Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West - David Brenner

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Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost Und West

David Brenner

About this title: Marketing Identities analyses how Ost und West (East and West), the first Jewish magazine (1901-1923) published in Berlin by westernised Jews originally from Eastern Europe, promoted ethnic identity to Jewish audiences in Germany and throughout the world. Using sophisticated techniques of modern marketing, such as stereotyping, the editors of this highly successful journal attempted to forge a minority consciousness. Marketing Identities is thus about the beginnings of "ethnicity" as we know it in the late twentieth century. As a cultural history of pre-Hitler Germany, this book also addresses whether a German-Jewish symbiosis ever existed, revealing the possibilities and the limitations of multiple identities for turn-of-the century German Jews. Even though the magazine's editors succeeded in creating a public sphere for pan-Jewishness (Gesamtjudentum), they were confronted with serious obstacles such as the negative perception of East European Jews (Ostjuden) since the Enlightenment by many West European Jews (Westjuden) and non-Jews. Since the late eighteenth century, an elite group of intellectuals and policymakers called on the Ostjuden to become less Jewish and to regenerate themselves into a group more like "the Germans" or "the French". The Ostjuden were increasingly caricatured in literature, the arts, and the sciences, a development that had reached a high point as Ost and West began publication. As a means of correcting these negative images of Eastern Jews, Ost and West attempted to legitimise public expressions of Jewishness in the West, yet its founders knew they would have to reflect the presuppositions of the broader Jewish audience if they were to attract more readers. . To influence Jews in Germany (and elsewhere) who knew little about Eastern Jewry, the editors of Ost and West appealed specifically to three main audiences (each the subject of a chapter in the book): Jewish intellectuals, middle-class Jewish women, and middle-class Jewish men. Judging by its wide circulation -- at least 10 percent of the 625,000 Jews in Germany at its height -- Ost and West was a success, bringing Westjuden closer to Ostjuden, at least in the public sphere. Such an approach to ethnic identity in early twentieth-century Germany is innovative in looking at minority self-stereotyping as an instrument of marketing, not just as a socio-psychological phenomenon to be explained as "self-hatred" or "assimilation". An interdisciplinary study, Marketing Identities illuminates present-day discussions in Europe and the Americas regarding the experience and self-understanding of minority groups and combines media and cultural studies with German and Jewish history. Its negotiation of ethnicity, race, nationalism, gender, class, and religion make Marketing Identities particularly appealing to those engaged in recent debates about multiculturalism and the relationship between "high" and "low" culture.

Binding: PAPERBACK

Publisher: Wayne State University Press ISBN-13: 9780814326848 ISBN: 0814326846

Description: New. Still in publishers shrink wrap

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