, 24 and 27. 28. Interview of Stanley Marcus, p. 5. 29. Richard Brettell, “The Nonesuch Library of Stanley Marcus,” in The Art of the Book: A Centennial Tribute to Stanley Marcus, Bibliophile, ed. Richard R.  Brettell and Russell L.  Martin III (Dallas, TX, 2005); and Marcus, Minding the Store, 25. 30. David Farmer, Stanley Marcus: A Life with Books (Forth Worth, TX, 1993), 16. 31. Farmer, Stanley Marcus, 17. 32. Farmer, Stanley Marcus, 18.

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33. The dean of the English department, Beaty, permitted Smith to return in his former capacity in the School of Comparative Literature. Farmer, Stanley Marcus, A Life with Books, 19. 34. Marcus, Minding the Store, 254. 35. Marcus, Minding the Store, 11. 36. Marcus, Minding the Store, 28; and interview of Stanley Marcus, 5. 37. Farmer, Stanley Marcus, A Life with Books, 15. 38. Marcus, Minding the Store, 73–74. 39. Marcus, Quest for the Best, 155. 40. Marcus, Minding the Store, 29. 41. Marcus, Minding the Store, 265. 42. Marcus, Minding the Store, 144. 43. See the various contributions in Legacies: A Historical Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas 23, no. 1 (Spring 2011). 44. Marcus, Minding the Store, 67 and 74–77. 45. Harris, Merchant Princes, 182. 46. Louis Kronenberger, “Dallas in Wonderland,” Fortune, November 1936; and Marcus, Minding the Store, 77–78. 47. Selma Robinson, Colliers, September 16, 1939; and Marcus, Minding the Store, 78–79. 48. Phillips, White Metropolis. 49. Coerver Hall, Neiman-Marcus,  127 and “Fashions: Mr. Stanley Knows Best,” Time Magazine, September 21, 1953. 50. Selma Robinson, Colliers, September 16, 1939; and Marcus, Minding the Store, 78–79. 51. David L. Cohen, “Dallas,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1940, 453–60. 52. “Texas: Neiman Marcus Store. A Fashion Center,” Life, September 3, 1945, 78–85. 53. Marcus, Minding the Store, 18–19; and Phillips, White Metropolis, 132 and 141–42. 54. Barbara Ravkind, “Herbert Marcuse,” Junior Historian 12, no. 1 (September 1951): 17–18. 55. Peggy Louise Jones, “Gauguin Name and His Fame Color Exhibit,” Dallas Morning News, February 1, 1948. 56. “Twelve Oils by Picasso to be Shown,” Dallas Morning News, September 30, 1948. 57. Stanley Marcus, “Introduction,” in Some Businessmen Collect Contemporary Art: An Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings by American and European Artists from Private Collections of American Professional and Business Men, ed. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (Dallas, TX, 1952), Dallas Museum of Art Exhibition Records, The Portal to Texas History, http://texashistory.unt. edu/ark:/67531/metapth183366/.

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58. Marcus, Minding the Store, 153–54. 59. Script from the WBAP-TV station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story about an exhibition of portraits by Hungarian artist Marcel Vertes at a Neiman-Marcus store in Dallas, March 29, 1951, KXAS-NBC 5 News Collection, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc700434/. 60. Coerver and Hall, “Neiman-Marcus,” 132. 61. Marcus, Minding the Store, 206. 62. Neiman-Marcus 50th Anniversary Celebration, SMU Archive. 63. These cities still actively collaborated as late as the 2010 exhibition of Dijon funerary sculptures, The Mourners, at the Dallas Museum of Art. 64. Thomas E. Alexander, Stanley Marcus: The Relentless Reign of a Merchant Prince (Waco, TX, 2009), 58–59. 65. On the construction of Frenchness in postwar America, see the very insightful book by Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago, IL, 2007). 66. “Merchandising: Dallas in Wonderland,” Time Magazine, October 28, 1957. 67. “Merchandising: Dallas in Wonderland.” 68. Schack, “Neiman-Marcus”. 69. Marcus, Minding the Store, 72. 70. Script from the WBAP-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story about two Great Danes staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas while they attend the Neiman-Marcus Danish Fortnight, October 17, 1964, KXAS-NBC 5 News Collection, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ ark:/67531/metadc965990/. 71. Alexander, Stanley Marcus, 56–83. 72. “Opportunity for Fashion Career Offered by Neiman-Marcus Co,” The Megaphone, January 29, 1947, 5. 73. Marcus, Minding the Store, 261. 74. Marcus, Minding the Store, 252. 75. “The Unspoken Speech, Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Dallas Trade Mart by President John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963,” Stanley Marcus Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. 76. Stanley Marcus, “What’s Right with Dallas?” Stanley Marcus Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX; and “Dallas Urged to Reject ‘Absolutism’,” New York Times, January 2, 1964, 21. 77. Script from the WBAP-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story about 2000 uniforms being made for the 1964 Democratic National Convention, July 22, 1964, KXAS-NBC 5 News Collection, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc960625/.

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78. Michael E. Young, “In ’66, Their Hair Triggered a To-Do; Stylish Marcus Proved an Ally in Band’s Battle to Keep Locks Long,” Dallas Morning News, March 4, 2002, 1A. 79. Marcus, Minding the Store, 254. 80. Marcus, Minding the Store, 261. 81. Blumenthal, “Dallas Comes to Terms with the Day That Defined It”; Harris, Merchant Princes, 194; “Retailing: Time to Get Involved,” Time Magazine, January 19, 1968; and Isidore Barmash, “Neiman-Marcus to Favor Minority-Hiring Suppliers,” New York Times, January 10, 1968, 55.

PART II

Jewish Consumer Cultures

CHAPTER 6

Buy Me a Mink: Jews, Fur, and Conspicuous Consumption Kerry Wallach

In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (written 1912, published 1915), just after Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect (ungeheures Ungeziefer), he looks around his bedroom: “Above the table, where an unpacked collection of cloth samples was arranged (Samsa was a traveling salesman), hung the picture he had recently clipped from a glossy magazine and placed in an attractive gilt frame. This picture showed a lady in a fur hat and fur boa who sat erect, holding out to the viewer a heavy fur muff in which her entire forearm had vanished.”1 That the image was “recently clipped” hints at both the transformative powers of fur-clad women—perhaps Samsa’s new obsession with this woman was related to his sudden metamorphosis—and the animalistic nature of the drive to consume and possess eroticized bodies that are just out of reach.2 Although Kafka’s Metamorphosis makes no explicit references to Jewishness, a number of clues open up questions about its subtexts. In the 1910s, Kafka was

K. Wallach (*) German Studies, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_6

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working through his own complex relationship to Jewishness and Zionism, and many of his works bear traces of this. If we interpret Gregor Samsa as a figure who is coded as Jewish, in part through his occupation as a traveling salesman, this scene takes on new layers of meaning.3 Kafka’s protagonist goes from human to presumed animal shortly after surrendering to the desire to idolize both fur and its wearer. The capitalistic trend of acquiring wealth becomes further entangled with the politics of overconsumption and conspicuous displays of luxury goods made from animals.4 By extension, Jewish dealings with fur are mired in a complex web of associations ranging from primal and traditional to fashionable and opulent. From mink to sable and stole to shtreimel, distinctive fur objects have been part of Jewish material culture and religious life for centuries. Indeed, Jewishness has become intertwined on many levels with literary, cinematic, and other cultural narratives about the conspicuous consumption and display of fur objects. Yet the roles of Jews and Jewishness have largely been neglected in the historical scholarship on fur, with the exception of several studies that examine Jewish involvement in fur workers’ unions.5 From a methodological perspective, I maintain that understanding cultures of consumption requires some understanding of production, and that examining culture in light of economic processes deepens our understanding of its broader significance. To establish links between production and consumption in my analysis, I draw on cultural discourses and historical research on Jewish involvement in the fur industry, which have shaped our understanding of how fur has been introduced and circulated in various locations. I focus on cultural texts (literary works, films, television shows) produced in Europe and the United States during an era of peak fur production and key fashion trends, from the 1890s to the 1930s. I also touch on the recurrence of some key motifs in the 1950s, in addition to a few more recent debates. To some extent, this essay offers a meditation on the ways Jews interacted with fashionable luxury objects in the vein of Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2008). As with other elements of fashion, representations of fur are highly gendered. Until the late 1800s, fur was associated mainly with providing warmth and serving as East European Jewish men’s religious and traditional garb, which was modeled on the attire of seventeenth-century Russian and Polish nobility. In some cultural representations, men who wear fur hats or coats are immediately coded as East European Jews. As

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women’s fashions shifted worldwide and the demand for and access to fur increased among the middle class in the 1910s and 1920s, fur came to signify belonging to the mainstream “smart set” of New York and other major cities, and, in some cases, the sexualization of women’s bodies. In many instances, valued fur objects serve as a currency for purchasing affection, health, sexual relations, status, or power, often intertwined with allegations of excessive or conspicuous consumption that pertained to Jewish women in particular. Whereas Jewish men often are imbued with the capacity to produce, trade, sell, and also consume, Jewish women wrapped in furs are depicted and interpreted pejoratively as social-climbing, selfish, and voracious consumers. Representations of Jewish women stand in contrast to their fur-wearing non-Jewish counterparts, whose furs symbolized prosperity and elegance. As the anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell has demonstrated, it was the stereotypical figure of the Jewish American Princess who was most likely to insist that someone buy her a mink.6 In other words, simply wearing—or even just desiring—a fur coat was enough to code women as Jewish in certain instances. In addition, images of fur consumption by Jewish women and men both perpetuated and complicated widespread notions of Jewish difference. This included stereotypical and sometimes antisemitic images of religious or allegedly ostentatious Jews, as well as allegations that Jews were too materialistic, capitalistic, or economically prosperous. Jews in expensive-­looking furs and jewelry were likely to be called out as too visible: Wearing luxury goods perpetuated stereotypes about visible otherness that had long shaped constructions of Jewishness as a racial or ethnic category. This visibility was bound up with a critique of Jewish conspicuousness that extended beyond—but was inextricable from—the realm of the material.7 In both Europe and the United States, Jewish women regularly came under fire for displaying luxury goods, which, according to both antisemitic stereotypes and some inner-Jewish discourses, was tantamount to calling attention to themselves as Jews. But it was not only through wearing fur that Jews became associated with these luxury garments; they had long been deeply involved in its production and distribution.



Jewish Involvement in the Fur Industry

Because Jews were significantly overrepresented in the European fur trade beginning at least with the seventeenth century, they have long been associated with both the production and distribution sides of the industry.

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Most of the sables, foxes, and martens exported from Russia to Western Europe came through Leipzig or London, many by way of trade networks in Posen, Cracow, and other cities in Central and Eastern Europe.8 Estimates suggest that Jews were responsible for as much as half of the German fur market prior to the Nazi rise to power.9 Such numbers, even if inflated, serve as a reflection of popular sentiment surrounding the industry: For many, Jewish involvement in the fur trade, as in the ready-­ to-­wear clothing sector (Konfektion), was emblematic of Jewish mercantile success and therefore cause for resentment. The German city of Leipzig became a major center of the fur trade in part because of its geographic location and renowned trade fairs. In addition, it attracted a sizable population of East European Jewish immigrants who arrived after the Leipzig Jewish community was officially established in 1847. In downtown Leipzig, the Brühl fur-trading district served as a seat of operations for many Jewish merchants, including many from Eastern Europe (Fig. 6.1). Historian Jack Wertheimer has suggested that

Fig. 6.1  The Brühl, Leipzig Fur District, ca. 1920s. (Source: Leipzig Jewish Community Collection, Leo Baeck Institute, Photograph F9629. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute)

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Galician Jews based in Leipzig “served as a major conduit of trade in furs between Germany and the East,” noting that at the turn of the twentieth century, East European Jewish immigrants possessed fifteen of the twenty-­ nine fur concerns owned by Jews in Leipzig.10 By the 1920s, there were over 500 Jewish fur traders, processors, and furriers in Leipzig, or about 58 percent of fur traders, and 40 percent of the Leipzig fur industry in general.11 To put it another way, about one out of ten Jews in Leipzig worked in the fur industry.12 Chaim Eitingon (1857–1932) and Max Ariowitsch (1880–1969) were among the “kings of the Brühl.” The “Brühl” became a code name for “Jewish evil” and was the target of several antisemitic attacks in the early 1920s.13 Chaim Eitingon, who was also the leading German fur wholesaler, was known as the “Rothschild from Leipzig.” Chaim’s son, Max, was an associate of Sigmund Freud and used money inherited from his family’s fur business to establish the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic (1920) and a psychoanalytic society and training institute in Jerusalem (1933).14 After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, leaders of the international fur trade expressed outrage at German persecution of Jews in the fur trade, in part because they believed it would endanger the whole industry.15 At the request of the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights, over twenty-five different fur associations and clubs in the United States joined the National Council of Fur Trade Organizations, which was established to help German Jewry. In July 1933, the Council organized a boycott of German firms.16 Jewish families began to lose their businesses well before the German fur industry underwent a process of forced “Aryanization” in 1938, and the industry’s European center shifted from Leipzig to London. A wave of Jewish fur merchants relocated from Leipzig to England around 1934.17 Many other Jews who maintained involvement with the fur industry after the 1930s were based in the United States. It is worth noting that immigration to Palestine essentially precluded working with fur, since there was little place in that region for either the fur trade or luxury objects that provided warmth.18 Jews had already played a critical role in the establishment of the modern fur industry in both the United States and Canada in the Gilded Age.19 Along with many non-Jews, European Jewish merchants who immigrated to the United States in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries traded imported goods for pelts procured by Native Americans. The demand for fur first shifted drastically in the 1880s, when fashions changed and the middle class began wearing fur coats and accessories. Trade

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followed and expanded rapidly in the 1890s. In the twentieth century, Jews were highly visible as both fur manufacturers and merchants, and they were also at the forefront of American fur workers’ unions.20 East European Jews constituted the largest ethnic group in the New York City fur manufacturing industry by 1910; about 70 percent of the 10,000 workers engaged in the industry at this time were Jews.21 Many were impoverished immigrants working in filthy sweatshops in tenement buildings, as was the case for many garment industry workers too. The working conditions were so poor that investigations by New York health commissions determined that eight out of every ten fur workers suffered from such occupational diseases as tuberculosis, asthma, bronchitis, eye sores, and skin disease. Mercury poisoning was also common.22 Not surprisingly, given their positions in trade unionizing in general, Jews played major roles in early organized attempts to improve working conditions in the fur industry. Many applied previous experience in organizing for East European radical movements to their new situations in the United States. During the fur workers’ strike of 1912, the Yiddish newspaper, Forverts (Forward), collected thousands of dollars in donations for furriers.23 Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923) helped create a sweatshop poem genre that focused on dehumanizing and brutal working conditions to agitate for social protest. A poem of his about fur was sung at mass meetings.24 Rosenfeld noted that the luxurious furs the workers toiled over did not keep them warm: It may be the best fur But it amounts to no good. It warms us not, oh no! We cut and we sew And have only sorrow and pain And hunger and weeping…. We will slave no more. The strong will no longer sleep over the damned fur.25

Jewish labor leaders such as Ben Gold (1898–1985) headed the International Fur Workers’ Union, which was founded in 1913. In fact, the union’s bimonthly journal, The Fur Worker, was published in both English and Yiddish, and the Yiddish edition published articles that specifically addressed Jewish involvement in trade unionism.26 One

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agreement negotiated by the union in 1917 made special provisions for observant Jews; for example, firms could substitute Jewish holidays for legal holidays and close on Yom Kippur instead of Columbus Day, or Saturdays instead of Sundays.27 Jews numbered prominently among the retailers of fur goods in the United States. In addition, a number of famous Jews enjoyed careers in or connections to the fur industry. One widely known example was film mogul Adolph Zukor (1873–1976), who made his start as a furrier before founding Paramount Studios.28 The grandparents of photographer Diane Arbus were the founders of Russeks Furs (in 1897), which went on to become a well-known Fifth Avenue department store and was known for its innovative approaches to fur garments, such as silver fox furs, fur cardigans, and bleached mink.29 Major department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman also became known for their fur departments. Along with many other businesses, nearly half of the 2,855 Jewish-owned fur stores in New York were forced to close in the early 1930s because of the Great Depression.30 As others in Europe sought to assign blame for hardships suffered in the 1930s and 1940s, the fact that the fur industry was viewed as primarily Jewish-owned resulted in special resentment toward Jews who wore fur or who were involved in its trade or distribution. Furs, especially fur coats, were among the valuable possessions regularly confiscated from Jews during the Holocaust. In some Polish ghettos, specific actions ordered Jews to surrender all clothing made of fur, which left many without anything to keep them warm.31 Antisemitic associations of Jews with fur played out in different ways. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described someone whose negative experiences with furriers, in Sartre’s estimation, had prompted antisemitic feelings: “A young woman said to me: ‘I have had the most horrible experiences with furriers; they robbed me, they burned the fur I entrusted to them. Well, they were all Jews.’”32 Sartre emphasized the fact that this woman came to hate Jews and not furriers. To be sure, Jewish involvement in fur production and distribution, as well as the disproportionately high percentage of Jews in the fur industry in both Europe and the United States, led to controversial connections between Jewishness and fur. In part due to its conspicuous nature as a luxury object, fur also found its way into many representations of Jews in a variety of contexts, though of course, it was also representative of prosperity and wealth in a general sense.

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Representations of Jewish Fur Wearers in German and Eastern European Contexts In addition to their prominent position as fur retailers, Jews have long been among the more visible consumers of fur in the form of traditional objects and luxury goods. Until the late nineteenth century, the Western European imaginary regularly depicted Hasidic and other East European Jewish men in fur hats and coats: Men wearing fur were key to notions of Jewish otherness through distinctive dress, and fur came to serve as a visual signifier of Jewishness. For example, the titles of several seventeenth-­ century Rembrandt works suggest that others may have ascribed Jewishness to certain male subjects wearing fur caps in his paintings and drawings.33 The fact that a gray beard and long fur coat serve as the primary distinguishing features of the unnamed Polish Jew in Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s popular novel, Life of the Swedish Countess of G—(1747–1748), suggests that fur played a role in coding its wearers as Jewish.34 In a similar vein, Heinrich Heine, in an 1823 work, describes Polish Jews as mumbling, fur-clad, and smelling of garlic—and, though he deems their fur hats “barbaric” and their fur coats “dirty,” Heine ironically comments that he prefers these East European Jews to bourgeois German Jews.35 For Heine, fur represented the opposite of bourgeois civilization, and the men who wore it were more like animals than like Germans. Later stereotypes about East European Jews relied on similar notions, often characterizing Eastern Jews as primitive or “unhygienic.” In Yiddish literature, by contrast, fur is a common trope with connotations of warmth, comfort, wealth, religiosity, and respect. Shtreimels— large hats made from sable, mink, or fox fur—were traditionally worn by rabbis; today, they are worn by men in many ultra-Orthodox communities on the Sabbath and on holidays.36 Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz’s 1894 story, “The Shtrayml,” locates the power of the Hasidic rabbi wearing a shtreimel in the hat itself.37 Peretz satirizes older Hasidic traditions by underscoring the arbitrary nature of their decisions. The story is told from the perspective of a shtreimel maker who rarely has the opportunity to craft such an important garment. For instance, he comments: “when [my wife] takes a perfectly good pot and throws it out onto the street, it’s really my shtrayml that threw it out!… I know that my shtrayml rules over millions and millions of pious women!”38 Peretz’s technique of anthropomorphizing a fur hat attacks the reverence shown to the select men who wore shtreimels, as well as the heightened visibility and power they enjoyed

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while wearing fur hats. Fur is both a symbol of male, religious power and itself a powerful object. Whereas fur was associated with Jewish men in religious Eastern European contexts, it was more often associated with women in secular Western European and American contexts. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the proliferation of stereotypes about Jewish women and opulence, and Jewish women who wore furs were often eroticized, objectified, or harshly criticized. At the same time, women also were deemed culpable for coveting these luxuries, which were perceived as a special kind of consumption that needed to be controlled or managed.39 Still, as we see in the stories of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), women’s bodies at times take on new abilities when clad in fur. Best known for his erotic novella, Venus in Furs (1870), which notably does not feature a Jewish woman, Sacher-Masoch focused more intensively on the relationships of Jews to fur in his collection of stories titled Jewish Life in Word and Image (1891). The accompanying line drawings complement the text and give visual form to literary descriptions of East European Jews in furs. Only one story focuses on a fur coat owned by a Jewish man, in which a town jokester pawns his heavy fur coat for a short time so as not to be burdened with it while walking.40 Several other stories focus on Jewish women whose luxurious fur coats position them at the center of attention. Historian David Biale has termed Sacher-Masoch a “philosemite in furs,” noting that some of his Jewish stories serve as a vehicle for erotic fantasies.41 Indeed, in the story “Schimmel Knofeles,” a fur coat renders a married Galician Jewish woman visible to a would-be suitor. After donning a magnificent fur jacket, Zebedia, the beautiful protagonist whose husband “too much resembled the Jewish caricatures she saw in the Viennese satirical newspapers,” finds herself the object of Graf Gorewski’s unwanted attention. Eventually, she arranges a secret meeting with the count, only to lock him up in a cage as a punishment.42 Ingenuity notwithstanding, Zebedia fits the mold of the Jewish woman whose beauty and elegance, facilitated in part by posh fur clothing, hold appeal for non-­ Jewish men. Likewise, another showy fur jacket (prächtige Pelzjacke) plays a central role in Sacher-Masoch’s story “Frau Leopard,” in which a Polish Jewish woman’s coat takes on animalistic power and helps her gain the upper hand. She tricks an antisemite into dressing up like a Jewish tailor who was sentenced to a beating because he couldn’t repay outstanding debts. The

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real tailor makes her a “jacket of crimson velvet, lined with ermine, that nestled softly against her svelte body.”43 While wearing this jacket, Frau Leopard is able to distract the town antisemite long enough for him to take the beating meant for the tailor. In this story, it is a Jewish tailor who fashions a fur-trimmed jacket (Kazabaika) at a Jewish woman’s request; the man is the enabler of the woman’s animalistic powers of seduction and vindication. In both Sacher-Masoch stories, Jewish women wearing fur coats are faulted for attracting the male gaze, yet they also deflect it by punishing the men who fall prey to this attraction. Other fur-wearing Jewish protagonists who find themselves the objects of similarly unwanted advances also must bear the burden of resistance and deflection. One example can be found in the 1929 film version of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, Fräulein Else (1924), directed by Paul Czinner and starring Jewish actress Elisabeth Bergner. Whereas Schnitzler’s novella codes nineteen-year-old Else as Jewish to the trained reader, it describes her coat only as a “big black coat, which covers [her] completely.”44 Yet in Czinner’s film version, the coat transforms into a large white fur coat that itself plays a role in the visual composition of the story.45 The purifying white fur conceals and protects Else’s eroticized body, which the viewer barely glimpses for a split second. When Else removes the coat to stand naked before Herr von Dorsday, who desires to “see” her in exchange for the sum that her bankrupt father desperately needs to avoid imprisonment, Else removes herself from the situation with a fatal overdose of sleeping medicine. If Jewishness is present in this film, it is established only through veiled stereotypes about wealthy, privileged Jews and their “Jewish princess” daughters. In this as in other German-language texts, Jewish women take the fall for the shortcomings of male family members, and fur serves to make them more visible targets.



Global Fashions, Visible Consumers, and Fur on Display

The consumption of fur luxury goods became mainstream in the early twentieth century, when fur coats, fur-trimmed collars and sleeves, and fur stoles were in vogue the world over. Coats made not necessarily of mink, but rather of muskrat or rabbit, became available to the masses by the 1920s. One editor of British Fur Trade suggested in 1923 that two-thirds of women of all social classes were wearing fur or fur-trimmed garments.46

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The plotline of German author Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) revolves around the desire of working-class women to wear fur, both to stay warm and to elevate their status. Keun’s impoverished protagonist, Doris, who at one point is taken for a Jew due to her dark hair, covets a fur coat so badly that she steals one in order to fulfill this uncontrollable longing.47 Historian Jenna Weissman Joselit has suggested that a fur coat in the United States symbolized the country’s “bounty and beauty” and an immigrant’s ability to experience the American dream.48 For some Jews, this meant women could afford to wear “jewelry and furs on the Sabbath.”49 Still, those who fulfilled this dream and proudly wore their fur coats in public were often criticized. Jewish women in Europe and the United States were often faulted with calling attention to themselves as Jews through the display of luxury goods. Both antisemitic stereotypes and some inner-Jewish discourses suggested that the conspicuousness of luxury objects such as fur was immodest and reprehensible. European sumptuary laws had mandated Jewish dress for centuries, and Jewish communities, too, sought to discourage showiness in order to emphasize modesty or prevent envy.50 Along with such items as velvet jackets, silk dresses, ostrich feathers, pearls, gold threads, and silver buckles, fur had often made the list of restricted material goods in earlier centuries. In some cases, like the 1691 Metz law that prohibited women in the Jewish community from wearing fur around the neck, luxury goods were permitted as long as they remained hidden.51 Adornments made out of certain types of fur, including sable and ermine, were expressly banned in one luxury ordinance (Luxusverbot) from 1715, reflecting the fact that wearing fur was often reserved for the nobility and symbolized a kind of royal power in early modern Europe.52 Jewish communities continued to call for clothing restrictions into the twentieth century, often with a gendered component. In 1922, for example, a self-proclaimed Jewish “Self-Discipline Organization” in Berlin distributed pamphlets warning Jewish women “to avoid all showy luxury in clothing and jewelry,” an implicit reference to fur.53 On a broader scale, the German-Jewish press regularly discussed women’s attire and emphasized modesty and plainness over “displays of exterior belongings,” which supposedly “betray[ed] a lack of inner wealth.”54 The unpleasant phenomenon of the “Luxury Woman” was often coded as Jewish, including by luminaries such as Walter Rathenau. Consequently, accusations circulated that “tactless” Jewish women wearing conspicuous jewelry and furs had provoked a major antisemitic attack in Berlin in 1931.55 Another “fur coat

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affair” emerged when Berlin Mayor Gustav Böß was accused of embezzling funds to buy his Jewish wife a fur coat in conjunction with the Sklarek Brothers Scandal (this plays a role in the second season of the German television show Babylon Berlin, from 2017). In a similar vein, Riv-Ellen Prell has argued that Jewishness became synonymous with excess in representations of Jewish women, especially the American “Ghetto Girl.”56 At least one series of British observational scientific studies claimed to have found a correlation between Jewishness and luxury that was supported by empirical evidence. The studies concluded that, compared to Cockneys, a higher proportion of Jewish women were smartly dressed and likely to be found wearing fur coats and high-heeled shoes.57 To put it another way, from the early modern period to the present, a great deal of attention has been paid to what Jews wear, especially Jewish women, and a broad range of both Jews and non-Jews were particularly likely to notice (and comment) whenever Jewish women wore fur. Yet even while criticizing female consumers, both mainstream and Jewish publications pronounced fur a means for women to exhibit modern elegance and good taste. Whereas images of the fashionable German New Woman of the 1920s were not explicitly coded Jewish, her dark hair and other features rendered her “Jewish-enough,” as historian Darcy Buerkle has argued.58 Among the firms that advertised in a range of both mainstream and German-Jewish periodicals were Bernhard Bauch (Munich), Carl Salbach (Berlin), and C.  A. Herpich Sons (Berlin). The Frankfurt-­ based Landsberg & Co. fur goods factory even advertised a prize contest pertaining to women’s coats. Readers of the C.V.-Zeitung, the newspaper of the liberal Centralverein, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, were invited to submit an “attractive invented term” (zugkräftiges Phantasiewort) that could serve as the name of a newly patented fur coat.59 The firm C. A. Herpich Sons was known for the fact that its Leipziger Straße store in Berlin had been redesigned by Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn in the late 1920s. Herpich’s storefront possessed especially large windows and innovatively lit nighttime displays, which made furriers and their wares highly visible within of one of Weimar Berlin’s central commercial districts.60 Its ads in the C.V.-Zeitung featured images of the sleek, modern store; its products also kept up with current fur trends. An extant Herpich fox stole features the type of popular tail-in-­ mouth clasp that supposedly helped Adolph Zukor make his way into the film business (Fig. 6.2).61

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Fig. 6.2  Fox stole by C. A. Herpich & Söhne, ca. 1920s. (Courtesy of the Claus Jahnke Collection)

Furs also inhabited a central role in countless Hollywood films, including many with origins in the Jewish American literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Film scholar Jeanine Basinger has argued that films from the 1930s through the 1950s used over-the-top glamorous fur fashions to appeal to “the audience’s need to see things they could never have” by “displaying the star not only in a variety of fur coats, but also in fur hats, fur gloves, fur muffs, fur skirts, and fur-trimmed pajamas.”62 Whereas some works criticize women’s immodest or ostentatious uses of fur, others offer critiques of a system that privileges the acquisition of material goods over social welfare. In several of the later films made by German-Jewish director Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947), for example, fur objects highlight the extravagant wealth and irresponsible spending practices of female characters, including working-class women who struggle to afford furs or rely on others to purchase them. The best example is The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which opens with a comment by a female store employee about the

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eye-catching silver fox stole she is wearing: “I hesitated a long time before I bought it; I said, no, I can’t afford it, and still I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and then I said, no, I have no right to….” Another (male) employee interrupts her with the accusatory line: “And then he said, aw, go on and take it.”63 Although Jewishness is present only between the lines in most Lubitsch films, different backdrops of clothing and retail stores situate the action in a milieu that was coded Jewish for many viewers.64 Films and fiction about tenement life and Jewish immigrants on New  York’s Lower East Side offer additional insight into the tensions between fur as a fantasy object and its status as an attainable reality. Several of Fannie Hurst’s stories use fur both to show relative prosperity and to judge desire for these non-essential objects. In “White Goods,” department store shopgirl Sadie Barnet can afford a hat with only an “imitation fur pompom” even as she dreams of the security that a wealthy suitor could provide in the form of a “great big fur coat” and a “great big muff.”65 In “Humoresque,” Hurst’s story about the Yiddish-inflected experiences of the Kantor family, an internationally renowned singer, Gina Berg (a stage name created from her last name, Ginsberg), wears a fur coat and fur cap as symbols of her status.66 Similarly, in Anzia Yezierska’s story “The Fat of the Land” (part of the collection that inspired the 1922 film Hungry Hearts), when Hannah Breineh’s children become wealthy and move her uptown and out of the tenements, she goes back to visit old neighbors wearing her fur coat. Her ironically named former neighbor, Mrs. Pelz (Pelz means “fur” in German), chastises her: “Look on your fur coat; it alone would feed a whole family for a year. I never had yet a piece of fur trimming on a coat, and you are in fur from the neck to the feet.” Hannah Breineh responds: “All the fur coats in the world can’t warm up the loneliness inside my heart.”67 In Yezierska’s world, a fur coat holds the power to sustain by way of its monetary value, though as a mere material object it lacks the ability to bring happiness. Numerous films about American-Jewish immigrants similarly treat fur coats like currency, sometimes with the connotation of Eastern Europe. Fur operates as a kind of visual shorthand for Russia or Eastern Europe in the film Breaking Home Ties (Frank Seltzer and George Rowlands, 1922), which depicts its Jewish protagonists as wearing heavy fur coats to protect against the elements in Europe, but these coats disappear or are replaced with furless or merely fur-trimmed coats once they arrive in America. In His People (Edward Sloman, 1925), the father (Rudolph Schildkraut) visits a pawnbroker to trade his prized Russian fur coat for a suit for his son,

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who tragically discards the suit upon deciding that its quality is too poor.68 Both the fur coat and the second-hand suit represent the old world and the older generation; neither can offer the son what he needs to move up in America. And in the wildly popular Yiddish talkie, Uncle Moses (Sidney Goldin and Aubrey Scotto, 1932), based on Sholem Asch’s novel, a rich sweatshop boss with his own fur-trimmed coat tries to buy the affections of young Masha with gifts including chocolates, jewelry, and a fancy Brenner Brothers fur coat (Brenner Brothers was also credited with providing the gowns for this film). Whereas Masha’s mother is overjoyed by the lavish gifts, Masha ultimately determines that wealth doesn’t bring her enough happiness to justify staying with Uncle Moses. Masha figures as a character whose resistance to being “bought” challenges stereotypes, though for the majority of the film, her family uses her eligibility to improve their social status. While fur also figures as an important status symbol in literature and films about non-Jews, its associations with Eastern Europe and ostentatious Jewish women at times add another dimension to its symbolism. Fur coats continued to play a major role in the prosperous postwar culture of the 1950s, when Jewish Americans and Americans as a whole embraced conspicuous consumption more openly. Middle-class women aspired to own mink coats that, due to new breeding techniques, were available in a variety of colors and could even be chosen to match a woman’s hair color; however, many women gave little thought to where the coats came from.69 It was during this period that literary works such as Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (1955) reinforced the stereotype of a Jewish American Princess-type who lusts after fur coats in her quest to become the model bourgeois housewife.70 In this novel, fur is depicted as typical attire for synagogue-goers; it also figures as the apotheosis of middle-­class respectability for many Jewish immigrants and their descendants. These women may have been among the viewers of the popular television game show, The Big Payoff (1951–59), which featured Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America, as “America’s Lady in Mink” (Fig. 6.3). In every episode, Myerson—whose prize-winning body had been politicized in 1945 as a statement about Jewish ethnic belonging in America—modeled the coveted prize of a mink coat for male contestants hoping to win a variety of clothing prizes for their wives.71 Media Studies scholar Marsha Cassidy has argued that Myerson’s luxurious mink coat “represented a reassuring mantle of femininity that mitigated any

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Fig. 6.3  Bess Myerson as the “Lady in Mink,” 1954. (Source: Author’s private collection)

latent threat from her earlier powers of speech,” namely Myerson’s time as an activist against antisemitism.72 If mink had the power to suppress Myerson’s political impulses, it also had the ability to domesticate other 1950s women. In the popular film How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953), the Jewish undertones are subtle, but present. Ringleader Schatze Page (played by Jewish actress Lauren Bacall, born Betty Perske) suggests to her gold-digger friends that they are most likely to find rich husbands in the mink department at Bergdorf Goodman. In the end, Schatze (a name that marks Bacall’s character as Jewish or at least foreign) determines that she is “strictly a hamburger and onions dame,” though she wears her mink even at the greasy spoon burger joint. But here the onions recall Heine’s description of fur-clad East European Jews, who he argued smelled pungently of garlic. From the Russian furs sold at Leipzig fairs and in the Brühl fur-trading district to New York sweatshops and fur workers’ unions, Jews played

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important roles in the production and distribution of fur objects, including some that came to signify Jewishness. Until the late 1800s, fur coats and shtreimel hats symbolized East Europeanness and religious male power. Once fur coats and other garments became readily available for mass consumption, Jewish women consumers were accused of causing unwanted visibility. Due in part to its luxurious and distinctive nature, fur often renders its wearers conspicuously wealthy and also “Jewish” insofar as Jewishness is conflated with showiness and economic success. Further, real fur always implies something animalistic, if only the base desire for prosperity.73

Epilogue: Jews and Fur in the Twenty-First Century Fur has become more politicized in recent decades, and it is still connected to Jewish themes in some ways. Debates often combine discussions of Jewish values and the ethical treatment of animals. Women are regularly blamed for creating demand for fur fashions and thus for prompting the ethical dilemmas that accompany the slaughter of animals for their pelts.74 Numerous Jewish vegan or vegetarian animal rights and anti-fur activists have emerged in the past few decades, including Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, actress Alicia Silverstone, and American author Jonathan Safran Foer. The activist work of these and others has been incorporated into the campaigns of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), which include a “Humane Kosher” angle of argumentation.75 Some rabbis have also spoken out against wearing fur and leather.76 In fact, Israel nearly became the first country in the world to ban the fur trade. For five years, from 2009 to 2014, the world’s major fur associations fought to put down a bill in the Israeli Knesset that would have banned the fur trade entirely, with an exception for shtreimel hats worn by ultra-Orthodox men.77 Although the ban was never put into place, fur fashions remain controversial and continue to make headlines in Israeli and Jewish news outlets. In the twenty-first century, media depictions of Jewish women as obsessed with lavish furs are still surprisingly common, though not uncontested. Take, for instance, the extensive 2009 news media coverage of how Ponzi scheme perpetrator Bernie Madoff’s wife, Ruth, famously asked the federal marshals who seized her apartment if she could keep a fur coat for the coming winter.78 Many articles (including several published on antisemitic websites) mocked Ruth Madoff for this attempt to hold onto a piece of her life of luxury, and at the same time, painted her as a Jewish woman

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loathe to be separated from her fur. Television flops such as the short-­ lived, unironic reality show Princesses: Long Island (2013) further exacerbated stereotypes of Jewish women as grotesquely materialistic and superficial. Poor reviews of Princesses suggest its overtly unfavorable representations of “real” Jewish women’s social circles did not sit well with viewers. As if to underscore this point in a different way, the television show Mad Men punctuated the eighth episode of its final season with an opportunity for viewers to observe ad men as they watch women try on furs during a casting call. To be sure, Mad Men is replete with 1960s women in furs—advertising guru Don Draper even worked as a fur salesman before becoming an ad man—but it is ultimately one of the show’s few Jewish characters who holds the position of Don’s fantasy fur model. This episode, which takes place in April 1970 and first aired in April 2015, features a scene in which Don dreams about his former lover, Jewish department store heiress Rachel Katz (née Menken).79 In Don’s dream, Rachel enters his office wearing little but the $15,000 chinchilla fur coat that another model previously mistook for mink. While posing in front of the mirror, Rachel says, “I’m supposed to tell you: you missed your flight.” This line hints at Rachel’s unavailability and suggests her image holds a powerful position in his thoughts. Don soon learns that Rachel recently passed away, and he even makes a shiva call to pay his respects, though he is told he can’t complete the minyan because he isn’t Jewish. With this potent imagery of Rachel as a highly desirable woman who remains out of reach, Mad Men replicates established representations of eroticized Jewish women in furs and simultaneously confronts the viewer with the need for a new critical reading of such images. In the hundred years from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to Mad Men, images of women in fur have persisted in two main forms: (Jewish) women are either portrayed as culpable for desiring or flaunting such luxury objects, which allegedly call attention to stereotypical notions of Jewish opulence, or their bodies are exoticized and eroticized because of connections between fur and sensuality that date back at least to Sacher-Masoch. In both instances, women’s fashions are at the heart of debates about fur. Allegations of Jewish and especially Jewish women’s conspicuous consumption inform discourses about public displays of furs in arenas ranging from store windows to appropriate synagogue attire. The prominent roles of Jews in the fur industry have heightened overall awareness of Jewish economic success and entrepreneurship, and also have contributed to

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broader associations of Jews with furs. Sometimes a fur is just a fur, but other times it tells a story of immigrant aspirations and hardship, of forays into contemporary fashion worlds and animal rights conflicts, or of class and gender differences that reveal unequal power structures. And at times it calls to mind ascribed Jewish difference in the form of East European otherness, or the pervasive stereotype of the Jewish princess who insists that her wardrobe is incomplete without a mink.

Notes 1. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (New York, 2014), 22. 2. Several scholars draw an explicit parallel between Gregor Samsa and the protagonist in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. See David Gallagher, Metamorphosis: Transformations of the Body and the Influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Germanic Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Amsterdam, 2009), 119; and Julia Emberley, The Cultural Politics of Fur (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 93–94. 3. See Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison, WI, 2007), 96–97. Many Jews worked as peddlers in Europe, and German-­ Jewish peddlers were also common in the United States beginning in the 1840s. See Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 28; and Rowena Olegario, “‘That Mysterious People’: Jewish Merchants, Transparency, and Community in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Business History Review 73, no. 2 (1999): 161–89. 4. In addition to being sought after as luxury objects, they served the more quotidian aim of providing warmth. On the everyday use of furs, particularly beaver fur in the United States, see Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York, 2010). 5. See, for example, Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement, 1882–1914, 2nd ed. (New York, 1969); and Sandra Spingarn, Trade Unionism among the Jewish Workers in the Fur Manufacturing Industry in New York City, 1912–1929 (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamtom, 1994). 6. On stereotypes of the Jewish American Princess, see Riv-Ellen Prell, “Rage and Representation: Jewish Gender Stereotypes in American Culture,” in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston, MA, 1990), 248–66. 7. See, for example, German Romantic writer Achim von Arnim’s 1811 speech “On the Distinguishing Signs of Jewishness,” in which he maintains

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that it is always possible to spot a Jewish woman based on her tendency to wear jewelry. Achim von Arnim, “Über die Kennzeichen des Judenthums,” in Ludwig Achim von Arnim, Texte der deutschen Tischgesellschaft, ed. Stefan Nienhaus (Tübingen, 2008), 107–28, here 124. 8. See Raymond Henry Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700 (Berkeley, CA, 1943), 196–97; and Francis W. Carter, Trade and Urban Development in Poland: An Economic Geography of Cracow, from Its Origins to 1795 (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 231–35. 9. In some cases, statistics generated by antisemitic groups such as Adefa put the Jewish stake at 55%. See Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford, 2004), 159. 10. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York, 1987), 93. 11. In 1929, at least half of the roughly 800 fur traders in Leipzig were Jewish, and over 10% of the fur processors and furriers were Jewish. See Wilhelm Harmelin, “Jews in the Leipzig Fur Industry,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964): 239–66, here 255; Jon Gunnar Mølstre Simonsen, “Perfect Targets—Antisemitism and Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919–1923,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 51 (2006): 79–101, here 81; and Barbara Kowalzik, Jüdisches Erwerbsleben in der inneren Nordvorstadt Leipzigs, 1900–1933 (Leipzig, 1999). 12. Kerstin Plowinski, “Die jüdische Gemeinde Leipzig auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer Existenz: Zur Berufs- und Sozialstruktur um das Jahr 1925,” in Judaic Lipsiensia: Zur Geschichte der Juden von Leipzig (Leipzig, 1994), 79–91, here 81; and Barbara Kowalzik, Wir waren eure Nachbarn: Die Juden im Leipziger Waldstrassenviertel (Leipzig, 1996), 33. 13. Simonsen, “Perfect Targets,” 81 and 97. 14. Eran J.  Rolnik, Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London, 2012), xxxii, 9–12, 73–86. 15. See Harmelin, “Jews in the Leipzig Fur Industry,” 259–60. 16. Arthur Ray, The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age (Toronto, 1990), 135. See also Anne Schenderlein’s contribution to this volume. 17. Doron Niederland, “Areas of Departure from Nazi Germany and the Social Structure of the Emigrants,” in Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. Werner E. Mosse et al. (Tübingen, 1991), 57–68, here 62. 18. For example, Adolf Felsenstein, a Leipzig fur trader, retrained to be a plumber in order to immigrate to Palestine in 1935. See Fred Grubel and Frank Mecklenburg, “Leipzig: Profile of a Jewish Community during the First Years of Nazi Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42 (1997): 157–88, here 185. See also Jeffrey Veidlinger, “One Doesn’t Make Out

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Much with Furs in Palestine: The Migration of Jewish Displaced Persons, 1945–7,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, nos. 2–3 (2014): 241–52. 19. A 1939 study of Canadian Jews found that fur workers were the second largest occupational group (after women’s ready-made clothing) among Jews in 1931; they numbered about 1300 workers and constituted nearly one-third of all workers in the industry. Louis Rosenberg, Canada’s Jews: A Social and Economic Study of Jews in Canada in the 1930s, ed. Morton Weinfeld (Montreal, 1993), 178–79. 20. The United Hebrew Trades organized the first Jewish fur workers’ union in 1892, though this union dissolved in 1893. Eleven years later, in 1904, the UHT launched the International Fur Workers Union of New  York. Epstein, Jewish Labor in U.S.A., 410. 21. Robert D.  Leiter, “The Fur Workers Union,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 3, no. 2 (1950): 163–86, here 167. Moses Rischin notes that the number of fur goods establishments grew parallel to the clothing industry, and that between 1890 and 1900, the number of fur goods establishments in New York grew from 60 to 232. By the beginning of the First World War, there were 912 fur shops. See Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 63, 67. 22. These studies were conducted in 1911 and 1915. See Philip S. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers Union: A Story of Dramatic Struggles and Achievements (Newark, NJ, 1950), 41; and Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 15–16 and 376, n31. 23. Sources differ on the exact amount raised by the Forward, between $20,000 and $40,000. See Foner, Fur and Leather, 46; and Spingarn, Trade Unionism, 111, 132–33. 24. Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse, NY, 2007), ix. 25. Cited in Sandra Spingarn, “Jews and the International Fur Workers’ Union,” Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, ed. Eunice G.  Pollack and Stephen H.  Norwood (Santa Barbara, CA, 2008), 362–65; and Spingarn, Trade Unionism, 111, 132–33. 26. See, for example, A. Steinhorn, “Jewish Strikers and Jewish Union Men,” Fur Worker, Jewish edition, February 20, 1917. Cited in Spingarn, Trade Unionism, 166. Occasional columns also appeared in the journal in Italian, German, and French. Foner, Fur and Leather, 61. 27. Polenberg, Fighting Faiths, 14. 28. Neal Gabler, Frank Rich, and Joyce Antler, Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (New York, 2000), 5. On Zukor, see also Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988), 15–18.

