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

Reuveni, Gideon

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_11

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

Gideon Reuveni⁶

Chapter
First Online: 22 January 2022

146 Accesses

Part of the book series: Worlds of Consumption ((WC))

Abstract

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. By assuming a “consumerist” approach to Jewish history, this chapter 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 which highlight their exclusion. Consumer culture, the author argues, facilitates the processes of both making and blurring differences. 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, feeling integrated in their surrounding societies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 109.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 139.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 139.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

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: 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.
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.
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-survey-reanalyzed/.
34.
See, for example, Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (New York, 1998); Riv-Ellen 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).
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).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Gideon Reuveni

Authors

Gideon Reuveni
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gideon Reuveni .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Paul Lerner
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Uwe Spiekermann
Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Anne Schenderlein

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Reuveni, G. (2022). Does Consumer Culture Matter? The “Jewish Question” and the Changing Regimes of Consumption. In: Lerner, P., Spiekermann, U., Schenderlein, A. (eds) Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_11

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_11
Published: 22 January 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-88959-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88960-9
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics