Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity

by Gideon Reuveni

Overview

Antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as capitalists have hindered research into the economic dimension of the Jewish past. The figure of the Jew as trader and financier dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the economy has been central to Jewish life and the Jewish image in the world; Jews not only made money but spent money. This book is the first to investigate the intersection between consumption, identity, and Jewish history in Europe. 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 end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the new millennium. It shows how the advances of modernization and secularization in the modern period increased the importance of consumption in Jewish life, making it a significant factor in the process of redefining Jewish identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108505598
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Gideon Reuveni is Reader in History and Director of the Centre for German-Jewish studies at the University of Sussex. His central research and teaching interest is the cultural and social history of modern European and Jewish history.

Table of Contents

Part I. Narratives of Belonging: 1. Producers, consumers, Jews and antisemitism in German historiography; 2. Ethnic marketing and consumer ambivalence in Weimar Germany; 3. The Jewish question and the changing regimes of consumption; 4. What makes a Jew happy? Longings, belongings and the spirit of modern consumerism; Part II. The Politics of Jewish Consumption: 5. Emancipation through consumption; 6. Boycott, economic rationality and Jewish consumers in interwar Germany; 7. Advertising national belonging; 8. The consumption of Jewish politics; Part III. Homo Judaicus Consumerus: 9. The cost of being Jewish; 10. Place and space of Jewish consumption; 11. The world of Jewish goods; 12. Spending power and its discontents; 13. Beyond consumerism: the bridge, the door and the cultural economy approach to Jewish history.

Editorial Reviews

Advance praise: ‘Moving beyond the stereotypes, this brilliant, wide-ranging, innovative, meticulously researched and very readable history of how Jews were targeted as consumers and Jewish consumer practices sheds new light on Jews' relation to modernity. Reuveni takes the reader from Europe to the United States and Israel, showing how buying, or refusing to buy, goods had political, social and cultural consequences.' Leora Auslander, University of Chicago

Advance praise: ‘In this pioneering book Gideon Reuveni rereads the history of Jewish life in Weimar Germany from the fresh perspective of consumerism, with an eye toward how daily habits of getting, spending, eating and furnishing were inseparable from larger questions of belonging, integration and exclusion amid the tumultuous conditions of interwar Germany.' Paul Betts, St Anthony's College, Oxford

From the Publisher