Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West
Marketing Identities analyzes how the Berlin-based Jewish magazine Ost und West (East and West) promoted ethnic identity to Jewish audiences in Germany and throughout the world between 1901 and 1923. Using sophisticated techniques of marketing such as repurposing stereotypes, the editors of this highly successful journal — westernized Jews originally from Eastern Europe — attempted to forge a modern minority consciousness.
Noah Isenberg, University of Texas
“For its discussions of ethnicity and nationalism, of class and gender, of Jewish intellectual life in Imperial and early Weimar Germany, Marketing Identities offers a fascinating glimpse into the larger complexities surrounding Jewish identity formation.”
Thomas Kovach, University of Arizona
“The conventional view of German Jews is of a group afflicted by a near-
pathological self-hatred, desperately anxious to assimilate into German culture and to shed all vestiges of Jewish identity . . . In his book Marketing Identities, which examines the Berlin-based Jewish magazine Ost und West, David Brenner suggests that this view is in serious need of revision.”
German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust
David A. Brenner examines how Jews in Central Europe developed one of the first “ethnic” or “minority” cultures in modernity. Not exclusively “German” or “Jewish,” the experiences of German-speaking Jewry in the decades prior to the Third Reich and the Holocaust were also negotiated in encounters with popular culture, particularly the novel, the drama, and mass media. The ensuing reinventions of Judaic traditions resulted in the creation of new forms of cultural identity.
Jill Suzanne Smith, Bowdoin College
German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust not only “celebrates the diversity of modern German-Jewish culture before the Holocaust” but also “engages with and tests the limits of major theoretical models, such as Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of mass culture, Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, and the psychoanalytic model of Jewish self-hatred.”
David A. Brenner 