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29. On the history of Russeks, see Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York, 2005), 3–8. Arbus’s own supposed fascination with fur is also the subject of a bizarre film, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, directed by Steven Shainberg (2006), starring Nicole Kidman. 30. Henry L.  Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945 (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 147. See also Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, CT, 1996), 20. 31. Helene Sinnreich, “Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives of World War II– Era Ghettos,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (New York, 2011), 115–24, here 116–17. 32. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1995), 11–12. 33. Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago, IL, 2003), 51–54. 34. See Ritchie Robertson, The “Jewish Question” in German Literature 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents (New York, 1999), 33–34. 35. Heinrich Heine, Über Polen, ed. Michael Holzinger (Berlin, 2014), 7–8. 36. Eric Silverman, A Cultural History of Jewish Dress (New York, 2013), 120–23. 37. Because Peretz’s story contained a negative depiction of a Hasidic Rabbi and old religious traditions, this story was commonly taught in Yiddish curriculum in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as a way of rejecting the old world. See Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival (New York, 1988), 181. 38. I. L. Peretz, “The Shtrayml,” in Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, ed. Ken Frieden (Syracuse, NY, 2004), 137–46, here 142–43. This story was translated by Ken Frieden. 39. Warren G.  Breckman, “Disciplining Consumption: The Debate about Luxury in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 3 (1991): 485–505, here 486. 40. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Das Mahl der Frommen,” in Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild (Wiesbaden, 1986), 61–76, here 72–73. This edition is a facsimile of the original text from 1892, which was published in Verlag J. Bensheimer. 41. David Biale, “Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 2 (1982): 305–23, here 313. It is possible that Sacher-Masoch had one or more Jewish ancestors; scholars disagree as to whether his in-depth knowledge of many Jewish texts and customs had a basis in his ancestry or identity. See Irving Massey, Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Tübingen, 2000), 17–19; and Samuel Spinner, “Anecdotal Evidence:

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Local Color and Ethnography in the Shtetl Stories of Leopold von Sacher-­ Masoch,” Studia Rosenthaliana 41 (2009): 65–79, here 66. 42. Sacher-Masoch, Jüdisches Leben, 91–103. 43. Sacher-Masoch, Jüdisches Leben, 145–57, here 154. 44. Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, trans. F. H. Lyon (London, 2012), 74. 45. Fräulein Else, directed by Paul Czinner, restored by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, ZDF, and ARTE (1928/20; Rome, 2004). 46. Cited in Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (London, 2010), 23. 47. Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie von Ankum (New York, 2002), 37, 51. 48. Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York, 2001), 149–69, here 169. 49. Social investigator Beatrice Webb made this observation in a publication from 1902 to 1903. Cited in Adam D. Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York, 2015), 210 and 284, n6. 50. On sumptuary laws in premodern Jewish communities, see David Biale, “Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” in Longing, Belonging and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer (Leiden, 2010), 23–38, here 33–35. 51. See Silverman, Cultural History of Jewish Dress, 59–60; and Jay R. Berkovitz, “Social and Religious Controls in Pre-Revolutionary France: Rethinking the Beginnings of Modernity,” Jewish History 15, no. 1 (2001): 1–40, here 9. 52. Max Grunwald, “Luxusverbot der Dreigemeinden (Hamburg—Altona— Wandsbek) aus dem Jahre 1715,” Mitteilungen zur jüdischen Volkskunde 25 (1923): 227–34, here 228. On early modern sumptuary laws, see Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire, 6–7. 53. Adolf Asch, Auszug aus Memoiren von Dr. Adolf Asch (Die Inflationsjahre 1919–1928), 3, file no. 2 (Adolph Asch), Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Translation cited in Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978), 183. On self-­ discipline and the policing of German-Jewish women’s attire, see Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI, 2017), 102–10. 54. “Jüdische Frauen!,” Der Schild, I. Beilage, no. 10, October 1922, 4. 55. See “Walter Rathenau über die Frau,” Die jüdische Frau 1, no. 2, May 22, 1925, 6; and Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2003), 247. 56. Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men (Boston, MA, 1999), 43, 163. On

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American Jewish women and excess, see also Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 181–87. 57. Dyhouse, Glamour, 77. 58. Darcy Buerkle, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 4 (2006) 625–36, here 631. 59. “Großes Preisausschreiben!,” advertisement, C.V.-Zeitung, no. 30, July 24, 1924, 455. 60. As Paul Lerner has noted, Mendelsohn designed buildings for a number of notable Jewish clients, many of whom he met through Jewish connections. Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 163. On Herpich, see Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 141–50; and Cyril Reade, Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Bern, 2007), 187–91. 61. See Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 15. The Herpich fur stole referenced here is part of the C. Jahnke Collection in Vancouver, Canada. 62. Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (New York, 1993), 115. 63. The play on which The Shop Around the Corner was based was written by Miklós László, a Hungarian Jewish émigré who arrived in the United States in 1938; its screenplay was by Samson Raphaelson, author of the play on which the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer, was based. Another Lubitsch film replete with furs is Trouble in Paradise (1932), which represents the peak of Art Deco glamour. Sabine Hake has argued that, “like Gaston and his ploys, the beautiful objects/images appeal to the spectators and draw them into their circle of deceit.” Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 187. 64. Several of Lubitsch’s early films contain both implicit and explicit references to Jewishness. See Valerie Weinstein, “Anti-Semitism or Jewish ‘Camp’? Ernst Lubitsch’s Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) and Meyer aus Berlin (1918),” German Life and Letters 59, no. 1 (January 2006): 101–21; Valerie Weinstein, “(Un)Fashioning Identities: Ernst Lubitsch’s Early Comedies of Mistaken Identity,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 120–33; and Richard W.  McCormick, Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch (Bloomington, IN, 2020). 65. Fannie Hurst, “White Goods,” in The Stories of Fannie Hurst, chosen and introduced by Susan Koppelman (New York, 2004), 67–91, here 71, 79. 66. Both Hurst stories were first published in the 1919 collection, Humoresque and Other Stories. Many of Fannie Hurst’s short stories ­provided the basis

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for the Jewish-themed “Ghetto Film” genre of the 1920s. See Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 87. See also Susan Koppelman, “Introduction,” in The Stories of Fannie Hurst, xix; and Prell, Fighting to Become Americans, 42–43. 67. Anzia Yezierska, “The Fat of the Land,” in Hungry Hearts (Boston, MA, 1920), 133, 134. 68. See Lester D. Friedman, “A Forgotten Masterpiece: Edward Sloman’s His People,” in Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance and Hava Tirosh-­ Samuelson (Detroit, MI, 2013), 19–34. 69. Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill, Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present, and Future (London, 2015), 149–50. 70. See Barbara Sicherman, “Reading Marjorie Morningstar in the Age of the Feminine Mystique and After,” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia R.  Diner, Shira M.  Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010), 194–209, here 198. 71. On Bess Myerson’s Jewish identity, see Kerry Wallach, “Recognition for the ‘Beautiful Jewess’: Beauty Queens Crowned by Modern Jewish Print Media,” in Globalizing Beauty: Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne (New York, 2013), 131–50. 72. Marsha F. Cassidy, What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s (Austin, TX, 2005), 212. 73. Fake furs first became immensely popular in the 1960s, when young people eschewed the “minks that mother wore” for fabrics made of synthetic fibers. Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 164. 74. See Emberley, Cultural Politics of Fur, 24–33; and Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 149–69. 75. In fact, one remark by Isaac Bashevis Singer supposedly inspired PETA’s highly controversial 2003 “Holocaust on Your Plate” traveling exhibition, which juxtaposed images of animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms with images of humans in concentration camps. See “Humane Kosher,” PETA, http://www.peta.org/features/kosher-­vegetarian/; and “PETA Germany’s Holocaust Display Banned,” PETA, March 27, 2009, http:// www.peta.org/blog/peta-­germanys-­holocaust-­display-­banned/. Silverstone has contributed to PETA campaigns and has published articles on her website about fur. See, for example, “My Thoughts on Fur…,” The Kind Life, http://thekindlife.com/blog/2011/09/my-­thoughts-­on-­fur/. 76. See, for example, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, “The Religious Case Against Wearing Fur & Leather!,” Jewish Journal, January 26, 2015.

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77. See Orna Rinat, “Denmark, Israel and the Deathly Stench of Fur,” Ha’aretz, May 7, 2015, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/. premium-­1.655245. 78. On Ruth Madoff, see, for example, Mark Seal, “Ruth’s World,” Vanity Fair, August 4, 2009. http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/09/ ruth-­madoff-­profile. 79. On Mad Men’s treatment of Jewishness, see Kerri P. Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience (New Brunswick, NJ, 2015), 6–8.

CHAPTER 7

Mrs. Blumenthal Builds Her Dream House: Jewish Women and Consumer Culture in Postwar American Suburbs Aleisa Fishman

In 1953, Rita Newborn, a founder of the Plainview Jewish Center in Nassau County, New York, asked the Waring Company to loan blenders to the new synagogue so that congregants could make latkas for the Center’s Hanukkah party. Waring recognized that this community-­ building event could increase sales as their product would ease the work of shredding potatoes for the latkas. Waring thus helped Jewish women establish a Jewish home. This example suggests that new marketplace conditions after World War II led Jews to combine novel forms of consumerism with traditional religious practices during this period of substantial change in America.

All views expressed herein are those of the reviewer, and are not necessarily those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A. Fishman (*) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_7

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Suburbia was a quintessential American experience. An important story of the 1950s, the development of suburbs was closely linked to consumerism. Post-World War II prosperity meant full employment and increased disposable income. Families wanted to own a new home and a new car— both now newly available—leading to the growth of suburbs. Technological and cultural developments also contributed. New systems of mass communication and mass marketing spread the same kinds of products throughout the nation.1 Mass marketing was not new, but the new medium of television very effectively distributed a marketing message. Fortune magazine summed up the trend in November 1953: “Anybody who wants to sell anything to Americans should take a long look at the New Suburbia…. It is big and lush and uniform—a combination made to order for the comprehending marketer.”2 Suburban consumer culture encouraged women in particular to fill their now larger homes with household goods, and businesses stepped in both to create and to meet the demands of a new suburban population. Although suburbia has been characterized by and criticized for its consumerist tendencies, my research suggests that Jewish women as consumers and as cultural guardians manipulated this new culture to reinforce and enhance their traditional Jewish identity and to build Jewish community. Like their mothers before them, and in ways similar to other ethnic groups,3 these Jewish women used American consumer culture to fashion a Jewish and American suburban identity. The act of consuming is more than just an economic exchange, it also has cultural and symbolic meaning as purchasers use the goods and services to express their own identity, what they believe, and what they think is important in their lives. In other words, consumer culture is not just about the hegemony of producers. It also provides a lens onto the motivations of consumers. As Jews purchased goods and services, they constructed their cultural identity and shaped their new suburban communities. In typically homogenous suburbs, Jewish women used the culture of consumption to create Jewish community and identity. * * * In the postwar period, Jewish identity was shaped by a variety of forces. World War II and the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, an economic and housing boom, a focus on the home and household, an increased interest in religion generally, and increased marketing to broad

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groups both ethnically and socially all affected the experience of Jews in the suburbs. In the military during World War II, Judaism was one of three religions—along with Catholicism and Protestantism—represented at every ceremony. This experience, along with the postwar idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition,” legitimized Judaism as a religion and made Jews equal partners with Christians in a common American heritage and democracy.4 By the 1950s, the American Jewish population was larger, approximately 5,000,000, and composed of more native-born citizens than ever before.5 These conditions paved the way for a postwar expansion in the number of synagogues in the United States. American Jews also took great pride in the establishment of the State of Israel. For the first time in 2000 years, Jews again had a national homeland. It promised security and refuge against future threats of expulsion or antisemitism. Many saw Israel as created out of the ashes of the Holocaust, an event that had tremendous impact on the consciousness of American Jews.6 In the postwar period, Jewish Americans felt entitled to their rights as U.S. citizens and more secure in their position than the immigrant generation, who had felt acutely their greenhorn status. After the war, many urban Jews, like their non-Jewish counterparts, moved to the suburbs to escape the crime and filth of the city,7 as well as to embrace the “American dream” of joining middle-class America and owning a piece of land. In fact, historian Edward Shapiro argues that Jews participated in the urban-to-suburban migration at rates higher than those of any other ethnic group.8 As they moved, Jews found that their living conditions differed from their experiences in the city. Cities were dense with apartment buildings, schools, and businesses. Interactions there were characterized by chance meetings in hallways, in lobbies, and on sidewalks. For example, in sections of the Bronx, the tenants next door and down the hall were likely all to be Jewish, as were the owners of the hardware store and the bakery. These residents and businesses filled the neighborhood with Jewish life and culture. In such a setting, Jewish community was well established and the amenities of Jewish life were readily available. Residents needed to exert minimal effort to sustain a Jewish cultural environment. In contrast, suburban neighborhoods were made up of single-family homes separated from businesses because developers wanted to create a feeling of country living. The new spatial dimensions of suburbia and the expansion of the domestic private sphere around the nuclear family meant that residents were often isolated from friends and neighbors, whom they no longer met in apartment hallways or on the sidewalk.9 One no longer

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heard a neighbor’s holiday celebration through the wall, nor could one tell whether that celebration was Jewish or Christian. And unlike cities, many postwar suburbs were still unformed social environments. There were few synagogues, schools, or businesses to sustain the various needs of suburban Jews. The stakes were high, in part because of the large numbers of young families whose children would eventually sustain Jewish tradition, yet would know little of their Jewishness unless their parents created a Jewish environment around them. Postwar consumerism meant buying and furnishing a home and filling it with the televisions, washers and dryers, and automobiles that would transform the homes and construct the lives of the new suburbanites as significantly different from the urban apartments where they had grown up.10 The single-family home as a refuge from the chaotic world was an idea of nineteenth-century housing reformers, but it really took off after World War II, when most middle-class and many working-class Americans could realistically hope to achieve that ideal.11 Between 1947 and 1953, the suburban population increased by 43 percent—in contrast to a general population increase of only 11 percent.12 New, often cookie-cutter, homes housed the burgeoning population and increasingly included luxuries like fireplaces, kitchen appliances, and sometimes built-in TVs.13 New homeowners filled larger dwellings that now had more personal space for adults and children, including recreation and family rooms. Consumer goods defined the pleasures and joys of the home, where one could decorate to one’s taste or relax in the evening with relatives in front of the TV. Home also served as an avenue of self-expression, a way to break away from the rituals and rules of parents. Americans used consumer goods both to join with others in purchasing similar products and to distinguish themselves: vacuum cleaners and Mixmasters displayed the homemaker’s artistry, while power tools and lawn mowers testified to do-it-yourself competence.14 The present study focuses on Nassau County, NY, because of the concentrated suburban growth there between 1940 and 1960, with its Jewish population rising from 4 percent to 25 percent in the same period.15 This huge jump was due to its proximity to New York City, good commuter transportation, and the growing economy, but the intense development during this period also allows us to see broad suburban trends that occurred around the country. Nassau County, therefore, provides an opportunity to explore how ethnicity and the consumer

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economy intersected to shape the contours of Jewish identity in the suburbs.



Supporting Jewish Community

Moving to the suburbs catalyzed many women into supporting what were, in many areas, fledgling Jewish communities. They did so by combining Jewish life and Jewish values with suburban consumer culture. Through their consumer behavior and support of Jewish community institutions, women simultaneously helped establish local suburban Jewish space and also enhanced their own Jewish identity. Rita Newborn described how she utilized the suburban housing boom to help found the Plainview Jewish Center: When we moved in and we were unpacking our things… my husband said to me “you know it’s almost yontiff [Rosh Hashanah]… we’ll go to my mother in Brooklyn.”… I said… “how can we, I have three babies, two of them in diapers, one’s still on formula, I’m not going to go to your mother’s house for a week, week and a half. Can’t do it.” So he says, “so what are we going to do?” I said, “we’ll start a temple, that’s all. We’ll need one eventually.” So he said, “how’re you going to get any Jews here because all the names I see [in the area are] Smith, Donneger… Candiotti… Colletti.”… I put a sign up in the sales office, where they were selling these [new] homes, that the first meeting of the Plainview Jewish Community Center, I called it, would be held at [our house]…. And [my husband] said, “well you’re not going to get a minyan even.”16

But her use of the sales office offering these new suburban homes worked, and she did get a minyan, one that included Smith, Donneger, Candiotti, and Colletti; “Who knew they were all Jews?”17 In posting this bulletin, Newborn used the consumer ideal of home ownership as a vehicle for her and for them to create a synagogue: a keystone to Jewish community, serving a variety of religious, educational, and social functions. The synagogue could be a welcoming presence to many newly arrived suburban Jewish women, who were often far from their friends, relatives, and familiar routines. Florence Gould recalled, “One of the reasons we became so dedicated here was that this congregation, the people, made us feel less alone. They made us feel that we had a family.”18 Harriet Sauerhoff had similar feelings: “When we first moved in here… the synagogue was very important; we were meeting all new people. All our friends we met

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through the synagogue. And every activity that was going on everybody wanted to partake of. We were building something…. I mean it was like it was my temple.”19 Women combined Jewish life with consumer culture to establish the form their community would take. Women used the cultural impetus to purchase a home to recruit likeminded neighbors to create a specific, in this case Jewish, community. While only one Jewish congregation existed in Nassau County in 1900, in 1950, there were twenty-six, and by 1960, there were eighty-five.20 As influential leaders, suburban rabbis encouraged involvement in this important religious institution. Rabbi Roland B.  Gittelsohn of Central Synagogue of Nassau County (Rockville Centre) praised his congregants: I saw you and your children sitting together as I stood on the pulpit of the Synagogue at opening Succos Services. You could not possibly have known how much it meant to me to see you there following the Service and reading our prayers together…. I thought to myself: This is good! This is what has kept Judaism alive through the centuries! This is what binds the hearts of parents and children closer together and brings the great beauty and richness of Judaism into their lives!21

Although these rabbis directed their remarks to all parents, it was often the mothers—in the fifties they spent more time at home than working fathers—who played a crucial role in a child’s observance.22 In the twentieth century, Jewish women became cultural guardians, the holders of tradition. Historians have found that as Jewish men acculturated in both Europe and America, they no longer regularly attended synagogue or studied the religious texts.23 As men’s outward expression of Jewish identity altered, it fell to Jewish women—whose expression of Jewishness was traditionally centered within a domestic context—to transmit Jewish culture to their children and to maintain the Jewish family as a center of Jewish identity. As Jewish men entered the workforce, Jewish women’s preparation of home religious celebrations became more significant. Women also fostered the synagogue as a suburban Jewish space by joining the sisterhood (the women’s organization of a synagogue or temple), which strengthened the synagogue financially and facilitated community social interaction.24 Groups sponsored charity card games,25 held fashion shows, and sold Uniongrams (a kind of telegram used as greeting cards and keepsakes).26 The yearly bazaar was perhaps the largest sisterhood

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fundraiser. Temple Sinai of Lawrence noted: “A large portion of the Temple budget is planned dependent on a gift from the Sisterhood— Without this gift the Temple and RELIGIOUS SCHOOL could not be properly maintained.”27 Such contributions became so significant to synagogue budgets that one congregant wrote, “PET PEEVE OF THE MONTH: With women responsible for a goodly share of the Temple’s financial burden, why haven’t we a woman on the Board of Trustees? Many Temples do.”28 Temple B’nai Sholom in Rockville Centre was one such synagogue. In 1953, the Temple board proposed to amend their bylaws to grant one vote to the sisterhood president, and also to include women on the rabbi selection committee.29 Through these bazaars and fashion shows, sisterhoods supported the synagogue financially. In 1958, the sisterhood of Midway Jewish Center (Hicksville) contributed $4000 to the congregation, which purchased a new piano and a stage curtain.30 The sisterhood of Temple Israel (Long Beach) built a playground and redecorated the synagogue auditorium.31 Participating in Jewish social activities that promoted consumption facilitated community formation. Women also supported fledgling Jewish communities by starting other local Jewish organizations. After establishing a synagogue in Plainview, Rita Newborn decided to start a chapter of Hadassah. I got a few women together; one of the women that moved in here had joined the Hadassah chapter in Levittown, [at] the Israel Jewish Community Center. So I went with her to the first couple of meetings and I told her that this was ridiculous for us to go all the way to Levittown; it was very far for me, because here I am in Plainview, which is what three miles, four miles, five miles. So she said, “you know I never thought of that.” She had nobody else to encourage her, so we started a Hadassah in Plainview.32

Local branches of Hadassah,33 B’nai B’rith, National Women’s League, Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, and United Jewish Appeal, for example, helped support Jewish community life.34 The Women’s Division of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) raised money for Jews overseas.35 The South Shore Women’s Division held benefit luncheons during which women pledged money and listened to a speaker. Such events were well attended (often by over 100 women) and raised significant sums (approximately $19,000 was pledged at one such event).36 The Great Neck Women’s Division of the UJA opened their 1948 campaign with these encouraging words: “In order to meet the $250,000,000

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[national campaign] goal it will be necessary for every Jewish woman in the community to accept her share of the responsibility. The committee hopes that Great Neck will go over the top.”37 The work of the Women’s Division swelled the contributions to UJA through “plus-giving,” which meant that a woman made a contribution over and above what her husband gave, “so that she can have a direct and personal share in this great humanitarian work.”38,39 In the tradition of Jewish female volunteerism, postwar suburban Jewish women offered their services to their community, which helped establish personal affiliation with Jewish institutions. Suburban Jewish women tended to be well educated, to have fewer children than their gentile cohort, and to be of a socioeconomic status that allowed them to stay home.40 Following the volunteer efforts of their mothers and looking for ways to enrich their lives, many women joined Jewish communal organizations, where their contributions ranged from stuffing envelopes to serving as organization presidents.41 Although women and men both volunteered for their communities, such work by women had particular significance. Women viewed volunteer work as their Jewish activity. Women involved in Jewish organizations could exercise and gain leadership and managerial skills, and simultaneously fulfill social, cultural, and spiritual needs.42

Establishing a Jewish Home Of course, a primary task for Jewish women upon moving to suburbia was to establish a Jewish home. The home had always held an important place in Judaism and Jewishness.43 In addition, the home also played a significant teaching role. Children placed more value on their Jewish learning and heritage, and did better in school, if they perceived that their parents regarded these issues as important and practiced Jewish observances at home.44 Home observance was particularly important in the suburbs, which initially offered little Jewish culture. Temple B’Nai Shalom in Rockville Centre encouraged parents to “Bring the Hebrew School into your home. Urge your children to talk about their studies, to practice the ceremonies and songs they learned. Your home is part of the school’s program.”45 Likewise, Rabbi Bernard Rubenstein of Midway Jewish Center (Hicksville) reminded his congregants of the Biblical command “And thou shalt teach them unto thy children.” He preached that parents played an important role in imparting Jewish customs to their children: “Thus

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will the traditions of Judaism be transmitted from generation to generation and its spirit give meaning and significance to our lives.”46 Women established a Jewish home in part by celebrating Jewish holidays and by procuring, preparing, and serving festive meals.47 They purchased appropriate foods, including kosher wine, challah, matzo, other bakery items, and so on for holidays. The Passover holiday, for example, involved the regulation of foods consumed: leavened bread, in particular, was not eaten because Jews hastily fleeing Egypt had been unable to wait to let their bread rise. Likewise, during Hanukkah, Jews fried potato pancakes in oil to commemorate the miracle of the lamp oil found in the Temple that should have lasted only one night but instead had burned for eight.48 Store advertisements encouraged women to buy items to maintain these Jewish foodways. Waldbaum’s “New and Modern” market in Lawrence, NY, announced a Passover department with “a complete line of quality products for your holiday needs!” The store also provided delivery service for a nominal fee.49 The Great Neck Liquor Shop sold “Kosher Passover wines, brandies, cordials,” and stocked kosher brands such as Manischewitz, Ganeles-Lenger kosher wines, Mount Karabi and Zwack Hungarian slivovitz, and imported Israeli wines, brandies, and cordials.50 The wines would be used for the Passover Seder, during which each person traditionally drank four cups of wine. Great Neck also boasted Benkert’s Bakery’s kosher-for-Passover foods: Creamy-rich Chocolate filled 7 LAYER CAKE, Golden Harvest HONEY LOAFS, Toasted Pecan HONEY CAKE, Plain-Nut and Almond SPONGE, Plain MACAROONS, Chocolate MACAROONS, Chocolate covered COCONUT MACAROONS, Plain COCONUT MACAROONS—Pure Almond Paste Used Only, Genuine Rugulahs—Cocktail DANISH Fresh Daily.51

Benkert’s offered women the opportunity to serve traditional and appropriately unleavened Passover desserts without time-consuming preparation. These purchases helped women maintain and celebrate Jewish traditions at home. Such businesses grew gradually, starting in areas where some Jewish families already lived and increasing in number as the Jewish population grew. Rita Newborn recalled that early on “I found it very difficult to get [kosher] meat. But I heard… there was a kosher butcher in Hicksville…. And I called them and they said they would deliver.”52 Riger

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Kosher Butchers “were very nice… and so I told all the other Jewish ladies…. So their business grew also with my big mouth.”53 Rabbis and lay leaders encouraged home religious celebration. Rabbi Gilbert Klapperman of Congregation Beth Sholom (Lawrence) held a seminar to discuss “the history, traditions and laws of Passover, outlined the preparations for the holiday, and answered questions.”54 Similarly, the Community Synagogue held a Sisterhood Chanukah Institute instructing what to serve, sing, and play, and how to decorate, “Everything but how to find eight gifts for each child!”55 The sisterhood at Temple B’nai Sholom (Rockville Centre) suggested that for Hanukkah women could prepare a festive supper with latkes, games, and songs for the entire family, and hang menorah cutouts and dreidels around the room: “It is not too difficult to decorate the home for the entire Chanukah period with Chanukah motifs.”56 The many advertisements for toys and other gifts reflected the trend clearly evident by the 1950s that the religious observance of Hanukkah had become closely tied to gift giving for children. Historian Jenna Weissman Joselit shows that consumerism and Hanukkah had become linked during the interwar period. She writes, “At once symptom and cause, toy manufacturers and Judaica importers throughout the later 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were quick to capitalize on the growing importance of Hanukkah by developing an inventive array of holiday novelty items, games, records, books, and papier-mâché decorations.”57 Women’s role in fostering a strong sense of Jewish identity was important in part because such identification would mitigate the potential influence of the Christian celebrations of America’s majority culture. The community was invested in making sure that women could uphold this tradition. Dianne Ashton writes that women and rabbis “became the most effective for advocating enhancing the holiday’s importance.”58 Hanukkah offered a way to perform Jewish commitment in the midst of the Christmas season.59 Rabbis particularly encouraged Hanukkah celebrations, a reaction in part to the alluring consumerism of the Christmas holiday with stores filled with decorations, gifts, and Santas. Rabbi Routtenberg at Temple B’nai Shalom (Rockville Centre) preached an inclusive attitude toward other religions, “to display friendly understanding and interest during the period when the Christian community in whose midst I live observes a sacred festival… that is the very least that I can expect of my best self.” However, he also asserted that Christmas had no place in the Jewish home. The consumerist tendencies of the Christian holiday might be tempting, but “to have a Christmas tree in my home, to conduct a

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Christmas party for my Jewish family and Jewish friends, to give Christmas gifts to my Jewish children, is both to offend my Christian neighbors and to violate all the decencies of Jewish loyalty.”60 Rabbi Bernard Kligfeld of Temple Emanu-El (Long Beach) thought likewise: “A Christmas tree has no place in a Jewish home,” he explained in the temple bulletin. He believed that a proper Jewish atmosphere for the season could be provided through home Hanukkah decoration and the giving of gifts.61 The Community Synagogue’s (Port Washington) Sisterhood advised women to make purchases to enhance Hanukkah celebrations instead: When the Chanukah festival is fully celebrated in the home, with gay decorations, ritual made suspenseful by secreting the gifts, all bound together with the re-telling of the ever-inspiring story of the miracle of the Menorah. Chanukah will then become a joyous holiday full of anticipation, with eight merry nights of presents, dancing, tasty cookies, stories and songs, easily providing the ammunition for exorcising ole man Santa from the child’s imagination.62

These strong sentiments about December holiday celebrations suggest that some Jewish suburbanites held Christmas parties and displayed Christmas trees in their homes, and that the local community tried instead to encourage a Jewish connection between consumption and culture.63 To augment further the Jewish nature of their home, women bought Jewish books, records, and magazines, from which they and their children could learn.64 In new suburban Jewish communities with little Jewish tradition established, fostering Jewish community and Jewish education was critically important. The Sisterhood of Temple Beth-El (Cedarhurst) encouraged the purchase of Jewish books in conjunction with Jewish Book Month.65 Similarly, Temple Emanu-El in Long Beach suggested that every family in the congregation should own a bible, a prayer book, and Pathways Through the Bible, which explained passages of the Old Testament; “These are MUSTS in every Jewish home.”66 Temple Beth El of Great Neck encouraged its members to join the Jewish Publication Society of America. Annual dues of $11.25 bought members five volumes published by the Society, which intended to bring American Jews “the best Jewish books at the lowest possible cost.”67 Recordings also augmented Jewish education. A local Jewish newspaper, Long Island Israel Light, advertised Banner Records: “These English-Jewish records are a ‘must’ in your home… play them at your parties or for the family… there’s a wealth of

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entertainment in them for young and old.”68 Temple Sinai in Roslyn recommended, in addition to books and records, specific Jewish magazines “to increase knowledge of Jewish affairs,” including Commentary, The Reconstructionist, Congress Weekly (by the American Jewish Congress), and The Jewish Digest.69 Jewish books and magazines not only enhanced the Jewish knowledge of the reader, but also kept her up to date on the latest happenings of interest to Jews. Since many of a woman’s daily interactions in the suburbs were likely with non-Jews, Jewish newspapers and magazines kept her aware of the latest events. In the 1950s, newspapers, magazines, widely circulated books and recordings encouraged people, especially women, to consume in particular ways. Women further enhanced home religious practice by purchasing Judaica, that is, items related to Jewish life and culture. In Nassau County, women could find Judaica in either a synagogue sisterhood gift shop or a religious goods store.70 Joellyn Wallen Zollman has found that by 1956, 85 percent of American Conservative synagogues had a gift shop.71 Congregations explicitly encouraged women to make purchases to create a Jewish space at home. The sisterhood gift shop of Temple Israel in Great Neck allowed members to purchase “objects of religious significance and aesthetic beauty right here in Great Neck, instead of having to hunt through many stores and in out of the way places in the city,” and “to fill as many homes as possible with an abundance of items that remind us of our Jewish heritage.”72 The sisterhood Judaica shop of Central Synagogue of Nassau County (Rockville Centre) carried artistic Hanukkah menorahs and urged “every family to secure at least one beautiful Menorah for Chanukah.”73 The synagogue school also gave a menorah to all new members, thereby assuring that each family in the congregation possessed the appropriate religious artifacts for the holiday.74 Each night of Hanukkah, the family could then commemorate the triumph of the Maccabees over the ruling Assyrian-Greek regime, which had tried to restrict Jewish religious practice, by gathering to light candles in a menorah proudly displayed in the window—a display that also informed the community of their Jewish identity. By the 1950s, the Hanukkah menorah had become more than just a functional object. Now it was important as a decorative element and a statement about the inhabitants of the home.75 Similarly, the sisterhood at the Community Synagogue (Port Washington) advised, “careful attention to decorations in the home can be meaningful and joyous. Set aside a place for the nightly kindling of the menorah with copies

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of the blessings and music and gifts nearby.”76 Judaica shops sold not only gifts for Hanukkah, but also items for other holidays, including graggers (noisemakers) for Purim,77 and Haggadahs, candy, and books (for example, How to Celebrate Passover at Home and Judaism in the Home Project– Passover) for Passover.78 A woman’s purchase of Judaica allowed her to transform the blank slate of her suburban tract house into a Jewish home. The display of candlesticks, a menorah, mezuzot, and Jewish holiday decorations, for example, allowed her to create a Jewish space by tying her family’s home to a long history of Jewish observance and tradition. In addition, as Zollman points out, the gift of a Jewish object is meant to obligate the recipient to use that object to live Jewishly in America and to encourage a continued commitment to Jewish living.79 The proliferation of synagogue gift shops and religious goods stores in suburbia contributed not only to the creation of Jewish space within individual homes but also to a sense of Jewish community more broadly.80 These shops also helped forge a place for Israel in the American Jewish home. Judaica shops frequently offered “for your home or for gift giving a wide variety of Israeli art objects.”81 The Judaica Shop at Temple B’nai Sholom in Rockville Centre offered “an attractive new line of Israeli coin jewelry,” including pendants, bracelets, earrings, perfume fobs, and children’s jewelry.82 While the synagogue gift shop served as a primary outlet for Israeli products and helped forge a place for Israel in the American Jewish home,83 other local stores joined the bandwagon. A Cedarhurst candy shop, Lucy Lynne Candies, advertised that their “Candies Are The Most Luscious You Have Ever Tasted. For a Sweet New Year, WE Are Featuring The Israel Tin.”84 Temple Israel (Long Beach) encouraged women to “use Israeli… wine for the Passover Seder! Bring Jerusalem to your Yomtov table.”85 As a kosher-foods distributor in Nassau County, Moe Kolpen tried to sell Israeli products: “Anything that came from Israel we tried to exploit. [But] at that particular time… they were so far behind the packaging and the marketing of the American standard… that it was tough. But we used to take it in on mere sentiment…. I wish you had a buck for every buck that I lost on trying to exploit Israel [sic] products.”86 As historian Joellyn Wallen Zollman has suggested, these products allowed Jews to “incorporate the new Jewish state into their lives, without compromising their Americanness.”87 Suburbanites drew parallels between the new state and their own suburban experiences, feeling an allegiance with Israel in terms of their efforts to create and establish a new Jewish community in an area with few resources. Harriet Sauerhoff remembered,

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“Even if they weren’t religious … everybody … wanted to be part of [Israel].”88 By purchasing Israeli products in these suburban venues, women enriched American Jewish domestic space.89

Maintaining Religious and Cultural Aspects of Life-Cycle Events Jewish women also had responsibility for marking life-cycle events—births, bar mitzvahs, and weddings—with Jewish tradition and character, and they hired halls, caterers, printers, photographers, and musicians. Harriet Sauerhoff confirmed: “Maybe now and then I asked [my husband] a question, but… it was really the women who planned all these things.”90 Jenna Weissman Joselit has discussed the importance of such events in Wonders of America. They manifested a new early twentieth-century form of Jewish identity, of Jewishness, “whose expression had as much, and perhaps more, to do with feeling ‘Jewish at heart’ than with formal ritual.” This modern version, she argued, focused on the life-cycle events of birth, death, puberty, and marriage.91 Although the majority of suburban families did not observe Jewish dietary laws in their homes, some women maintained a kosher kitchen and needed appropriate food for life-cycle events.92 Marion Mayer, of Victor Mayer Caterers, said that women hired a kosher caterer for reasons ranging from keeping kosher themselves to wanting to make other community members comfortable.93 Elmont-resident Florence Gould explained: I had … an aunt and uncle who had no children…. [And] since my grandparents were all exterminated in Poland, my aunt and uncle were like … grandparent[s]…. We were very, very close. So when we bought the house…. I wanted … my aunt and uncle, to feel comfortable…. And then I wanted my kids to have to ask me a question, why do you keep two sets of towels, mommy? Why do we have two sets of dishes? Why can’t we have bacon in the house? I wanted them to have to ask me questions so that I could answer them why we were doing all this.94

By buying kosher food to create a Jewish home, Gould maintained a link to her past. She displayed respect for the religious beliefs of her aunt and uncle, and acknowledged their influence and importance in her home and in her life. At the same time, she transmitted a part of her Jewish identity

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to her children and offered them a connection to their history by encouraging them to ask about the meaning and significance of keeping kosher. Unlike Florence Gould, Harriet Feiner did not grow up in a kosher home. Her mother had stopped keeping kosher during the Great Depression, when a scandal over kosher food and a limited budget had made her reconsider her food choices. For years, Jewish women had led bread and meat strikes whenever prices got too high for working families, and their ability to buy food during the depression was severely stretched.95 Nonetheless, Feiner’s grandmother, who lived with them at the time, continued to keep kosher and used her own separate set of dishes, likely because kashrut was part of being an observant Jew and she wanted to maintain her observance. Because of her grandmother’s influence, Feiner herself chose to have a kosher home when she and her husband moved to Roslyn in 1956.96 There she easily found the items she needed.97 The Roslyn-Great Neck area already had a sizable Jewish community, a kosher butcher,98 and at least one local grocery, Foods-A-Poppin, that carried a full line of Passover foods.99 Women who wanted to use kosher catering services could choose from a variety of options in the fifties, as the number of kosher caterers grew from nine to sixty-three during that decade.100 Beginning as an assistant at Dornstein Caterers in Brooklyn, Victor Mayer became the official caterer of the Hillcrest Jewish Center in Queens in 1946. Twelve years later, he moved his business to Hewlett after observing during the 1950s an increase in Nassau County clientele.101 His catering company became the official caterer at several county synagogues, including Temple Israel of Great Neck.102 Marion Mayer, his wife, said women chose Victor Mayer Caterers because of its reputation for quality and because her husband “gave people what they wanted and what they paid for…. I think the reason he was successful was because he remembered everyone’s name. And when he greeted them, he greeted them by name.” That special touch was important because “caterers have to be personal with their clients, otherwise what good is it?” For the client, the party was a once in a lifetime event and it had to be right; Victor Mayer Caterers understood that.103 Like other kosher caterers, Mayer was familiar with the Jewish traditions and rituals accompanying life-cycle celebrations and could easily provide the services required. The selection of a kosher caterer was a public pronouncement of the family’s Jewish identity and likewise obligated those in attendance to participate in keeping to the dietary laws. The public-private distinction is important here, since many people who did not eat kosher at

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home would opt for a kosher caterer for various reasons, including as a statement to the community. Women also purchased wares from other Nassau County proprietors to enhance the Jewish nature of these celebrations. For example, printer Max Liebman ran a small advertisement in the bulletin of Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow informing the congregation that “ALL ANNOUNCEMENTS—Birth, Wedding, Bar Mitzvah, etc. plus Informals and other types of printing, can now be handled by a fellow member of our Temple.” He offered a “Large Selection of Raised Printing for all occasions. Shown in your own home.”104 Similarly, Myra Levy advertised “Having a bar mitzvah? Be sure to choose an invitation you’ll be proud to send!” She also sold personalized stationary, napkins, and matches.105 Clearly Liebman and Levy had the equipment necessary to print announcements and invitations using Hebrew characters, a service likely required by their clients. ABC Photographers also ran ads in temple bulletins: “Over 10 years specializing in … Baby, Children, Family, Bar Mitzvahs and Wedding Portraits.”106 Choosing a photographer who felt comfortable at such celebrations, knew when photos were allowed, and knew the specific and traditional event highlights that clients would want captured on film was important. These images would serve to reinforce the family’s Jewish identity each time they were viewed by evoking the memory of an event imbued with religious tones. Likewise, women wanted appropriate Jewish music as well as American hits played at such events. Richard Meisler and his orchestra (located in Levittown) advertised “music and entertainment for all occasions, Bar Mitzvahs, Temple Functions, Weddings.” Barbara Bell, a “professional coloratura soprano,” was also available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and engagements.107 These religious life-cycle events in a new suburban area helped foster Jewish identity and community (Figs. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3). Suburban rabbis encouraged women to enhance the religious aspects of these celebrations by holding them in the synagogue. In this way, rabbis facilitated a connection between Jewish custom and appropriate consumption. However, historian Jenna Weissman Joselit points out that the synagogue wedding was a fairly new practice. “For centuries, the synagogue’s sanctuary had been off-limits to wedding celebrations lest displays of merriment and frivolity mar its sanctity.” In fact, in western and eastern Europe, Jewish weddings had not traditionally been held in synagogues, but rather at home or in the courtyard. Joselit explains that German-­ Jewish reformers reversed that prohibition in the mid-nineteenth century,

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Fig. 7.1  Myra Levy’s ad in the Nassau Herald, April 2, 1954

hoping “to demonstrate that Jewish marriage was not merely an economic transaction, as non-Jewish authorities commonly believed, but an event of the highest moral probity and sanctity, equivalent to divine worship.” Nonetheless many American synagogues lacked sufficient facilities for such events, and immigrant families often turned to catering halls.108 Sociologist Albert Gordon found that by the 1950s more than half of the weddings that took place in suburbia occurred in the synagogue, when it had adequate facilities, or in the rabbi’s study.109 Rabbi Lieberman of Central Synagogue of Nassau County (Rockville Centre) asserted that the wedding is a sacred ceremony and “it rightfully belongs in a sacred place.” He acknowledged that “people have a right to hold a marriage ceremony elsewhere…. I can only use suasion, explanation and education” to

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Fig. 7.2  ABC Photographers ad in The Voice, Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow, April 1959

Fig. 7.3  Richard Meisler ad in The Scroll, Wantagh Jewish Center, December 1959

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convince them otherwise. But he was bothered that the choice of a club or inn did not clearly link the religious marriage ceremony to a religious location, although “I am sure plenty is spent in order to create some semblance of an altar.” It troubled Lieberman that the next event in the hall could be a convention or a civic ceremony. He was also weary of being “dragged all over the Island and the city to conduct marriage ceremonies… in clubs, lodges, halls, restaurants, hotels, inns, cellars, pits and slippers.” He recognized that congregants clearly wanted a sacred ceremony “otherwise, they would not need a rabbi.”110 And his own synagogue had two suitable rooms. Caterer and Great Neck resident Marion Mayer agreed with Lieberman. From her perspective the synagogue provided a wonderful site for a wedding. She did allow, however, that some synagogues were just not large enough or did not have an appropriate social hall for a reception. Victor Mayer Caterers themselves often catered weddings in other venues.111 As new congregations began to add social halls to accommodate the new sentiment, they likely also wanted the extra income that came from renting the social hall to a wedding party. Women often selected the synagogue for a wedding as an expression of the family’s commitment to their faith. Establishing and maintaining a Jewish home required not only knowledge about keeping kosher and celebrating Jewish holidays but also the purchase of appropriate products. Rita Newborn’s Hanukkah party, described at the start of this chapter, offers a useful illustration of how Jewish women used suburban consumer culture to enhance the Jewish home. Newborn’s recommendation to congregants about the usefulness of a blender, a modern technology, in making latkes, an old tradition, indicated that purchasing this blender represented a new way for homemakers to enhance their Jewish identity. Women who may not have served latkes in the past now saw that they could purchase a product that would more easily facilitate the process of cooking for and celebrating Hanukkah. As a suburban Jewish consumer, Newborn had to fulfill multiple cultural, communal, and religious expectations. She had to fill her home with stuff, purchase the latest timesaving appliances, maintain Jewish home traditions, and help foster community identity. By incorporating a blender into her Hanukkah celebration, Newborn combined her identity as a suburban American consumer with that of a Jewish homemaker concerned with maintaining traditional Jewish foodways. * * *

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The aftermath of World War II began a new age of American prosperity. The era boasted near full employment and high disposable income for goods and services. Couples who had lived with relatives because of the wartime housing shortage now owned new “cookie-cutter” homes.112 Popular writers and scholars alike have characterized suburbia as homogeneous—a consequence in part of the purchase of similar cars, homes, and appliances. In the wake of widespread Jewish migration to the suburbs during the 1950s, Jewish social critics feared that the transition threatened Jewish identity, and they predicted the attenuation of Jewish affiliation in the face of the homogenizing influences of suburban consumerism.113 However, women made purchases that helped them construct their identity as Jews, not only by supplying items necessary for religious celebration and observance but also by assisting in their multilayered creation and presentation of themselves as Jews. The purchases they made announced their membership in the group, or alternatively separated them from the group. In addition, their interaction with consumer culture helped construct community. The products and services they needed on a personal level, such as kosher food or Jewish education, encouraged the establishment of businesses and institutions that helped create Jewish community. In other words, Jewish migrants to suburbia utilized consumer culture to create Jewish American spaces. Women utilized new postwar trends—particularly suburban consumer culture—in order to maintain Jewish traditions and to enhance Jewish identity. Jewish women built community not only by encouraging the creation of community institutions—such as synagogues—but also by encouraging (through their purchases) the creation of community businesses that fulfilled the consumer needs of Jews in suburbia.

