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

Marketing Identities analyzes how Ost und West (East and West), the first Jewish magazine (1901-1923) published in Berlin by westernized 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.<P>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.<P>As a means of correcting these negative images of Eastern Jews, Ost and West attempted to legitimize 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 morereaders. 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 Jew