Notes 1. Elliott West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, CT, 1996), 187. 2. Quoted in Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York, 1990), 39. 3. In From Steerage to Suburb, Salvatore LaGumina describes Italian life on Long Island primarily from the 1880s to the 1950s, and shows the areas of social, cultural, economic, and religious involvement and interest of

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one ethnic group on Long Island (Salvatore John LaGumina, From Steerage to Suburb: Long Island Italians [New York, 1988]). Similarly, in Salvadorans in Suburbia, Sarah Mahler investigates the lives of another ethnic group in this area. She challenges the stereotype of the suburbs as homogenous havens of the white middle class. Her study is useful for its discussions of the suburban ties that bind together individuals in this group, such as life-cycle rituals and community organizations (Sarah J. Mahler, Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict [Boston, 1995]). 4. Deborah Dash Moore, “War of Our Fathers: Jewish GIs in World War II,” Bernard Wexler Memorial Lecture, Washington D.C.  Jewish Community Center, October 21, 1999; see also Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 5. Jacob Rader Marcus, To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585–1984 (Lanham, MD, 1990), 240–42. 6. See Michael Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York, 2002). 7. On postwar Jewish life in New York City, see Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970 (Syracuse, NY, 2001). 8. Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York, 1989); Edward Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore, MD, 1992). 9. Urban dwellers lived in a dense conglomeration of apartment buildings, schools, and businesses. But new suburbanites had to adapt to new spatial arrangements and lifestyles, no longer characterized by informal visits and chance meetings in the hallway and lobby, or on the sidewalk (Marshall Sklare, “Jews, Ethnics, and the American City,” Commentary, April 1972, 73; Albert Isaac Gordon, Jews in Suburbia [1959; Westport, CT, 1973], 76, 227–30). The car culture typical of suburban living meant that residents often had less interaction with neighbors. Lacking public transportation, parents chauffeured their children to play dates and various other after-­school activities. 10. Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York, 2000), 93. 11. Elaine Tyler May, “The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home,” in Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 298–315, here 306. 12. Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,” in The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader, ed. Jennifer Scanlon (New York, 2000), 245–66, here 245.

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13. James M. Mayo, The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space (Westport, CT, 1993), 163. Sales of refrigerators in the United States increased by 82% from 1946 to 1955. Dishwashers and clothes dryers became more common in the 1960s. 14. Cross, An All-Consuming Century, 94, 97, 99. 15. Religious identity is difficult to measure in the United States, since the U.S. Census does not, and is not allowed to, ask about religion. Jewish historians have relied on a variety of informal and inexact methods for determining religious affiliation. One method was to address a questionnaire to member communities of CJFWF (Council of Jewish Federation and Welfare Funds), and then United Jewish Appeal data was used to estimate CJFWF non-respondents and non-members. One popular method was to tabulate synagogue membership records. For New York City, another method in the 1950s used information on religious affiliation from a special study by the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP) in 1952 and linked those data to the non-Puerto Rican white population in each borough; see Henry Cohen, Jewish Population Trends in New  York City, 1940–1970 (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, January 1956 [mimeo]), as quoted in American Jewish Year Book 62 (1961): 54. An alternate form of data collection for Jewish population statistics was the Yom Kippur Method, which estimates the number of Jewish school children—aged 5 to 13—based on the Yom Kippur absences recorded in the public schools. Using this method, C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan recorded Jewish population figures for 1958. The authors acknowledged that utilizing this method for the New York area was problematic since “a certain number of nonJewish children take the day [Yom Kippur] off, and this number increases as the density of Jewish population increases. When Jewish absences are so high that regular classroom activity is postponed, a larger number of non-Jewish children will also tend to be absent”; Alvin Chenkin, “Jewish Population in the United States, 1960,” American Jewish Year Book 62 (1961): 56. Thus, Jewish population figures for Nassau County are hard to pinpoint year-by-­year or even by decade. However, in 1937 and 1960, the American Jewish Year Book did try to do systematic surveys of the United States and thus we have some general figures for the county. Those figures may then be compared to the 1950 and the 1960 general census records for the county. Because of the various problems in collecting figures on Jewish population as outlined above, the data discussed here is gleaned from incomplete and non-standard sources. Nassau County’s Jewish population is available by town from the 1937 American Jewish Year Book survey. In 1940, only 4.3% of the county’s population was Jewish (17,596 of

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406,748, whereby the former number is for 1937), but by 1960, it had grown to 25% (329,100 of 1,300,171). In other words, the Jewish population increased by 1770% as compared to a county population increase of 220%. This was a dramatic increase compared to the overall Jewish population in the United States, which dropped from 3.6% in 1940 to 3.08% in 1960. In comparison, the Jewish population in nearby Westchester County increased by 232% (from 35,063 to 116,400). Similarly, the general population increase in these two suburban counties of New York City was 41% (from 573,558 to 808,891) and 10.3% respectively (from 837,340 to 923,545). U.S.  Bureau of the Census, U.S.  Census of Population: 1960, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, Part A: Number of Inhabitants (Washington, DC, 1961), 17, 20; American Jewish Year Book, v. 42 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941), 254–56; Jacob Rader Marcus, To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585–1984 (Lanham, MD, 1990), 157. 16. Rita Newborn interview, March 7, 2002. 17. Rita Newborn interview, March 7, 2002. 18. Florence Gould interview, March 8, 2002. Florence Gould and her family belonged to Temple B’nai Israel of Elmont in Elmont, NY. 19. Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002. Sauerhoff and her family belonged to the Jericho Jewish Center in Jericho, NY. Synagogues sponsored a variety of secular social programs, including balls, musicals, theater shows, dinner dances, lectures, and parties. Women were in a position to encourage their community to make a financial commitment to establishing and running a synagogue. The establishment of a synagogue implied a commitment by members to purchase a variety of goods and services (salaries, upkeep, programming). 20. Tifereth Israel in Glen Cove existed in 1900 (Edward J. Smits, Nassau, Suburbia, U.S.A.: The First Seventy-Five Years of Nassau County, New York, 1899–1974 [Syosset, NY, 1974], 164); Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1950; Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1960–61. 21. Central Synagogue Bulletin, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, NY, November 2, 1951, 3. 22. Churches and synagogues increasingly became women’s spaces. For example, see Benjamin Maria Baader, “Jewish Difference and the Feminine Spirit of Judaism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History, ed. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner (Bloomington, IN), 50–71. 23. Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle, WA, 1995), 153.

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24. Sisterhoods aimed “to instill in each member a finer knowledge of Judaism, which we can bring into homes and foster in our children” (Bulletin, Midway Jewish Center, Hicksville, NY, March 1958, 7). The groups sponsored cultural, religious, and social programs to educate members, to enhance the social welfare, and to support the synagogue. 25. The Sisterhood of Temple Beth-El in Great Neck held an annual charity dessert bridge and the proceeds benefited the sisterhood’s Braille Fund, Emergency Relief Fund, and the Sewing Group. The program was held on Monday, December 10, 1956, at 12:30 p.m. in the temple social hall. Tickets cost $2 (“Beth-El Sisterhood Plans Charity Bridge,” Great Neck News, November 23, 1956, 2). Earlier, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck sponsored a charity bridge event, offering bridge, canasta, gin, and mah jong. “Two dollars will pay for refreshments, door prizes, and the thrill of the game, and add much to our support of the Service to the Sightless, the Sewing Group, and the Emergency Relief Fund” (The Bulletin, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY, November 2, 1951, 3). Similarly, the Sisterhood of Temple Emanu-El of Lynbrook annually sold date books containing ads for local businesses: “For every $25 worth of ads you secure, you are invited to attend a lovely luncheon at one of the fashionable restaurants” (Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El, Lynbrook, NY, November 7, 1951, 3). 26. Uniongrams, sponsored by the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, “serve a very special purpose. As we know, they are used as greeting cards are used. On special occasions, such as anniversaries and confirmations, attractively bound, they are an everlasting reminder of a beautiful and happy event. At the cost of 25¢ each, the funds thus raised provide scholarships at the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion” (The Bulletin, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY, September 18, 1959, 4; see also Suburban Weekly Bulletin, The Suburban Temple, Wantagh, NY, February 10, 1960, 2; and Temple Sinai News, Temple Sinai, Lawrence, NY, December 1958, 2). 27. Temple Sinai News, Temple Sinai, Lawrence, NY, March 1959, 2. 28. Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El of Long Beach, NY, March 1960, 3. 29. In addition, the synagogue held its first Bat Mitzvah during the coming winter. “The very progressive attitude in our Synagogue should be an example to many other Conservative Temples” (Bulletin, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, November 13, 1953, 2). 30. The piano cost $350 and the curtain $475 (Bulletin, Midway Jewish Center, Hicksville, NY, May–June 1958, 10). In another example, Wantagh Jewish Center’s 1955 fashion show netted $534 (they grossed $1100.05) (The Newsletter, Wantagh Jewish Center, Wantagh, NY, October 1955, 4).

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31. Temple Israel Bulletin, Temple Israel, Long Beach, NY, December 1947, 2. Similarly, the Sisterhood of Temple Beth Elohim (Old Bethpage) contributed $1000 to the congregation in 1957. The gift was announced at the synagogue’s annual fundraiser dinner dance at the Garden City Hotel (Mid Island Herald, April 25, 1957, 5). 32. Rita Newborn interview, March 7, 2002. 33. The Woodmere Chapter of Hadassah in its newspaper announcement for its opening meeting of the year—to be held at the Capri Beach Club in Atlantic Beach—explained that this year “the chapter plans to make even greater efforts than before to continue its work of healing, teaching and research in Israel” (“Hadassah Will Meet At the Capri Club,” South Shore Record, September 4, 1958, 4). 34. Women at Midway Jewish Center (Hicksville) were encouraged to pledge money to the National Women’s League’s Torah Fund in support of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America’s efforts to train rabbis, cantors, leaders, and teachers: “As Jewish women, it is up to us to see that our traditions and customs are carried on from generation to generation. By contributing to the Torah Fund, you maintain these Jewish principles” (Bulletin, Midway Jewish Center, Hicksville, NY, November 1957, 2). The National Council of Jewish Women included among its projects a dental clinic, a volunteer bureau, Camp Louemma, Ship-a-Box, scholarships, and a thrift shop (Nassau Herald, September 10, 1954, 2). Correspondingly, the North Shore Women’s Division of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York held a Special Gifts luncheon in 1945 at the Great Neck home of one of its members. At the event, seventy-five women announced pledges toward the $30,000,000 campaign. “The fund will be used for the furtherance of research, and for expansion and modernization of the Federation’s 116 hospitals and medical and welfare agencies—a network of institutions serving 300,000 persons a year” (“Federation Gifts To Be Announced,” Great Neck News, November 2, 1945, 19). Women were similarly encouraged to participate in other national Jewish associations, such as the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations. The organization’s 63rd convention was held on January 14, 1959, at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Temple Emanu-El of Long Beach suggested that women “interested and ambitious in organizational work” should participate in the conference themed “Tensions and Tranquilizers” (Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El, Long Beach, NY, November 1958, 4). 35. The Bulletin, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY, March 18, 1959, 3. UJA of Greater New York raised money for several Jewish organizations, including United Israel Appeal, Joint Distribution Committee (including ORT), United Service for New Americans and New York Association for New Americans, National Jewish Welfare Board, and American Jewish

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Congress. In 1953, the budget was over $144 million. The major tasks of UJA included: cooperating in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; transporting men, women, and children from the DP (Displaced Persons) camps in Europe to Palestine; facilitating the immigration of European Jews to America under quota regulations; providing for the welfare of the remaining European Jews as to hasten their progress toward self-support; and preserving and defending basic human rights and liberties throughout the world (“Great Neck UJA Unit Starts Fund Drive,” Great Neck News, March 19, 1948, 2). 36. During the previous year, the Women’s Division raised a record $120,000 for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York (“Sponsor Luncheon To Aid UJA,” Nassau Herald, April 9, 1948, 1, 4). 37. “Great Neck UJA Unit Starts Fund Drive,” Great Neck News (March 19, 1948): 2. Similarly, the East Meadow Women’s Division of UJA held a Dessert Tea during which the group hoped to raise significant sums; “please remember to be as generous as possible when you are asked to help your less fortunate brothers overseas” (The Voice, Temple Emanu-El, East Meadow, NY, February 1959, 2). 38. The Scribe, Roslyn Jewish Community Center, Roslyn Heights, NY, April 17, 1953, 1. 39. Suburban women involved in Hadassah purchased new items to donate to charity. Committed primarily to philanthropic Zionist work, Hadassah chapters raised money to “to heal the sick, to educate the youth, to rescue the homeless, [and] to rebuild the land” in Israel. In the United States, Hadassah participated in efforts to extend democracy in the United States, to support the United Nations, to help establish world peace (Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, March 1955, 15). Founded in 1912 by Henrietta Szold, the organization was dedicated to the Zionist cause and building Israel (Allon Gal, “Hadassah and the American Jewish Political Tradition,” in An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischen, ed. Jeffrey Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael [New York, 1995], 89–114, here  89). In April 1948, the Great Neck Chapter of Hadassah held a Palestine Supplies luncheon. Admission was one article of new bed linen, toweling, or “wearing apparel” that could be used by the Hadassah Hospital in Palestine (“Hadassah to Hold Lunch for Palestine Supplies,” Great Neck News, April 9, 1948, 3). The Roslyn chapter held a similar “linen shower” to gather new clothing and linen to send to Israel: “The significance of putting new clothing on the back of an Israeli immigrant … cannot be overestimated” (“Hadassah Unit Sponsors Fashion Show,” Roslyn News, April 10, 1953, 6). Through these efforts, suburban Jewish women fulfilled their cultural obligation to consume with their religious obligation to give charity. Like Hadassah, B’nai B’rith had many facets to its mission,

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including vocational guidance and scouting, hospitals, Institutes of Judaism, donations to Israel, and civic affairs. Perhaps the most wellknown facet of the organization, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sought (and continues to seek) to eliminate discrimination and remedy injustice against Jews. Also within the purview of B’nai B’rith were university and college Hillel Foundations, which provided a “Jewish home base” of religious and social programs on campuses (Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, April 1955, 15). The Great Neck Lodge and Chapter of B’nai B’rith held an annual Hanukkah party with dancing, ­entertainment, and refreshments. Guests were asked to bring a gift for veterans at a local hospital. Great Neck B’nai B’rith members would present the gifts at the hospital’s Christmas party (“B’nai B’rith to Hold Annual Hanukkah Party,” Great Neck News, December 8, 1950, 1). 40. Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (Hanover, NH, 1993), 73. 41. Such a role was not unusual for women. In the early part of the twentieth century, women volunteers had visited jails, tenement houses, and juvenile courts, but over time, professionals assumed such efforts. By the 1930s, they were involved in efforts of self-education and fundraising, although they continued to visit hospitals and senior citizen homes. As the communal structure became more complex, Jewish federations were formed to oversee the various social service organizations. Women’s divisions of these federations began to appear in the 1930s, serving mainly as fundraising arms (see June Sochen, “Some Observations on the Role of American Jewish Women as Communal Volunteers,” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 [September 1980], 22–34, here 30). 42. Fishman, Breath of Life, 72–73. 43. Sociologist Albert Gordon found that suburban Jewish women chose schools; reared and guided children; chose religious, organizational, and social affiliations; decided on home religious ritual and the extent of worship; and determined the extent of observance expected of children (Gordon, Jews in Suburbia, 62). Temple Israel in Great Neck pointed out that in the Jewish home “it is the function of the mother to light the [Sabbath] candles, preferably in the presence of her children” and recite the Hebrew blessing, and that “actions, they say, speak louder than words” (Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, October 1955, 15). Her actions told her children that Sabbath observance was important in their home. The sisterhood president at the Wantagh Jewish Center agreed, asserting that because a child inherits the faith of the mother, this “strongly indicates the mother’s responsibility for the spiritual welfare of her children. … By embracing the study and practice of our faith, we can strengthen and make more meaningful … the attach-

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ment of our children to our faith. We must learn to initiate and intensify our Jewish interest within our homes and our community. Expending our time and our efforts towards religious aims is a meaningful investment in our future.” (“Woman to Women,” The Scroll, Wantagh Jewish Center, Wantagh, NY, June 1959, 4) 44. Bulletin, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, May 11, 1956, 7–8; Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, December 1956, 18. Rabbi Max Routtenberg, of Temple B’nai Shalom in Rockville Centre, spoke to this point: “One simply cannot have a meaningful Jewish life without a knowledge of the Torah. We are trying to teach that Torah to our children in the Hebrew School, but the difficulties and obstacles are tremendous. Not that our children are dull or incapable of learning; on the contrary, they are very alert and able to absorb a tremendous amount of information. But no one can learn who does not want to learn, who is not interested in learning. And our children, alas, not all of them but many of them, have a negative attitude to Hebrew School. Believe me, they did not develop that attitude by themselves. They came to it very legitimately, from a home environment in which Torah is not prized, in which Jewish living is non-existent, or from association with pupils who came from that type of indifferent background. The whole climate of opinion must be transformed in order to achieve a wholesome program of Jewish education in our community.” (“The Curse of Bigness,” sermon by Rabbi Max J. Routtenberg, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, January 28, 1955, located in the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ratner Center for the Study of Conservative Judaism, Max Routtenberg Papers, Box 2, Folder 1) 45. The Bulletin, Temple B’Nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, March 25, 1955, 4. 46. Bulletin, Midway Jewish Center, Hicksville, NY, January 1959, 2. 47. For example, during the first seven days of Succoth, part of the holiday celebration includes eating and drinking in the temporary dwelling, succah in Hebrew, to remind Jews of the forty years their ancestors wandered in the desert after the exodus from Egypt (Illustrated Hebrew-English Calendar and Handbook of Information [S.l.: General Foods Corporation, ca. 1933], 6). Likewise, eating and drinking rich foods and beverages as joyously as possible characterizes the celebration of Purim. An elaborate feast, seudah, is served before sunset on Purim day. It is also traditional during Purim to eat hamantaschen (triangular-shaped cookies made of cake dough filled with poppy seeds) to demonstrate that Haman (in the Book of Esther) failed to kill all the Jews, who instead increased in number, “countless like poppy seeds” (Customs and Traditions of Israel [New York, 1955], 27). Of particular importance in the chronicle of Jewish

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food is the Passover Seder, during which the story of the exodus from Egypt is told. During the Seder, those gathered eat a variety of foods special to the occasion. Similarly, The Midway Jewish Center (Hicksville) Sisterhood instructed: “The High Holidays are almost here and it is up to us as Jewish Wives and Mothers to strive to make this Rosh Hashonah [sic] Holiday More meaningful and enjoyable than ever” (Bulletin, Midway Jewish Center, Hicksville, NY, September 1957, 4). Women could ensure a meaningful New Year’s celebration by purchasing and serving, along with kosher wine and a round challah (representing the cyclical nature of the year), apples, and honey signifying hope for a sweet new year. 48. The Temple in Jerusalem had been desecrated after a three-year battle between Jews and Assyrian-Greeks. At the conclusion of the battle in 165 B.C.E., Jews found just enough oil in the Temple to keep the Eternal Light (Ner Tamid) lit for just one night and it would take eight days to produce more oil. Hanukkah celebrates the miracle that this single day’s worth of oil lasted eight days (Donin, To Be a Jew, 258). 49. Nassau Herald, April 8, 1949, 13. 50. Great Neck News, April 8, 1949, 18. 51. Great Neck News, March 28, 1958, 5. Dairyland in Plainview offered the sisterhood of Midway Jewish Center (Hicksville) a discount on all Passover food. In fact, with the sisterhood discount women paid full price for the items, but a percentage of each purchase went into the sisterhood treasury. (Bulletin, Midway Jewish Community Center, Hicksville, NY, February 1956, 6) Although sisterhood members were making donations to their organization, they needed the food regardless of the discount and their charity benefited in the process. 52. Rita Newborn interview, March 7, 2002. 53. Rita Newborn interview, March 7, 2002. 54. The event was clearly geared toward women since it was sponsored by the Sisterhood and PTA and was held at 11 a.m. (“Passover Seder To Be Given At Beth-Sholom,” Nassau Herald, April 4, 1952, 1). Similarly, women on The Community Synagogue’s Committee on Religion in Family Life led a discussion “on every aspect of Passover ranging from games and traditional cooking to the ethical and spiritual ramifications.” Participants also viewed a model Seder table, decorations, and an “exhibition of unusual ceremonial vessels and Hagaddahs” (Bulletin, The Community Synagogue, Port Washington, NY, March 1953, 2). 55. Bulletin #15, The Community Synagogue, Port Washington, NY, December 8, 1959, 4. 56. Each night they could give children gifts of Jewish significance, such as Jewish books, records, and albums (Bulletin, Temple B’nai Shalom,

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Rockville Centre, NY, December 8, 1952, 4). For Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the sisterhood also encouraged women to serve special foods, including honey for a sweet new year (Bulletin, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, September 24, 1954, 3). 57. See Jenna Weissman Joselit, “‘Merry Chanuka’: The Changing Holiday Practices of American Jews, 1880–1950,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York, 1992), 303–25, esp. 317–18. 58. Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History (New York, 2013), 4. 59. Ashton, Hanukkah, 4. 60. “Some Christmas Reflections of a Jew,” sermon by Rabbi Max J. Routtenberg, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, December 17, 1954, located in the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ratner Center for the Study of Conservative Judaism, Max Routtenberg Papers, Box 2, Folder 1. 61. Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El, Long Beach, NY, December 1955, 3. Harriet Sauerhoff said that she took it for granted that Jews did not have Christmas trees in their homes (Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002). 62. Bulletin, The Community Synagogue, Port Washington, NY, December 1952, 2; see also Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, December 1958, 13. 63. Andrew Heinze has suggested that Jewish adoption of the custom of gift giving “implied the alteration of a Jewish festival, not the acceptance of a Christian belief.” He asserts that Jewish celebration of Christmas was an “effort to embrace the American spirit” and had little to do with the religious meaning of the holiday (Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity [New York, 1990], 76–77). 64. Harriet Sauerhoff noted that she purchased books and music at a local Jewish shop for her family to enjoy. She went to Cinnamon’s in Hicksville (Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002). 65. In 1943, the Jewish Book Council of America (sponsored by the National Jewish Welfare Board) instituted Jewish Book Month, which encouraged every family to have a shelf of Jewish books (on Jewish religion and history, Israel and modern Jewish problems, Jewish poetry, art, drama, and fiction) in their home. See Bulletin, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, November 13, 1953, 5. Books on display included prayer books, novels, and other volumes published by the Women’s League of the United Synagogues of America (“To Display Jewish Books at Beth-El Sisterhood Session,” Nassau Herald, October 24, 1947, 1).

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66. Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El, Long Beach, NY, December 1955, 2. Likewise, Temple Emanu-El of Lynbrook suggested that for $1 members should purchase copies of the Union Haggadah for use during the Passover Seder. “It is a modern service, with complete detailed explanations, and so arranged that regardless of previous experience or knowledge of Hebrew, you can conduct a successful Seder…. The book itself is beautifully printed and bound” (Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El, Lynbrook, NY, March 11, 1953, 2). 67. Congregants who took advantage of this offer “would be assuring themselves of regular additions to their library of significant Jewish books; and at the same time, they will have the satisfaction of knowing that they are supporting the only Jewish organization of its kind in America” (The Bulletin, Temple Beth El of Great Neck, Great Neck, November 9, 1951, 4); see also Bulletin, Midway Jewish Center, Hicksville, NY, April 1958, 3. Such book groups were popular at this time, and the Central Synagogue of Nassau County (Rockville Centre) encouraged membership in a Jewish one by saying “most of you belong to one or another of the well-known book clubs” (Bulletin, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, NY, April 4, 1947, 2). 68. Banner Records’ artists included such well-known contemporary performers and stars of the Yiddish stage as Molly Picon, Menasha Skulnick, and Moishe Oysher (Long Island Israel Light, October 17, 1947, 3). 69. The Scribe, Temple Sinai, Roslyn Heights, NY, January 27, 1955, 4. 70. The synagogue gift shop was run by women, who often had more flexible schedules than their husbands particularly during the day when children were in school. See Joellyn Wallen Zollman, “Shopping for a Future: A History of the American Synagogue Gift Shop,” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2002). 71. Joellyn Wallen Zollman, “The Gifts of the Jews: Ideology and Material Culture in the American Sysnagogue Gift Shop,” American Jewish Archives Journal 58, nos. 1 & 2 (2006), 52–54, here 52. 72. Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, December 1954, 4. The Judaica Shop at Temple Sinai in Roslyn Heights instructed women, “Don’t leave your Chanuko shopping to the last minute. Visit … the Judaica Shop, NOW” (The Scribe, Temple Sinai, Roslyn Heights, NY, November 25, 1955, 3). 73. Central Synagogue Bulletin, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, NY, November 16, 1951, 3. 74. Perhaps the newly married couples and young families living in the area had not yet purchased this religious item, so the school provided “one temporary, inexpensive Menorah per family” (Central Synagogue Bulletin, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, NY, November 16, 1951, 3).

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75. See Joselit, “‘Merry Chanuka’,” 318. “If you’ve been burning one of those tin Menorahs all these years, why not make Chanukah the beautiful holiday it is … this festival of lights merits a Menorah which befits the occasion, and displayed all during the year is not only a decorative piece, but compliments the home and at the same time creates a Jewish atmosphere,” encouraged Temple Israel Light (Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, December 1954, 8). New families and homeowners might have waited to find the design, style, and size to express their idea of themselves, or perhaps had other financial priorities. Yet the small, inexpensive Hanukkiah (nine-pronged menorahs lit during Hanukkah) offered by the sisterhood allowed women to maintain the family’s Hanukkah observance while pursuing pressing issues faced by a newly suburban growing family. 76. The Community Synagogue’s Judaica Shop also sold Let’s Celebrate Chanukah issued by the UAHC (Union of American Hebrew Congregations), which contained “all the necessary written material, music and suggestions for games and decorations” (Bulletin #16, The Community Synagogue, Port Washington, NY, December 15, 1959, 2). Likewise, Temple Israel Light (Great Neck) encouraged mothers to purchase a new book by Bloch Publishing entitled Jewish Holiday Party Book by Lillian Leiderman and Lillian Abramson. The school office sold copies of it for $1.50 because it served as a practical guide for mothers in planning Jewish holiday parties for children ages five through twelve (Temple Israel Light, Temple Israel, Great Neck, NY, January 1955, 15). 77. The Newsletter, Wantagh Jewish Center, Wantagh, NY, January 1953, 6. 78. How to Celebrate Passover at Home was written by Rabbi Albert Gordon and published by the United Synagogue of America (n.d.). Judaism in the Home Project–Passover was published by The National Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America (n.d.) (The Newsletter, Wantagh Jewish Center, Wantagh, NY, April 1954, 9). The Suburban Synagogue’s sisterhood also sold Passover macaroons (Suburban Weekly Bulletin, The Suburban Synagogue, Wantagh, NY, March 16, 1960, 2). 79. Wallen Zollman, “The Gifts of the Jews,” 61. 80. Women living in a new community with a young congregation or without a synagogue entirely (and thus without a synagogue gift shop) could purchase Judaica at local religious goods stores. The Nassau County yellow pages also listed a number of religious goods stores located in New York City. The Israel Book Shop in Far Rockaway advertised that it stocked “All Hebrew Religious Articles,” including a complete line of Passover products: plastic tablecloths “to protect your linen,” Seder trays, matzo covers, Haggadahs, records, and coloring books (The Bulletin, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, NY, December 5, 1958,

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4; Nassau Herald, April 13, 1951, 10). Residents living near the center of the county purchased items at Theo S.  Cinnamon’s. Launched in the basement of the Cinnamon home, the Hicksville store stocked “Hebrew Books, Religious Articles, Gifts” (Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1960–1961, 875). Harriet Sauerhoff recalled that she never traveled into Manhattan to purchase religious goods, because Cinnamon’s had everything she needed (Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002). 81. The Bulletin, of Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY, November 2, 1951, 3. For further information on the Sisterhood gift shop, see Wallen Zollman, “Shopping for a Future.” 82. Bulletin, Temple B’nai Shalom, Rockville Centre, NY, February 2, 1953, 4. 83. Wallen Zollman notes that demand and supply of Israeli goods increased after the establishment of the state (Wallen Zollman, “Shopping for a Future,” 183, 185, 189). 84. South Shore Record, September 23, 1954, 8. 85. This was not an advertisement for particular products; rather, the bulletin editors decided to encourage the purchase of Israeli goods (Bulletin, Temple Israel, Long Beach, NY, April 1949, 1). 86. Moe Kolpen interview, December 7, 2001. 87. Wallen Zollman, “Shopping for a Future,” 202. 88. Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002. 89. On the concept of “American Jewish domestic culture,” see Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Jewish Home Beautiful,” in The American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna. (New York, 1997), 236–44, here 239; and Wallen Zollman, “Shopping for a Future,” 187. 90. Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002. 91. Joselit, Wonders of America, 294. 92. Albert Gordon found in his study that 66% of suburban families did not observe the dietary laws within their homes, and 93% did not observe them outside their homes. He also found that no more than 10% of families purchased kosher meat (Gordon, Jews in Suburbia, 130–31). Marshall Sklare found in his study that 9% of his suburban respondents abstained from serving pork products, while only 5% bought kosher meat. However, 45% of the respondents’ parents abstained from serving pork products, and 46% bought kosher meat (Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenblum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society [1967; New York, 1979], 52). 93. Victor Mayer’s catering career began shortly after his 1937 arrival in the United States from Germany. Wishing to improve his English-language skills, Mayer enrolled in a class at a nearby synagogue. While trying to locate the correct classroom, he entered the wrong door, which lead to

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the catering office for Dornstein Caterers. Having no prior experience with catering or the food business, this chance encounter launched his catering career (Marion Mayer interview, October 3, 2001). 94. Florence Gould interview, March 8, 2002. 95. Beth S.  Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, CT, 1996), 125. 96. Harriet Feiner interview, March 8, 2002. 97. Getting kosher food was not always easy. Rita Newborn recalled her trek to purchase kosher food in the first months after her arrival in Plainview in 1953. Since her husband drove to work in their car, Newborn placed her three small children into a stroller and set off for the grocery. There, she recalled, “I found it very difficult to get [kosher] meat. But I heard … there was a kosher butcher in Hicksville…. And I called them and they said they would deliver” (Rita Newborn interview, March 7, 2002). Home delivery was an important amenity offered by stores in suburbia. Housing developers had spatially arranged the suburbs so that homes and businesses were often located at some distance from each other (Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States [New York, 1985], chap. 3). With little public transportation existing to bridge the gaps, women without a car or driver’s license relied on food delivery services. Between 1945 and 1960, the number of kosher meat markets in Nassau County more than quintupled from thirteen to seventy, and the number of kosher delis increased from two to seventeen (Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1945–1960). This data from the yellow pages reveals that as the Jewish population of the county grew, nearly every town was able to support its own kosher meat market. As a result, residents did not have to travel far to obtain kosher meat. Riger & Sons Kosher Meats & Poultry advertised themselves in the yellow pages as “One of L.I.’s oldest, most reputable firms … serving Hicksville & all L.I.  Strictly Kosher meats—poultry, home freezer orders” (Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1960–1961, 634). The Nassau County yellow pages included a listing for Riger & Sons in Hicksville beginning in 1953 (Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1953–1954, 524). Similarly, Berman’s Delicatessen advertised “Kosher catering all occasions, platters, salads, hors d’oeuvres, easy parking in rear” (Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1960–1961, 312). 98. In 1945, only two meat markets existed in Great Neck, but by 1958, there were five (Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1945–1946, 149–50; Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1958–1959, 601–4). 99. The Roslyn News, April 15, 1959, 28. Similarly, Harriet Sauerhoff purchased kosher meat from the kosher butcher in the newly built MidIsland Plaza shopping mall in Hicksville (Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff

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interview, March 6, 2002). Mid-Island Kosher Meat and Poultry began advertising in the yellow pages in 1957, the year after the mall was built (James T. Madore, “The Malling of Long Island: Developers transform old air fields into open-­air, covered versions of downtown” Newsday, https://web.archive.org/web/20031224235248/http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/specbiz/bizmall.htm). Sauerhoff explained that in the 1950s it was not unusual to have food retailers in the shopping mall. Mid-Island contained at the time several food stores, including a grocery. In the 1950s, Kolpen Distributors sold kosher food to Nassau County groceries. Moe Kolpen recalled, “the Jewish population was growing in Nassau County, and they’d go in and shop and [say]…, ‘hey, I want Mother’s.’ ‘Well, we don’t sell it.’ ‘Well, if you want me to shop here, I want Mother’s gefilte fish. I want Mother’s borscht. I want Streit’s matzos’” (Moe Kolpen, interview by author, December 7, 2001). 100. Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1950–1960. 101. The Nassau County yellow pages listed his business beginning in 1948 (see Nassau County Yellow Pages, 1948–1949, 128). 102. Remarked Harriet Sauerhoff, a former sisterhood president at Jericho Jewish Center: “Victor Mayer was always the caterer. I don’t think we ever used a different caterer in New York. …He did a great job.” (Harriet and Irving Sauerhoff interview, March 6, 2002). 103. As for her own role in the catering business, Marion Mayer helped book parties and served as the coordinator for these strictly kosher events (Marion Mayer interview, October 3, 2001). 104. The Voice, Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow, East Meadow, NY, February 1959, 3. 105. Nassau Herald, April 2, 1954, 2; see also Bulletin, Temple Emanu-El, Long Beach, NY, November 1955, 6. 106. The Voice, Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow, East Meadow, NY, April 1959, 3. 107. The Scroll, Wantagh Jewish Center, Wantagh, NY, December 1959, 9. 108. Joselit, Wonders of America, 33–4. 109. Gordon, Jews in Suburbia, 143. 110. “The Splendor of the Unfinished,” sermon by Rabbi George B. Lieberman, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, October 11, 1959, located in the American Jewish Archives, MS Collection #280, Box 7, Folder 5. Similarly, congregations encouraged members to keep the Sabbath holy by not holding social functions or attending such functions on Friday evenings, “as this not only precludes their attending the Temple Friday Evening Services, but prevents others from attending also” (Bulletin, Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, NY, January 3, 1947, 2).

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111. Nonetheless, the Mayers preferred catering at a synagogue that owned kosher dishes and utensils. At non-synagogue locales, Victor Mayer Caterers employed a mashgiach, who ensured that the kitchen was properly cleaned. Once the kitchen was “kashered,” the staff began organizing to serve the meal. Most food items were prepared at their Hewlett facility, a former candy factory. They generally hired Jews to help in the kitchen, although the staff did not themselves have to keep kosher, just know the dietary restrictions. Since they only served meat meals, the Mayers did not worry about staff inadvertently using the wrong utensils. Although Victor Mayer catered many different events—brises, bar mitzvahs, engagements, weddings, and anniversary parties—they did not cater funerals. According to Marion Mayer, most people purchased a platter of cold cuts from a local deli to serve after a funeral (Marion Mayer interview, October 3, 2001). 112. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 240–41. 113. Sociologist Marshall Sklare and Rabbi Albert Gordon noticed an increased tendency toward standardization and conformity in suburbia. The idea of social approval was not new, but the degree was. They saw uniformity of food, dress, homes, and thought—consequences of mass production and advertising—and feared its impact on Jewish observance. Sklare and Greenblum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier; Gordon, Jews in Suburbia, esp. Chap. 8.

CHAPTER 8

The Jewish Consumer Culture of British Mandate Palestine Hizky Shoham

In recent years, the links between modern consumer culture and Jewish life have attracted increasing scholarly attention. The diverse ways in which Jews “adapt[ed] to abundance” have been examined in various contexts, unsurprisingly with particular focus on the history of Western Jewries.1 More and more scholars have been asking (to paraphrase Moshe Rossman): what is “Jewish” about Jewish consumer cultures?2 Should we define a Jewish consumer culture by the use of “Jewish” products, recognized as

The author wishes to acknowledge the participants and organizers of the stimulating conference about Jewish consumer cultures that took place at the GHI in Washington, DC, in May 2015, and the Jewish history seminar at the UCL, led by Michael Berkowitz, in February of 2016. Some insightful comments by Francois Guesnet, Paul Lerner, and Anne Schenderlein were particularly helpful.

H. Shoham (*) Graduate Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_8

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such by Jewish tradition(s)? Or just by the fact that it operates in a group of people that identifies itself (or is identified by others) as “Jewish”? These questions have been discussed in connection with specific products or lifestyles that came to define Jewish identities in concrete historical contexts.3 This chapter suggests an anthropological approach to these questions, focusing on the sphere of ritual and on the way that consumer culture altered Jewish holidays and domestic practices in the Jewish sector (known as the Yishuv) of British Mandate Palestine. The works of Jenna Weissman Joselit and Gideon Reuveni on North America and Germany, respectively, demonstrate the ways in which modern consumer rituals in various forms—gift giving, hosting, public celebration, and the like—were blended with Jewish traditions and customs to construct new American-Jewish or German-Jewish identities.4 In a similar vein, but with more focus on the arena of ritual, this chapter charts the vernacular Jewish consumer culture of the Yishuv in Mandate Palestine. It begins by defining consumer culture as a culture in which acts of purchase construct meanings and identity for its participants. After briefly describing the naturalization of Western consumer culture in British Mandate Palestine, the body of the essay discusses various rituals that communicated this notion to Yishuv society— public festivals and processions such as the Tel Aviv Purim carnival, as well as domestic rituals like the bar/bat mitzvah, which ritualized and “Judaized” the act of purchasing and functioned as markers of Jewish identity.



Consumer Culture and Its Spread throughout Yishuv Society

The capitalist culture of the industrial era was far from the only culture in human history to use the buying and selling of goods to construct individual and group identity.5 The uniqueness of modern consumer culture may be illustrated by Marx’s distinction between an object’s “use-value” and its “exchange-value” in the capitalist mode of production. Marx coined the phrase “the fetishism of commodities” to highlight the role played by the commercial process itself in the construction of identity through objects in capitalism.6 Modern consumer culture relies on purchasing objects, rather than using them, to make the object an extension of personal or group identification. With the encouragement of

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individualist worldviews, on the one hand and, somewhat paradoxically, business interests, on the other, the act of purchase was socially constructed as a form of self-fulfillment and self-expression. In North America and Western Europe, this happened in particular after the Great War, when a new hedonist ethics of consumerism began to replace, or at least supplement, the Protestant ethics of frugality and hard work that had governed the public sphere of the early industrial era (although the question of periodization is complicated and beyond the scope of this essay).7 Employing this Marxian distinction, however, does not mean abiding by neo-Marxist pessimism with regard to consumer culture, starting with the Frankfurt School, which saw it mainly as commercial manipulation aimed at increasing sales and maintaining the existing capitalist order by selling “illusions” of self-fulfillment to the masses, especially the lower classes.8 Rather, this chapter follows anthropological approaches to consumption that, without ignoring the criticisms voiced by the Frankfurt School and others, interpret modern consumer culture as much more than an economic engine. These approaches see it as an autonomous form of culture—a source of meaning for people’s lives, created with active consumer participation.9 Rather than evaluating the actual effect of anti-­ consumer discourse on the actual shopping habits of the public, I will use it as a historical indication of the development of a latent consumerism, that is, as an ethnographic source that inadvertently documented the (“distasteful”) details of consumer culture. In other words, the following essay shifts the perspective from the social agents of consumer culture—entrepreneurs, campaigners, advertisers, and the like—and from pro- and anti-consumer discourse to the ethnographic dimensions of consumer culture on the grassroots level. As a culture, consumer culture has developed its own myths, norms, and behavioral codes. Like other cultures portrayed in classic works of anthropology, consumer rituals may be interpreted as a key to understanding this form of culture.10 Modern parades, ceremonies, family rituals like birthdays, and similar events encode and spread the central myth of consumer culture throughout society. But these modern rituals do more than merely communicate the idea of self-fulfillment through the act of purchase: they often celebrate the real or imagined prosperity of a given social group (a household, city, nation, etc.), ritualizing the act of purchase and luring individuals to join the group by buying goods. In the capitalist era, therefore, rituals of consumer culture are vital to instilling a sense of belonging to families, communities, ethnic groups, or nations.

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The main rituals of consumer culture may be roughly categorized according to their venue: outdoors or indoors. The industrial age separated the spaces of consumption from the spaces of production, and also sharpened the distinction between the public and the private.11 On the one hand, the act of purchase had become habitual in everyday public life and transformed the marketplace into a central arena of identity construction through buying goods.12 On the other hand, the family had ceased to function as a productive unit and had become a consumer unit instead. Forming a sense of belonging to the nuclear family—the new epicenter of personal identity—required new domestic rituals that celebrated the commercial process at home, whether in community festivals or family celebrations. Modern consumer culture thus re-appropriated and altered pre-industrial rituals, adjusting them to public and domestic settings alike.13 In other words, although these two categories will be discussed here separately, the distinction between the public and the domestic is by no means absolute. Public holidays and family customs are felt strongly in both the public and the domestic spheres. In the public sphere, both kinds of celebrations influence the advertising industry, which keeps offering specific products to express personal and group identity through holidays and family rites. The domestic space is where most rituals of both kinds actually take place because it is considered the nucleus of modern identity. Studying the rituals of consumer culture can thus shed light on everyday aspects of the relationships among religious, ethnic, familial, and national identity.



Consumer Culture in the Yishuv

On the ideological-doctrinal level, the encounter between modern consumer culture as described here and the Zionist project seemed challenging for both sides. Like many contemporary modern nationalist movements, Zionism was “talking of peasants [while] making townsmen,”14 seeking to transform the typical Jewish middle-class city dweller into “a new Hebrew”—attached to his land, rooted, and “productive.”15 This image implied, among other things, a Spartan and anti-urban ethos that was unsympathetic to “unproductive” consumer culture. Nonetheless, in the interwar era, a typical consumer society emerged in the Yishuv. This process was facilitated by the British conquest in World War I, immigration among the Jewish middle class, and the rapid and unexpected urban

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development of the country, especially in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.16 As elsewhere, the rise of consumer culture in Palestine was accompanied by moralizing discourses about consumption as a destructive form of materialism. This anti-consumer discourse was partly influenced by the masculine nature of Zionist ideology and was often manifested in the image of a gendered division of labor in which men produce and women consume.17 Promoted by the hegemonic labor movement circles and the nationalist Hebrew press, the anti-consumer discourse was primarily directed at endorsing the Puritan ethos of the pioneer, encouraging frugality or even asceticism for the sake of the nation.18 Anti-consumer discourse met no opposing pro-consumer discourse, but occasionally it faced the reality of consumerism. In this way, the Yishuv resembled many other contemporaneous societies that believed in economic nationalism and favored productivist paradigms.19 Nonetheless, oddly, in the case of the Yishuv, the dominance of the Puritan self-image over Yishuv culture has deterred researchers from studying the influences of consumer culture on Yishuv society. Whereas Zionist consumer culture in Europe has already been studied from several perspectives, we still do not know enough about the consumer culture of Eastern European Jewry.20 Until recently, most scholarship on the Yishuv has focused on the pioneer sector and neglected the silent majority of urbanites. Starting in the early 2000s, the historian Anat Helman, who specializes in everyday life in the Yishuv, began publishing an excellent series of studies about Yishuv consumer culture. With a natural focus on the emerging metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, but with an eye to other urban and urbanizing spaces, Helman colorfully describes a vivid commercial sphere that promised personal self-fulfillment through the act of purchase and that proliferated in parallel to, and regardless of, the proliferation of anti-consumer discourse.21 Other scholars have followed suit.22 Whereas scholarship on Zionism has traditionally emphasized its Eastern European cultural orientation, which supported the puritan self-image of the Yishuv, this new scholarship underscores a Western orientation that resulted from global trends of westernization (and Americanization) rather than from unique internal Jewish processes.23 (The contribution of the British control over Palestine to this Zionist Western orientation is a different topic that is still in need of further research.)24 Yet, this new research scarcely deals with the Jewish-ritual aspects of consumer culture that concern us here. Zionist culture showed great interest in the ritual aspects of traditional Jewish culture, re-appropriating

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and reinterpreting traditional holidays and life-cycle rituals in light of the new context. Nonetheless, most scholarship about the revamped holidays and family customs overlooks their crass commercialization, instead focusing on ideological-political aspects.25 The commercial aspects were by no means concealed by anti-consumer discourse; rather, the ideological tensions evoked by the Jewish consumer culture of the Yishuv were themselves represented in Jewish consumer rituals. Let us turn to the commercial aspects of Jewish festivals that nationalized the public sphere.

Public Rituals: Celebrating the Jewish Economy The convergence of “church time” and “market time,” that is, the celebration of traditional holidays through shopping, is characteristic of the festive culture of the industrial age.26 In the Yishuv, too, on the days before most traditional holidays, such as Passover or Rosh Hashana, there were huge streams of shoppers and annual increases in sales. Even when times were hard, such as during the Second World War, when the Mandatory government instituted strict rationing, we find reports of price-gouging and profiteering in basic commodities before major holidays, and not even the clouds of war could dampen the strong demand.27 In addition to the classic holiday items (such as matzo for Passover), other branches boomed as well, especially “clothing, housewares, … groceries, wine, flowers, and so on.”28 In other words, even bad years saw no drop in demand, only in supply, which naturally led to higher prices and shortages. It seems that everyone, whatever their social class and income, wanted to celebrate the festivals in the proper way, and this included stepped-up purchases of consumer goods. This atmosphere recalls the Talmudic sages’ description of the ideal Seder, at which all behave like free and wealthy men and women, even if their real situation is quite different.29 The Jewish middle class of Mandatory Palestine was similar in this aspect to its European and North American counterparts, where holidays were increasingly celebrated with festive meals and gift giving becoming intensely commercialized.30 In British Palestine, unlike the Western Diasporas, the street and the marketplace were recognized as “Jewish” spaces. Interwar Tel Aviv, in particular, inadvertently and rapidly developed into a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants, all Jewish, forming an overwhelming demographic majority that marked the urban space as Jewish.31 The meaning of this Jewishness was far from agreed upon. Indeed, bitter disputes about the relationships between leisure, religion, and Jewish identity were a matter

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of routine.32 Nonetheless, the existence of a “Jewish” commercial sphere redefined the convergence of “church time” and “market time,” which was felt toward the holidays. The Jewishness of the commercial sphere was most vividly expressed through the Tel Aviv Purim carnival. This was the largest public event in Tel Aviv and all of Palestine, and it reinterpreted and re-appropriated the traditional holiday to express the Jewishness of the urban space.33 The carnival took place between 1920 and 1935 and was, all at the same time, a nation-building event, a hedonist-escapist event, and a tourist event intended to put the city on the map of international tourism to Palestine and to stimulate the urban economy.34 Tens or hundreds of thousands of people from all around the Middle East crowded the streets of the young city to watch the mayor riding his horse, an oriental beauty queen waving her hand to the masses, three gigantic mannequin biblical figures that viewed the celebration from their hundred-foot high stage, a fourth biblical figure of a notorious persecutor executed in the city square, and more floats of this kind. But in addition to boosting the urban economy, the carnival depicted commercial activity as the primary emphasis of the main parade, which always included many commercial floats. The ideological justification for this commercialization was the advent of the “totzeret ha’aretz” campaigns in 1920s Palestine: unlike other “buy local” campaigns, these were not directed solely against imports. Instead they were often also “buy Jewish” campaigns directed against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethno-national sector in Palestine. These campaigns were designed to mold national identity through the sphere of consumption by linking the mundane act of purchase to the strength of the nation, urging costumers to consider a product’s ethnic origins rather than its price or quality.35 The campaigners organized numerous fairs, exhibitions, processions, and other means of publicity to encourage the public to “buy Jewish.” Similar to other interwar “buy local” campaigns, whose effects on the actual shopping habits of consumers were negligible, the main achievement of these campaigns was to exert moral pressure that generated a sense of national belonging in the public discourse.36 In other words, their primary accomplishment was not so much to strengthen the Jewish economy as to mold a nationalist identity by delineating certain products and market spaces as “Jewish.” Naturally, the campaigns made frequent use of Jewish holidays to encourage customers to “buy Jewish.”37 But the Purim carnival conveyed this theme more strongly: in 1925, the organizers, who worked for the

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Jewish National Fund (JNF), officially declared “totzeret ha’aretz” the theme of the parade. In practical terms, this decision meant that every Jewish business was permitted to participate and advertise itself for free. Some businesses did so without even trying to add a light-hearted touch to amuse the crowd.38 Before the 1925 parade, and even more so after it, many vehemently criticized the carnival’s commercialization. For example, Moshe Glikson, editor of the influential daily Ha’aretz (which represented the Jewish middle class), warned, “The commercial ad requires much caution.”39 Other critics, spokesmen (mostly men) for both the socialist left and the conservative-religious right were much blunter.40 No one publicly challenged this criticism, which did lead the organizers to add a few original and somewhat more satirical floats every year, and some explicitly endorsed the Zionist agricultural ethos. Nonetheless, the commercial component continued to play a central role in the parade. Even after 1928, when the Tel Aviv municipality convened a special program committee to plan and carry out large “educational” floats every year, a considerable number of the floats still represented private commercial interests under the guise of the “buy Jewish” campaign. Although it was a “traditional” holiday, the carnival procession was also one among the countless “buy Jewish” fairs, exhibitions, and processions—and somewhat resembled the “Levant Fair”—that took place for several years on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Although this fair echoed the international fairs known in the industrialized West as early as the nineteenth century, the most impressive pavilion was nonetheless dedicated to “totzeret ha’aretz,” that is, local Jewish products. The Levant Fair, too, celebrated commerce, but faced much more subdued ideological criticism of its commercialization because it was not tied to a traditional Jewish holiday.41 The capitalist urge to sell permeated the entire experience of the street-­ carnival (as it did at the fairs), and not only on the floats. During the carnival, the municipality allowed the merchants to display their stock outside their stores, on the streets, and to extend their business hours until ten at night.42 Illegal peddlers, many of them Arabs, walked through the streets, offering food, drink, or costume accessories.43 To stroll about the Tel Aviv streets during Purim would have been an intensive shopping experience, as visitors incessantly confronted the temptation to buy, or to contribute to the massive fundraising campaigns by the JNF and other national institutions.44 The sight of money changing hands was thus integral to the carnival experience, and many of the tens of thousands of people who

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came from all over Palestine and crowded in the streets for the carnival saw spending money as part of the fun. The clearest evidence of the profits made during the Purim carnival was the fact that after it was cancelled in 1936 due to budgetary limits, the first and most vociferous protest to reach the municipality came from the merchants’ organizations of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.45 Nonetheless, the carnival was much more than just a platform for a sales agenda. Folklorist Roger Abrahams, who has analyzed festivities in pre-­ industrial agricultural communities, coined the phrase “celebration of the economy” to describe galas in which such communities glorify their own abundance by extravagantly presenting it in the public space, mainly in the form of parades.46 Following Abrahams, Helman suggests interpreting the Tel Aviv carnival as “celebrating the economy” because it annually depicted and celebrated the plentiful agricultural, industrial, and commercial products of the Yishuv, albeit in an urban context.47 In terms of the dramaturgic concepts developed by Erving Goffman as tools for social research, the economic activity was acted out and performed “on stage,” that is, in the carnival procession, in addition to being the center of the carnival’s “backstage.”48 Hence, despite the criticism, both the economic activity and its performance were major themes. For our purposes, it bears mentioning that the carnival celebrated the abundance of the Jewish economy by appropriating a Jewish holiday. Critics saw this as crass commercialization, but the opposite was no less true: the Purim procession “Judaized” the commercial sphere. The Jewishness of the public commercial space may be further illustrated by the Tel Avivian Sabbath that Helman describes.49 She begins her description with a heated debate that took place in interwar Tel Aviv between the secular elite, led by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, and rabbinical authorities regarding whether the Sabbath should be halakhically observed or given new secular intellectual-cultural contents. But this learned debate passed over the heads of the majority of the populace, who chose a third way: routine leisure activities such as cafés and restaurants, bathing or tanning on the beach, or just strolling around the city to see and be seen. This created the unique and novel Tel Aviv Sabbath, which, according to Helman, “took place not only in public but for the public,” that is, for people who wanted to relax and enjoy rather than to study or pray.50 This Sabbath, which was condemned in vain by both the secular and the religious intellectual elites, was neither religious nor secular. As such, it spread much beyond Tel Aviv’s municipal borders and became the

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unique contribution of Tel Aviv’s commercial sphere to modern Jewish cultures. The “celebration of the economy” on display in the Purim carnival, the shopping sprees that precede the Jewish holidays, the leisure culture of the Sabbath, and even the more mundane “buy Jewish” campaigns were all at odds with the Zionist puritan ethos.51 The latter officially, if reluctantly, tolerated these celebrations because of the need to support Jewish industry and agriculture. The actual result of these celebrations of commerce, though, was the indirect nationalist legitimization of hedonistic consumer culture. Moreover, the centrality of commercial activity, not only as a reality but also as a national symbol communicated through the public rituals of the new Zionist society, highlighted the intersection of this typical capitalist consumer society with nationalist ideology. The new Jewish public sphere, the one that eventually yielded to the new polity, was a commercial one, and the new Jewish festivals celebrated it magnificently. The commercialization of traditional practices brought by modern consumer culture affected not only the public sphere but also the family sphere, to which we will turn now.

Domestic Rituals Historian Elizabeth Pleck termed the industrial era the “sentimental age,” because it formed an entire system of family rituals that worshiped childhood and the nuclear family, where the home was juxtaposed to the “alien” public sphere and seen as a place of refuge from that “filthy” environment. In addition to traditional festivals, which were domesticated and celebrated with the nuclear family, new family rituals were invented or widely popularized among the emerging middle classes: anniversaries, birthdays, “white weddings” (that is, the Victorian format in which the bride wears a white dress), and sentimental funerals. In holidays and family rituals alike, the bourgeoisie of the sentimental age popularized a hosting and gift-giving culture in which one shows one’s affection or appreciation to the celebrant, the host, or the guests by purchasing items for them. Rites of passage and family celebrations thus turned into major consumer celebrations, as the social status of the hosts and guests came to be defined by outfits, hairstyles, food, and so forth, which in turn became services provided by the market. In other words, these events were commoditized.52 Among the many new family rituals, the ultimate consumer rite was doubtlessly the birthday party. In contrast to pre-industrial rites of

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passage, which marked changes in status, the middle class of the industrial era placed the numerical count of a person’s years at the center of the structure of individual identity and ritualized the passage of time.53 Whereas in classical rites of passage, initiates typically performed a social task to gain a new status, the honorees in modern, industrial-era birthdays are not expected to perform any tasks to demonstrate their abilities. They are part of society simply by virtue of their existence, which is the quintessence of the celebration. Today’s cult of birthdays thus relies on the modern assumption that each of us is a unique phenomenon with her or his own story, from birth to death.54 This individualist notion is correspondingly endorsed by consumer culture, which recognizes each of its members as a distinctive person with his or her own desires, and offers specific ways to fulfill them. Thus, the birthday, which traces back to the cult of the Roman genius and was celebrated mainly by the nobility and upper classes up until the industrial era, gained broad popularity and became the ne plus ultra in modern industrial culture. Combining the individualism of consumer culture with the Victorian cult of childhood, the birthday has held on to its basic format throughout modernity, a cake with candles and special songs (which may vary as a function of the celebrant’s national culture as it coalesced in the industrial age).55 This remained so even in the very late industrial age—which Pleck has called the “Postsentimental Age.”56 The birthday celebration’s form and contents were shaped mainly by modern consumer culture, which emphasizes the value of the individual’s existence through gifts and other purchased items or services, such as food and clothing, which indicate the social status of celebrants and their families and simultaneously fulfill their wishes and express their personalities.57 Birthdays, along with similar individualist rituals of modern consumer culture, arrived in the Jewish world toward the end of the nineteenth century, first for wealthy Jews, and then for almost everyone.58 Although few people in Ottoman Palestine celebrated birthdays or anniversaries, birthday parties had been celebrated in the handful of Hebrew-language preschools that operated in the Yishuv only after the First World War. They were seen as part of the idea of protected childhood, which teachers were trying to spread. But with the rise of the middle-class lifestyle and its accompanying value system during the Mandate era, family birthday parties became common as well. Organizing birthdays for children was perceived as a hallmark of Western civilization in light of middle-class perceptions of sentimentalized childhood, which were common in the

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Yishuv.59 A birthday party at home with presents for the child became an obligatory norm. In communities not yet familiar with birthday celebrations, preschool teachers attempted to introduce the practice to parents, or at least to compensate children by holding a larger party in the classroom.60 Any contemporary society in the process of westernization could be described similarly. But although most birthdays in the Yishuv celebrated merely individual existence, there was an exception, the birthday that ostensibly celebrated the Jewish identity of the celebrant: the thirteenth birthday for boys, and the twelfth birthday for girls, known as the bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, respectively. The bar mitzvah was a long-established rite of initiation for boys. It arose in Europe in the late Middle Ages, and was widely popularized in the Jewish world from the early modern era. By the eighteenth century, the event delicately balanced the religious ritual and the social occasion, whose conspicuous consumption attested to the family’s social standing. As Michael Hilton noted in his exhaustive historical account of the bar mitzvah, its popularity among Jewish parents has grown since the rise of modern consumer culture in the industrial era in inverse proportion to their commitment to observing the precepts, reaching its peak in the late industrial era. Parents, educators, and rabbis often expressed (and still do) their concern about consumer culture’s influence on the ceremony’s form and content; indeed, the ceremony seemed to lose its function as a rite of initiation. Although now more like an expanded birthday party, these overblown events somehow began to mark Jewish identity precisely when this was perhaps the only link between the celebrant and Jewish life.61 In the consumer culture of Mandatory Palestine, as elsewhere in the Jewish world at the time, the bar mitzvah party gradually came to carry greater weight than the corresponding synagogue ritual and was sometimes held in the middle of the week rather than after Sabbath services. For example, a family named Gutt celebrated their son’s bar mitzvah in the auditorium of the Zion Cinema in Jerusalem in 1927.62 Even in Ultra-­ Orthodox circles, people of note, like the Rebbe of Sadigora, held a bar mitzvah banquet in the middle of the week, in addition to the event at the synagogue on Sabbath.63 The press reported on these events because of the families’ social prominence, but throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it seems, most families in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Petah Tiqva, and other cities and towns still invited their friends and acquaintances, along with the boy’s peers, to a reception after the synagogue service or in the middle

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of the week—at home instead of in a hall.64 In a semi-autobiographical story by Yaakov Shabtai, set in the Mandate era, tables are set for the party in the family’s apartment, and the women of the neighborhood bring cakes.65 The children invited as guests might bring their friend colorful postcards, toys, and “manly” tools such as pliers. Adult relatives and friends brought a book, a globe, or a toy; the more affluent could afford to give musical instruments such as harmonica.66 The party resembled the domestic birthday parties that began to be held in the Yishuv during those years. The children played party games; if there was enough space in the home, they might dance the hora and other contemporary dances.67 Other families still held a reception in the synagogue after the service, Sephardic families midweek and Ashkenazi on the Sabbath.68 Here it is likely that the Western influence was augmented by the custom of Jews from Muslim countries, many of whom conducted the entire bar mitzvah celebration on a weekday.69 For most social circles in the Yishuv, the celebrations were still relatively modest. The midweek party was disconnected from the synagogue, but the latter remained in the picture. Many boys were still called up to the Torah in the synagogue nearest their home, even if they never set foot there before or after that day.70 In urban neighborhoods, the local synagogue invited boys to attend the morning service and perform the religious ceremony, and many did so. But it is not clear whether their parents attended the ceremony, let alone other friends and extended family members.71 The ritual was not considered to be very important or worthy of note, which explains the paucity of newspaper reports about it. Generally, the Yishuv held on to the traditional ceremony, although its function as a religious initiation rite was becoming more dubious. Interestingly, the 1940s saw a sharp change in how the bar mitzvah was celebrated and in the balance between the birthday party and the rite of initiation. The focus of the celebration moved from the family home and the synagogue into the public arena, that is, to banquet halls or schools (and similar venues), and the associated financial outlay skyrocketed, along with the number of guests. By the late 1940s, there were newspaper advertisements of “modern halls for rent, for weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, and balls.”72 Renting halls for balls and parties, including family events such as weddings, had been a common practice in the Yishuv going back to Ottoman times, but not, until the 1940s, for bar mitzvah receptions. The specification “modern” in the advertisement referred, among other things, to catering services, which were now provided by the hall, rather

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than by the family with the help of the neighbors, as in the past.73 As before, public figures of note held extravagant bar mitzvah parties midweek with hundreds of invitees to demonstrate their social standing.74 In the 1940s, however, those who could not afford the expense, or who lived in remote places that did not have a banquet hall, celebrated in more modest venues such as the local school, “with many guests in attendance.”75 Of course many still celebrated at home, but now, for the first time, celebrating outside the home and synagogue was an option that not only the rich could afford.76 The bar mitzvah thus entered the public marketplace and became an opportunity for lavish expenditure across the social spectrum. For example, a beggar in Tel Aviv reported that most of his income came from weddings and weekday bar mitzvahs.77 The midweek event became the focus of the bar mitzvah, not only in the minds of the partygoers but also in language, in which the term “bar mitzvah” came to mean the party rather than the initiation ceremony in the synagogue.78 As part of this process, more and more families no longer bothered at all with the synagogue service.79 But the commercialization of the bar mitzvah took place among the observant to the same extent. Also in the 1940s, advertisements began appearing specifically for bar mitzvah gifts—such as a fountain pen engraved with the celebrant’s name.80 Another new phenomenon of that decade, which reflected the changes in the value of the gifts and in the social obligation to give them, was the publication of bar mitzvah anthologies. Books were still a very popular gift among adults who wanted to give the child something “educational,” and the market responded to the demand. In 1943, mainstream authors of the Zionist elite published a bar mitzvah reader containing classic texts from modern Jewish and world literature that the editors thought adolescents should be familiar with.81 Of course, the popularity of this gift among adult relatives and friends of the parents may not testify to its popularity among the boys themselves. For them, the ultimate present in the 1940s was a wristwatch.82 Interestingly enough, the bar mitzvah gifts of the 1940s onward resembled those of the interwar era in North America and Europe.83 The shift was reflected in the criticism that began to issue from various directions about the extravagance and waste of bar mitzvah parties, the conspicuous consumption, the children’s inappropriate behavior, and the absence of any educational or cultural content. During the Second World War, there was harsh censure by critics from across the socio-political scale of the Yishuv for the “numerous celebrations, banquets, and festive

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occasions” being held, while the Jews in Europe were groaning under the yoke of a bitter oppressor.84 Criticism of extravagance was nothing new in the Yishuv, but this was the first time that the bar mitzvah was included as a prominent example of such excess. Right-wing revisionist circles, which had always delighted in castigating the methods employed by the JNF to angle for donations, could now add to their list the fact that “every bar mitzvah boy whose parents have rich friends can easily ‘perpetuate’ his name.”85 Religious circles attacked the lavish bar mitzvah parties of the non-religious as empty and meaningless.86 But similar disapproval was heard from within labor movement and the urban and rural middle classes as well. And everybody complained about the children’s inappropriate behavior during the event. These critics often described in detail how what used to be a religious ritual took on the form of an elaborate birthday party: presents, food, and a get-together with friends and family, but no ritualistic or educational meaning.87 At the same time, though the trend would seem to have occurred independently, people began to celebrate bat mitzvahs for girls, not with any religious meaning or significance as a rite of passage but only as a more important birthday, a process I have documented in detail elsewhere.88 Bat mitzvah parties as a ceremony unrelated to the synagogue, but simply as a public thanksgiving that one’s daughter had reached the age of twelve, were sometimes discussed in the abstract in the rabbinic literature in Poland and Iraq. In both countries, however, the authors stated explicitly that they knew of no such celebration that had actually taken place.89 In fact, both the practice and the term were unfamiliar in the Yishuv in the 1930s. During the 1940s, the bat mitzvah emerged there from the grassroots as an expanded birthday party to mark a girl’s twelfth birthday, copied from the bar mitzvah festivities for a boy of thirteen, but without the religious ritual. By the early 1950s, invitations to a bat mitzvah were considered to be routine in all strata.90 Of course, adults soon began complaining about the children’s inappropriate behavior at bat mitzvah parties, too.91 And the standard censure of ostentation was henceforth directed at bat mitzvahs just as much as at bar mitzvahs.92 Intriguingly, the Yishuv’s invention of the bat mitzvah took place at the same time as it was moving the bar mitzvah from the synagogue and home into the public domain. This was a trickle-up process. No cultural entrepreneurs, let alone feminist groups, promoted bat mitzvah celebrations and brought them to the masses. Quite the opposite. The initiative came from below, from the families, perhaps from the girls themselves, envious

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of their brothers and male peers and wanting their own event with presents, a new outfit, and so forth.93 The bat mitzvah’s development from the birthday party is consumer culture’s most concrete contribution to Jewish culture in the Yishuv, and ultimately to the entire Jewish world, which seems to have adopted twelve as the age for it “as a result of the influence of Israeli practice, in which celebrations at age twelve have become the norm” (whereas in North America, where the initial motive was feminist, the bat mitzvah was often celebrated at thirteen).94 The almost ex nihilo creation of the bat mitzvah and its evolution into a social norm in all sectors of Israeli Jewish society is an extreme example of the influence of the consumer culture on modern Jewish culture—even in a society, such as the Yishuv, whose overt ethos rejected consumerism. Despite the frequent remarks about the transition from childhood to maturity, the bat mitzvah changes nothing in the life of the twelve-year-old girl, whose daily routine continues after the party along the same track as before. The special quality of the number twelve is only its traditional significance in the halakhic literature. The halakhic age of obligation by the precepts was already there, ready-made for girls who wanted to have a more elaborate birthday party. But, paradoxically, this party became a marker of Jewish identity and continuity in the family sphere and in the market for the mainstream of Israeli Jews.95 The swift growth of bar mitzvah expenditures and the emergence of the bat mitzvah mark an inversion in the hierarchy between the two components of the event during the 1940s. The rite of initiation, in the synagogue, even if still performed, became marginal and at best exotic, and the elaborate birthday party, with all the presents and fancy clothing, took center stage. A similar transformation took place in North America around the same time, in the era of suburbanization.96 But the designation of this consumerist event as “bar/bat mitzvah” makes it a prominent marker of Jewish identity in the family sphere.97 In this, it was similar to various Jewish practices that were observed in the domestic sphere of the Yishuv as a result of national or family heritage rather than of religion per se, articulating “symbolic ethnicity” invigorated by modern consumer culture.98

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Conclusion: What is Jewish about Jewish Consumer Cultures?

Jewish consumer cultures were often preoccupied with the tension between separation from and integration into the majority cultures around them.99 But unlike consumer cultures of diaspora Jewries, in which the host culture was the relevant majority, in the Yishuv the reference was to a geographically distant and vague “West.” Hence, to the extent that the Yishuv’s consumer culture performed boundary work, it was more political than its Jewish-Western counterparts: it marked the “Jewish” as Western and distinguished it from the “non-Western”; it politicized the public space with public events that celebrated the prosperity of a distinctly Jewish commerce. The marketplace was “Judaized” not so much by the presence of so-called Jewish commodities, but more by the public commercialization of Jewish rituals that were constructed as “traditional,” even if of recent origin like the bat mitzvah and the Purim parade.100 These “traditions” turned the purchase of rather mundane objects into an indication of Jewish belonging and created a Jewish consumer culture. This brief survey of the public rituals and domestic customs of Jewish consumer culture unveils just a little of the methodological potential of studying the Jewish consumer culture of the Yishuv and Israel. Recent trends in the historiography of Zionism struggle to overcome the political and literary biases that have characterized the field for decades, narrowing the scholarly gaze to the political arena or the world of letters.101 Thanks to the mundane nature and social pervasiveness of identity construction through the purchase of objects, the study of the Yishuv’s consumer culture can shed new light on processes of personal and group identity construction that trickled up from below. Here we saw the examples of the bat mitzvah as a more elaborate birthday celebration for twelve-year-old girls and the Tel Aviv Sabbath, which the consumer culture forged from the grassroots in spite of criticism by rabbis and the Orthodox, on the one hand, and by secular intellectuals and educators, on the other hand. Consumer culture did not have its own intellectuals and ideological platforms, but perhaps this is part of why it was so difficult to resist and why it may prove to be a highly promising road for modern historiography of Zionism, the Yishuv, and Israel.

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Notes 1. In short: Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990); Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer, eds., Longing, Belonging and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture (Leiden, 2010). 2. Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford, UK, 2007). 3. For example: Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish princesses don’t sweat: desire and consumption in postwar American Jewish culture,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-­ Schwartz (Albany, NY, 1992), 329–59; Gideon Reuveni, “‘Productivist’ and ‘Consumerist’ Narratives of Jews in German History,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 165–84; Paul Lerner, “Circulation and representation: Jews, department stores and cosmopolitan consumption in Germany, c. 1880s–1930s,” European Review of History 17, no. 3 (2010): 395–413; Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015); Sarah Wobick-Segev, “Buying, Selling, Being, Drinking: Jewish Coffeehouse Consumption in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev (New York, 2011), 115–34. 4. Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York, 1994); Gideon Reuveni, “Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalence in Weimar Germany,” in Reuveni and Roemer, eds., Longing, Belonging, 113–37. See also Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History (New York, 2013). 5. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (1979; London, 1996); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, UK, 1986). 6. Robert C.  Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 319–29. 7. E.g. Peter N.  Stearns, “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,” The Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 102–17. 8. For example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA, 2003): 94–136. See Ishay Landa, “The Negation of Abnegation. Marx on Consumption,”

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Historical Materialism 26, no. 1 (2018): 3–36. I would like to thank Dr. Landa for sharing this unpublished manuscript with me. 9. For example, Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods; Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, UK, 1989); Jean-Christopher Agnew, “Coming Up For Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 19–39. On the autonomy of “culture,” see: Jeffrey C.  Alexander and Philip Smith, “Cultural Sociology or Sociology of Culture: Towards a Strong Program for Sociology’s Second Wind,” Sociologie et Sociétés 30, no. 1 (1998): 107–16. 10. For example, Victor W.  Turner, Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-­ Structure (London, 1969); Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 412–53. 11. For example, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL, 1958); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989). 12. For example, Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, CA, 2001). 13. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ, 1996); Elizabeth H.  Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture and Family Rituals (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 14. Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY), 107. 15. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, IL, 1995), 20–28; Anita Shapira, “The Origins of the Myth of the ‘New Jew’: The Zionist Variety,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 13 (1997): 253–68. 16. Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy 1920–1929 (Syracuse, NY, 1993); Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge, UK, 1998); and mainly Anat Helman, Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities, trans. Haim Watzman (Waltham, MA, 2010). 17. Anat Helman, Or Veyam Hikifuha: Tarbut Tel Avivit Bitkufat Hamandat (Haifa, 2007), 119. Compare De Grazia with Furlough, The Sex of Things; Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 817–44; Matthew Hilton, “The Female Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 103–28.

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18. For example, Oz Almog, The Sabra: the Creation of the New Jew, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley, CA, 2000), 209–25. 19. For example, John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” The Yale Review 22 (1933): 755–69; Ivan T.  Berend, “The Failure of Economic Nationalism: Central and Eastern Europe before World War I,” Revue économique 51, no. 2 (2000): 315–22. 20. Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 119–43; Reuveni, “Advertising,” 129–30. 21. Anat Helman, “European Jews in the Levant Heat: Climate and Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv,” Journal of Israeli History 22, no. 1 (2003): 71–90; Anat Helman, “Two Urban Celebrations in Jewish Palestine,” Journal of Urban History 32, no. 3 (2006): 380–403; and Helman, Young Tel Aviv, 77–103. 22. Dafna Hirsch and Ofra Tene, “Hummus: The Making of an Israeli Culinary Cult,” Journal of Consumer Culture 13, no. 1 (2013): 25–45; Ofra Tene, Ha-batim ha-levanim yimalʼu (Bene Beraq, 2013); Liora Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven, CT, 2015), 44–49, 83–92. 23. For example, Ilan S.  Troen, “Frontier Myths and their Application in America and Israel: A Transnational perspective,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1209–30; Dafna Hirsch, “‘We are here to bring the West, not only to ourselves’: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 4 (2009): 577–94. 24. See Halperin, Babel in Zion, pp. 99–141. 25. For example, Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley, CA, 1983); Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “Hanukkah and the Myth of the Maccabees in Zionist Ideology and in Israeli Society,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 34, no. 1 (1992): 5–23; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 96–102, 218; Lilach Rosenberg-­ Friedman, “Wedding Ceremony, Religion, and Tradition: The Shertok Family Debate, 1922,” Israel Studies Review 27, no. 1 (2012): 98–124; Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman, “Traditional Revolution: The Issue of Marriage on Religious Kibbutzim, 1929–1948—A Comparative View,” Journal of Israeli History 31, no. 1 (2012): 109–28. 26. Schmidt, Consumer Rites, 19–23. 27. For example, “Tel Aviv: Mi mashgi’ach al hamefakhim,” Davar, April 3, 1945, 5. 28. “Tel Aviv,” Davar, April 8, 1936, 6. 29. Yosef Tabori, Pesach Dorot: Prakim Betoldot Leil Haseder (Tel Aviv, 1996): 48–130, 350–377.

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30. Joselit, The Wonders of America, 219–63; Reuveni, “Advertising,” 130–35; Ashton, Hanukkah in America, 113–14. 31. Anat Helman, “Was There Anything Particularly Jewish about ‘the First Hebrew City’?,” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 116–127. 32. Anat Helman, “Torah, avodah u-vatei kafeh: Dat u-farhesiya be-Tel Aviv ha-mandatorit,” Cathedra 105 (2003): 85–110. 33. Hizky Shoham, “Of Other Cinematic Spaces: Urban Zionism in Early Hebrew Cinema,” Israel Studies Review 26, no. 2 (2011): 109–31; Hizky Shoham, Carnival in Tel-Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Boston, MA, 2014). 34. Michael Berkowitz, “The Invention of a Secular Ritual: Western Jewry and Nationalized Tourism in Palestine, 1922–1933,” in The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response?, ed. S. Daniel Breslauer (Albany, NY, 1997), 73–95; Hizky Shoham, “‘A Huge National Assemblage’: Tel Aviv as a Pilgrimage Site in Purim Celebrations (1920–1935),” Journal of Israeli History 28, no. 1 (2009): 1–20. 35. Hizky Shoham, “‘Buy Local’ or ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 3 (2013): 469–89. See also Deborah Bernstein and Badi Hasisi, “‘Buy and Promote the National Cause’: Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestine Society,” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1  (2008): 127–50; Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA, 2015), 53–76. 36. For example, Stephen Constantine, “The Buy British Campaign of 1931,” European Journal of Marketing 21, no. 4 (1993): 44–59; Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston, MA, 1999); Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Nancy Reynolds, “National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman’: Materiality, Gender, and Nationalism in Textile Marketing in Semicolonial Egypt, 1930–1956,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 49–74. 37. For example, Lea W-tz, “Hovat ha-isha,” Al Hamishmar–Bama Hofshit, undated, 2–3, CZA S8/2267/1 – before Purim; or ad for “Assis” (a beverage company) before Yom Kippur, Davar, October 1, 1930, 3. Articles and ads like those were numerous. 38. Batya Carmiel, Tel Aviv be-tahposet va-keter: Hagigot Purim 1912–1935 [Tel Aviv Crowned and Costumed: Purim Celebrations 1912–1935], (Tel-­ Aviv, 1999), 241–242; “Hashavu’a ba-pe’ula lema’an Totzeret Ha’aretz,” Doar-Hayom, March 13, 1935. 39. Moshe Glikson, “Al haperek,” Ha’aretz, March 28, 1929.

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40. See, for example, editorial letter, Ha’aretz March 8, 1927; A.  Z. Rabinowitch, “Beveit yisrael ra’iti sha’aruriya (Hoshe’a vav),” a proclamation from December 1, 1931, posters collection, National Library of Jerusalem, file V1836/e; Avraham Shavdron, “Ke-ein krovetz lakarnival,” Ha’aretz March 11, 1931; H.  Shorer, “Ivelet-Purim,” Hapo’el Hatza’ir 8, no. 19, March 14, 1930, 2–3; H. Shorer, “Hamasekha sheli,” Hapo’el Hatza’ir 22–23, March 18, 1932, 12. 41. Sigal Davidi Kunda, “The Flight of the Camel: The Levant Fair of 1934 and the Creation of Situated Modernism,” in  Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, ed. Haim Yacobi (Aldershot, 2004), 52–75. 42. Carnival Committee advertisement, Doar-Hayom, March 6, 1928; “Tel-­ Aviv ve-Yafo,” Ha’aretz, March 2, 1928; “Likhvod Purim,” DoarHayom, March 21, 1929. 43. From A.  Yemini to Tel-Aviv municipality, received on March 9, 1936, TMA 04-3222. 44. “Amar azmavet,” Doar-Hayom, March 25, 1932. 45. From the Tel Aviv and Jaffa Merchants’ Organization to the municipality, Feb. 20, 1936; and from the Palestine Industrialists’ Association to the municipality, March 2, 1936; from Dizengoff to industrialists’ association, March 3, 1936, TAMA 04–3222. 46. Roger D.  Abrahams, “The Language of Festivals: Celebrating the Economy,”  in Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, ed. Victor Turner (Washington, DC, 1982), 161–77. 47. Helman, Young Tel Aviv, 66–67. 48. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, NY, 1973), 1–16. 49. Helman, Young Tel Aviv, 67–75. 50. Ibid, 68. 51. Helman, “Two Urban Celebrations,” 388–89. 52. Pleck, Celebrating the Family. 53. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962), 150–54; Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 4–5. 54. Arendt, The Human Condition, 183–84. 55. Vyta Baselice, Dante Burrichter, and Peter N.  Stearns, “Debating the Birthday: Innovation and Resistance in Celebrating Children,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 12, no. 2 (2019): 262–84. 56. Pleck, Celebrating the Family, 141–61. On various national traditions, see Barbara Rinkoff, Birthday Parties around the World (New York, 1967). 57. Hizky Shoham, “It’s about Time: Birthdays as Modern Rites of Temporality,” Time & Society 30, no. 1 (2021): 78–99.

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58. See, for example, Shaul Mendel Halevy Rabinovitch, “Zekher Li-tzi’at Sefarad,” Ha-Magid, May 21, 1891, 2; Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford, UK, 1991), 59. Cf. Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 129. 59. Sachlav Stoler-Liss, “‘Mothers Birth the Nation’: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parents’ Manuals,” Nashim 6 (2003): 104–18; Tammy Razi, “The Family Is Worthy of Being Rebuilt: Perceptions of the Jewish Family in Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 4 (2010): 395–415; Ofra Tene, Ha-batim ha-levanim yimalʼu (Tel Aviv, 2013), 222–24, 235–36. 60. For example, Yehudit Horowitz, “Mo’adon Ha-yeladim,” Devar Ha-po’elet 6, no. 1, March 28, 1939, 28. 61. Michael Hilton, Bar Mitzvah: A History (Lincoln, NE, 2014), 54–73, 170–80. 62. “Ḥ agigah yafah,” Doar Hayom, January 27, 1927, 4. 63. “Simḥat bar miẓvah be-vet ha-’admor mi-Sadigora,” Hatzofeh, August 28, 1941, 4. 64. “Bimkom hazmanah peratit,” Haboker, December 24, 1932, 1; Moshe Braver, “Yom hikansi le-miẓvot,” Haverenu (the student publication leaflet of the Tahkemoni school in Jerusalem) 104 (April 1933): 3–4 (in the Aviezer Yellin Archive for Jewish Education, container 3.147, file 20); “Mar u-geveret Edward Egyon” (Hebrew), Davar, March 9, 1938, 6. 65. Yaakov Shabtai, “Adoshem,” in Ibid., Uncle Peretz Takes Off: Short Stories (Woodstock, NY, 2004), 7–24. 66. Braver, “Yom hikansi le-miẓvot”; Eliezer Smoli, “Bar Mitzvah,” in Orhah: A Literary Anthology (Tel Aviv, 1934), 147 and 152; Shlomo Me’iri, Bi-netive maḥteret u-ve-’ereẓ gezerah: Mi-Petaḥ-Tikvah le-Kenya u-va-­ ḥhazarah (Tel Aviv, 1993), 75–77. 67. Me’iri, Bi-netive maḥteret u-ve-’ereẓ gezerah, 77. 68. Shmuel Yedidya, “Ḥ agigat bar miẓvah sheli,” Haverenu 79 (April 1930): 3–4 (Aviezer Yellin Archive for Jewish Education, container 3.147, file 20); Braver, “Yom hikansi le-miẓvot.” 69. “Mah ḥadash be-viratenu,” Doar Hayom, Mar. 17, 1933, 8. 70. For example, Letters to the Editor, Hatzofeh, Oct. 21, 1942, 3. 71. For example, Dunash, “Reshimot,” Hatzofeh, July 14, 1939, 2; Reuven Gafni, “Ma’avakim ‘al hakamat bate keneset bi-shekhunat po‘alim, 1922–1934,” Kenishta 4 (2010/11): 134–54. 72. For example, “Lehaskir, liskor, lehaḥalif,” Davar, October 31, 1947, 8. 73. “’Ulamey Rut,” Maariv, January 19, 1953, 1. 74. For example, “Mosadot ve-’ishim,” Hatzofeh, April 23, 1947, 4.

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75. “Harav Yaakov Berman be-Ḥ adera,” Hatzofeh, February 6, 1942, 3; David Avisar, “Bimkom derashah,” Hapoel Hatza’ir 12, no. 21, July 4, 1941, 6–8. 76. Ad in Davar, June 7, 1946, 10. See also Haim Be’er, The Pure Element of Time, trans. Barbara Harshav (Hanover, NH, 2003), 204–10. 77. Yosef Yambor, “Kabẓanim tel ’avivitim,” Al Hamishmar, November 12, 1943, 2. 78. For example, Yehuda Goor (Grazovski), Milon ‘ivri (Tel Aviv, 1946), s.v. “bar mitzvah.” Cf Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 170–71. 79. “Mi-divre ha-rahar R. M. A. Amiel,” Hatzofeh, January 15, 1941, 3. 80. For example, Davar, February 4, 1943, 3; Itton Meyuhad, April 27 and May 4, 1945, 1. 81. A.  Rosenzweig et  al., On the Verge of Youth: A Bar-Mitzvah Book (Tel Aviv, 1943), 24. 82. Dan Benaya Seri, ’Adam shav ’el beto (Jerusalem, 2009), 99–109; Ruth Almog, “Ha-sifriyah sheli,” in Me-’ayin naḥalti ’et shiri?, ed. Ruth Carton-­Blum (Tel Aviv, 2002), 85–87; Avigdor Shinan, “Ha-bar miẓvah ke-tekes ma‘avar kalkali,” in Ha-tarmil ha-yehudi: Masa‘ bar miẓvah bekehilot Yisra’el, ed. Aliza Lavie (Jerusalem, 2010), 217–19. 83. Joselit, The Wonders of America, 102; Marion Kaplan, ed., Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford, UK, 2005), 328. 84. “Ba-’aspaklariyah,” Hatzofeh, June 3, 1942, 2. 85. “Ve-ka’asher shenorartem teshnoreru,” Hamashkif, December 27, 1943, 3. 86. “Bar miẓvah be-lo’ miẓvah,” Hatzofeh, August 13, 1945, 2. 87. For example, “Ḥ agigot bar mitẓvah,” Davar, November 20, 1947, 4. Cf. “Yeme huledet lama?,” Davar, November 2, 1947, 2. 88. Hizky Shoham, “‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger’: A Historical Anthropology of the Israeli Bat Mitzvah,” Jewish Culture and History 16, no. 3 (2015): 275–92. 89. Yosef Ḥ ayyim, Ben-Ish Ḥ ai: Halakhot (1901; Jerusalem, 1994), Re’eh §16, p. 251; Petaḥya Horenblass, Pitḥei she’arim, s.v. “13,” §16 (Warsaw, 1909), 7a. 90. Baruch Hermon, “Yeladim historiyim,” Davar, August 1, 1952, 15. 91. K. Shabtai, “Keẓad meḥankhim?,” Davar, September 28, 1951, 3. 92. Tova, “Mesibot pe’er u-matanot,” Hatzofeh, August 27, 1954, 2. 93. Shoham, “A Birthday Party.” 94. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 109. 95. Hizky Shoham, “The Conceptual and Anthropological History of Bat Mitzvah: Two lexical paths and Two Jewish identities,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 13, no. 2 (2018): 100–22.

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96. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 170; Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley, CA, 2004), 290. 97. Cf. Reuveni and Roemer, Longing, Belonging, 17. 98. Pleck, Celebrating the Family, 64. See: Hizky Shoham, “‘You Can’t Pick Your Family’: Celebrating Israeli Familism around the Seder Table,” Journal of Family History 39, no. 3 (2014): 239–60. 99. See note 4 above. 100. Hizky Shoham, “Rethinking Tradition: From Ontological Reality to Assigned Temporal Meaning,” European Journal of Sociology 52, no. 2 (2011): 313–40. 101. In a nutshell: Asaf Likhovsky, “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography,” Israel Studies 15, no. 2 (2010): 1–23.

PART III

Jewish Questions, German Questions, and the Politics and Meaning of Consumption in the Modern World

CHAPTER 9

“For Humanity’s Sake”: American Jewish Boycotts of Germany Before and After the Holocaust Anne Schenderlein

In May 1998, the German car manufacturer Daimler-Benz acquired the iconic American brand Chrysler. At the time, the title of an article in a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper asked, “Will Jews boycott Chrysler after buyout by Mercedes?”1 The article was referring to the fact that some American Jews had abstained from purchasing German cars ever since the end of the Second World War and was asking whether they would treat an American company now owned by Germans the same way. Numerous papers across the United States, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal among them, reported on discussions within the Jewish community over the merger of Mercedes Benz and Chrysler and what this meant for Jewish consumer decisions.2 Judging from these texts, it appears as if the purposeful abstention from or, in other words, the boycotting  of German cars was, or is, a particular Jewish consumer practice. But what

A. Schenderlein (*) Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_9

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made this practice Jewish? And who said so? This chapter explores the historical dimensions of Jewish consumption and boycotting of German goods and asks what it has meant for Jews since the 1930s, when some major American Jewish organizations, together with Jewish and non-­ Jewish groups around the globe, engaged in boycotting products from Nazi Germany. No such official boycott movement existed after the war, but some American Jews continued, or later took up, boycotting German goods and services. Though an individual decision, it was assumed to be widespread enough to make headlines. The constitutive role of consumer goods and consumption in identity construction is well established at the heart of consumption studies, a distinctly interdisciplinary field. As sociologist Celia Lury notes, for example, “people’s involvement with consumer culture is such that it infiltrates everyday life not only at the level of economic decision-making, social activities and domestic life, but also at the level of meaningful psychological experience. It affects the construction of identities, the formation of relationships and the framing of events.”3 In this way, boycotting, or the willful withholding of consumption as one form of consumer culture, is both implicitly and explicitly a way of identifying with a particular political, economic, social, or other cause and also with a particular group of people who partake in the boycott for the same reason. Seeing that the primary function of a boycott is to put economic pressure on people to make them change their behavior, the social element of boycotting is arguably more pronounced than with other consumer practices and as such is conceivably one of the oldest forms of consumer activism. Lawrence Glickman observes that the history of consumer activism is one “of people linking their actions with unseen others … claim[ing] membership in a group, often through the denigration of a despised other.”4 Boycotters act upon the belief that consumption of a product exists not in isolation, that it is not just a matter of personal preference or individual taste but exists in a social context, integrally connecting the consumer to those who made the product and under what circumstances. Purchasing a certain product then becomes a question of social relations, an issue of moral and ethical consideration, as the product might sustain a good or bad cause, system, or people. Boycotting can serve and be used as a community-building activity, but it can also figure as a site of negotiation, tension, and contestation that can divide community; it is with the latter that I am foremost concerned in this chapter. How did the boycott function? How was it utilized by different individuals and groups toward

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Jewish community building, identity politics, and identity making? And what effects did participating—or not—in the boycott have on people: those who practiced it, those who chose not to participate, and the social and community relations surrounding it? In asking questions centered on the social relations that boycotting reflects and engenders, I deemphasize the economic aspects of boycotts because they are already frequently examined in scholarship. Economic and political notions of success and failure—that is, whether the boycott succeeds in effecting the change it sought, and how it did so—are central to many studies. Yet, not only is it frequently difficult to assess such success (it is often unclear which variables determine the outcome or whether that result was caused directly by the boycott) but “success” itself can have different meanings for different actors.5 In this chapter then, drawing on examples from before and after the Second World War, I examine what extended beyond the ostensible initial aim of the boycott to weaken Nazi Germany by asking how the goals, motivations, and functions of boycotting have changed over time, and what role this boycotting played in Jewish identity construction. The “collective … withholding [of] patronage for political, ethical, or moral reasons” is a practice older than the term “boycott” that has come to describe it.6 In early 1800s America, the practice of withholding business from people considered antagonists for one reason or another was called “leaving alone,” “blacklisting,” or “ostracizing,” making obvious the social implications consumer choices could have.7 The word “boycott” was coined only in 1880 in Ireland, taken from the name of an exploitative British estate manager by the name of Charles Boycott. In response to his behavior, the local Irish peasants decided to “desert” and no longer serve him. Two witnesses to the event, the Scottish-born American radical James Redpath and the Irish priest John O’Malley sought a word more apt than “ostracize” to denote the peasants’ act and settled on “boycott.”8 The term as well as the practice soon spread to the American continent, where it came “into vogue far and wide,” according to one labor journalist.9 Evoking this term, people all over the world have employed boycotts in the pursuit of causes as diverse as national independence (India, China, colonial America), social justice (slavery, racial segregation, apartheid), and social welfare (many and various labor disputes). Ostensibly, this list suggests a multitude of moral and ethical reasons for boycotting, often undertaken by underprivileged groups and people outside of traditional centers of power for whom this was one feasible form of protest against injustice. Boycotts, however, can and have been otherwise employed for

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less virtuous motivations. Under the banner of boycott, people have withheld their purchasing power from others who they despised for their religious, ethnic, or racial difference. Jews have frequently been targets of boycotts for such reasons. Stereotypes of Jews as menacing economic forces have existed, mainly among Christian communities, for centuries. By the end of the 1800s, boycotts had become a common means of self-­ confessed antisemites in Europe. From the mid-1920s, German National Socialists began using boycotts systematically as part of their party politics and propaganda. Boycotts against Jewish businesses and professionals carried out locally by SA men (storm troopers) culminated in an official nationwide boycott on April 1, 1933, the first large-scale anti-Jewish action by the Nazi government.10 Local Nazi party officials and the SA were again the main organizers and agitators. Well-known are the images of SA men standing menacingly in front of Jewish businesses and bearing signs with slogans such as “Germans, strike back! Don’t buy from Jews!” and painting stars of David and antisemitic symbols and slogans on store fronts and windows. While there were sporadic cases of non-Jewish Germans actively defying the boycott, much of the German population stood by or watched the sometimes violent spectacle take place. In this way, whether ideologically inspired or not, they abstained from visiting a Jewish business, thus fulfilling the task the Nazis had intended for the German people on that day.11 Particularly significant for this chapter is the fact that the Nazi regime justified boycotting Germany’s Jews as an act of self-defense in the face of so-called Greuelpropaganda (atrocity propaganda) that Jews abroad had supposedly been spreading against the new Nazi government, unleashing a boycott on German goods.12 In fact, Jewish organizations around the world had been watching the situation of German Jewry after January 1933 with great concern. Besides mobilizing public opinion, one of their first responses to the Nazi treatment of Jews was to boycott German goods.13 These boycott efforts were especially strong in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Poland.14 In this case then, while the Jews in Germany were, under the guise of boycott, victims of economic discrimination, Jews outside the country became for the first time a driving force behind a major boycott effort in defense of Jewish rights.

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The Prewar Boycott

The first organization in the United States to call for a boycott of Nazi Germany was the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America (JWV), the smallest of American Jewish defense groups.15 Their mission included the members’ dedication to “uphold the fair name of the Jew and fight his battles wherever unjustly assailed”; they translated those words into action upon hearing reports of assaults on Jewish stores from Germany in early March 1933.16 In response to violent picketing and boycotting campaigns against Jews in several German cities on March 8 and 9, the JWV organized a parade in New York City for March 23, demanding diplomatic action and calling for an economic boycott of Nazi Germany. JWV activists believed that a boycott of German goods and services would pressure the Nazi government to change their treatment of Jews. However, rather than backing down, the Nazis launched their notorious boycott of April 1, 1933. Shortly thereafter, the JWV opened a boycott office in the United States and began distributing materials promoting the boycott of German goods in the United States. In the 1930s, the main German products that circulated were colors and dyes, clay and earthen wares, textiles, and pharmaceuticals. For retailers, the major products were metalware, textiles, and especially leather gloves, toys, food stuffs, and musical instruments, not to mention the retail services German shipping lines provided.17 Support for the ideas of the JWV call also came from a group of men from Yiddish journalistic circles, especially newspapers such as Forward and Der Tog. The associate editor of the latter, Abraham Coralnik, together with the journalist Ezekiel Rabinowitz, founded the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights in April 1933. Believing that the organization needed a prominent and financially influential representative, Coralnik and Rabinowitz recruited Samuel Untermyer, a successful and well-known lawyer and member of New York City’s Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s political machine. Untermyer was a stern advocate for Jewish rights, having served as attorney in a lawsuit against antisemitic content in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, and had been critical of the non-­ responsive attitude of the U.S. government toward the Nazi regime. He welcomed and embraced the group’s position.18 Untermyer proved to be a strong, if somewhat authoritarian and controversial leader, fervent about the boycott and eager to have his ideas realized.19 Thus, although Coralnik and Rabinowitz were adamant that the attack on Germany’s Jews demanded a “Jewish defense,” Untermyer believed that this was not solely

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a Jewish affair and that expanding support for this fight against Nazism to non-Jewish allies would make it more effective. One of his first steps in this direction was to change the organization’s name to Non-Sectarian Anti-­ Nazi League to Champion Human Rights.20 Whereas Untermeyer wanted to extend the boycott to non-Jews, he also insisted that it was an obligation for Jewish Americans to boycott Germany. He argued that a “boycott will teach the German people that we Jews have not lost our self-respect,” repeatedly declaring in public that the boycott “is our only effective weapon against this brutal onslaught upon our people.”21 For him, a Jew who did not boycott was an unacceptable member of the community. Numerous American Jews, however, did not believe that boycotting Nazi Germany was the best way to react to the German situation. The three largest and most influential Jewish organizations in the United States at the time, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and B’nai B’rith, had been closely following the developments in Germany as well. Initially, they unanimously decided to not engage in public protest, hoping that the situation would ameliorate itself. After the March incidents in Germany, however, the AJ Congress changed its position on this. Its honorary president, Rabbi Stephen Wise, declared that the time had come to “speak up like men…. What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked.”22 Thus, on March 27, the AJ Congress held a large protest meeting in Madison Square Garden. Thinking that it was possible to still reach some sort of agreement with the Nazi government through diplomatic means, the AJ Congress had not yet reached the point of supporting a boycott on German goods. Only in August 1933, after coordination with the World Jewish Conference and failed attempts to convince President Roosevelt to intervene in the German situation did AJ Congress President Bernard Deutsch recommend “the organization, coordination and integration of a boycott movement of German manufacturers of all kinds, in the hope that the economic isolation of Germany would bring the Hitler Government to the realization of the contempt in which the civilized world holds its mad policies.”23 Dr. Joseph L. Tenenbaum, formerly chairman of the National Executive Committee of the AJ Congress, became the chair of the Congress’ Boycott Committee. In 1936, the AJ Congress’ boycotting efforts intensified when the Jewish Labor Committee, after a great deal of

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disagreement between the groups, joined the Congress to form the Joint Boycott Council.24 The other two large American Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith, not only opposed the boycott but also other forms of public protest against Nazi Germany. Many AJ Committee members were the established and well-off descendants of German Jewish immigrants who had arrived in the United States before the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration that had occurred between 1880 and 1921. The latter group formed the constituency for the AJ Congress. While one of the major arguments of the AJ Congress for protest and boycott was solidarity with German Jews, the AJ Committee and B’nai B’rith used the same reasoning to argue against it. They feared that a boycott would incite “further excesses” against Jews in Germany and also contribute to a rise in antisemitic sentiment in the United States.25 Members of the AJ Committee justified their anti-boycott stance by referring to their close contacts with Jews in Germany who had urged them to abstain from boycotting out of fear of retaliation.26 Moreover, members of the AJ Committee sometimes still had family in Germany, as well as business and property interests. What happened in Germany potentially had more direct or personal repercussions for them than for other American Jews.27 Similarly, the American leadership of B’nai B’rith declared that it did not want to endanger the organization’s 14,000 members in Germany.28 Another reason for the opposition of the AJ Committee and the B’nai B’rith was a certain upper-class or elitist consciousness among the membership, which reflected general tensions between Eastern and Western (or German) Jews in the United States.29 In their argumentation against the boycott, leading American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith representatives often referred to their own methods as “responsible” while characterizing the boycott inciters as emotional (“many people feel more strongly than they think”) and leading on an irrational populace.30 In a letter the AJ Committee’s executive secretary, Morris Waldman, sent to Samuel Untermyer, he insisted that, regarding important issues such as the boycott, individuals like Untermyer should not attempt to speak for the entire Jewish people. In these cases, “all should entrust the responsibility to recognized organizations like the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith who have been dealing with these problems for many years.”31 This jab from another Jewish leader was not unique, but rather a reflection of long-time divisions in the American Jewish community. The AJ Committee

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and B’nai B’rith claimed veteran status in the United States and a better understanding of conditions there, including the marginal position of Jews in American society. The boycott, they feared, would alienate Christians and endanger Jewish–Christian relations. Yet, B’nai B’rith finally joined the ranks of the boycotting organizations in early 1939, when it had become clear that diplomatic efforts were not forthcoming and after the Nazis had liquidated the B’nai B’rith Orders in Germany. The American Jewish Committee, however, remained the only leading American Jewish organization never to support the boycott.32 Communication between those for and against the boycott was heated at the time and revealed deep tensions over the question of the role and position of Jews in America, over their relationship to non-Jews, over who could speak authoritatively on Jewish issues, and more generally, over what it meant to be Jewish in America. As the boycott debate grew increasingly contentious, the competing sides began to attack each other, questioning their opponents’ commitment to the Jewish people. This discourse sometimes took quite insulting, patronizing forms. The AJ Committee charged, for instance, that the opposition lacked the judgment necessary to understand the risks that boycotting could entail for Jewish people in the United States and elsewhere. On the other hand, pro-boycott organizations had little sympathy for the position of the AJ Committee, believing that the boycott opponents were abandoning their European brethren to certain doom. Long-standing tensions between Jews of Eastern and Western European origin, rooted in differences in the amount of time spent in the United States and to some extent social class, intensified in the face of the deteriorating situation for Jews in Europe and the apparent lack of initiative by the American government to undertake anything to ameliorate the situation. Simmering conflicts between Eastern and Central European—mainly German—Jews came to the surface in what was essentially a struggle over consumer choice but which had much wider political and moral implications. Jewish supporters of the boycott engaged in their own kind of propaganda by framing participation as a Jewish duty. While the boycott organizations, in their efforts to make the boycott as effective as possible, tried to enlist support from a broad spectrum of Americans, they were particularly adamant that all Jews adhere to the boycott. They showed little toleration of or sympathy toward those Jews who violated it. The JWV, for example, publicly denounced as traitors those Jews who did not participate in the boycott. In a 1934 pamphlet, they called for the

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adoption of “sterner methods in dealing with fellow Jews, who, for monetary gain, betray an entire civilization—who place profit above principle—who, approximately one year and a half after the inception of the boycott are still buying and selling German merchandise.” In large black print, the pamphlet further exhorted, “Parasites must be treated as such.” Jews of this kind, the concluding section urged, “should no longer be accepted in the decent society of their neighborhood and business associations.”33 In this way, refusal to boycott could have serious social and economic consequences. This JWV rhetoric used wording similar to that of antisemitic activists and was certainly extreme within the pro-boycott camp. Nonetheless, other organizations shared their conviction, albeit with less extreme rhetoric, that it was a grievous mistake for Jews to not join or to break the boycott.34 To be sure, the threat of being ostracized by the community for not boycotting was not an empty one. When the Joint Boycott Committee (JBC) of the AJ Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee found out in 1937 that A. D. Jacoby, owner of two needlework stores in New York City, was still handling German merchandise, even though he had promised not to, the JBC, with the help of its Youth and Women’s Division, picketed not only at his stores but also at his home. They wanted to embarrass Jacoby before his neighbors and cast him as a sort of social “yichus.”35 JBC executive secretary Israel Posnansky even wrote to the president of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, to which Jacoby belonged. Posnansky suggested that they expel Jacoby for his treachery, for dealing “in goods which are soaked in the tears, sufferings and the humiliations of his co-religionists.”36 Posnansky added that other congregations had established a precedent for this treatment.37 Perhaps it was this threat that eventually caused Jacoby to give in.38 The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, which deliberately worked to make the boycott more than just a Jewish issue, was also convinced that it was wrong for Jews to abstain from boycotting. They attempted to discipline Jewish boycott violators, although in a less confrontational manner than the JCB or JWV. They did not condone picketing, but they did engage in public shaming. With pamphlets sporting such slogans as “Hitler Threatens the World! Refuse to Trade with the Enemy! Boycott Nazi Germany” and “The Boycott is the Moral Substitute for War,” the League promoted the boycott and even published the names of violators in order to shame them into joining the boycott.39 The League’s research department, which investigated firms trading in German merchandise, also appealed to Jewish solidarity in their

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correspondence with retailers, often claiming that it was inappropriate for a Jewish person to support Germany by selling German goods. In turn, when businesses wrote to the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to convince boycotters that their business should be omitted from the boycott list, they often pointed out that their sales manager was Jewish. Sometimes, they also argued that they had Jewish employees and thus were certainly sensitive to the cause. Businesses used this tactic also with the JWV. When, for instance, the soap company Fels & Co. in Philadelphia was suspected of not participating in the boycott, and even having been sold to “Germans, or Nazis,” their advertising company sent a letter to the JWV. It stated that the firm, which was run by “a high-minded, public-spirited American citizen of the Jewish faith … advertises consistently in the Jewish press— and this in itself is concrete evidence that the plant has not been ‘sold to Germans or Nazis’ as you report having heard.”40 Thus, being Jewish was in some cases presented as a reason, or assurance, that a business would not sell German-made goods, or as a shield, if it did. Boycott organizers also observed a lack of sensitivity for the greater goal of the boycott among German Jewish refugees who had begun arriving in the United States in the 1930s. These refugees were still coming to terms with the difficulty of maintaining their identity as both Jews and Germans, and that dual identity was being declared—first by the Nazis, now by other Jews—irreconcilable. Although one might expect them to have held the hardest line against Germany, having suffered Nazi oppression most directly, some continued to consume German goods or patronize German businesses in an attempt to maintain glimpses of a life they had been forced to leave behind. Desire for certain German products or perhaps a certain “German atmosphere” was in some cases greater than sensitivity toward efforts to combat the Nazis from the United States. At the same time, this sort of consumer behavior was not tolerated within the organized refugee community, in which discussions about a refugee’s “correct” relationship to Germany and German language and culture more broadly were constant during the 1930s.41 In 1937, for instance, after some members of the German Jewish Club in New York City were spotted frequenting German coffeehouses, a reprimand was published in Aufbau, the widely-read community newspaper: A deplorable lack of Jewish self-respect is in evidence when notorious Nazi coffeehouses are still frequented by German Jews—even members of our organization! We are thinking here particularly of that dance café on 86th

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Street, whose owner not so long ago attached great importance to the public declaration of his “pure Aryan” lineage.42

In contrast to the general boycott of German goods, in this case, it was clear that the business in question, located in Yorkville, the heart of the German community in New York City, was run by a German-American Nazi. Most likely these café-goers were unaware of the owner’s political views and sought this place out because its German trappings made them feel at home. As in other instances of disciplining Jews who violated the boycott, the outraged writer of this reprimand, a fellow Jew from Germany, referenced a lack of Jewish self-respect, implying that violators of the boycott were not “good” Jews. Considering that the German refugees entered the place for its “German atmosphere,” this reprimand clearly shows the fracturing of Jewish and German consumer cultures and identities among German Jews. Earlier, Jews who were German had frequently opted for German goods and services simply as part of their everyday German Jewish existence. For them, becoming American at this time and under these political circumstances meant that they had to reorient their consumer behavior away from German things. As we have already seen with the AJ Committee and B’nai B’rith, Jews of German background or with some tie to Germany were often more likely to abstain from the boycott, contributing to the antagonism between American Jews of Eastern European descent and those from Germany. One small example of this antagonism is the correspondence between two leading members of the boycott movement, Bertha Corets and George Fredman.43 When it came to their attention in late 1938 that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was purchasing German reproductions of famous masterpieces, they wrote to the museum to inquire and to express their disapproval. The President of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, George Blumenthal, did not appreciate this sort of reprimand and replied, according to Fredman in a letter to Bertha Corets, that “such acts will bring about the same condition that is in Germany” and were doing “more harm than good.”44 Blumenthal was supposedly concerned that an atmosphere of control might develop around German art works, mirroring what was happening with “Jewish” or so-called “degenerate” art in Germany. It is also likely that he feared, should it become known that Jews were preventing German art from being shown, triggering a rise in antisemitism in the United States.

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George Fredman was unhappy with Blumenthal’s response, writing to Corets that “He [Blumenthal] was insulted, apparently by our request. I understand that he is Jewish and very wealthy. The typical German-Jewish type.”45 What Fredman meant here can certainly be interpreted in different ways. However, Blumenthal’s response fits the argumentation of the AJ Committee and the contemporary stereotypical image of German Jews who were thought to believe that their higher-class status would protect them from antisemitism. This perceived egocentric attitude damaged solidarity with other Jews. Fredman himself was not willing to accept this attitude and suggested that picketing in front of the museum would be the right course of action. Records do not indicate whether that took place. Individual and communal Jewish non-participation in the boycott was both an expression and a cause of conflict and division among American Jewry. But even among those organizations that did boycott, there was disunity over how the boycott was to be carried out. While the organizations cooperated with each other—and some of the other members were affiliated with more than one—there were disagreements over the standards of the boycott. The JWV, for example, published different boycott lists than the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League or the Joint Boycott Council. When at one point the Joint Boycott Council removed Woolworth from its list, for instance, the Veterans thought this categorization unjust, pointing out that it was only in places where strong boycott pressure existed that Woolworth had removed German goods from their stores. In the majority of places outside of the center of the boycott, which was New York City, Woolworth stores still carried German goods.46 Jewish War Veterans were frequently unhappy with the work of the other movements, bestowing on themselves, as the original boycotting organization, the role of prime arbiter. A memo to the membership from Dorothy Kuhn, the National President of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, reveals that some in the organization deemed the boycott important not only because they wanted to do something against the Nazis but also because it was a means to further their position in the American Jewish organizational landscape.47 Kuhn urged members around the country to collect pennies at formal and informal gatherings: Now sisters, I want you to realize, in asking for these pennies, you will be serving a two-fold purpose. Not only will you be spreading the doctrine of boycotting, but you will also be giving notice to the world that our J.W.V. is foremost in the ranks of the boycott movements. Although our organization

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was the originator of the boycott movement, other organizations have assumed the leadership. It is high time that our J.W.V. shall once more rise to the top where we belong in furthering the German Boycott, so that ultimate results shall be the complete break of Hitler and his form of government.48

Clearly, here the boycott took on functions beyond its primary goal of beating the Nazis. It became a medium through which Jewish organizations competed with each other for importance. The organized American boycott of German goods continued until 1941, when the United States entered the war and trade between the countries ceased. The boycotters had failed in their goal of weakening the Third Reich or ameliorating the treatment of Jews in Germany. News of deportations and atrocities against Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, which arrived in the United States from September 1939 on, exceeded the fears of some boycott supporters that the Nazis would bring about the destruction of Germany’s Jews. What the boycott accomplished was to rally certain groups of Jews and providing them an outlet for their frustration, a way to stand up to the enemy, and a sense of having done something meaningful in the face of catastrophe.



Postwar

In the postwar period, no official boycott movement or official calls from organizations to boycott Germany existed. The reason for the original boycott, the defense of Germany’s Jews against the Nazis, was no longer applicable. As we have seen, however, defeating the Nazis had never been the only reason for boycotting German products. American Jews had also aimed to strengthen cohesion within the Jewish community, set a good example of Jewish morale, and counter any reputation of powerlessness. Some Jewish groups also wanted to further their standing within the Jewish organizational landscape. In the postwar period, amid changing socio-political circumstances, some of these motives for not buying German products persisted, while new functions and rationales emerged. Less than five years after the war and genocide’s end, the U.S. government sought the economic reconstruction and political integration of West Germany as a buffer between the Western and Eastern blocs. American Jewish leaders, meanwhile, showed great interest in the fate of postwar Germany, carefully monitoring Allied and American policies toward it. They were particularly cautious about efforts to buttress the

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German economy as German industry and business had been so crucially involved in the exploitation and murder of European Jewry. Within Jewish circles, this concern was articulated in newspapers and private correspondence, but large Jewish organizations tended to be hesitant to publicly protest West German restoration. They were careful not to act in ways that might drive a wedge between the Jewish community and the great majority of Americans who supported U.S. reconstruction policy in Germany. In this regard, some American Jewish organizations were reacting similarly to how they had before the war, when they believed that “rocking the boat” would only have negative consequences for Jews in America. Insecurities over the position of Jews in the United States persisted in the new Cold War climate as various state and local initiatives sought to eradicate communism from American life. Historically well represented in leftist politics, even though only a minority of American Jews were members of the Communist Party, American Jews feared that their protests against favorable policies toward West Germany could feed the Jews-are-­ communists stereotype.49 None of the large American Jewish organizations engaged in public protest, for example, when a German industrial exhibition, organized by the Military Government of the three Western German zones, was held in New York City’s Museum of Science and Industry at Rockefeller Center in April 1949. This was striking in light of their actual opposition to this fair, which was supposed to stimulate German-American trade. The AJ Committee had, in fact, appealed to the U.S.  State and Defense Departments, presenting evidence of Nazis holding high posts in German industry, but these appeals were met with demands from the government that they refrain from protest.50 In the face of the intensifying conflict with the Soviet Union over Germany and the apparent need for experienced personnel to build up functioning administrative apparatuses in the Western occupation zones, the United States had significantly reduced its initially strict denazification policies. In the process, many people who had been gravely implicated as Nazis regained their positions in various realms of German life.51 Whereas large Jewish organizations resisted such developments through administrative channels and accommodated the authorities’ calls for restraint, smaller Jewish organizations struck a less compromising stance, often those that openly identified as left-wing such as the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, several local unions, and some left-­ wing members of the AJ Congress in New York.52 The American Federation for Polish Jews, for example, which had also been active in the prewar

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boycott, picketed the German industrial fair with signs bearing slogans such as: “Six million Jewish men, women and children tortured, killed, gassed and burned alive by the Germans in Europe. Shall we forget and forgive???”53 That the signs read “by the Germans” rather than “by Germany” was important. From 1945 to the 1980s, if not later, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and those complicit in its execution were still alive and living in Germany, producing goods and profiting from their production. Buying German products, the American Federation of Polish Jews was suggesting, amounted to letting the perpetrators off the hook and even rewarding them. Indeed, some German businessmen were concerned that there would be resistance to buying German goods in the United States, primarily among American Jews. Their concern that Jews had the economic and political power to hurt German efforts to construct a “new Germany” revealed the persistence of classic antisemitic stereotypes, even as German industrialists had begun trying very hard to distance themselves from their Nazi past.54 Bayer, Rheinmetall, Mannesmann, and Daimler-Benz, for example, hired public relations and advertising experts who designed campaigns specifically to convince the transatlantic public of the companies’ “moral worth.”55 These efforts yielded some success, and German companies, even if they had compromised themselves in the Nazi regime, were able to market their products in the United States to individual consumers and larger manufacturing businesses.56 The United States became the main export market for West German businesses in the first two decades after the war’s end. In the immediate postwar, machine building, chemical, and textile industries registered the highest import numbers to the United States, and by the middle of the 1950s, German automobiles became the number one import.57 Some American Jews, however, remained reluctant to buy German products after the Holocaust, visit Germany, or attend cultural events with performers from Germany, some even to this day.58 Rabbi John Friedman (b. 1949) remembered repeated discussions from when he was growing up in Kansas City in the 1950s and 60s about whether it was acceptable to purchase German goods. Such debates occurred mostly among adult men and frequently when they met at the Reform synagogue that Friedman’s family attended. They went somewhat like this: We shouldn’t buy German products after the Holocaust. After all, look what they did, it’s in their nature. We should punish them…. The other side was,

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well, I am sure that Hitler, and all his friends, in their graves, or South America, would be much more … disappointed and angry to find out that Jews were now driving Volkswagens and Mercedes and the better way to show our anger is to drive their cars and drink their wine, and other products that they make.59

Friedman went on: “the sides went back and forth, I heard both arguments all the time. I must say there was a bit of a tendentious motivation, I think, on the part of the person who advocated that we show them that we’ll drive their Volkswagen, that’s because he was probably driving a Volkswagen or a Mercedes and needed to justify it, possibly. I don’t know the answer to that.”60 According to Friedman, anger over the quick rehabilitation of Germany and the German people was one prevailing motivation for American Jews to boycott German goods during the early years and decades after the war and the Holocaust. Another, he added, might have been a sense of guilt about not having been able to do anything to stop the atrocities against the European Jews. Who were the Jews in the United States who purchased German goods? Again, as before the war, some Jewish refugees who had arrived in the United States from Nazi Germany were more likely to buy products made in Germany. This was not self-evident and not unanimously sanctioned within the German Jewish refugee community, however. Especially during the early postwar years, refugee organizations were very skeptical of developments in postwar Germany. The 1949 German Industrial Exhibit in New York, for example, was harshly criticized by a frequent contributor to the community newspaper Aufbau. His articles revealed that some of the exhibitors were not only known Nazis but also representatives of industries that had profited from slave labor, war, and extermination. Prime examples were Hoechst and Agfa, both earlier part of the former IG Farben conglomerate, well-known for having been involved in producing Zyklon B, the poison that the Nazis used to kill millions of people in the extermination camps.61 At the expo booth of a smaller German company whose executives apparently did not feel the need to engage in public efforts to disassociate it from the Nazi past, the reporter found advertisements showcasing pocket knives bearing the engraving “Greetings from Nuremberg, City of the Rally” (the annual Nazi Party convention). The reporter believed these were meant to cater to German-Americans who still held Nazi ideologies.62 However, if treatment of the topic was most critical in the German Jewish refugee publication in 1949, as time went by,

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beginning in the early-to-mid-1960s, German products became increasingly accepted, with advertisements for German beers, liquors, and even Lufthansa appearing in Aufbau. Although such ads initially met with protest, the editors did not stop publishing them. Objections eventually died down, whether because people became used to the ads or grew tired of complaining about them. Or perhaps those who objected had stopped buying the newspaper.63 The decision to include Lufthansa ads originated with certain leaders from the refugee community, including the especially important Aufbau editor Hans Steinitz, who actively advocated for more amenable relations with the Federal Republic of Germany.64 Their motivations came largely from personal connections with individuals in Germany whom they had known since before the war and who were known to not have been Nazis. Restitution payments from the German government to Jewish refugees, which started arriving by the late 1950s, also made some more amenable to supporting relations with Germany and to purchasing and using German goods and services. In addition, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s efforts to form a relationship with Israel—including reparations, which also came in the form of German products for use in Israel— influenced decision-making in this regard.65 Although there were still refugees who wanted nothing to do with Germany, who would never buy anything made there, and who rejected the very idea of restitution as blood money, representatives of refugee organizations, and institutions like Aufbau, were generally in favor of critical engagement with Germany. They believed it could benefit the community in different ways.66 Economic relations with the country were increasingly accepted, and by the 1970s, it was not completely uncommon for refugees to do business with German companies. These were frequently travel agents who worked with German tourism. There were also people who dealt in household electronics and photographic equipment—an area in which German products were state of the art. For refugees from Germany, the question of purchasing German goods had much to do with their personal relationship to the country. On the one hand, there was a familiarity with, fondness of, and trust in the quality of certain products from their pre-1933 childhoods. On the other hand, their individual experiences of persecution by the Germans complicated this relationship. In many ways, this dilemma of consumption was intimately connected to the refugees’ understanding of themselves and where they stood in the world. For the majority of American Jews who had no

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personal lived connections with Germany, the Holocaust had brought the country into their lives as well, at least symbolically. Educational initiatives and events such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War gradually made the Holocaust a topic of wider public consciousness in the United States, and it increasingly became more significant to American Jewish self-understanding. In this way, Germany became a part of American Jews’ life even if they had no personal ties to the country.67 In a society where consumption had become a citizen’s duty of sorts and where German brands like Volkswagen, especially the VW Beetle, were very popular, many American Jews felt ambivalent and conflicted over the question of purchasing German goods and what it meant in American and German historical contexts.68 In this situation, some sought advice on what to do. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the prominent leader of the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, was one figure to whom people ascribed authority in this matter. Although a minority of Hasidim, the Chabad Lubavitchers are the most visible and most extroverted branch of Hasidim, and Rabbi Schneerson was consulted not only by other religious leaders but also those from politics and business.69 In 1969, the Rebbe received a letter from someone who inquired whether it was right, “as a Jew, in light of Jewish law and custom,” to avoid buying German goods. It becomes clear again in this example, as in those from the period before and during the war, how closely the issue of boycotting was connected to the notion of being a good Jew. In his answer, the Rebbe replied that though this was “more a matter of feeling rather than a question of Jewish law and custom,” he believed that it was right to boycott German goods since the behavior was based on a principle which may be considered to come under the category of “Remember what Amalek did unto you.” For, as is well known, the inhuman atrocities, etc., against our defenseless and innocent brethren were not perpetrated by a small group, but was [sic] carried out with the knowledge, consent and even cooperation of the vast majority of the German nation. Moreover, I do not think that anyone seriously believes that the Germany of today is entirely different from the Germany of two decades ago.70

Here, a Jewish leader, while not explicitly advocating a boycott, was ruling that such an action was proper for a Jew in the context of solidarity with Jewish kin. Schneerson, referencing a biblical analogy, was evoking a Jewish group, and setting it against or in contrast to Germanness.71 He

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reminded his reader of the culpability of the majority of Germans in “the inhuman atrocities” and of the responsibility to remember, particularly in the face of the Western world’s apparent wish to forget. In contrast to the prewar and wartime boycott then, abstaining from consumption this way was not an attempt to effect change. Rather, it was about punishing or shunning Germans. At the same time, one might stress that in this context boycotting was also a way of keeping up a Jewish tradition and being a “good Jew.” Yet, Schneerson insinuated that boycotting would not make a difference since, he believed, it was well-known that Germany had not changed since the war. Schneerson’s statement that no one believed Germany had really changed was, of course, erroneous. It was not even true for all American Jews.72 But for some, and more widespread in the postwar period than before, instigating change in Germany had nothing to do with the boycotting decision. The writer Cynthia Ozick, for example, has declared that her conviction to boycott has nothing to do with Germany itself, but that she does it as a personal memorial to the Jews killed in the Holocaust.73 In Ozick’s example, the boycott aimed not to influence Germany, exert economic pressure, bring about change, or punish Germany for past acts. Instead, the goal was to memorialize victims of the Holocaust: “Not buying a German spoon is a memorial act for its own sake; it has no power to punish anyone, nor is it meant to. If I avoid buying something marked Made in Germany, I do it for myself: to keep alive the memory of Jews marked Murdered in Germany. It is the way I remember.”74 That Ozick mentions a spoon here as the object of boycott and not a Mercedes or VW—arguably the most obvious of German goods in the United States and important status symbols and identifiers—is perhaps significant. It underscores that for her boycotting German products was not about sending a signal to the outside world but a very personal and private act of memorializing. In its connection to the Holocaust, the postwar boycott of German goods was (and is) a much more individual Jewish consumer practice than the prewar boycott had been. This did not mean that non-Jews who had been themselves, or whose relatives had been, victims of Nazi persecution, imprisonment, forced labor, or murder might not have a similar aversion to buying German goods. However, in contrast to the prewar period, when the boycott was able to recruit non-Jewish allies with the argument that Hitler was against humanity, after the war there was less incentive for a wider American population to not buy a Volkswagen or a Mercedes.75

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Boycott as an everyday practice, performed as memorialization, corresponds closely with Jewish religion and tradition, in which the passing on of community memory, knowledge, and tradition plays such an integral role. In this way, generations of American Jews have grown up with taboos around the purchasing of German products. For Ozick, the decision to boycott German products continued a tradition her parents had begun when they participated in the prewar boycott. As owners of a pharmacy, they had refused to sell Bayer aspirin, the leading brand in the United States at the time. In doing so, they lost many customers and, as Ozick acknowledged, “deprived themselves of a quarter when a quarter weighed heavily.”76 Her decision to boycott was also a way to remember and honor her parents. Similarly, the journalist and writer Rifka Rosenwein explained her reasoning for boycotting in her column in The New York Jewish Week in February 1999. In her family, no gesture in memoriam was considered too small. Buying a German product was as anathema to my family as eating treif [non-kosher]. Doing so would be an acknowledgement that the world was back to normal, all was forgiven, Germany was just another country. In our family, at least, that would never be true. I am not naive enough to believe that by my not buying a Peter Kaiser shoe or a Dodge Caravan, the German economy will topple and fall. My personal “boycott,” I know, is meaningless on an economic level. But since when does Jewish ritual or Jewish memory or Jewish tradition depend on its effect on the outside world? I boycott German products not to make an impact on Germany, but to make an impact on myself.77

Rosenwein equated boycotting German goods with keeping kosher, characterizing it even as a Jewish ritual or tradition. Religious rituals such as keeping kosher or buying garments according to religious tradition were clearly established forms of consumption or non-consumption. In this way, abstaining from buying German products harmonizes with familiar forms of Jewish consumption behavior. This particular consumer behavior also served as a marker of distinction. Rosenwein made this explicit by stating that she checked for the “Made in Germany” label in the supermarket, which “takes an extra minute, but it is an extra minute to remind myself that I am different, I am apart.”78 The element of knowledge transfer or education about boycotting Germany created a notion that placed this particular consumer behavior within Jewish tradition. Boycotting functioned simultaneously as a tool for memorialization and community

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building. At a time when there was no outside threat of antisemitism to bind the group together, and intermarriage and low birth rates had led to anxiety over the loss of Jewish group distinctiveness, boycotting German products also functioned as a means to maintain or create Jewish identity.79 Because the Holocaust became an important element of identification for American Jews, a sort of civil religion, as Jonathan Woocher has argued, the boycotting of German goods persisted well into the postwar period and even into our own time, despite generational shifts and changes in Germany and the United States.80

Conclusion For Jews in the United States boycotting German products has served several functions since the first campaigns were launched in 1933. Then, boycotting movements sprang up in several countries as a response to Nazi discrimination toward and persecution of Jews in Germany. While the anti-Nazi boycott was not carried out and driven solely by Jews, it held a special significance for them. Jewish boycott supporters generally believed it a Jewish duty, a means of defense against the Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews and in solidarity with them. In contrast, those Jews who opposed the boycott believed it was detrimental to Jews in a majority gentile world and thus a practice not “suitable” for Jews. The disagreement between the boycott’s supporters and opponents was directly related to diverging ideas of Jewish self-understanding, of the position of Jews in the United States, and of how Jews ought to behave. The boycott of German goods found its most significant function for American Jews in contributing to a sense of belonging, a sense of Jewish connectedness, identity, and purpose. Changing historical circumstances altered the reasons for employing a boycott. In the prewar years, it was solidarity with German and European Jews and weakening a common enemy. In the postwar period, it was the responsibility to remember the atrocities against the Jewish people, to remember the Jews killed in the Holocaust, and to honor the survivors. Thus, the initial target of the boycott—the Nazi German state and its successor—became almost obsolete in the considerations around the boycott. Even when it must have been obvious in the prewar years that the boycott was not actually affecting the Nazis’ treatment of Germany’s Jews in positive ways, the boycott organizers still rallied around the cause. Not only did they doubtlessly seek to do something in the face of the unfolding

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catastrophe in Europe, but the boycotting had also become a tool for some Jewish groups to establish or further their significance and authority within the larger Jewish community in the United States. I have shown how boycott leaders wielded a certain power over Jews who abstained from boycotting, for example. In this case, the boycott affected its targets possibly less than it did those who participated in the boycott, not to mention those who ostensibly should have been on the side of the boycotters but who, for various reasons, did not participate and consequently felt the repercussions. In the postwar period, there was no official boycott movement and consequently no clear official authority monitoring or sanctioning the boycotting of German goods. With the large organizations opposed to a boycott, other authority figures and institutions became important: the rabbi, Hebrew school, the synagogue, the community, and especially the family. While an awareness that Nazis were in positions of power in the Federal Republic motivated people to boycott Germany during the early postwar years, as did a desire to not reward the murderers and even a sense of revenge, West Germany’s development into a stable democracy and its generational change did not necessarily affect decisions to boycott.81 Research on online Jewish community forums reveals that the question whether or not to buy German goods was an ongoing concern even in the early 2000s, especially among orthodox and conservative Jews and frequently in threads with the title “Jewish ethics.”82 People arguing that it was okay to buy German products often referred to Germany’s special relationship with Israel and its generational change. In certain tight-knit groups of American Jews, such arguments did not hold, as one study investigating the practice of boycotting German goods between the years 2006 and 2008 pointed out: “many members of these communities trust the memories of those in their families and communities over what they read in historical texts and the ‘mainstream’ mass media.”83 Thus, for many American Jews during the past three decades, the motivation to boycott has been centered on notions of loyalty to, solidarity with, and respect for the victims of the Holocaust or to the (imagined) Jewish community at large. Hence, one of the most important characteristics of this boycott contrasted with current views of boycotting’s function. It worked above all not to provoke change but instead to prevent change, that is, to preserve group identity and maintain a status quo. As such, the boycott hitched consumer practices to Jewish rituals and traditions.

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Notes 1. Natalie Weinstein, “Will Jews Boycott Chrysler after Buyout by Mercedes?,” The Jewish News of Northern California, May 22, 1998, https://www.jweekly. com/1998/05/22/will-­jews-­boycott-­chrysler-­after-­buyout-­by-­mercedes. 2. Lisa Miller, “For Some Jews, Daimler-Chrysler Merger Reopens Old Wounds in a Delicate Debate,” The Wall Street Journal, updated May 13, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB895017161773261500. 3. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA, 2011), 193. 4. Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, IL, 2009), 10. 5. On the problems of evaluating the success of a boycott, see Monroe Friedman, “Consumer Boycotts in the United States, 1970–1980: Contemporary Events in Historical Perspective,” The Journal of Consumer Affairs 19, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 106–10. 6. Glickman, Buying Power, 115. 7. Ibid. 8. Monroe Friedman, Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change through the Marketplace and the Media (New York, 1999), 5–6; Glickman, Buying Power, 115. 9. Ibid. 10. There exists a lot of historical literature on the boycott of April 1, 1933. See, for example,  Hannah Ahlheim, “Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden!” Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott 1924–1935 (Göttingen, 2011). 11. Ibid., 260. 12. Ibid., 248. While some scholars categorize the Nazi boycott as “racist,” Christoph Kreutzmüller argues that the Nazis “deformed” the term and that it is more accurate to call the action a “racist blockade” (Ausverkauf: Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin 1930–1945 (Berlin, 2012), 23). While boycotts are commonly understood as tools to engender behavioral change, the Nazi action aimed to destroy Jewish business in Germany. Thus, Kreutzmüller encourages scholars to use the word in this context only as a source term. 13. On American Jewish responses to the persecution of the European Jews, see, for example Jeffrey Gurock, America, American Jews, and the Holocaust (London, 2013). 14. See Sharon Gewirtz, “Anglo-Jewish Responses to Nazi Germany 1933–1939: The Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Board of Deputies of British Jews,” Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 2 (April 1991): 255–76. Yfaat Weiß, “Projektionen vom ‘Weltjudentum’: Die Boykottbewebung der 1930er Jahre,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 26 (1997): 151–79; Werner E. Brantz, “German Commercial Interests in Palestine:

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Zionism and the Boycott of German Goods, 1933–1934,” European Studies Review 9 (1979): 481–513. 15. For more on the Jewish War Veterans, see Michael Berkowitz, “Kristallnacht in Context: Jewish War Veterans and Britain and the Crisis of German Jewry,” in American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht, ed. Maria Mazzenga (New York, 2009), 57–84. 16. Preamble, National Constitution of the Jewish War Veterans of America, The Jewish War Veteran 8, no. 9 (April 1940): 6. 17. Moshe Gottlieb, “The Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement in the United States: An Ideological and Sociological Appreciation,” Jewish Social Studies 35, nos. 3/4 (July–October 1973): 198–227, here 199. 18. Richard A.  Hawkins, “The Internal Politics of the Non-Sectarian Anti-­ Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, 1933–1939,” Management and Organizational History 5, no. 2 (2010): 251–78, here 252. 19. Ibid. 20. Gottlieb has argued, and this is also what Coralnik had said at the time, that, despite its new “Non-Sectarian” name, the League was “essentially … a Jewish body with a sprinkling of non-Jewish officers and directors.” Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 226; see also Hawkins, “Internal Politics,” 254. 21. New York Times, April 14, 1933, 15, quoted in Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 206. 22. Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 211; speech by Wise on his 59th birthday, published in the New York Times on March 21, 1933. 23. Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 215. From a speech given at the meeting of the National Executive Committee on August 20, 1933, in New York City. The Records of the Joint Boycott Council, Carton #14, Speeches 1936–1938 folder, p. 3, NY Public Library. 24. See Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 217f. for details on the disagreements. 25. From Statement of the American Jewish Committee, August 17, 1933. Quoted in Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 222. 26. Oscar Wassermann, director of the Deutsche Bank, reached out to the AJ Committee when a boycott of German goods by Jews abroad became a possibility. Referring to the Nazi threat of a boycott against Jews in Germany, he wrote “There is no doubt that threatened boycott against Jews will be carried through with full severity if somewhere protest meetings would be held or boycott against German goods would be started by Jews or with Jewish assistance. As German Jews are faced with utmost poverty and distress if Jews in foreign countries continue to interfere, I request your help as far as you can and should be thankful for your reply.” Quoted in Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933–1941:

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An Historical Analysis (New York, 1982) 43; originally published in The New York Times, March 27, 1933. 27. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 37. 28. Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenges of Ethnic Leadership (Albany, NY, 1981), 171. 29. Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith, 171. 30. Waldmann to Untermyer, quoted in Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 62. 31. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 61. 32. Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 222. More detail on B’nai B’rith and their reactions to the Nazis in the chapter “Witnessing the Holocaust” in Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith, 164–94. 33. Records of the Joint Boycott Council, in the 1934 correspondence of the I folder, NYPL (New York Public Library). The document was signed by Edgar H. Berman, Commander-in-Chief of the JWV at the time. Cited in Moshe Gottlieb, “Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement,” 203. 34. The Jewish War Veterans had a reputation for their “brazenness,” a view perhaps derived from the membership’s working-class and small-business roots. See Berkowitz, “Kristallnacht in Context,” 62. 35. “Yichus”: Hebrew and Yiddish for one’s lineage. Gottlieb, American AntiNazi Resistance, 218. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Gottlieb’s source for this information is an interview he did with Israel Posnansky. Ibid., 365, fn 18. 39. Different posters and pamphlets in MS0307. B01, F. 15. Anti-Nazi Pamphlets, 1933–1945, AJA. 40. Letter from Bertha Corets to Fels & Co. December 5, 1938 and letter from Joseph Jacobs to Bertha V. Corets, December 13, 1938. MS0307. B01, F 05, Gen Corr Nov–Dec 1938. 41. For more on this, see the author’s book, Germany on their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Relationships to Germany, 1938–1988 (New York, 2019). 42. “Muss das wirklich sein??,“ Aufbau 3 (May 1937), 2. 43. George Fredman was the National Boycott Chairman of the JWV. Bertha V.  Corets was the “Chairman” of the National Ladies’ Auxiliary of the JVW. She was also a member of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. 44. Letters from December 24, 1938. Quotation here from note dated December 28, Box 1, Folder 5. MS-307. Bertha V.  Corets Papers. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.

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45. Letter from Fredman to Corets, December 30, 1938, Box 1, Folder 5. MS-307. Bertha V.  Corets Papers. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. 46. Letter to auxiliary presidents and boycott chairmen from National Ladies’ Auxiliary of the JWV, May 5, 1939, Box 1, Folder 8, General Correspondence May–December 1939, MS-0307, Bertha V.  Corets Papers. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. 47. Undated memo from National Headquarters Jewish War Veterans, to Ladies’ Auxiliaries (Dorothy Kuhn, National President), Box 1, Folder 13, Publications 1938–1943, Bertha V.  Corets Papers. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. 48. Ibid. 49. Susan A.  Glenn, “The Jewish Cold War: Anxiety and Identity in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” Belin Lecture Series 24 (2014), http://hdl. handle.net/2027/spo.13469761.0024.001; Shlomo Shafir, Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany Since 1945 (Detroit, MI, 1999), 124. 50. Shafir, Ambiguous Relations, 128. 51. For a brief overview of this change, see, for example, Cornelia Rauh-­ Kühne, “Life Rewarded the Latecomers: Denazification During the Cold War,”  in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990, ed. Detlef Junker et al. (Cambridge, UK, 2004), i:65–72. For a more in-depth treatment, see Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich, 1996). 52. Shafir, Ambiguous Relations, 129. 53. Hasia R.  Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love (New York, 2009), 242. 54. Business leaders hired journalists or other writers to rewrite the history of their industry to their liking. One such example is August Heinrichsbauer, Schwerindustrie und Politik (Essen-Kettwig, 1948). See S.  Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001). 55. S.  Jonathan Wiesen, “Study Tours, Trade Fairs, Publicity Campaigns: German-American Business Encounters and Cold War Anxieties,”  in United States and Germany, ed. Junker et al. (New York, 2004), i:578–79. 56. Ibid.; Thomas Alan Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1991). 57. Lutz Frühbrodt, “American and German Trade Relations,”  in United States and Germany, ed. Junker et al., i:320; Corinna Ludwig, Amerikanische Herausforderungen: Deutsche Großunternehmen in den USA nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt a.M., 2016), 36–37.

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58. When the Berlin Philharmonic toured the United States in 1955 under its conductor Herbert von Karajan, an Austrian who had joined the Nazi party already in 1933, American Jews in different cities protested against the performances. The American Jewish Committee and the American Council for Germany discouraged explicit, visible public protest and boycott actions so as to not “antagonize liberal music-loving concert-goers.” Shlomo Shafir, American Jews and Germany After 1945: Points of Connection and Points of Departure (Cincinnati, OH, 1993), 27. 59. Interview with John Friedman, June 30, 2016, Cincinnati, Ohio. Reform congregations have traditionally had a majority membership of people of German background. Rabbi Friedman, whose family is of Eastern European descent, remembers that his congregation was very mixed in the 1960s. He added that it would have been impossible to know whether the people who engaged in these conversations about boycotting were German Jews or not. Email correspondence with John Friedman, July 20, 2017. 60. Interview with John Friedman, June 30, 2016. 61. Kurt Hellmer, “Deutsche Geschäftsleute sehen Dich an,” Aufbau 15, no. 14, April 8, 1949. 62. Kurt Hellmer, “Nazimesser als deutscher Exportartikel,” Aufbau 15, no. 16, April 22, 1949, 3. 63. “Hans Steinitz,” in Gloria V. D. Kirchheimer and Manfred Kirchheimer, We Were So Beloved: Autobiography of a German Jewish Community (Pittsburgh, 1997), 225. 64. For an in-depth discussion of the relationships of the German Jewish refugee community to Germany, see Schenderlein, Germany on their Minds, 171. 65. For German-Israeli relations, see, for example, Lily Gardner Feldman, The Special Relationship between West Germany and Israel (Boston, 1984); Niels Hansen, Aus dem Schatten der Katastrophe: Die deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen in der Ära Konrad Adenauer und David Ben Gurion: Ein dokumentierter Bericht (Düsseldorf, 2002); Hannfried von Hindenburg, Demonstrating Reconciliation: State and Society in West German Foreign Policy Toward Israel, 1952–1965 (New York, 2007); and Michael Wolffsohn and Douglas Bokovoy, Eternal Guilt? Forty Years of German-Jewish-Israeli Relations (New York, 1993). 66. For more detail, see Schenderlein, Germany on their Minds. 67. On the importance of the Holocaust in the United States, see, for example, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999); and Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York, 2010).

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68. For the relationship of consumption and citizenship in the United States, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). 69. Joshua Comenetz, “Census-Based Estimation of the Hasidic Jewish Population,” Contemporary Jewry 26, no. 1 (October 2006): 35–74; and Jewish Virtual Library, Biography Wing, s.v. “Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rabbi-­menachem-­ mendel-­schneerson-­jewish-­virtual-­library. 70. Letter by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, dated November 25, 1969 (15th of Kislev 5730), posted by forum member “Chasidus” on January 19, 2009, on Internet Forum “Chabad Talk,” at Chabadtalk.com (accessed July 4, 2014). Unfortunately, only the first page of the letter is posted and it is not clear whether or why “Chasidus” actually is in possession of the letter or where it is held. The website Chabadtalk.com seems to no longer exist. 71. Schneerson referred here to a line from Deuteronomy related to the Amalekite attack on the (weakest of the) Israelites on their way out of Egypt. Amalek has come to represent the archetypical enemy of the Jews and a symbol of evil. Frequently, contemporary enemies are associated with Amalek, and in this way, the Nazis have also been referred to as Amalekites. Certain Orthodox Jews believe in the significance of frequent, if not daily, remembrance of Amalek. 72. See Schenderlein, Germany on their Minds. 73. S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 149–50. 74. Cynthia Ozick, “Roundtable Discussion,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York, 1988), 284. 75. The VW beetle became a great hit in the United States because of its small size and comparatively low price. In 1968, for example, 40% of VW’s production was exported there, Bernhard Rieger, The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 199–200. Some American Veterans of World War II had a certain aversion to buying Japanese products, such as cameras or cars, when they became popular in the United States by the early 1970s. 76. Ibid. 77. Rifka Rosenwein, “Back of the Book: Why I Still Won’t Buy German,” The New York Jewish Week, February 5, 1999. 78. Ibid. 79. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore, MD, 1992), esp. chap. 8. 80. Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington, IN, 1986).

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81. Though there are certainly many American Jews who argue that today’s Germans are not the same as during the Nazi era and that one should not punish them for what their forbearers had done. See, for example, the voices quoted in Natalie Weinstein, “Will Jews Boycott Chrysler after Buyout by Mercedes?” J. The Jewish News of Northern California, May 22, 1998, https://www.jweekly.com/1998/05/22/will-­jews-­boycott-­ chrysler-­after-­buyout-­by-­mercedes. 82. Ibid., 307. 83. Jeffrey S. Podoshen and James M. Hunt, “Animosity, Collective Memory, Rumor and Equity Restoration: Consumer Reactions to the Holocaust,” Consumption Markets and Culture 12, no. 4 (2009): 301–27, here 311–12, DOI:10.1080/10253860903204485. Interesting is also the category of “rumor” that the authors of this study investigate. They show that many people make their decisions whether or not to buy German products without historically accurate evidence. One recurring argument for not buying German cars was the apocryphal story that BMW “was responsible for building the ovens in the concentration camps” (313).

CHAPTER 10

The Art Market in Photography: Modernity, Jews, and Wiedergutmachung? Michael Berkowitz

Consistent with the exaggerated roles in the economic realms in which they had been prominent, such as newspapers, textiles, liquor, and tobacco, Jews played a significant part in the evolution of photography as a growing element of consumer culture from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries in Central Europe and the United States.1 This chapter mainly concerns a tightly circumscribed, elite dimension of consumerism: the history of the art market in photography, particularly that which is now generated from tony galleries and prestige auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s.2 The importance of Jews in photography, overall, was tied to their marginal socio-economic and cultural circumstances, which overdetermined Jewish participation in the field. Before the Second World War, Jews were conspicuous in establishing commercial photographic premises; devising and popularizing studio practices; engaging in state-sponsored photographic projects; advancing film and optical

M. Berkowitz (*) Hebrew & Jewish Studies, University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_10

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technologies; photojournalism; the retailing of cameras, film, and photo equipment; and the merging of photography into the fine arts, avant-­ garde, and political movements.3 Ironically, in her classic On Photography, there is but a single moment when Susan Sontag (1933–2004) entertains the notion of ethnic-religious significance in photography’s history. She speculates that Diane Arbus (1923–1971) can best be understood within an aesthetic paradigm created by Andy Warhol (1928–1987), “in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness.” In a solitary allusion to Jewishness, Sontag muses: “It is unlikely that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any of the ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s” such as Arbus. “To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background.”4 Few have taken up the discussion from where Sontag left off. Photography, as it has come to play its massive, complex, and highly malleable role in our modern world, could not have had the history it possesses without the weighty factor of Jewish ethnic difference. This is true as well for the art market in photography. The main question with which we will be concerned here is: how did photography’s art market evolve as a feature of general consumer culture—with Jews grossly disproportionate as producers, agents, and consumers—that spread to the world at large? Some reflections on a special Jewish relationship with photography, firmly situating photography as integral to culture overall and as a rightful member of the arts disciplines, surface in literature and film, but are fleshed out neither in writing on photography nor modern Jewish history. In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin (1957), one of the lamented lost loves of the Russian émigré title character was Mira Belochkin. When Pnin “conjured up Mira’s image with unusual force,” his first memory was “the passion she had for photography. Where were they now, those artistic snapshots she used to take—pets, clouds, flowers, an April glade with shadows of birches on wet-sugar snow, soldiers posturing on the roof of a box-car, a sunset skyline, a hand holding a book?”5 Having married a fur dealer, she settled in Germany and was ultimately murdered in the Holocaust. Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1967) includes a freighted reference to photography as part of the cultural canon. Alex Portnoy struggles to sustain and justify his relationship with his gorgeous West Virginian, non-Jewish, non-intellectual girlfriend (grotesquely named “the monkey”), and tries to make her presentable. She would have

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to read and understand signal works in American literature, such as John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936). In addition, Alex believed that she had to acquire literacy in photography, “to speak to her of her own early life, to enlarge her perspective on her origins (origins, of course, holding far more fascination for the nice left-wing Jewish boy than for the proletarian girl herself).” It was therefore imperative that “to help her along,” she appreciate the photography of Walker Evans (1903–1975), considered one of the greatest photographic interpreters of the rural and hard-scrabble mid-Atlantic United States.6 Until the late twentieth century, differences of opinion persisted about whether photography was, or should be accepted as part of the canon of the fine arts. In a signature scene of modern film, where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton first contemplate their attractiveness to each other in Annie Hall (1977)—with subtitles showing their deeper thoughts—they are, on the surface, engaged in a conversation about photography’s status as art. Indeed, Alvy (Allen) and Annie (Keaton) concur that photography can be both a documentary medium and fine art. It was no simple coincidence that rumination over photography in the realms of the fine arts and consumer culture was overrepresented in the writing of Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), Scholem Asch (1880–1957), Woody Allen (born 1935), Philip Roth (1933–2018), Leonard Michaels (1933–2003), Patrick Modiano (born 1945),7 and other Jews who are renowned for telling unfiltered stories about their own tribe, and for revealing insights about Jewish experiences as those of an ethnic group, outside of religion per se. The idea that in addition to literature, philosophy, art, and history, knowledge of photography is necessary in order to become a complete person, is a facet of cultural history that remains largely unpacked. It furthermore makes historical sense that the theorists who were most instrumental in arguing the case for photography’s cultural significance, if not equivalence to other arts, have been Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Susan Sontag.8 It is crucial to recall that photography was an upstart.9 It was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and the question of whether photography was to be considered a fine art has been articulated and debated since its inception.10 Around 1900, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) emerged as photography’s loudest champion and leading practitioner.11 Due to his patronage of artists, including Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) in his New York galleries, Stieglitz can be seen as a progenitor of the current market in modern art, including prints, painting, and sculpture.12 His own

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photographs fetched thousands of dollars toward the end of his life. But he was not altogether comfortable with photography being another category of art and, for better or for worse, for photographs to be subject to the same economic boom-and-bust impulses as paintings. To her credit, Dorothy Norman (1905–1997), a protégé and lover of Stieglitz, probed this question in interviews, which were collected (but not all published) as the basis of a Stieglitz biography: “As with the making of prints and reproductions, so, even with respect to the ‘price’ to be set upon photographs there were to be many apparently contradictory attitudes” voiced by Stieglitz, and “many contradictory acts.” At bottom, he “found it difficult to tolerate those who approached photography without proper respect, or on a purely ‘business’ or ‘commercial’ basis—either as creators, publishers, or buyers.”13 Stieglitz’s concern for, and his respect for the work of the creative photographer was such that he could not see why a first-rate photograph should not command the same price as any equivalent work of art in any other medium. Thus, from the very beginning of his career, he struggled consistently to establish a “decent wage” for photographs about which he cared deeply, paying higher prices himself for the work of those in whom he believed than commonly was asked. He fought not only against the idea that photographs were to be thought of “by the Dozen—to be paid for by the dozen,” as though they could be turned out quite automatically and mechanically, but also against the practice of using photographic reproductions without giving those who had made the originals proper credit or adequate compensation for their work. His adamant position on all such issues gave others more and more courage to take similar stands, helped to raise the price paid to photographers, and played an important role in gaining respect for photography as a new medium of expression.14 While Stieglitz assiduously sought for photography to be considered dignified labor, and for photographers to be accorded respect as both artists and craftsmen, he did not wish for prize photographs to be another form of precious artistic masterpiece. Nevertheless, according to Norman, Stieglitz realized that “each new print is a fresh experience for the creative artist. In [an] unprecedented manner he offered to pay more than the current asking price for the picture he acquired, being eager to establish greater respect for photography and more adequate monetary support for those whose work he admired.” By so doing he set an example and was a source of unparalleled encouragement. “I was battling,” he said, “for fresh

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ideas, for a new spirit in life that went deeper than mere preoccupation with what is termed ‘photography,’ in a literal or superficial sense.”15 However contradictory were Stieglitz’s ideas on the matter, one of the chief means that photographs came to be valued as art was through the relationships that Stieglitz nurtured with his patrons. This process began with his family and was therefore an inner-Jewish matter. He often gave his photographs, as gifts, to those who supported his endeavors such as by contributing to the rent fund of his enterprises. He himself expressed surprise when he was presented with a check that he considered excessively generous for a specific print or a few photographs. It is important to recall that Stieglitz was initially financed by his own parents and his brothers-in-­ law. It was relatives of his wife, mainly Charles and Aline Liebman (1879–1966), who started paying him what seemed to be outsized sums for his work, far more than the cost of his material and the time he had labored.16 Stieglitz explained, Norman reports, “I have never approached art as business,” referring mainly to his galleries, 291 and An American Place. “But,” he would observe sadly, “I have been forced, at times, seemingly to turn art into property—not for myself, but so that certain of the artists whose work I championed might live. And even while I have rebelled against doing so. This is one of the great tragedies of my life. Because of it I am defeated all along the line. This is at the root of why what I have tried to do is misunderstood and finally must be destroyed. This is what all but kills me.”17

Stieglitz was responding to the idea that he himself had helped make the market for modern, abstract art. It was never his intention for such work to be ascribed value that would make it the province of only museums and elites. Although his Jewishness has rarely been the subject of retrospective commentary, Stieglitz in his time was known as a leading Jew in New York whose career was not in any way connected to Jewish institutions or concerns. Therefore, the strands of Stieglitz as an artist, photographer, theorist of photography, arts patron, and secular Jew cannot be easily disentangled. Only a few of Stieglitz’s followers, such as Paul Rosenfeld (1890–1946) and Waldo Frank,18 but many of his detractors and, in times of stress and conflict, his lover and wife Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), sought to emphasize the significance of his Jewishness.19 Yet in the reverence to Stieglitz as a prophet, one can detect similarities to the way that

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Walter Benjamin was received by those who saw in him an unusual gift for insight, and for forging a path toward a brighter future—by virtue of how he “lived through the eye.”20 According to Norman, “Stieglitz seems most closely to resemble some prophet of old lashing out relentlessly at the shoddy and corrupt; bitterly attacking the false and the destructive; tirelessly championing the inner world of the spirit; passionately pleading for the togetherness of man.”21 Akin to what philosopher Eric Jacobson has termed the “sparks in the lens” of Walter Benjamin, wrote Norman, apparently in conversation with Stieglitz, “to see the moment is to liberate the moment,” and “to show the moment to itself is to liberate the moment.”22 Until the 1950s, one of the notable individuals outside of Stieglitz’s circles who purchased photography as art, next to supporting photography through philanthropy, was David McAlpin III (1897–1989), a close friend and confidant of Beaumont Newhall (1908–1993). Newhall, along with Helmut Gernsheim (1913–1995), was a foundational historian of photography. Both Newhall, and Gernsheim, an émigré to Britain, sought to recast photography as part of general history that also would be integrated into the academic canon. Similar to Newhall, McAlpin was smitten by the photography of Ansel Adams (1902–1984), although Newhall counted both Stieglitz and Adams as the giants who inspired his career as a historian of photography. McAlpin, an investment banker related to the Rockefellers, endowed the first position in the history of photography at Princeton University. His interests were broad and generally liberal, with photography, classical music, and conservation the main causes to which he was devoted.23 As curator of the museum of the George Eastman House, Newhall frequently called on McAlpin for help, along with the creators of Kodachrome, Leopold Mannes (1899–1964) and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (1900–1983).24 Mannes and Godowsky both stemmed from famous, but not necessarily wealthy families from the world of classical music. They made fortunes for themselves from their invention of what proved to be the leading color film in the 1930s. The promotion of photography at the Eastman House certainly complemented the elevation of photography to an exclusive commodity, testifying to its value. Let us fast-forward to what might have been a nightmare for Alfred Stieglitz: as of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the art market is such a colossal force in the culture and economy of the United States and Europe, and the scrutiny of it so sophisticated, that in 2010 the New York Times surveyed an extensive international network of “art business

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schools.”25 MA degrees dedicated to the “Art Business” are currently offered by Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, Los Angeles, and London, which purport to balance “academic rigor with real-world applications in a dynamic environment” as “an alternative to traditional academic models of study and… in sync with the rapidly-evolving global art market.”26 Despite having courses on “International Art Markets,” “Theories of Postwar Art,” “Contemporary Art 1960–1990,” and “Contemporary Art 1990–Present,” as well as electives on “Emerging Art Markets” and “Photography from the Daguerreotype to Instagram,”27 there is little scholarly work on which to draw for an intensive academic investigation of photography’s role in the historical development of the art market.28 This is not entirely surprising. After all, “the medium of photography” is said to comprise only “a tiny fragment (about 2 percent) of the global art market.” If copyright sales are included, however, the figure might be higher. In 2014, “all the photographs that were sold at auction globally brought in about $180 million, greatly exceeding the high set before the art market crash of 2008.” While this sum is far from negligible, “it can be exceeded by a single modern or contemporary evening sale at Christie’s or Sotheby’s.”29 Photography may be “only two percent” of the art trade, but given the immensity of art dealing, and the ease and speed with which images are disseminated, it comprises a significant element of elite, popular, and consumer culture. The work of scores, or perhaps hundreds of Jewish photographers, which had earlier been categorized as photojournalism, studio photography, or “street photography” is now regarded as having artistic merit. Much of the discourse on and trade in photography has been generated by Jews. In the aforementioned classic, Annie Hall, “socialist summer camp” and “Ben Shahn prints on the wall” mark the middle-class liberal Jewishness of Allison Porchnik’s family—to which Allen might have added “photographic prints by Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray.” And the way photography works, as a commodity and consumer item on postcards and in auction houses, is similar to that of other media: the more it is talked about, written about, and theorized, the greater its value. The conventional wisdom of the art scene is that the passage of photography into the realm of fine art is marked by the Getty Museum’s purchase of Sam Wagstaff’s rapidly acquired collection in 1984 for $5 million.30 Wagstaff (1921–1987) came from a wealthy family, which facilitated his evolution from studying to curating to collecting, initially paintings and

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eventually photography. To the extent that there is any prehistory of note, it seems to have begun in the 1970s, again with Wagstaff as a principle figure in discovering that photographs should be treated more like traditional works of art. As open homosexuals, Wagstaff and his lover, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), were famous for being different kinds of outsiders than Jews. Today, the two are regarded as having breached the barricades between obscenity and art, launching the art market in photography into the stratosphere in the 1980s. It is instructive to look briefly at a less heralded moment in the high end of photography’s consumer culture. Here is an example of what was dismissed as a damp squib in the art world: A few murmurs filled the Christie’s showroom off Rockefeller Plaza on Thursday night, as one of Richard Avedon’s most iconic works, which captures an aloof Marilyn Monroe, failed to reach its low estimate of $100,000. It was the inaugural evening of Christie’s fall photography season [in October 2012], and the Avedon sale… was the keynote event. Avedon’s iconic portraits were all in attendance, but also all underperformed. Of course, the failure to move the Marilyn image wasn’t enough to halt the night, which ended on a reasonable note with Avedon’s hopped-up, solarized portrait of The Beatles. The lot was a later edition, printed in 1981, and failed to reach its low estimate of $100,000. It sold, but for $70,000. Overall, the auction was successful, with evening results totaling $1,517,250 against a low estimate of $1,352,000 for the 28 works. That’s nothing to be sad about. Still, most of the lots that did sell hovered just above their low estimates, and 30 percent of the lots didn’t sell. It seems that at this moment, a showcase of Avedon’s strange, glamorous world doesn’t garner much excitement. Josh Holdeman, international director for Christie’s photography department, described the current market for Avedon as “steady.” Just two years ago, Holdeman might have said it was robust. In 2010, at a Paris sale, Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants sparked a personal record for the photographer in excess of a million dollars.31

It is taken for granted that those with means are willing to pay thousands of dollars, pounds, or euros for photography. In a 2012 auction at Sotheby’s, an Alfred Stieglitz image of Georgia O’Keefe’s hands and a thimble fetched between $800,000 and $1.2 million. A nude and hands of O’Keefe, in 2016, sold for between $300,000 and $500,000.32 In 2010, a Robert Capa (1913–1954) Spanish Civil War print went for over

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£10,000.33 At present, it even costs more than a nominal fee simply to access the auction and gallery prices paid for photographs. That Stieglitz is a mainly forgotten reference point is beyond doubt. Indeed, Wagstaff was a WASP, and Robert Mapplethorpe was Irish Catholic. But Wagstaff was inspired to champion Mapplethorpe due to his viewing of a 1973 show in New York, “The Painterly Photograph, 1890–1914.” This was largely work by—or favored by—Alfred Stieglitz, which he had published in his journal, Camera Work, a quarterly that appeared from 1903 to 1917.34 The commercial failure of Camera Work, now prized by collectors as the greatest photography publication ever, was in part due to Stieglitz’s own marginal status and the extent to which he was not considered respectable. In the less rarefied world, even in the so-called third world, it may be as common to hang on one’s wall a reproduction of a famous photograph as it is a reproduction of a drawing or a painting. At college in 1977, I had a poster of Nat Fein’s The Babe Bows Out (1948), purchased at the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Fein’s photograph shows the back of a stooped Babe Ruth, in his last official appearance in Yankee Stadium. My genteel roommate found the photograph so odd that he defaced it. Of course, photos of personalities always circulated widely, and this was something of a Jewish invention. The Melbourne and London photographer, H. Walter Barnett (1862–1934), was a portrait photographer who also sold his pictures of the crowned heads of Europe, along with writers such as Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson to the general public.35 The ubiquitous Ansel Adams’ “Yosemite” posters would have been almost unthinkable before the 1960s, which also were the progeny of his colorful agent, Harry Lunn, Jr. (1933–1998). Lunn helped bring Robert Frank (1924–2019), Diane Arbus, and Walker Evans to greater public acclaim, with a corresponding increase in their market price.36 This valuing and popularity of photography could not have happened as it did without the overwhelming presence of Jews as photographers; as progenitors of photographic discourses including history, criticism, and publishing; and as vital actors in what became the art market for photography. Certainly, it also was connected to the Jewish role in art dealership, as has been discussed by Charles Dellheim and others.37 Ansel Adams, who was not Jewish, was well aware that his work would never have reached the broad masses, and reaped great wealth, without Jews as prime actors in the market in which he had become a star.38

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Stieglitz was said to have protested the claim, most famously made by Waldo Frank, that there was any significance to his Jewishness.39 Yet, he had mixed feelings about being read as Jewish.40 Richard Avedon (1923–2004), overlapping a bit with Stieglitz but of a later generation, was one of the few prominent Jews in the heavily Jewish field of photography who could be termed Jewishly self-aware, that is, articulate about the importance of Jewishness for himself and his wider milieu. Avedon keenly sensed the intimacy between his immigrant father’s trade in the shmate (clothing) business and his emergence as a fashion photographer.41 Few have paused to muse over the irony that the photographs Avedon and others took of fashion have outlasted and outperformed the fashion to which it was initially an instrument of transmission. The theoretical work that best describes the phenomenon of the art market in photography, overwhelmingly created by Jews, is Yuri Slezkine’s 2006 The Jewish Century. Simultaneously brilliant and wacky, the book argues that Jews engineered the socio-economic order of the twentieth-­ century United States and Soviet Union to a much greater extent than typically is acknowledged, which ostensibly often—but not always—coincided with their interests. Many aspects of the history of photography fit Slezkine’s argument beautifully. Jews did not invent photography (yet some, in fact, were critical in its advance). More importantly, Jews colonized it and kept pushing it forward and developing subfields. In the spirit of Slezkine, I believe it is possible to establish major watersheds in the development of photography’s art market as illuminated in the careers of Alfred Stieglitz, Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Gernsheim, Andor Kraszna-Krausz (1904–1989), Walter Neurath (1903–1967), Lew D.  Feldman (1906–1976), Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995), Gisele Freund (1908–2000), Harry N.  Abrams (1905–1979), Peter Pollack (1909–1978), Paul Strand (1890–1976), Walter Rosenblum (1919–2006), Josef Breitenbach (1896–1984), Arnold Newman (1918–2006), and Richard Avedon. Along with the purchase of individual photographs as artwork, often created by Jewish photographers or commissioned through Jewish agents, we also may consider the acquisition of entire collections— starting with the Gernsheim Collection by the University of Texas and later the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, and the Breitenbach Collection by the Munich municipal museum. Few have noticed that post-1945, West German museums, galleries, and archives helped substantially to fuel the art market for photography. These institutions recognized that the Jewish photographers, agents, and

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editors expelled from Nazi Europe represented a lost cultural treasure. Elites in the arts and local politicians determined that these persons and their work might be partly restored to Germany, and in turn, serve to fortify the myth of a culturally effervescent Central Europe before Hitler. Valuing and displaying such work also lent credence to the idea that the German Federal Republic had broken completely with its Nazi past. In this way, Jewish photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt served as contemporary witnesses and became part of the mosaic of Weimar culture and the resplendent cultural scene of interwar Vienna.42 In 2013, the Jewish Museum of Vienna staged Shooting Girls about the Jewish women who owned and ran the majority of Vienna’s “quality” studios before the Anschluss in 1938. Many of the same factors that had allowed for Jewish entry and free rein in photography were also enjoyed by women, which helps to account for the unusually high number of Jewish women photographers. The postwar discovery of a Jewish photographic corpus and cohort also led to increasing value and valuing of photographs more generally as German institutions sought—and paid relatively high prices for— work by Jews and “of Jewish interest.” Although it was never admitted expressly, there seems little doubt that the so-called discovery of Gisele Freund and Alfred Eisenstaedt as artists and the acquisition of the Breitenbach collection in Munich and the Gernsheim collection in Mannheim would not have occurred but for the spirit and reality of Wiedergutmachung, the term used to describe Germany’s efforts to atone for its crimes.43 Thus far, there has been little written about the Gernsheim collection, despite its huge role in the history of photography’s art market.44 Reflections on the significant acquisition of the Breitenbach Collection of Munich are also scarce. In fact, Jews continued to be overrepresented as actors in and consumers of the photography art market until it started going through the roof and attracted all sorts of people with money. Almost to the close of the twentieth century, the field was dominated by persons of Jewish origins and networks between Jews, although this circumstance was rarely discussed openly. Relatedly, there was a distinctly German Jewish dynamic at stake in how photography was treated by arts institutions and municipalities in Europe in the wake of the Holocaust. What had been an almost exclusively Jewish discourse—the assertion that photography should be treated as art— became normal. “The Germans,” Gisele Freund confided to her agent, in 1986, “make big efforts ‘to get me back.’ My photographs sold well and I have never had so much money as I have now.”45 As much as the

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summaries of photography’s art market in New York and London illuminate discussions of figures such as Wagstaff and Lunn, there are few, if any references to how developments in continental Europe influenced this market. One area where scholars of German Jewry and the Holocaust are beginning to excavate a notable Jewish presence with respect to consumer culture, followed by its abrupt absence, is photography. Besides Rolf Sachsse, Hanno Loewy, and Christoph Kreutzmüller on the destruction of Jews in photography,46 there is Ofer Ashkenazi on film and photography, and Nissan Perez on exile photography.47 While building on this important research, I wish to defuse any impression that my contribution might be an exercise in valorization. Part of the reason why there is such a huge disparity between Jews’ roles in photography, and the extent to which this past has been forgotten is because photography was not always considered the most respectable of vocations, no matter how much the photographs themselves were valued.48 Sometimes, descendants of photographers are unaware of photographers in their own family. For their part, historians have barely dealt with the problem of why photographers have been obscured or marginalized as a matter of course until quite recently. Parts of photography were regarded as dirty work, a coarse trade which was undesirable for those who had other options. I believe that photography’s problematic relationship with respectability provided a critical opening for Jews, while it also helped obfuscate the heavily Jewishly-inflected history of the field. To give but one example: Stieglitz perhaps did more than anyone to make it possible to see photographic nudes as art instead of pornography. The development of the art market in photography, especially as seen through the career of Josef Breitenbach, reveals works originally sold to “obscene” publications and later deemed “vintage photographs” and offered for thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, pounds, and euros.49 Stieglitz opened the door to photography being valued at the same level as art through curatorial practices in his public studio spaces, 291 and An American Place. He was the first to display art with photography. There were probably private homes in New York where this was being done as well. Many of these people were intimates of Paul J.  Sachs (1878–1965), who helped launch a generation of museum professionals from his position at Harvard University. Sachs encouraged Beaumont Newhall to pursue those who equally valued art and photography.50 Stieglitz himself, as we have seen, held complicated and contradictory

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views about high prices being paid for traditional art and, later in his life, photography. This attitude of Stieglitz’s audience had not been accorded his predecessors, such as Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), and David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), who now garner huge sums. In some ways, through his success, Stieglitz helped endow the fledgling photography market with many of the same characteristics that he abhorred in the art market. Stieglitz’s innovation of treating photographs like paintings was continued by his non-Jewish protégé, Edward Steichen (1879–1973) at the Metropolitan Museum, and at the Julien Levy gallery. Perhaps the next most significant attempts at elevating photography to fine art as the foundation of the art market in photography, before the generally recognized watershed of the 1970s, were devised by Helmut Gernsheim. After his brother Helmut had escaped to London in 1937, Walter Gernsheim exhibited Helmut’s avant-garde photographs in his art gallery. Helmut, however, turned most of his energy after 1945 to collecting and writing a systematic history of photography. Noel Chanan observes that Gernsheim’s histories were invaluable as a unique and essential account of photography’s development, providing the basis for the boom in photography auctions after 1970.51 And it was Helmut Gernsheim who brought attention to the importance of Lewis Carroll as a photographer, which was crucial in Wagstaff’s appreciation of photography. Gernsheim’s work on Carroll would not have been possible without German Jewish refugees having taken a commanding role in photography publishing in Britain in the 1950s. Helmut Gernsheim championed the art market in photography in other ways, such as by promoting the work of photographers he considered cutting edge, such as Ferenc (Franz) Berko (1916–2000) and Gisele Freund.52 Interestingly, it was to Berko and Freund to whom Gernsheim turned when he became interested in the subject of Jews in photography. When it became known that Gernsheim had collected color photography (including works of Berko and Freund), as well as the supposedly classic black and white, it became possible to assign color photography greater market values. Many of the early color pioneers were indeed Jews. Peter Pollack, best known for his Picture History of Photography, also was a prime mover in fostering photography as art. He attempted to elevate photography, especially photojournalism, as equal to art during his curatorship at the Art Institute of Chicago, when he featured photographers such as Kertesz and Izis. After Chicago, Pollack moved to New York

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to work for Harry Abrams publishing, continuing a role he had begun informally while still in Chicago. Among his major efforts were producing limited edition, signed photographic books. The books, however, never took off as did the prints themselves. Beyond the cases of Gernsheim and Breitenbach, photographs both taken by and of Jews seem initially to have become highly valued in the Central European photography marketplace. In postwar Germany and Austria, beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some institutions active in photography began to grapple with the historical eradication of Jews who had been at the heart, or cutting edge, of the field. Therefore, photojournalists Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gisele Freund, Gerti Deutsch (1908–1979), Simon Gutmann (1891–1990), Josef Breitenbach, and Lisl Steiner (born 1927) were “welcomed” back to Germany and Austria, as was the pioneering collector and historian Helmut Gernsheim. While usually prompted by arts professionals who either knew or learned of the unusual Jewish connection to photography, politicians often lent critical support too. Erich Salomon (1886–1944), murdered in Auschwitz, was posthumously made part of a German cultural canon. All of this served a two-fold purpose: it was part of the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and it also was a means of creating the myth of Weimar Germany, especially Berlin, and pre-World War II Vienna as precursors to multiculturalism and the greatest incubators of avant-garde trends. The selective appropriation of the phenomenon, as part of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, however laudatory, has been fragmentary and occasionally distorted in historical reflections. The German embrace of Helmut Gernsheim and Josef Breitenbach, in particular, represents a near overturning of the pre-World War II disrespect of photography as art. As personalities and as important collectors of historical photography, both men were integrated into what may be seen as a German photographic canon—with reverberations, albeit rarely credited, around the world. Toward the end of his life, Helmut Gernheim arranged to sell and donate part of his collection to the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim (completed seven years after his death, in 2002). The bulk of Gernsheim’s collection, however (which he had tried to keep in Britain) became one of the many jewels of the Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin. In the early 1960s, the University of Texas paid Helmut Gernsheim $300,000 for his collection, which I believe was at least as consequential as the 1984 Wagstaff deal for $5 million in setting an important precedent in photography’s art market.

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Josef Breitenbach’s collection of historical photography is less known and heralded than that of Gernsheim. Indeed, it is of a much smaller scale and not nearly as comprehensive. Nevertheless, it has a number of fabulous pieces. Breitenbach is mainly remembered as a photographer for his portraits of Bertolt Brecht and Max Ernst and as a teacher of photography of diverse and rather eclectic interests. There seems no doubt, though, that he was invited back to Germany generally, and Munich specifically as a native son in the late 1970s as an act of restitution.53 The first stirrings began the late 1950s. He was paid well for his “donation,” which apparently he had loaned to the university before its permanent fate was settled. There were a few grand events, publications, and exhibitions to mark the “return” of Breitenbach to his home country. As early as 1967, we can see through Breitenbach’s efforts to sell off his collection that the work of German Jews and refugees, including of Erich Salomon, Erwin Blumenfeld, Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995), Lotte Jacobi (1896–1990), and Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), were being accorded relatively high value. How and why, one may ask, did Jews take up photography as a vocation in the first place? And how and why did they begin to treat it as high art? To the extent that this problem has been posed as all, it is frequently said that photography was attractive to Jews due to its portability. It was transferable from one locale to another, and it offered the opportunity of expansive entrepreneurship. Compared to other trades, it was relatively easy to receive a permit to practice photography in the Russian Empire, which would allow a Jew otherwise restricted to the Pale of Settlement to travel and live more freely in the Russian interior. These were indeed important factors. For Central European Jews in the 1920s and 1930s, it was often straightforward: turning a hobby or sideline into a vocation. John Gutmann (1905–1998), who would become one of the most respected photographers in the United States, described his transition from art to photography in this way: The reason I left Germany as early as 1933 was that I received an official cancellation of my rights to be an art instructor for the Prussian government. I had been teaching art off and on since 1928. I also was notified that I could not exhibit my paintings and drawings anymore in such exhibitions as Berliner Succession and Kunste Akademie [sic] where I had shown my work before. Another reason that I left was that I witnessed ugly incidents of anti-semitic nature by stormtroopers. If I would have stayed I probably would have remained a painter. I only bought a camera and took up photog-

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raphy as a possible source of income in a depressed America three weeks before my departure to America at the advice of my well informed journalistic friends.

This was almost exactly the same advice Walter Gernsheim gave to his brother, Helmut Gernsheim, namely, that the latter should harbor no illusions about being an art historian in Britain, and train as either a dentist or photographer. John Gutmann continued: I arrived New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1933  in San Francisco which remains my home up to the present. I still continued painting until I entered WWII as a still and motion picture cameraman for the OWI. Had I remained in a Hitler-free Germany hopefully, I would have become a successful major artist and teacher. I never had the intention to live again in Germany where I felt I was not wanted, but dishonoured and possibly eliminated.54

For refugees in Britain from the 1930s to the 1950s, the best means of access to the realm of the arts, generally, was through photography. The Gernsheims, I have argued elsewhere, revolutionized the relationship between photography and the fine arts.55 Finally, I wish to reintroduce Walter Benjamin into the conversation. Perhaps Benjamin seems best employed for making an argument against photography as art, and an art market in photography, having famously said that the mechanical reproduction of a work of art fails to replicate its aura. Yet Benjamin, like Stieglitz, thought that all workers toiling in aesthetic fields should be compensated as dignified workers. But there is an even more important way that Benjamin belongs here, which I will relate in the form of an observation. I was at a big conference on the history of photography in Rome, in November 2014. It comprised a program of several days and audiences in the hundreds, if not some thousands. After listening to talk after talk, I thought: What if there had been no Stieglitz, no Kracauer, no Benjamin, no Susan Sontag? No Phaidon, Braziller, Abrams, or Thames & Hudson to bring photography to the world’s attention as art? Barthes and Bourdieu have written on the significance of photography, but often in a disparaging manner. Perhaps we would treat cameras as largely utilitarian instruments, like, say, refrigerators and washing machines. Stieglitz, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Sontag endowed photography with weighty cultural significance. Of course there is a gap between, say, Benjamin writing about Atget and a businessman paying

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thousands for Atget’s work. But the entire Benjaminian project, and the recovery of his thought, is about the reassessment of culture and criticism, and seeing the world in a new light. The radical conceptualization of photography as art, mainly by Jews, precipitated the consideration of photography as art in consumer culture. Although it is difficult to quantify, Jews—through their photographic work, exhibition practices, and critical writing—were instrumental in elevating photography into an accepted form of fine art, with Alfred Stieglitz as the towering figure. Otherwise, photographs might have remained primarily a byproduct of media and entertainment, a skilled craft to serve other domains and a taken-for-granted commodity. The sense of photography as art became reflected and manifested in its inclusion in an elite marketplace, which was tied to the emerging politics of the twentieth century and beyond. The history of photography’s entry into the art market, intertwined with the changing fortunes of Jewish difference, offer a glimpse of how photos came to be accorded respect as things-in-­ themselves, possibly deserving of value well beyond the reach of mere mortals.

Notes 1. See Michael Berkowitz, “Russian Jews and Photography,” in Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, ed. Brian Wallis and Maya Benton (New York, 2015), 51–54; Michael Berkowitz, “‘Jews in Photography’: Conceiving a Field in the Papers of Peter Pollack,” Photography and Culture 4, no. 1 (2011): 7–28. 2. While this chapter was in the editing pipeline, a new book appeared on the subject: Juliet Hacking, Photography and the Art Market (London, 2018); it mentions Helmut Gernsheim briefly and treats Alfred Stieglitz more extensively. The effort to have photography understood and treated as art is discussed in Phyllis Rose, Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (New Haven, CT, 2019), 67, 97–100. 3. Berkowitz, “Jews in Photography.” 4. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; London, 2002), 44–45. 5. Nabokov, Pnin (1957; London, 1986), 111–12. 6. Philip Roth, Portnoy’ Complaint (1967; London, 2005), 208. 7. I.  J. Singer, “In der finster,” in Perl un andere dertseylungen (Vilnius, 1929), 74–93; Sholem Asch, Three Cities, trans. Edwin and Willa Muir (1933; New  York, 1967); Patrick Modiano, The Search Warrant, trans. Joanna Kilmartin (1977; London, 2014), Leonard Michaels,

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“Introduction,” in A Girl With a Monkey: New and Selected Short Stories (London, 2000), 6; Italo Calvino, “The Adventure of a Photographer” (1955), in Difficult Loves (London, 1999), 40–52. 8. Walter Benjamin, On Photography, ed. and trans. Esther Leslie, On Photography (London, 2015). 9. Sontag, On Photography, 144. 10. Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 4th ed. (New York, 2008); Therese Mulligan and David Wooters, eds., A History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present (Cologne, 2012). 11. Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (New York, 1995). 12. This is the theme of Rose, Alfred Stieglitz. 13. Dorothy Norman, manuscripts for Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, AG7 3/5, “file notes,” p. 168, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ [hereafter: CCP]. 14. Dorothy Norman, manuscripts for Alfred Stieglitz An American Seer, AG7 3/5, CCP, p. 168. 15. Norman, AG7/13, p. 80, CCP. 16. See correspondence between Aline M.  Liebman and Alfred Stieglitz, (undated, probably January 1916), Liebman to Stieglitz, Stieglitz to Liebman, February 2, 1916, May 16, 1917, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, YCAL MSS 85, Box 31, folder 719, Series II.  Alfred Stieglitz: Correspondence, Personal and Business Correspondence, Liebman, Aline Meyer; Liebman, Charles J, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut [hereafter: Beinecke]. 17. Norman, AG7/3-4, p. 50, CCP. 18. Paul Rosenfeld, “The Boy in the Dark Room,” in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, eds. Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, Harold Rugg (New York, 1934), 59–88; Waldo Frank, Our America (1919; New York, 1920), 186; Waldo Frank, The Jew in Our Day (London, 1944), 46. 19. Benita Eisler, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance (New York, 1991), pp. 229, 367, 455. 20. Norman, AG7 2: 12, p. 13, CCP. 21. Norman, AG7 2/19, p. 1, CCP. 22. Norman, AG7 2/19, p. 1a, CCP. 23. Susan Heller Anderson, “David McAlpin 3d, A Longtime Patron of Photography, 92,” New York Times, June 3, 1999, obituaries. 24. Letter from Beaumont Newhall to Dave McAlpin, undated (apparently October or November 1950), in “McAlpin, David H. (1897–1989),” file 26, box 71, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall collection, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles [hereafter cited as GRI]. 25. Claudia Barbieri, “Art Business Schools Create a Network,” in New York Times, November 24, 2010.

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26. See http://www.sothebysinstitute.com/new-­york/masters-­programs/ ma-­art-­business/. 27. Sotheby’s Institute of Art-New York, Master’s Degree Curriculum, http://www.sothebysinstitute.com/wp-­content/uploads/2016/02/sia-­ curriculum-­chart.pdf. 28. See Juliet Hacking, Photography and the Art Market. 29. Stephen Heyman, “Photography’s Place in the Global Market,” New York Times, May 6, 2015. 30. Hiton Als, “Wagstaff’s Eye,” The New Yorker, January 13, 1997, 36–37. 31. Corinna Kirsch, “Some Surprises and Old Standards at Christie’s Richard Avedon sale,” Politico, October 8, 2012, https://www.politico.com/ states/new-­y ork/albany/stor y/2012/10/some-­s urprises-­a nd-­o ld-­ standards-­at-­christies-­richard-­avedon-­sale-­067223. 32. See the Artsy website: https://www.artsy.net/artist/alfred-­stieglitz/ auction-­results. 33. See the Artsy website: https://www.artsy.net/artist/robert-­capa/ auction-­results?sort=-­auction_date&page=5. 34. In 2011, a complete set of fifty issues of Camera Work was sold for nearly $400,000; see http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/photographs-­n08775/lot.57.html. 35. Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain, 36–38. 36. Margaret Loke, “Harry Lunn Jr., 65, Art Dealer Who Championed Photography,” New York Times, August 24, 1998; Elisabeth Bumiller, “Images of Harry Lunn,” Washington Post, August 5, 1980. 37. Charles Dellheim, “Framing Nazi Art Loot,” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 319–34. 38. Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain, 206–7. 39. Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (New York, 1983), 236; Eisler, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, 229. 40. Sarah Greenough, ed. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, vol. 1, 1915–1933 (New Haven, 2011). 41. “Press release from The Museum of Modern Art, No. 35, JACOB ISRAEL AVEDON: PHOTOGRAPHED BY RICHARD AVEDON TO BE PRESENTED AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN, May 1-June 16, 1974,” file 11, box 6, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall collection, GRI. 42. Clippings about Alfred Eisenstaedt, folder 14, box 5, Peter Pollack collection, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; F. Kempe, “Alfred Eisenstaedt, Zeuge seiner Zeit” [offprint] (Cologne, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, 1962); and E.  J. Klinsky, “Alfred Eisenstaedt,” Der Bild Journalist 8, no. 1 (1963): 6–13, in file 23, box 34, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Collection, GRI.

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43. See, for example, Gisele Freund to Joan Daves, December 18, 1986, and May 3, 1986, folder 7, general correspondence, 1985–1990, Gisele Freund collection, Washington State University special collections, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington [hereafter: WSU]. 44. Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain, 239–43. 45. Freund to Joan Daves, August 29, 1987, folder 7, general correspondence, 1985–1990, WSU. 46. Rolf Sachsse, “‘Dieses Atelier ist sofort zu vermieten’: Von der ‘Entjudung’ eines Berufsstandes,” in ‘Arisierung’ im Nationalsozialismus: Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis: Jahrbuch 2000 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust, ed. Irmtrud Wojak and Peter Hayes (Frankfurt a.M., 2000), 269–86; Christine Kühnl-Sager, “Schule Reimann, College of Applied Art,” and Heike Stange “Yva Photographic Studio,” in Final Sale: The End of Jewish Owned Businesses in Nazi Berlin, eds. Christoph Kreutzmüller and Kaspar Nürnberg (Berlin, 2010), 58–51, 68–71; Hanno Lowy, Kersten Brandt, and Krystyna Oleksy, eds., Before They Perished: Photographs Found in Auschwitz (Oswiecim, 2001). 47. Ofer Ashkenazi, Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (London, 2012); Nissan Perez, Displaced Visions: Émigré Photographers of the 20th Century (Jerusalem, 2013). 48. Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain, 11–16. 49. See the Artsy website at https://www.artsy.net/artist/josef-­breitenbach/ auction-­results. 50. Beaumont Newhall papers, “Meeting with Stieglitz,” Memoirs-III [drafts], file 5, box 203, p. 2, GRI. 51. Noel Chanan, “John Dillwyn Llewelyn Redivivus,” in The Photographer of Penllergare: a life of John Dillwyn Llewelyn (London, 2014) [no pagination]. 52. Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain, 246, 261–62. 53. See Anne C.  Schenderlein, Germany on Their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 (New York, 2020), 163–211. 54. Letter from John Gutmann to Petra Benteler, June 21, 1989, John Gutmann papers, AC 173, CCP. 55. Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain.

CHAPTER 11

Does Consumer Culture Matter? The “Jewish Question” and the Changing Regimes of Consumption Gideon Reuveni

Antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as capitalists have hindered research into the economic dimension of the Jewish past.1 The figure of the Jew as trader and financier haunted the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to a large degree has shaped academic interest in the topic, which consequentially almost exclusively focuses on Jews as moneymakers. One can only wonder why it took scholars of Jewish culture so long to appreciate the significance of spending, especially in light of the weight Judaism ascribes to consumption. Indeed, being Jewish has always been intertwined with consumption. Jewish dietary requirements and dress prescriptions, as well as the use of special objects for ritual purposes are just a few examples of the ways Judaism delineates consumer practices as markers of distinction. Rabbinical authorities often have called upon Jews not to

G. Reuveni (*) The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_11

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forgo their Jewishness when doing their shopping. Rules and regulations for buying and selling according to Jewish traditions have featured prominently in responsa and other rabbinic literature. Here, we find questions regarding apposite Jewish lifestyle as well as the permissibility of specific products for Jewish use, for example, tomatoes or margarine, which were strictly forbidden for observant Jews until the start of the twentieth century. Rabbinic authorities urged Jews to display moderation in the marketplace, warning against the devastating implications of ostentatious consumption for Jewish life. Some rabbis urged Jews to be more aware of the origin of the goods they purchased. Thus, for example, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), one of the leading orthodox rabbinical authorities in nineteenth-century Germany, proclaimed in 1837 that Jews must not buy goods whose origin was unclear, in case they were stolen. That is why he advised Jews not to buy things from “a shepherd, a watchman, a man hired by the day or a craftsman, if it is usual for them to steal such things entrusted to their care.”2 Hirsch allowed the purchase of goods from women, servants, and children only if one could safely establish that they were the owners of the property. Keeping a Jewish way of life has thus been not merely a matter of religious confession or a form of group or ethnic affiliation. It has also involved a distinct relationship with various material objects. Such practices require a suitable and supportive infrastructure and commonly involve additional expense for those individuals who wish to live according to Jewish ways. But even for those who did not actively practice religious Judaism, spending seemed to have comprised a significant part of how their Jewishness was perceived and enacted.3 Thus, the study of Jewish consumption deals with a crucial and neglected axis of spending, identity, and Jewish history. It aims to examine the role and place of consumption within Jewish society and the ways consumerism generated and reinforced Jewish notions of belonging from the early modern period to the beginning of the new millennium. By assuming a “consumerist” approach to Jewish history, this exploration strives to move research beyond the common binary divisions in Jewish history, which tend to oscillate between approaches that stress the inclusion of Jews and those that highlight their exclusion. It suggests that as consumers, Jews were able to develop a self-­ understanding based on heterogeneous elements taken from a multiplicity of cultural representations and practices, facilitating a feeling of belonging to a wider consumer community, while still retaining a clear sense of being Jewish.

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This essay seeks to demonstrate why consumption matters in Jewish studies and how it might advance our understanding of the Jewish experience in modern times. The following pages will suggest, for example, that in different settings, such as settler societies in the Americas and Australia, consumer culture played a more important role in promoting social cohesion than it did in societies that developed an ethos of common origin. In settler societies, or societies of “strangers,” to use the sociologist Georg Simmel’s terminology, where citizens have disparate origins and distinct cultural backgrounds, people seem to be bound by their desires and aspirations for a common future rather than by taboos or obligations to a real or imagined primordial community.4 To extend the argument, it seems that such a consumer-oriented culture as the United States would also be more appreciative of traditional Jewish activities around buying and selling than would production-oriented European countries that are based on the ethos of common origins.5 Israel occupies a middle ground between the production-oriented approaches of European countries and the consumerist orientation of settler societies. It is, on the one hand, a society constructed out of immigrants. On the other hand, the idea of belonging in Israel is based on a strong sense of a common (Jewish) descent. I will briefly deal with the Israeli context toward the end of this chapter. The main focus of the following pages will be on the changing meanings and functions of consumption within the specific setting of American Jewry in the twentieth century. At the outset of this exploration stands a question that has shaped the modern Jewish experience since the end of the eighteenth century—the so-called Jewish question. In different times and places, we find various formulations. At its core, however, the Jewish question is about whether Jews as individuals or as a community are able to integrate into their surrounding—modern and non-Jewish—society. Historically, questioning the compatibility of Jews with modernity has given rise to a further and no less fundamental issue regarding the “nature” of Jewish difference. Depending on their worldviews, both Jews and non-Jews developed various understandings of what constitutes Jewish difference, thus offering a variety of responses to the Jewish question. Whereas certain Jews sought to reform Judaism, making it more “compatible” with modern life, others turned to politics, reaffirming Jewish difference and rendering it a prerequisite for their integration into non-Jewish society. A third path taken by millions of Jews was migration. Hoping to find a better life, over three

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million Jews left Europe between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the First World War. About 85 percent of them headed to the United States.6 In contrast to the European case, the story of American Jewish consumer culture is quite well documented, and this chapter draws upon what is already an established body of research.7 This history reveals how the changing regimes of consumer culture turned the so-called Jewish question on its head. Whereas in the past Jews struggled to negotiate their difference in order to promote integration, since the Holocaust the very notion of Jewish difference in America has been questioned, and Jews, more than ever before, are preoccupied with the question of how to reassert and preserve their distinctiveness. Consumer culture, I argue, facilitates the processes of both making and blurring differences. As a social arrangement in which structures of meaning and feeling are organized primarily around the act of purchase, consumer culture enables processes of standardization, rendering a sense of homogeneity and social cohesion.8 At the same time, however, consumption also allows individuals and groups to craft distinct social definitions through the act of buying. Studying the changing nature and dynamics of consumer cultures in the context of Jewish history thus reveals this multifaceted process by which minorities are able to maintain a separate identity through consumption, while at the same time, as consumers, to feel integrated in their surrounding societies.



Longing for Belonging

Demographically speaking, the story of American Jews is one of a spectacular rise. While in 1800 approximately 10,000 Jews lived in the United States, by 1880, already 1.7 million Jews had made the journey to its shores. Just before National Socialism’s rise to power, that number had grown to approximately 4.5 million, with most Jewish Americans living in New York. Where did these Jews come from and why? There were two major waves of Jewish immigration to the United States. The first took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, as vast numbers of immigrants from central and northern Europe arrived in America, seeking economic opportunity and a new life. Increasing numbers of anti-Jewish policies in the wake of the Napoleonic era and a sense of dismay after the failure of the liberal revolutions of 1848 further motivated Jews to leave Europe. It was during a second wave of immigration,

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between 1881 and 1924, a period ended by the infamous Immigration Act, which virtually halted immigration, that the majority of Jews arrived in the United States. Most of these second-wave newcomers were Yiddish speakers, escaping persecution and stifling economic conditions in Eastern Europe. Notwithstanding significant social and cultural tensions between different groups of Jewish immigrants, they had much in common, including their reasons for leaving Europe, their largely successful integration into American culture, and the forms of Judaism they came to practice. The perception of America as a utopian place of emancipation and material prosperity helped American Jews create a collective identity.9 Although the reality of life in the United States did not always match the utopian fantasies of the goldene Medinah (“land of Gold” or “golden land”), Jews perhaps more than any other group embraced the idea of the American Dream, and in fact played an active role in shaping and propagating the notion of America as the Promised Land. A telling example is Israel Zangwill’s celebrated play The Melting Pot, the hit of New York’s 1908 theatrical season.10 The play depicts the life of a Russian-Jewish musician, David Quixano, who arrives in America in the wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, during which his entire family was killed. In America, David writes a great symphony called “The Crucible,” expressing his hope for a society free of ethnic division and hatred, and falls in love with Vera, a beautiful Russian (and Christian) immigrant. The climax of the play comes when David meets Vera’s father, who turns out to be the Russian officer responsible for the annihilation of his family. Vera’s father admits his guilt, the symphony is performed to accolades, and David and Vera live happily ever after, or at least agree to wed, and then kiss as the curtain falls. As much as Zangwill’s play extols America as a place of reconciliation that transcends differences, it also reflects a deep-seated tension between its assimilationist message and explicitly Jewish content. Zangwill’s own position in this matter is ambivalent. On the one hand, he claims that Jews are “the toughest of all white elements that have been poured into the American crucible.”11 On the other hand, he suggests that Jews are not just any group of immigrants but the quintessential Americans. Despite the soaring rhetoric of the theater, in reality it was very unlikely in the early twentieth century that any immigrant group would abandon its ethnic distinctiveness, whether it wanted to or not. Nor did the idea of a radical melting pot find much support among key figures of the Jewish community. Jewish social thinkers like Horace Kallen (1882–1974) instead

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argued for a more malleable concept of what it meant to be American, a “democracy of nationalism” or “cultural pluralism” that would acknowledge difference. Intellectuals like Kallen could draw on the work of John Dewey, one of America’s most influential philosophers of the last century, in portraying America as a “complex and compound” nation. “Such terms as Irish-American or Hebrew-American or German-American are false terms,” wrote Dewey: because they seem to assume something which is already in existence called America, to which the other factors may be externally hitched on. The fact is, the genuine American, the typical American, is himself a hyphenated character. This does not mean that he is part of America and some foreign ingredient is then added. It means that… he is international and interracial in his make-up. He is not American plus Pole or German. But the American is himself Pole-German-English-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandinivian-­ Bohemian-Jew-and so on.12

It should be noted that this vision of a hyphenated American is purely European: people of African, Asian, or Latin American origin are granted no place in it. For Jews, being identified as white Europeans reinforced the positive image of America as an “enlightened” and receptive place, even as it implied a deeper level of racism directed toward Americans of non-­ European origin. This vision of an enlightened America was opposed to the negative image of the bigoted and discriminatory Old World. The brutal history of Jews in Europe during the Second World War provided further credence to this approach, promoting a perception of America as a site in which the Old World’s problems were to be resolved. To be sure, Jews faced discrimination in America as well. In the years leading up to the Second World War, antisemitism was on the rise in the United States too. Yet Jews of European origin could pass as white, whereas blacks could not. This very basic observation provides an important insight into the nature of American racism and helps us to better understand the different trajectories of these groups in the twentieth century.13 Jews had the opportunity to realize the American Dream of social mobility and economic progress. Their ambitions were largely fulfilled as the number of white-collar workers expanded. Whereas in 1900, approximately 60 percent of American Jews held blue-collar jobs, by 1930, only 30 percent did manual work.14 An integral part of this embourgeoisement

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process was the creation of a Jewish consumer market, which served both to Americanize the Jewish newcomers and to uphold their Jewishness. The historical significance of consumerism in America is well documented. Scholars have even argued that for Americans, spending became a form of citizenship, an important ritual of national identity.15 At the same time that consuming allowed individuals to feel part of a collective nation, it also enabled ethnic groups to maintain separate identities. As in the metaphor of the melting pot, consumption offered a compelling way for Jews, as well as other white European minorities, to realize their desires for full citizenship without completely assimilating. As Andrew Heinze has postulated in his seminal book Adopting to Abundance, being American meant having things, and Jews, more than any other group of newcomers, embraced this culture of Americanization through consumption.16 I will now examine a few examples of this phenomenon in the interwar period.

Integration Without Assimilation Perhaps the most profound example of how consumer culture responded to the diverse and changing needs of different consumer groups is advertising. Advertisements of major American companies appeared more frequently in the Yiddish press than in the foreign-language newspapers of other immigrant groups, suggesting that these companies quickly identified Jews as a strong prospective market for national brands. Let us consider an advertisement for Borden Company, a well-known American manufacturer of condensed milk, food, and beverage products. Seeking to expand the market for their baby food, the Borden Company took exceptional measures to court Jewish customers. The company set up a special department to provide free advice on baby nutrition, and in their advertisements in the Jewish press, they invited Jewish mothers to use this service, promising that inquiries in Yiddish would receive a prompt reply.17 Another compelling example of how advertising translated commodities considered American—in this case, the doughnut—into a Jewish context by targeting Jewish women in a 1934 advertisement for Mazola oil (Fig. 11.1). Another such ad features the renowned Jewish baseball player Andy Cohen (1904–1988). Cohen came to play for the New  York Giants in 1926, partly to draw Jewish fans who would otherwise be inclined to support the New  York Yankees.18 During Cohen’s successful 1928 season,

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Fig. 11.1  Mazola vegetable oil ad that states, “American bagels—doughnuts— fried in Mazola oil have a wonderful taste.” It then calls Jewish housewives’ attention to the fact that since Mazola is made from pure vegetable oil it can replace animal fat and thus help to Americanize the Jewish kitchen and to diversify Jewish cooking. The ad also contains a recipe for doughnuts. (Source: The Jewish Morning Journal, December 30, 1920)

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vendors responded to his popularity by selling “Ice Cream Cohens” at the Polo Grounds’ concession stands (Fig. 11.2). Advertisements were not the only method used to address Jewish consumers. In 1921, Gold Medal Flour published a Jewish cookbook. This Fig. 11.2  “Andy Cohen drinks Toddy!” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 14, 1928

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collection of recipes for soups, poultry, fish, eggs, cakes, condiments, and ice cream, all written in Yiddish, was the result of a contest, which promised Jewish housewives who entered the competition the possibility of five hundred dollars in prize money and publication of the winning recipes (Fig. 11.3). An even more intriguing example of such marketing ploys is The Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah, first published in 1932, when Maxwell attempted to make coffee drinking a new Passover tradition.19 More than fifty million copies of this Hebrew-English Haggadah have been printed, making it the most widely used Haggadah in the world. Jews were not passive recipients of this marketing effort. As elsewhere, Jews in America were disproportionately active in consumer-oriented business, from clothing, furniture, and real estate sales to movie production. The populous Jewish neighborhoods of New York City were dense with retail stores of all types during the heyday of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Street markets even sold specialized luxury items such as fur coats, overtly targeting Jewish shoppers.20 Jewish newspapers in America also sought to make their readers into consumers.21 Even Forverts (Forward), the leading Jewish socialist newspaper, actively encouraged consumption by promoting the paper as a space for advertising. By playing up the purchasing power of its readers, the paper tried to persuade manufacturers and advertisers that advertising in the Forverts would pay off in increased sales. In a special illustrated brochure, the Yiddish daily asserted, “there is nothing strange, mysterious or secret about the Jewish field. It is just like any other portion of the great American market of which it is an integral part. Good merchandising principles are just as sound when applied on the East Side or Bronx as in Portland or Sacramento.”22 The newspaper also offered expert advice for advertisers wishing to familiarize themselves with the Jewish market. Other marketing and advertising agencies offered similar services, the most well known of which was the Joseph Jacobs Organization. Founded in 1919, the company still offers its services under the slogan “when it comes to the Jewish market… we know what to say.”23 These agencies helped manufacturers adopt and develop special marketing strategies aimed at Jewish consumers, as was the case with the Maxwell House Haggadah—an idea developed by the Joseph Jacobs advertising agency. This highly sophisticated and well-designed marketing regime reflected a unique American Jewish lifestyle derived, as Jenna Weissman Joselit notes, “from American notions of consumerism, gender, privacy, and

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Fig. 11.3  Gold Medal Flour Yiddish Cookbook, published in Minneapolis in 1921. (Source: Harvard Library, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/ drs:23012778$1i)

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personal happiness as well as from Jewish notions of tradition, ritual, memory, and continuity.”24 Most scholars agree that the experience of consumer culture in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on American Jews, creating a distinct American Jewish way of life.



Commodifying Jewishness

While the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War is considered formative for consumer culture in America, in the postwar years, American, and for that matter Western European consumption, experienced an unprecedented boom, making it the hallmark of what some thinkers have called “post,” “late” or even “liquid” modernity—the last a concept developed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to denote the shift from the period of “solid” modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the postwar consumer society is “a society of credit cards, not savings books. A wanting society, not a waiting society.”25 Although the idea of such a straightforward temporal disjuncture is problematic, it is clear that consumer culture has undergone major changes since the Second World War. Foremost among these changes was the emergence of a new marketing regime that promoted cultural differences by stimulating the diverse needs of different consumer groups, while at the same time making this seemingly particular demand available to a wider consumer market. Modern shopping spaces have become receptacles of various goods and services associated with different cultures, making shopping perhaps the most tangible experience of present-day multiculturalism. This marketplace cultural diversity is best represented in the food industry. The rapid growth of certified kosher products is an illuminating illustration of the new multicultural marketing regime. Unlike during the prewar years, when economic interest corresponded to the demand of a group, generally speaking, defined by a set of distinct religious and cultural needs, in the postwar period, as these distinctive traits were disappearing, like religious observation and the use of Yiddish, the marketplace began to stimulate these (Jewish) needs. Thus, unlike in the past when kosher food was marketed predominately to Jews, now it was made available to the larger consumer market. According to some estimates, the kosher market grew from a $35 billion industry in 1994 to one worth $65 billion in ten years, with more than 90,000 certified kosher products on sale in the United States in

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2005.26 Indeed, it is becoming difficult not to buy kosher products these days. According to one consumer survey from 2003, 28 percent of Americans said that they have knowingly bought a kosher product; only 8 percent of those did so for religious reasons. Promoting his new eponymous brand of lactose-free kosher cheesecake, comedian Jackie Mason suggested that the kosher food success story is connected to growing awareness about the food we eat. “Gentiles,” he drolly claimed, “have finally learned that Jews make food with no junk, dirt, or garbage.”27 Although there is no guarantee that kosher supervision makes products any more hygienic or wholesome, the word has become another marketing term that appears on labels along with “organic,” “all natural,” “no preservatives,” and “gluten-free.”28 To be sure, merging the notions of “Jewish” with “kosher” sets up inaccurate expectations about people and food, often with misleading, if delicious, results. In some sense, kosher food is no more “Jewish” than vegetarian food is Buddhist. The assumed connection between health and kosher may be a myth, but as many marketing experts now proclaim, it is a myth that leads to sales. By introducing so-called ethnic or multicultural products into a wider, undefined consumer market, food manufacturers and wholesale suppliers have sought to make commodities attractive and available to consumers beyond the specific group or cultural circle with whom these products were normally associated. An illuminating case in point is the slogan “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Rye Bread,” an award-winning advertising campaign from the early 1960s that introduced Jewish ethnicity into mainstream marketing. Another fascinating example for the crossing of Jewish culture over to the non-Jewish market is the Bar/Bat Mitzvah. According to journalist Elizabeth Bernstein, upscale non-Jewish kids in present-day America are envious of the lavish parties their Jewish classmates are throwing. The result is that some parents are giving them catered thirteenth birthday parties with DJs and dancers that bear a striking resemblance to contemporary Jewish celebrations.29 Commodifying Jewish culture, and packaging it as a tempting possibility for non-Jews, is then part of a new regime of consumption in which identities are fixed and become accessible to “outsiders.” The transformation of Jewishness into something both indelible and consumable also applied to American Jews, giving rise to what we now may well call “google Judaism.” For the “google Jew,” or perhaps “Jewgle,” Jewishness is not so much about faith, a regimen of distinctive ritual practices, or even a sense of common descent, but a matter of choice, a personal orientation that

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corresponds to individual taste and emotional sentiment. The new American Jewgle does not only browse through the mall of different traditions and notions of Judaism, “bookmarking” his or her own self-styled idea of “being Jew-ish,” but also engages in cultural swapping in order to sample the many lifestyles, tastes, themes, and sounds of other cultures as well. The overlapping of Jewish and consumer cultures poses questions no less challenging in Europe, where in recent years Jewish culture has gained unprecedented popularity, becoming entangled in non-Jewish politics of remembrance and in questions about cultural pluralism and European identities.30 Jewish festivals, concerts, films, museums, historical restorations, publications, lectures, and readings as well as restaurants cater to largely non-Jewish consumers. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, for example, attracted over a quarter of a million visitors even before the installation of its permanent exhibition was complete.31 Ritual objects like menorahs feature as centerpieces of Jewish museums in Europe, many of which are under private, non-Jewish administration. These institutions cater to a diverse group of European non-Jewish and Jewish consumers, and their goods from Star of David–shaped pretzels to clothing, books, and artifacts fill the shopping bags of tourists from around the world. For a non-Jewish public looking to come to terms with the past, this form of consumable Jewishness is enticingly accessible. Yet, as some commentators argue, the creation of this “virtual” state of Jewishness is problematic because it is fixed on an ostensibly extinct Jewish culture and ignores Jewish life evolving in Europe today.32



Beyond Ambivalence

Coming back to the question with which I opened this chapter, it seems that this so-called marketplace multiculturalism has turned the Jewish question on its head. Whereas until the mid-twentieth century, in America as elsewhere, Jews were constantly questioned about the nature of their difference, in post-Holocaust America, the very idea of Jewish difference is contested. Certainly, American Jews today are white, dominant, middle-­ class “insiders” much more than they are members of the marginalized “outsider” groups of American society. Although most American Jews, at least those I know, do not see themselves as privileged or even as simply “white people,” the overwhelming majority of them feel at home in the United States and regard it as their Heimat or home.33 Some observers

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today even wonder whether Jews are not getting too comfortable in America, alluding to the challenges this development poses to “Jewish identity.”34 The blurring of boundaries between Jewish and American consumer cultures also significantly alters the meaning of consumer goods. Perhaps the most prominent example of such a trajectory is the bagel, no doubt the most quintessential Jewish food in America.35 According to filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, what makes the bagel so fundamentally Jewish is not merely its origins, but even more so its shape, which is defined by an outside rather than an inside, epitomizing the Jewish experience as the quintessential outsiders in Western society.36 After reading a report about the popularity of the bagel in the United States, the late commentator Leonard Fine subtly asserted, “it is not the Jews who are assimilating into America; it is America that is assimilating into the Jews.”37 Yet, as historian David Biale has recently noted, the assimilation of the bagel into the mainstream, and its mixing with other foods such as bacon, has undermined the bagel’s distinct origin as a Jewish product.38 Interestingly, the most profound illustration of how the bagel lost its Jewishness took place in the mid-1990s when the roll-with-the-hole finally made Aliyah and arrived in the Jewish state. Until not so long ago, most Israelis typically associated the bagel or ‫כעך‬ with either a rock-hard biscuit ring called bagalech (pretzels); a large, soft, and sweet Arabic loaf (Bagale Aravi); an in-between version called Bagale Yerushalmi; or a dachshund. So it came to pass that just as the Jewish ring-­ shaped roll started bagelizing America, in Israel it came to be known as the American bagel, understood as no more than another American fast food product that hit Israel’s shores during the 1990s.39 With this observation in mind, we finally approach the troublesome question of the relationship between different regions of Jewish consumption as well as the nature and role of consumer culture in the Jewish state. Consumption in Israel, like everywhere else, has multiple meanings. A salient expression of this ambiguity is the way the Zionist movement looked toward modern consumer culture. Most Zionist thinkers associated consumption with femininity, and diaspora Jews regarded it as an impediment to the “normalization” of Jewish society and even as a threat to Jewish survival. To be sure, the call to “normalize” Jewish life was not exclusively a Zionist cause. It constituted a central thread in discussions of the Jewish question from the end of the eighteenth century. For Zionism, at least, normalization did not only mean the return to the land of Israel, but the inversion of the occupational pyramid of Jews, so that its base

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would consist of “healthy” agricultural and manual laborers instead of what the socialist Zionist Ber Borochov (1881–1917) called the “‘luft’ [air] economics” (making money from nothing) of diaspora Jews.40 It also underscored Jewish (read: national) distinctiveness, facilitating the Jews’ Eigen-Sinn or self-reliance as a prerequisite to Jewish integration within the family of nations. Even a pragmatic politician like Chaim Weizmann, who eventually became the state of Israel’s first president, proclaimed in a speech from 1935, “the content of Zionism is changing all values according to which Jews lived under the pressure of foreign cultures.”41 For him, as for most other Zionist leaders, Zionism was not merely about colonizing a “new world,” but about making a homecoming to an old one. The attempt to reconstitute an independent and self-sustaining Hebrew culture was thus perceived as an act of emancipation by which Jewish people should become a nation “like all other nations.” While denouncing consumption as a culture of comfort and conformity that undermined the people’s resilience (like other political movements of the time were also doing), the Zionist movement also had to reconcile its utopian ideals with the pragmatic needs of a political organization operating in a consumer-oriented society. Early on, the Zionist movement utilized cutting-edge marketing practices to promote its message, raise funds, and reinforce national consolidation.42 The Zionist message underwent a visualization process that was reflected in the image of Theodor Herzl and other Zionist leaders displayed on a variety of objects: cigarette packets, plates and cups, carpets, flags, postcards, and calendars.43 Attempts were made to create a market for so-called Jewish products from the Holy Land. These goods were not marketed as a simulation of long-established Middle Eastern trade, such as woven rugs, but as Jewish models with explicit Jewish symbols and meaning. From a 1913 report on Zionist settlements in Palestine, we learn that different objects designed and manufactured by the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (established in Jerusalem in 1906) were displayed in places like London, Moscow, and Berlin. Following such exhibitions, the department store Wertheim took over the monopoly of Bezalel rugs in Berlin. The report highlights this fact not only because Wertheim was one of the biggest department stores in Berlin but because Georg Wertheim  was a German Jew, which demonstrated that he was “not afraid to take up a monopoly for a Jewish product.”44 In London, Liberty & Co. were the exclusive sellers for the Bezalel objects. According to the same report, the manufacturing of “Jewish products” in Jewish Palestine was a growing

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industry with more than 500 people earning a living just by working in arts and crafts in 1913. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), to add another example, distributed children’s games.45 In one of their advertisements (Fig.  11.4), the JNF urged: “Zionists! Make your children happy on Hanukkah! Give them Keren Kayemet games!” Beyond children’s games, the Jewish National Fund also produced short stories for children in order to reinforce Zionist messages and instill

Fig. 11.4  “Zionists! Make your children happy on the Hanukkah holiday!” Jüdische Rundschau, December 9, 1927, 701

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the habit of giving for the national cause. Thus, for example, in the late 1920s, the Jewish National Fund assigned the writer and educator Dov Kimchi (1889–1961) the task of writing a series of stories to promote among children the Blue Box, the flagship of the JNF fundraising enterprise.46 One of these tales narrates the story of “the silver coin and his little friend Annie,” and it begins like this: My name is a silver coin; I glisten and glitter and I’m hot, too. A hot silver coin? Have you heard of a hot silver coin? I say again I’m a hot silver coin. Little Annie who is in the second class in the girls’ school warmed me in her hands. For two whole days she warmed me.47

The story goes on to describe Annie’s adventures with the silver coin until she finally decides to forgo all temptations to spend it on new toys or sweets and puts the coin in the Blue Box—the “redemption box,” as it is called in the story. What I find most intriguing about this story is that it was written from the perspective of the coin and thus provides us with a unique insight into the Zionist approach to the relationship between giving and spending surrounding their attitude to money. The coin is not depicted as an abstract and passive object but as an active agent of the Zionist project. This pragmatic approach is one way the JNF attempted to respond to what could seem a substantial, and unbridgeable, distance between private and national capital in Zionist discourse about money.48 As a fundraising organization, the JNF carefully, and cannily, presented itself as a vehicle through which the pursuit of personal profit could also benefit the national interest. The story ends with the coin reflecting on its life’s trajectory: Sometimes I think also of little Annie, especially when it’s very hot. Then the sun pricks, and strokes but I don’t run wild anymore like a fool let loose. I work. I work with the sweet of my brow. I force and push the shoots: Grow, Grow big!49

In a recent book on the JNF as an agent of Zionist propaganda, the geographer Yoram Bar-Gal claimed that children were targeted for educational purposes and not merely for political propaganda or fundraising.50 I must admit that I am not entirely convinced by his argument. Rather than retaining a clear distinction between education, propaganda, and fundraising, it seems to me that the intensive and somewhat aggressive targeting

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of children blurred the differences between these allegedly distinct realms. What is more important for me in this context, however, is to place the Zionist promotional apparatus within the broader framework of the development of marketing and advertising strategies at the beginning of the last century. Indeed, the attempt to promote the Zionist message by reaching children comported with new marketing techniques of the time that “discovered” children and adolescents as a consumer group. This development did not escape the sharp eyes of, for example, Walter Benjamin, who recalled that his introduction to civic life at the turn of the twentieth century had been as a consumer.51 The political campaigns of the Zionist movement were thus grounded in marketing principles such as the branding of political leaders and issues, targeted advertising, and staged media events, all of which were part of the commercialization processes and the emergence of a new consumer culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Insurance offers another fascinating illustration of the conjunction between Zionism and commercialism. At the beginning of the 1920s, the JNF signed an agreement with Lebensversicherungs-Gesellschaft Phönix, for the latter to insure most Zionist organizations. Significantly, it also granted the JNF permission to sell insurance policies, making it into an active representative of the Phönix Company. The insurance business was viewed by the JNF as a source of income for the Zionist project, as well as a propaganda or marketing device to attract and bind old and new members to the Zionist movement. No wonder that the crash of Phönix Life in mid-1936 shook the Zionist movement to the core.52 It not only caused economic difficulties of serious proportions, but also robbed many Jews of their trust in Zionism during a time of extreme political turbulence in Europe, not to mention in Palestine, where the emerging Jewish polity was challenged by the Great Arab Revolt that began in April 1936. The Zionist ambivalence toward consumption speaks to the complex and often strained relationship between nationalism and consumerism. At times, the two seem to mutually reinforce each other, while on other occasions, they appear to undermine one another. And yet, while consumer culture in most postwar Western societies operated in a cultural environment that strove to overcome nationalist tensions, Israel still faced significant challenges to national consolidation, not to mention the difficulty of operating in a constant state of war. Daily life in today’s Israel is lived in the contrast between the morality of consumption, which fulfills a longing to maximize pleasure, and the

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ethos of a warrior society, which is very much about the maximization of pain. It is not surprising that under such circumstances, sites of consumption do not simply represent a dream world of affluence and material comfort. Instead, as the Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider cogently observes, for many Israelis consumption stands for “order and regularity rather than abandon.”53 According to Sznaider, “Malls and streets full of boutiques represent the yearning for a rational bourgeois way of life, a nostalgia for a world not yet gained. It is a dream of quiet pleasures, of sitting in a cafe and bathing in the sun without fearing that a bomb will end it all.”54 In contrast to the American Jewish context in which consumption seems to spur Jewish distinctiveness, in Israel, consumer culture denotes a longing to dissolve the nation’s upheavals, and to be like all other consumer societies. It is an irony of history that while the Zionist topos of “normalization” is still prevalent in Israel today, it does not have the same political connotations as in the past. Now it is clearly associated with consumer culture and a deep longing for a secure and more comfortable life. Jewish consumption is both an important realm of scholarly interest and a field of inquiry that further illuminates existing studies of politics, societies, and economics with questions of integration and acceptance, class, and gender. By placing consumption at the center of Jewish history, I believe that we will be able to unveil an important and hitherto neglected area of inquiry that will significantly widen our understanding of the modern Jewish experience.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on different sections of Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Jewish Identity (New York, 2017). 2. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horev, oder Versuche über Iissroéls Pflichten in der Zerstreuung, zunächst für Iissroéls denkende Jünglinge und Jungfrauen (Altona, 1837), 305–6. 3. For inspiring work on the world of Jewish goods, see Leora Auslander, “‘Jewish Taste’? Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford, UK, 2002), 299–331; and Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 1015–45. 4. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in: The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York, 1950), 402–8. On Simmel’s attitude toward Jews, see, for example, Amos Morris–Reich, “The Beautiful Jew is a Moneylender:

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Money and Individuality in Simmel’s Rehabilitation of the ‘Jew’,” Theory, Culture and Society 20 (2004): 127–42. 5. Rebecca A.  Kobrin, ed., Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012); Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class (New York, 2009). 6. Lloyd P.  Gartner, “Jewish Migrants en Route from Europe to North America: Traditions and Realities,” Jewish History 1, no. 2 (1986): 49–66; Tobias Brinkmann, “Jewish Migration,” European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz 2010; Hasia A.  Diner, New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America (New York, 2003). 7. The most prominent examples include Andrew R.  Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990); Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880–1950 (New York, 1994); Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York, 2000); Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Kerri P. Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience (New Brunswick, NJ, 2015). 8. For this notion of consumption, see Victoria de Grazia’s introduction in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, CA, 1996), 1–10. 9. Ben Halpern, “America is Different,” in The Jew in American Society, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York, 1974), 67–90; Rael Meyerowitz, Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams (Albany, NY, 1995). 10. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York, 1921), available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23893/23893-­h/23893-­h.htm. The following section owes many of its insights to David Biale, “The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity,” in Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 17–34. 11. Zangwill, Melting Pot, 204 (afterword). 12. John Dewey, “Nationalizing Education” in The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL, 2008), 205. 13. Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000); Cheryl Greenberg, “Pluralism and its Discontents: The Case of Blacks and Jews” in Insider/Outsider, ed. Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, 55–87.

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14. Beth S.  Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Syracuse, NY, 1999), 15. 15. See, for example, Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending. Attitudes Towards the Consumer Society in America (Baltimore, MD, 1985); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2004). 16. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance. 17. On this, see also Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America, 188. 18. On why Jews were inclined to support the Yankees, see, for example, Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (New York, 1993). 19. Further on this, see Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men. 20. See Kerry Wallach’s excellent chapter on Jews, luxury, and fur in this volume. 21. For the active involvement of Jewish newspapers in the making of German–Jewish consumer culture, see my “Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalance in Weimar Germany,” in Longings and Jewish Belongings, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Nils Römer (Leiden, 2010), 113–37. 22. Quoted in Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America, 145. 23. On this company, see Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men; Daniel Pope and William Toll, “We Tried Harder: Jews in American Advertising,” American Jewish History, vol. 72, no. 1 (1982): 26–51. Today, the company changed the slogan to “When it comes to the Jewish Market…. We Discovered it.” See http://www.josephjacobsadvertising.com/. 24. Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America, 4. 25. Peter Beilharz, ed., The Bauman Reader (Malden, MA, 2001), 321. 26. Vicky Hallett, “Bring Home the Kosher Bacon,” US News & World Report, November 2, 2003, http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/ 031110/10kosher.div.htm. See also Roger Horowitz, Kosher USA: How Coke Bacame Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (New York, 2016). 27. Hallett, “Bring Home the Kosher Bacon.” See also Seth Wolitz, The Renaissance in Kosher Cuisine: From Ethnicity to Universality (Jerusalem, 1999). 28. Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York, 2000), 111–17; and Frederick Kaufman, “The Secret Ingredient: Keeping the World Kosher,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2005, 75–81. 29. Elizabeth Bernstein, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Want a Bar Mitzvah,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2004. 30. See also Reuveni and Roemer, eds., Longing, Belonging. 31. Jack Zipes, “The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish: Toward a Minor Jewish Culture,”  in Re-emerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler (New York, 1994), 15–45.

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32. Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Jeffrey M. Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick, NJ, 2006). 33. Jack Wertheimer and Steven M.  Cohen, “The Pew Survey Reanalyzed: More Bad News, but a Glimmer of Hope,” Mosaic Magazine, November 2, 2014, http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2014/11/the-­pew-­survey­reanalyzed/. 34. See, for example, Alan M.  Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (New York, 1998); RivEllen Prell, “The (Un)Importance of Jewish Difference,” Mosaic, November 17, 2014, http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2014/11/ the-­unimportance-­of-­jewish-­difference/. For a broader overview: Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004), 209–39; Eli Lederhandler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970 (Syracuse, NY, 2001). 35. For an illuminating history of the bagel, see Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven, CT, 2008). 36. See Tiffany Shlain’s 2005 film, The Tribe, available at http://tribethefilm.com/. 37. Quoted in Halter, Shopping for Identity, 198. There is evidence suggesting that the Matzos that Jews eat during the Passover holiday are making a similar way into mainstream taste because most European and American supermarkets sell kosher Matzos all year long. 38. David Biale, “Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective” in Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, ed. Reuveni and Roemer, 23–38, here 36. 39. Maoz Azaryahu, “McIsrael? On the Americanization of Israel,” Israel Studies 5, no. 1 (2000): 41–64. 40. Ber Borochov, “The Economic Development of the Jewish People,” available at http://www.angelfire.com/il2/borochov/eco.html. For more general discussion of the Zionist view, see Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA, 2000). 41. Quoted in Azaryahu, “McIsrael,” 47. On the German term Eigen-Sinn, see Thomas Lindenberger, “Eigen-Sinn, Domination and No Resistance,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, August 3, 2015, http://docupedia.de/zg/ lindenberger_eigensinn_v1_en_2015. 42. See Olivier Baissez’s chapter about advertising in German Zionist periodicals around 1900 in this volume. 43. Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), 119–43; Kobi Cohen-Hattab, “Zonism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-­ Propaganda Tool,” Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 63–85; David Tartakover, Herzl in Profile: Herzl’s Image in the Applied Arts (Tel Aviv, 1979).

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44. The report by Aaron Aaronsohn was published in the Bnai Brith Messenger, May 30, 1913, 3. I thank Michal Friedlander for calling my attention to the Bezalel-Wertheimer connection. 45. The Jewish National Fund was the organ of the World Zionist Organization for the purchase of lands in Palestine and settling it with Jewish people. For its early history, see, for example, Zvi Shilony, Ideology and Settlement: The Jewish National Fund, 1897–1914 (Jerusalem, 1998). 46. On the blue box and its significance for the Zionist movement, see Yoram Bar Gal, “The Blue Box and JNF Propaganda Maps, 1930–1947,” Israel Studies 8, no. 1 (2003): 1–19. 47. This and other quotes from the story are taken from the manuscript of the English translation found in Central Zionist Archive, KKL5 2353, here p. 1. 48. Menachem Ussishkin, “National Capital and Private Capital,” [in Hebrew] Karnenu (1933), 20. 49. CZA, KKL5 2353, here p. 7. 50. Yoram Bar-Gal, Propaganda and Zionist Education: The Jewish National Fund, 1924–1947 (Rochester, NY, 2003). 51. See Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Consumer Culture and Literature before 1933 (New York, 2006), 189. 52. For some of Zionist press response, see: “Phönix und die jüdischer Nationalfond,” Die Neue Welt, May 1, 1936, 1–2; “Die Phönix und die Zionisten,” Die Stimme, April 6 and May 1, 1936; Eliyahu Monschik “To Phönix Policyholders in Eretz Israel and the Zionist institutions,” [in Hebrew] Davar May 20, 1936, 3; “Der ‘Phönix’-Zusammenbruch,” Jüdische Rundschau, April 17, 1936, 4; Hans J. Lembke, Phönix, Wiener und Berliner: Aufstieg und Sturz eines europäischen Versicherungskonzerns (Wiesbaden, 2016). 53. Natan Sznaider, “Consumerism as a Civilizing Process: Israel and Judaism in the Second Age of Modernity,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 14 (2000): 311. 54. Ibid., 312. For similar views, see Uri Ram, “Citizens, Consumers and Believers: The Israeli Public Sphere between Capitalism and Fundamentalism,” Israel Studies 3, no. 1 (1998): 24–44. For a broader discussion of Israel as a consumer society see, Yoram S.  Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum, eds., Consumption and Market Society in Israel (Oxford, 2004); Orit Rozin, The Rise of the Individual: A Challenge to Collectivism (Boston, MA, 2011); Anat Helman, Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s (Lebanon, NH, 2014).

Index1

A Acculturation, 2, 3, 19 Adenauer, Konrad, 239 Adopting to Abundance, 279 Advertisement/advertisements/ads, 9, 10, 12, 18, 25, 51, 67–80, 92, 103, 114, 117, 120, 121, 123, 144, 150, 167, 168, 174–176, 182n25, 191n85, 202, 207, 208, 238, 239, 279–281, 289 Advertiser/advertisers, 68–74, 77, 80, 81, 103, 197, 282 Advertising, 3, 4, 13, 22, 24, 25, 50, 51, 67–82, 88, 96–101, 103, 104, 117, 118, 150, 193n99, 194n113, 198, 232, 237, 279, 282, 285, 291, 295n42 Aesthetics, 6, 92, 105, 114, 116, 119, 170, 254, 268 Agriculture, 26, 47, 56, 204 America/American, 88, 111, 138, 159–178, 223–244, 255, 275

American dream, 143, 161, 277, 278 American experience, 160 Americanization, 19, 20, 37n74, 83n8, 101, 104, 199, 279 American Jewish Committee, 228–230, 249n58 American Jewish Congress, 170, 184n35, 228 American Jewish defense groups, 227 American Judaism, 20 Annihilation, 58, 60, 277 Announcement/announcements, 75, 174, 183n33 Anthropology, 24, 26, 197 Anti-Jewish policies, 276 Antisemite/antisemites, 3, 4, 55, 92, 141, 142, 226 Antisemitic, 3, 4, 13, 15, 17, 46, 47, 52–55, 59, 60, 61n16, 65n66, 80, 91, 98, 113, 115, 135, 137, 139, 143, 149, 152n9, 226, 227, 229, 231, 237, 267, 273

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lerner et al. (eds.), Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9

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INDEX

Antisemitism, 2, 3, 19, 80, 90, 113, 115, 119, 148, 161, 233, 234, 243, 278 Arbus, Diane, 139, 254, 261 Arcades Project, 93 Architecture, 8, 22, 29, 92, 93, 99, 100, 102–104, 117 Art, 7, 27, 89, 95, 99, 102, 104, 113, 114, 119, 120, 171, 233, 239, 254–261, 263–269, 269n2, 289 Art in consumer culture, 269 Art market, 27, 253–269 Art trade, 259 Assimilation, 6, 27, 112, 124, 279–284, 287 Aufbau, 232, 238, 239 Austria-Hungary, 11, 20, 71 Avedon, Richard, 260, 262 B The Babe Bows Out, 261 Baby nutrition, 279 Baked goods, 80 Baker, Josephine, 113 Ballin, Albert, 73 Bar mitzvah/bat mitzvah, 9, 20, 21, 26, 172, 174, 182n29, 194n111, 196, 206–211, 285 Barter, 45, 48 Baudrillard, Jean, 93, 103 Baumfeld, Rudy, 99, 100, 103 Bayer, 237, 242 Bazaar, 49, 50, 164, 165 Beauty, 7, 8, 18, 22, 29, 92, 95, 112, 113, 125n8, 141, 164, 170, 201 Beggars, 49, 208 Belonging, 25, 27, 81, 84n21, 112, 113, 135, 147, 197, 198, 201, 211, 243, 274–279

Benjamin, Walter, 93, 255, 258, 268, 291 Bergdorf Goodman, 111, 139, 148 Berlin, 1, 7, 8, 13, 58, 70, 71, 76, 77, 84n21, 89, 93, 94, 102, 113, 143, 144, 266, 286, 288 The Big Payoff, 147 Binder, Joseph, 99 Birthdays/birthday party, 117, 197, 204–207, 209–211, 285 B’nai B’rith, 165, 184–185n39, 228–230, 233 Böhme, Margarete, 90, 91 Borden Company, 279 Bourgeois/bourgeoisie, 6, 47, 49, 55, 56, 60, 74, 77, 100, 140, 147, 204, 292 Boycott/boycotts/boycotters/ boycotting, 21, 27, 137, 223–244 Boycotting German goods, 224, 242, 244 Brand, 19, 67, 71, 101, 167, 223, 240, 242, 279, 285 Branding, 68, 291 Breitenbach Collection, 262, 263 British Mandate Palestine, 195–211 Business, 5, 10, 13, 21, 22, 24, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49–51, 54, 57, 58, 60, 68, 73, 74, 77, 79, 90–92, 96, 98, 111, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 137, 139, 144, 160–162, 167, 168, 173, 178, 179n9, 182n25, 192n93, 192n97, 197, 202, 225, 226, 229, 231–233, 236, 237, 239, 240, 245n12, 248n54, 256, 257, 262, 282, 291 Businessmen, 13, 44, 54, 56, 58, 119, 237 Buying power, 6, 89 “Buy Jewish,” 26, 27, 201, 202, 204

 INDEX 

C Camera Work, 261 Candles/candlesticks, 8, 9, 80, 170, 171, 185n43, 205 Capital, 7 Capitalism, 3, 5, 7, 16, 19, 28, 55, 90, 98, 103, 196 Capitalists, 2, 55, 91, 105, 196, 197, 202, 204, 273 Cartoon/cartoons, 4, 17, 52, 53 Cash, 7, 45, 73, 92 Cassidy, Marsha, 147 Celebration/celebrations, 9, 26, 77, 122, 162, 164, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 178, 186–187n47, 188n63, 196, 198, 200, 201, 204–211, 285 Chabad-Lubavitch, 240 Chanukah, 168–170, 190n75 Charity, 76, 164, 182n25, 184n39, 187n51 Cheap goods, 50 Chemical industry, 49 Children, 22, 24, 73, 74, 80, 117, 122, 123, 146, 162, 164, 166, 168, 169, 171–174, 179n9, 180n15, 182n24, 184n35, 185–186n43, 186n44, 187n56, 189n70, 190n76, 192n97, 205–209, 237, 254, 274, 289–291 Chiswick, Carmel, 19 Christian anti-Judaism, 4 Christmas, 8, 114, 168, 169, 185n39, 188n61, 188n63 Chrysler, 223 Church, 7, 8, 75, 92–95, 100, 181n22 Ciarlo, David, 68, 83n6 Circulation, 44, 68, 92, 104

299

Class, 1, 2, 7, 29, 79, 83n7, 100, 112, 113, 142, 151, 191n93, 200, 205, 230, 292 Cohen, Andy, 279 Collective identity, 277 Cologne, 9, 12, 13, 18 Commentary, 113, 122, 170 Commercialism, 291 Commodification, 8, 15, 18, 45 Commodifying Jewish culture, 285 Commodifying Jewishness, 284–286 Commodity culture, 7 Community, 1, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 27, 28, 56, 75, 77, 78, 81, 84n21, 114, 115, 120–124, 136, 140, 143, 159–161, 163–166, 168–174, 177, 178, 179n3, 180n15, 181n19, 186n43, 186n44, 190n80, 197, 198, 203, 206, 223–226, 228, 229, 231–233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 242, 244, 249n64, 274, 275, 277 Community center, 163, 165 Community relations, 225 Conspiracy theories, 3 Construction of Jewishness, 5, 18 Consumer boycotts, 21 Consumer capitalism, 25 Consumer cooperatives, 21 Consumer culture, 1–29, 43–60, 68, 69, 72, 74, 78, 87, 88, 90, 92, 98–105, 113, 124, 159–178, 195–211, 224, 233, 253–255, 259, 260, 264, 273–292 Consumer decision/consumer decisions, 27, 223 Consumer desires, 22 Consumer economy, 14, 162–163 Consumer goods, 1, 12, 17, 20, 24, 26, 45, 47, 58, 60, 81, 93, 162, 200, 224, 287

300 

INDEX

Consumer imaginary, 68, 83n6 Consumerism, 2, 3, 6, 15, 19, 21, 27, 49, 53–56, 60, 87–89, 103, 105, 159, 160, 162, 168, 178, 197, 199, 210, 253, 274, 279, 282, 291 Consumerist orientation, 275 Consumer practices, 27, 223, 224, 241, 244, 273 Consumer preference, 2 Consumer research, 22 Consumer revolution, 88 Consumer rituals, 196, 197, 200 Consumers, 2, 43, 68, 87, 114, 135, 160, 195, 224, 254, 274 Consumer satisfaction surveys, 88 Consumer society/consumer societies, 2, 3, 6, 15, 16, 44–46, 48, 49, 60, 68, 89, 198, 284, 292 The Consuming Temple, 62n29, 91, 105n1, 156n60 Consumption, 2, 5–7, 10, 15, 17, 19–29, 43–46, 48, 50, 55, 68–70, 73, 74, 79–81, 83n7, 83n8, 88, 89, 93, 94, 99, 103, 104, 112, 133–151, 160, 165, 169, 174, 198, 199, 201, 206, 208, 224, 239–242, 250n68, 273–292 Consumption practices, 2, 25, 29, 72, 80 Coralnik, Abraham, 227, 246n20 Corets, Bertha, 233, 234 Cosmetics, 5, 13, 22, 79, 118 Countryside, 45, 47 Craftsmen, 49, 256 Credit, 45, 50, 55, 60, 256, 284 Cultural history, 255 “Cultural pluralism,” 278, 286 Culture, v, 1–29, 43–60, 68, 69, 72, 74, 78, 79, 81, 83n6, 87, 88, 90, 92, 98–105, 112–114, 116,

118–120, 122–124, 134, 147, 159–178, 195–211, 224, 232, 233, 253–255, 258–260, 263, 264, 269, 273–292 Customers, 13, 18, 22, 44, 49, 51, 55, 68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 81, 96–98, 100, 117, 122, 201, 242, 279 D Dallas, 25, 109n56, 111–121, 123, 124 Dallas Museum of Art, 119, 120 Davis, Marni, 5 Day laborers, 49 Decorators, 98, 121 Defense of Jewish rights, 137, 226, 227 Democracy, 25, 99, 104, 161, 184n39, 244 “Democracy of nationalism,” 278 Democratic symbolism, 44 Department store, 7, 8, 13, 24, 25, 49, 50, 55, 57, 58, 71, 72, 87–105, 111–114, 118–120, 122, 139, 146, 150, 288 Der Tog, 227 Design, 9, 21, 22, 70, 99, 100, 102–105, 116, 117, 121, 190n75 Dewey, John, 278 Dichter, Ernest, 99, 103, 104 Dirty goods, 46 Discourse history, 5 Distinctiveness, v, 243, 276, 277, 288, 292 Domestic rituals, 196, 198, 204–210 Door-to-door salesmen, 49 Dry goods, 47, 89, 94 Durable goods, 45

 INDEX 

E Early modern, 3, 5, 7, 143, 144, 206, 274 Eastern Europe, 22, 23, 60, 73, 77, 84n19, 136, 146, 147, 174, 277 Eastern European Jews, 19, 20, 43 Economic activity, v, 2, 3, 57, 203 Economic behavior, 4, 16 Economic circumstances, 2 Economic conditions, 16, 277 Economic decision-making, 224 Economic environment, 6, 19 Economic hardship, 2, 57 Economic history, 24 Economic milieu, 4 Economic mobility, 2, 49 Economic niches, 2 Economic performance, 43 Economic processes, 28, 134 Economic resources, 1 Economic turn, 3–7 Education, 19, 20, 56, 112, 113, 115, 116, 123, 124, 169, 175, 178, 242, 290 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 262, 263, 266, 267 Elegance, 112, 114, 116, 123, 124, 135, 141, 144 Emancipation, 3, 24, 46, 49, 54, 277, 288 Embourgeoisement, 278 Emigrés/Émigrés, 13, 25, 87, 88, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106n5, 254, 258 Entrepreneurs, 12, 13, 22, 87, 90, 98, 104, 119, 197, 209 European, 5, 14, 17, 22, 23, 25, 26, 55, 56, 74, 77, 88, 92, 99, 101–105, 135, 137, 140–143, 200, 230, 275, 276, 278, 279, 286, 295n37

301

European fascism, 99, 103 European Jews, 12, 20, 43, 58, 69, 134, 136–138, 140, 141, 148, 184n35, 199, 229, 236, 238, 243, 267 Exclusion, 57–60, 274 Experts, 22, 237, 282, 285 F Fabrics, 20, 44, 47, 157n73 Families, 1, 10, 11, 20, 21, 24, 73, 81, 89, 103, 112, 113, 115, 124, 137, 142, 146, 147, 160–164, 167–175, 177, 181n18, 181n19, 188n64, 188n65, 189n74, 190n75, 191n92, 197, 198, 200, 204–210, 229, 237, 242, 244, 249n59, 254, 257–259, 264, 277, 288 Family home, 207 Family rituals, 197, 204 Family sphere, 204, 210 Fascism, 88, 99, 103, 104 Fashion, 7, 13, 21, 25, 26, 34n44, 46–49, 92, 93, 95, 102, 112–115, 118–124, 134, 135, 137, 142–151, 160, 164, 165, 262 Film, 26, 120, 121, 134, 139, 142, 144–148, 154n29, 156n63, 156n64, 174, 253–255, 258, 264, 286 Focus groups, 88 Food, 2, 9, 10, 17, 20, 22, 26, 27, 78, 91, 114, 167, 172, 173, 178, 186–187n47, 187n51, 188n56, 192n93, 192n97, 193n99, 194n111, 194n113, 202, 204, 205, 209, 227, 279, 284, 285, 287

302 

INDEX

Form of payment/forms of payment, 45, 49 Fortnight exhibitions/Fortnight/ Fortnights, 114, 120–123 Forverts, 138, 282 Forward, 138, 227 France, 12, 29, 71, 89, 121, 122, 226 Frankfurt am Main, 13, 54, 57 Fredman, George, 233, 234 French, 6, 7, 23, 89, 93, 95, 112, 120–122 Freund, Gisele, 262, 263, 265, 266 Function/functions, 11, 27, 28, 44–46, 50, 75, 81, 112, 163, 185n43, 193n110, 198, 205–207, 224, 225, 235, 243, 244, 275 Fur, 26, 133–151, 254 Fur boa, 133 Fur coat, v, 26, 135, 137, 139–147, 149, 150, 282 Fur hat, 8, 133, 134, 140, 141, 145 Fur muff, 133, 145 G Galveston, 113 Gender history, 4 Gentile, 1, 3, 10, 18, 37n74, 44, 47, 49, 50, 55, 59, 90, 91, 115, 166, 243, 285 German goods, 224, 226–228, 232–235, 237–244, 246n26 German-Jewish community, 56 German Jewry, 7, 49, 56, 57, 137, 226, 264 German Jews, 19, 55, 58, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84n21, 98, 140, 229, 230, 232–234, 246n26, 249n59, 267, 288 Germany, 2, 5, 12, 13, 24, 25, 27, 43–60, 69, 71, 77, 78, 82, 83n6,

84n16, 84n21, 86n45, 87, 89–92, 95, 96, 98, 104, 137, 191n93, 196, 223–244, 254, 263, 266–268, 274 German-Zionist consumption regime, 25, 68 Gernsheim Collection, 262, 263 Gernsheim, Helmut, 258, 262, 265–268 Getty Museum, 259 Gift-giving, 21, 168, 171, 188n63, 196, 200, 204 Glickman, Lawrence, 224 Goldarbeiter, Lisl, 113 “Goldene Medinah,” 277 Gold Medal Flour, 281 Goods, v, 1, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20–22, 24–26, 28, 29, 44–47, 49–51, 54, 55, 58, 60, 69, 72, 78–81, 88, 89, 92–94, 96, 97, 100, 103, 114, 120, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142–145, 153n21, 160, 162, 164, 170, 171, 173, 178, 181n19, 190–191n80, 191n83, 191n85, 196–198, 200, 224, 231–235, 237, 240, 241, 274, 282, 284, 286–288 Gould, Florence, 163, 172, 173, 181n18 Great Depression, 57, 118, 139, 173 Groceries, 80, 173, 192n97, 193n99, 200 Gruen, Victor, 99, 100, 102–104 Grünbaum, Viktor, 100, 103 H Hadassah, 165, 183n33, 184n39 Haggling, 59 Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG), 72, 73

 INDEX 

Hanukkah, 8, 9, 22, 80, 159, 167–171, 177, 185n39, 187n48, 190n75, 289 Harper’s Bazaar, 117 Haute culture, 124 Heinze, Andrew, 21, 188n63, 279 Helman, Anat, 199, 203 Herzl, Theodor, 14, 55, 68, 288 Hidden Persuaders, 103 High culture, 19, 99, 112 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 274 Historiography, 44, 83n8, 101, 211 History, 2–5, 7, 8, 11, 15, 24–29, 43, 60, 74, 87, 92, 97, 99, 111, 168, 171, 173, 188n65, 195, 196, 224, 248n54, 253–255, 258, 261–265, 268, 269, 274, 276, 278, 292 History of consumption, 5, 44, 83n7 Hitler Youth, 58 Holocaust, 27, 139, 160, 161, 223–244, 254, 263, 264, 276 Homogeneity, 276 Hotels, 13, 18, 77, 79, 80, 115, 121, 123, 177 Household, 1, 10, 24, 79, 99, 103, 160, 197, 239 Housewife/housewives, 147, 280, 282 Housing, 2, 9, 100, 160, 162, 163, 178, 192n97 How to Marry a Millionaire, 148 Hurst, Fannie, 146 Hyperinflation, 57, 60, 85n37 Hyphenated American, 278 I Identity/identities, 5, 6, 9, 10, 20, 22, 25–28, 45, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83n6, 103, 112–114, 160, 163, 164, 168, 170, 172–174, 177, 178, 180n15, 196, 198, 200, 201,

303

205, 206, 210, 211, 224, 225, 232, 233, 243, 244, 274, 276, 277, 279, 285–287 Immigrant biographies, 112 Immigrants, 11, 14–16, 19–22, 25, 28, 44, 58, 84n19, 99, 111, 112, 124, 136–138, 143, 146, 147, 151, 161, 175, 184n39, 229, 262, 275–277, 279 Immigration, 19, 20, 46, 72, 115, 137, 184n35, 198, 229, 276, 277, 282 Import-Gesellschaft Palästina, 14 Inclusion, 21, 269, 274 Individual decision, 224 Insurance, 73, 77, 78, 291 Integration/integrate, 17, 19, 20, 27, 44, 50, 60, 62n25, 211, 228, 235, 275–277, 279–284, 288, 292 Intellectual history, 30n5 Interwar, 7, 18, 26, 100, 101, 104, 105, 168, 198, 200, 201, 203, 208, 263, 279 “Invention of the consumer,” 68 Israel, 2, 5, 14, 15, 21, 27, 90, 149, 161, 171, 172, 184–185n39, 188n65, 211, 231, 239, 244, 255, 275, 277, 287, 288, 291, 292 Itinerant auctions, 49 Itinerant business, 47, 50 Itinerant middlemen, 46 Itinerant retailing, 49 Itinerant trade licenses, 49 Itinerant traders, 47, 48, 56 J Jacoby, A. D., 231 Jewish, v, 1–29, 43–60, 69, 87, 111, 134–142, 159–178, 195–211, 223–244, 253, 273

304 

INDEX

The Jewish Century, 262 Jewish consumption, v, 7, 17, 28, 224, 242, 274, 287, 292 Jewish culture, 2, 28, 35n54, 164, 166, 199, 204, 210, 212n3, 273, 285, 286 Jewish defense, 227 Jewish difference, 4, 7, 23, 135, 151, 269, 275, 276, 286 Jewish Encyclopedia, 49, 56 Jewish history, 2–5, 7, 28, 29, 43, 92, 254, 274, 276, 292 Jewish identity, 5, 20, 26, 28, 77, 103, 113, 114, 160, 163, 164, 168, 170, 172–174, 177, 178, 196, 200, 206, 210, 225, 243, 287 Jewish life, 10, 28, 69, 161, 163, 164, 170, 186n44, 195, 206, 274, 286, 287 Jewish market, 282 Jewish Museum of Vienna, 263 Jewish National Fund (JNF), 76, 202, 209, 289–291, 296n45 Jewishness, 2, 5, 8, 9, 18, 26, 28, 44, 55, 74, 88, 91, 94, 98, 133–135, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 149, 162, 164, 166, 172, 200, 201, 203, 254, 257, 259, 262, 274, 279, 284–287 Jewish publications in Germany, 69, 70 “Jewish question,” 27, 273–292 Jewish religious reform, 4 Jewish society, 210, 274, 275, 287 Jewish studies, v, 4, 5, 28, 29, 275 Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America (JWV), 227, 230–232, 234, 247n33, 247n34 Jews and capitalism, 5 Joint Boycott Committee (JBC), 231 Joselit, Jenna Weissman, 143, 168, 172, 174, 196, 282

Joseph Jacobs Organization, 282 Judaism, 2, 6, 20, 21, 24, 78, 114, 161, 164, 166, 167, 182n24, 185n39, 273–275, 277, 286 Jüdische Ründschau, 25, 68–81, 84n17, 84n18, 85n33, 289 Junk dealing/junk dealers, 3, 49, 55, 56 K KaDeWe/Kaufhaus des Westens, 91, 94, 102 Kafka, Franz, 26, 133, 134, 150 Kallen, Horace, 277, 278 Kashruth, 10, 11 Kauflust, 96, 100 Kimchi, Dov, 290 Kishinev pogrom, 277 Kleptomania, 97 Köhrer, Erich, 94, 95 Kosher, 2, 10, 12, 17, 20, 21, 27, 78, 79, 91, 167, 172–174, 177, 178, 187n47, 191n92, 192n97, 192–193n99, 193n103, 194n111, 242, 284, 285, 295n37 Kosher market, 284 Kuhn, Dorothy, 234 L Ladies Paradise, 7, 90, 92 Lamm, Fritz, 1, 2 Leipzig, 13, 136, 137, 148, 152n11, 152n12, 152n18 Lending bank, 57 Life-cycle events, 172–178 Lifestyle/lifestyles, 14, 74, 76, 77, 79, 113, 179n9, 196, 205, 274, 282, 286 London, 30n2, 89, 136, 137, 259, 261, 264, 265, 288

 INDEX 

Los Angeles, 259 Luther, Martin, 3, 116 Luxury goods/luxury items/luxury objects, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 150, 151n4, 282 M Machinery, 21, 70 Mail-order, 49, 51 Mall, 16, 22, 25, 87–105, 105n2, 192–193n99, 286, 292 Mandate Palestine, 14, 26, 195–211 Manischewitz, 10, 167 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 260, 261 Marcus, Stanley, 25, 26, 111–124 Marginality, 3 Marginalization, 2, 20 Marketing, 10, 17, 18, 22, 23, 78, 90, 101, 103, 160, 171, 282, 285, 288, 291 Marketing regime, 282, 284 Marx, Karl, 5, 7, 196 Mason, Jackie, 285 Material culture, 8, 9, 22, 134 Materialism, 15, 92, 199 Matzahs, 10, 11 The Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah, 282 Mayer, Marion, 172, 173, 177, 192n93, 194n111 Meaning/meanings, 2, 7, 9, 27, 29, 79, 81, 85n37, 89, 112, 134, 160, 167, 173, 188n63, 196, 197, 200, 209, 225, 275, 276, 287, 288 Medieval, 3, 4, 93, 94 Medium of photography, 27, 259 The Melting Pot, 277, 293n10 Mendelsohn, Erich, 94, 144 Mercedes Benz/Mercedes/Daimler-­ Benz, 223, 237, 238, 241

305

Merchandising, 113, 282 Metalware, 47, 227 Metamorphosis, 133, 150 Middlemen, 46, 47, 73 Migration, 2, 19–21, 43, 161, 178, 275 Minding the Store, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124 Miss Austria, 113 Miss Universe, 113 Mobility, 2, 20, 43, 49, 97, 112, 278 Modern art, 119, 120, 255 Modernity, 2, 29, 46–49, 90, 92, 95, 205, 253–269, 275, 284 Modernization, 6, 93, 183n34 Motivations, 160, 225, 226, 238, 239, 244 Müllenmeister, Joshua, 90, 91 Muller, Jerry Z., 4, 5 Multiculturalism, 266, 284, 286 Myerson, Bess, 147, 148 N National brand/national brands, 279 National identity, 198, 201, 279 National independence, 225 National Socialism, 276 Nazi Germany, 21, 152n17, 224, 225, 227–229, 231, 238 Nazi government, 226–228 Nazis, 6, 12, 15, 25, 44, 57, 58, 77, 90, 91, 98, 99, 136, 137, 226, 227, 230, 232, 234–239, 241, 243, 244, 246n26, 250n71, 251n81, 263 Nazi state, 58 Neiman-Marcus, 25, 112–114, 117–124 Netherlands, 71 Newborn, Rita, 159, 163, 165, 167, 177, 192n97

306 

INDEX

Newhall, Beaumont, 258, 262, 264 Newspaper, 12, 69, 73, 75, 76, 80–82, 95, 123, 138, 141, 144, 169, 170, 183n33, 207, 223, 227, 232, 236, 238, 239, 253, 279, 282, 294n21 New York, 11, 17, 21, 26, 89, 100, 103, 113, 116–118, 122, 123, 135, 138, 139, 146, 148, 159, 162, 165, 180–181n15, 183n34, 183n35, 190n80, 191n89, 191n92, 192n97, 193n102, 212n1, 227, 231–234, 236, 238, 255, 257, 259, 261, 264, 265, 276, 277, 282 Night of Broken Glass, 58 Non-Jewish society, 275 Normalization, 287, 292 Norman, Dorothy, 256–258 Nostalgia, 23, 45, 292 NSDAP, 58 O Observant, 2, 20, 74, 139, 173, 208, 274 Old clothes, 53, 54 Old metal, 53, 54 On Photography, 254 Orthodox, 1, 2, 8, 15, 20, 56, 211, 244, 274 Ostentatious consumption, 274 Otherness, 9, 10, 135, 140, 151 Outsiders/outsider, 60, 88, 260, 285–287 Overrepresentation, 27, 46, 104 Ozick, Cynthia, 241, 242 P Packard, Vance, 103 Paintings, 119, 122, 140, 226, 255, 256, 259, 261, 265, 267, 268

Palestine, 2, 5, 13–15, 25, 26, 28, 57, 70–74, 77, 78, 86n45, 137, 152–153n18, 184n35, 184n39, 199–201, 203, 288, 291 Paris, 7, 89, 103, 113, 118, 121, 260 Passover, 2, 8, 10, 20, 80, 167, 168, 171, 187n54, 200, 282, 295n37 Passover foods, 173, 187n51 Peddling, 3, 19, 24, 25, 43, 44, 46–51, 53–60, 61n8, 61n16 Penslar, Derek, 4, 5 Periodicals, 25, 67, 68, 70, 73, 144 Personal identity, 113, 198 Personal preference, 224 Philadelphia, 89, 232 Philanthropy/philanthropic, 2, 12, 20, 165, 184n39, 258 Philosophy, 24, 255 Phönix Company, 291 Photographer/photographers, 27, 139, 172, 174, 176, 256, 257, 259–265, 267, 268 Photographic discourses, 261 Photographs, 16, 23, 136, 256, 257, 259–266, 269 Photography, 27, 253–269 Photography as art, 258, 265, 268, 269 Photojournalism, 254, 259, 265 Pleck, Elizabeth, 204, 205 Pogrom/pogroms, 3, 19, 277 Poland, 20, 172, 209, 226 Politics, 88, 97, 111, 112, 116, 124, 134, 225, 226, 236, 240, 269, 275, 286, 292 Pollack, Peter, 262, 265 Pollock, Jackson, 120 Poor, 11, 48, 55, 57, 60, 84n19, 138, 147, 150 Popular culture, 20 Posen (Poznań), 71, 136 Posnansky, Israel, 231, 247n38

 INDEX 

Postwar, 263, 266, 284, 291 Poverty, 1, 16, 19, 53, 56, 246n26 Producers, 13, 46, 51, 100, 111, 160, 254 Production-oriented, 275 Productivity, 47, 59, 93 Product packaging, 88 Propaganda, 3, 4, 75, 89, 96, 98, 226, 230, 290, 291 Protest, 138, 203, 225, 228, 229, 236, 239, 246n26, 249n58 Public celebration, 77, 196 Public festivals, 196 Public opinion, 103, 104, 226 Public processions, 196 Public rituals, 200–204, 211 Publishing, 70, 199, 239, 261, 265, 266 Purim, 22, 26, 171, 186n47, 196, 201–204, 211 R Rabbinical authorities, 203, 273, 274 Race/racial, 3, 4, 28, 113, 124, 125n8, 135, 225, 226 Racism, 113, 115, 278 Rag trade, 54 Recycling/recycled, 4, 46, 56, 60, 83n7 Refugees/refugee, 25, 88, 99, 232, 233, 238, 239, 265, 267, 268 Regimes of consumption, 273–292 Religion/religious, 2, 4, 7–10, 12, 15, 20, 26, 28, 77–80, 88, 92, 93, 97, 114, 115, 124, 134, 135, 141, 149, 159–161, 163, 164, 168, 170–178, 178n3, 180n15, 182n24, 184–185n39, 185–186n43, 188n63, 188n65, 189n74, 190n80, 198, 200, 202, 203, 206, 207, 209, 210, 226, 240, 242, 243, 255, 274, 284, 285

307

Religious beliefs, 172 Religious consumption, 10 Religious Judaism, 274 Religious objects, 9 Religious observance, 8, 168 Religious practice, 9, 22, 159, 170 Renaissance Revival architecture, 117 Renting halls, 207 Respectable, 55, 261, 264 Restitution, 6, 27, 239, 267 Restrictions, 47, 49, 55, 72, 143, 194n111 Retail, 2, 3, 5, 13, 22, 24–26, 28, 44, 49–51, 89–91, 94, 96, 98, 100–102, 104, 111, 112, 114, 120, 146, 227, 282 Reuveni, Gideon, 27, 28, 30n2, 69, 79, 83n10, 155n50, 196 Ritual objects, 2, 7, 8, 17, 286 Rosenwein, Rifka, 242 Rosh Hashanah, 80, 163, 188n56 Rural, 14, 15, 48, 53, 55, 209, 255 Russia, 20, 71, 136, 146 S SA, 226 Sabbath, 24, 140, 143, 185n43, 193n110, 203, 204, 206, 207, 211 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 141, 142, 150, 154–155n41 Sanatoriums, 80 Sauerhoff, Harriet, 163, 171, 172, 181n19, 188n61, 188n64, 191n80, 192–193n99, 193n102 Scarcity, 1 Schneerson, Menachem, 240, 241, 250n70, 250n71 Scholarships, 88, 95, 123, 134, 182n26, 183n34, 199, 200, 225

308 

INDEX

School/schools, 68, 73, 74, 76, 80, 115, 121, 123, 124, 161, 162, 166, 170, 179n9, 180n15, 185n43, 189n70, 189n74, 190n76, 207, 208, 244, 259, 290 Scrap trade, 53–55 Secondhand, 54 Second World War/World War II, 15, 25, 27, 159–162, 178, 200, 208, 223, 225, 250n75, 253, 278, 284 Secularization, 6 Segmentation, 18, 47 Self-defense, 226 Servants, 20, 49, 78, 274 Services, 25, 69, 76, 78–81, 113, 114, 122, 160, 164, 166, 167, 173, 174, 178, 181n19, 185n41, 189n66, 192n97, 204–208, 224, 227, 233, 239, 279, 282, 284 Settler societies, 275 Shipping, 72, 73, 77, 227 Shopping spaces, 284 Simmel, Georg, 5, 112, 124, 275 Sisterhood, 164, 165, 168–170, 182n24, 182n25, 182n26, 183n31, 185n43, 187n47, 187n51, 187n54, 188n56, 190n75, 190n78, 191n81, 193n102 Slezkine, Yuri, 262 Smoking, 5 Social cohesion, 275, 276 Social justice, 225 Social relations, 224, 225 Social welfare, 1, 145, 182n24, 225 Sombart, Werner, 3, 5, 90, 91 Sontag, Susan, 254, 255, 268 Southdale shopping center/ Southdale, 100–102 Southern Methodist University, 114, 116, 119

Spending, 1, 12, 16, 79, 145, 203, 273, 274, 279, 290 Standardization, 194n113, 276 State of Israel, 15, 27, 160, 161, 288 Stereotype/stereotypes, 3, 16, 44, 60, 135, 140–143, 147, 150, 151, 151n6, 179n3, 226, 236, 237, 273 Stieglitz, Alfred, 255–262, 264, 265, 268, 269, 269n2, 270n14, 270n16 Street photography, 259 Style, 2, 6, 9, 17, 22, 25, 28, 70, 77, 88, 101, 116–118, 190n75 Subjectivity, 6, 24 Suburban communities, 160 Suburban consumer culture, 160, 163, 177, 178 Suburban growth, 162 Suburban identity, 160 Suburban neighborhoods, 161 Suburbia, 26, 101, 160, 161, 166, 171, 175, 178, 192n97, 194n113 Suburb/suburbs, 26, 100, 101, 105n2, 159–178 Summer camps, 80 Switzerland, 71, 76, 99 Synagogue as a suburban Jewish space, 164 Synagogue/synagogues, 8, 20, 76, 78, 150, 159, 161–165, 170, 171, 173–175, 177, 178, 180n15, 181n19, 181n22, 182n24, 182n29, 183n31, 189n70, 190n80, 191n93, 194n111, 206–210, 237, 244 T Technologies, 4, 10, 15, 33n22, 51, 177, 254 Tel Aviv, 199–204, 206, 208, 211

 INDEX 

309

Tel Aviv Purim carnival, 196, 201 Temple, 93–95, 163–165, 167, 169, 174, 182n25 Texas, 25, 113, 114, 117–119, 121, 123 Texas Book Club, 116 Theater, 77, 114, 121, 181n19, 277 Trader/traders, 3, 44, 47, 48, 53, 55–57, 60, 137, 152n11, 152n18, 273 Tradition/traditions, 4, 9, 11, 22, 26, 43, 90, 92, 95, 102, 140, 154n37, 161, 162, 164, 166–169, 171–173, 177, 178, 183n34, 196, 211, 241, 242, 244, 274, 282, 284, 286 Traditional, 6, 10, 20, 22, 25, 44, 51, 70, 74, 81, 90, 95, 96, 98, 134, 140, 159, 160, 167, 174, 177, 186n47, 187n54, 199–202, 204, 207, 210, 211, 225, 259, 260, 265, 275 Traditional anti-Judaism, 3 Transition, 10, 48–51, 54, 56, 61n8, 178, 210, 267 Transnational, 22–24, 28 Transport, 51, 73 Trickery, 4, 21, 96 Trope/tropes, 4, 15, 97, 140 Tzedakah, 11

223, 226–230, 232, 233, 235–238, 240–244, 250n75, 253, 255, 258, 262, 267, 275–278, 284, 286, 287 Untermyer, Samuel, 227, 229 Urban, 10, 22, 25, 28, 29, 44, 49, 51, 52, 54, 79, 92, 93, 95, 99–102, 104, 113, 114, 116, 118, 123, 161, 162, 198–201, 203, 207, 209 Urban-to-suburban migration, 161 Used goods, 45, 46, 54, 55, 58, 60, 63n40 Utzschneider, Joseph von, 47, 61n17, 61n19

U United Jewish Appeal (UJA), 165, 166, 180n15, 183–184n35, 184n37 United States (US), 2, 5, 8, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24–27, 29, 43, 44, 56–58, 72, 88, 89, 98–104, 118, 134, 135, 137–139, 143, 151n3, 151n4, 156n63, 161, 180–181n15, 184n39, 191n93,

W W.A.G.M.U.S., 90, 91 Wagstaff, Sam, 259–261, 264–266 Warenhaus Berlin, 94 Warhol, Andy, 254 Way of life, 77, 79, 274, 284, 292 Wealth, 6, 9, 15, 16, 56, 57, 59, 76, 93, 134, 139, 140, 143, 145, 147, 169, 261 Weber, Max, 5

V Vacation destinations, 80 Verband deutscher Reklamefachleute, 68 Verband jüdischer Frauen für Kulturarbeit in Palästina, 71 Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, 266 Vernacular Jewish consumer culture, 196 Victor Mayer Caterers, 172, 173, 177 Vienna, 22, 54, 100–104, 105n3, 106n5, 263, 266 Villages, 44, 46 Volkswagen/VW, 238, 240, 241

310 

INDEX

Wedding/weddings/wedding celebrations, 9, 75, 172, 174, 175, 177, 194n111, 207, 208 Weimar culture, 263 Weissman Joselit, Jenna, 143, 157n74, 168, 172, 174, 196, 282 Wertheim, George, 8, 72, 89, 93, 136, 288 West German museums, 262 West Germany, 27, 235, 236, 244 Wiedergutmachung, 27, 253–269 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 4 Women, 7, 15, 17, 21, 24, 26, 44, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 103, 117, 118, 123, 133, 135, 140–145, 147–150, 153n19, 159–178, 199, 200, 207, 237, 263, 274, 279 Woolworth, 234 World Jewish Conference, 228 World War I/First World War, 15, 37n74, 49, 51, 57, 60, 68, 71, 72, 75, 83n6, 198, 205, 276 World Zionist Organization, 68, 296n45

Y Yiddish, 20, 114, 138, 140, 147, 149, 154n37, 189n68, 227, 277, 279, 282, 284 Yiddish press, 279 Yishuv, 14, 26, 37n79, 196, 198–200, 203, 205–211 Yishuv society, 196–198 Yom Kippur, 8, 139, 180n15, 188n56 Z Zangwill, Israel, 277, 293n10 Zionism, 2, 28, 74, 75, 78, 114, 115, 134, 198, 199, 211, 287, 288, 291 Zionists, 14, 15, 25, 67–73, 75–82, 86n45, 184n39, 198, 199, 202, 204, 208, 287–292 Zola, Émile, 7, 8, 90, 92 Zollman, Joellyn Wallen, 170, 171, 189n70, 191n81, 191n83