{"title":"Jewish Beauty Pageants in Interwar Poland: Entertainment, Beauty Ideal, and National Emotions","authors":"E. Zohar","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1929, the Polish-Jewish newspaper “Nasz Przegląd” announced “Miss Judaea Contest” – Beauty Pageant exclusively for Jewish ladies. In the following year, the Yiddish newspaper “Unzer Express” launched an additional similar contest. This article focuses on two elements related to the Jewish Beauty Pageants in Interwar Poland: First, by using quantitative research methods, it reveals the esthetics and fashionable elements of the typical Jewish young women. Despite the differences between different groups in Polish Jewry, they shared similar attributes and influences which were manifested in the fashionable choices. In addition the article presents the vivid discussions that the contest aroused both in the Jewish community in Poland and in other Jewish communities abroad. The Jewish beauty pageants, as the discussions that followed, were representative of the process of change that Polish Jewry underwent in the interwar years. These pageants represented more than just pure entertainment and symbolized more than just modernity processes. For the Jewish community, as a national minority dispersed throughout Poland, such ethno-specific entertainment activities played an important role in shaping national identity.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"19 1","pages":"626 - 644"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84444231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Afterlife of Early Modern Images of Jews","authors":"Cornelia Aust","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Early modern copperplate engravers, painters, and printers produced an increasing number of images that depicted Jewish individuals or more often groups of Jewish men and women. Many of these images sought to present an ideal type, displaying (allegedly) typical Jewish dress and outward appearance. Some of these images saw adaptations already during the eighteenth-century, but all were photographed, reprinted, adapted, and altered from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This article choses three images – an engraving of a Jewish man and woman from an early-eighteenth century costume book, the depiction of a Jewish couple from a late eighteenth-century painting, and the painting of Bertha Pappenheim posing as early modern Jewish merchant Glikl bas Judah from the early twentieth century – and follows their adaptations over time. I analyze how these adaptations were (re)used in different contexts and the problems they may create for historians as well as for (non-professional) observers interested in the history of early modern European Jewry. The afterlife of these early modern images is often framed in a discourse of Jewish belonging and identity. Especially popular adaptations are characterized by an uncritical and sometimes ahistorical approach to these images.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"13 1","pages":"772 - 796"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87148934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jewish Women, English Dress: From Kindertransport to Women in Uniform in Wartime England","authors":"Jeordy Farnell","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The study of dress in relation to Jewish identity in England is critically understudied. Historic anxieties concerning the presence of Jews in England impacted the lives of many, refugees seeking asylum from fascist Europe in particular. Images from the snapshot collection of Lorraine Sulzbacher, a German Jewish refugee, are correlated with oral history testimonies from other Kindertransport refugees to explore the identity formation and integration of female Kindertransport refugees in England from 1939 to 1945. This article investigates how dress was used as a visual signifier of integration, and how both dress and photographic practices simultaneously created space for identity formation. It discusses the impact dress had on the formation of identity during the transition from girlhood to adulthood for female Kindertransport refugees. Additionally, this article examines how uniformed war work provided these young women opportunities to develop their identities as displaced European Jewish persons in Britain. This analysis of dress and photography posits that these refugees were a diaspora in formation.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"5 1","pages":"682 - 700"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90844014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modern Confections: Jews, New Women, and the Business of Fashion in Imperial Berlin","authors":"Angelina Palmén","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes a series of visually arresting albums by the Jewish-owned Berlin department store and clothing manufacturer Kaufhaus N. Israel, published between 1899 and 1914. The company wooed and shocked bourgeois audiences by photographically illustrating the gender norm-defying activities of early twentieth-century “new women”—over a decade before the equivalent German term became commonplace. The N. Israel albums relied on readers’ extrapolation from their pages to the Israel company brand and the fashionable inventory of its store. The article demonstrates how an innovative device to craft the image of a Jewish clothing company also incorporated tacit ideas about Jewishness. Along the way, these visions traveled through the prism of female figures, establishing connections between Jewishness, fashionability, and modernity—the “fashionable” Jewish feminist, a reformer of Imperial German society, and the “fashionable” “Oriental” Jew, a style icon and imitable “cross-dresser.” The article examines the albums’ visual and verbal components as part of a larger design, isolating the voice of the department store. The Israels used their albums, the article argues, to style their store as a “women’s paradise,” simultaneously, however, confecting their own public identities as liberal allies of the feminist cause and creators of modern German culture.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"645 - 681"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83444054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Processing of Used Clothing as a Survival Strategy: The Łódź Ghetto Textile Industry in Official Visual Documents of the Judenrat","authors":"Paweł Michna","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes a photomontage album produced in the Graphics Office of the Łódź (Litzmannstadt) ghetto under Nazi occupation. Commissioned by the Jewish Council, the Judenrat, in a modern style, the album shows the functioning of the ghetto’s textile production. The article argues that the album was a visual expression of the Judenrat’s survival strategy: it was aimed at perpetuating a productive image of the ghetto in influential German circles to persuade the authorities to produce goods in the ghetto and to have it play an essential role in the Third Reich economy. The article draws on content and discourse analysis to demonstrate how the album’s narrative appealed to commonly held modern values such as industrialization, rationalization of work, and the idea of a circular economy. It argues that the narrative conveyed in the album can be seen as a counter-propaganda strategy to challenge the antisemitic image of the Jews as \"weak” and \"unproductive” communicated through Third Reich propaganda.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"121 1","pages":"720 - 745"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79232730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Photographs of Jewish Clothing in Nazi Germany and the Shoah: Visual Records of Economic Assaults, Exploitation, and Plunder","authors":"Nathaniel Parker Weston","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Pictures of Jewish clothing allow viewers to witness the centrality of clothes in Nazi persecution and expropriation both before and during the genocide of Jewish Europeans. The photographs serve as documentary records and vehicles for seeing specific situations in which buying, selling, producing, wearing, and stealing clothes was part of everyday life in Nazi Germany, occupied Europe, and the Holocaust. They demonstrate the importance of clothing as goods sold and produced by Jewish people and as a locale for publicly targeting and socially segregating them. This article focuses on several photographs of clothing stores, forced labor workshops in ghettos, massacre sites, and concentration and death camps to expose the dynamics of Nazi economic persecution and dispossession before and during the genocide of Jewish people across Europe.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"76 1","pages":"701 - 719"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86684489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Not Looking Jewish: Visualizing Submerged Memories and Appearances","authors":"A. Pollen, Barbara Loftus","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For more than 25 years, artist Barbara Loftus, born 1946, has developed a substantial body of work, across figurative painting, book works and creative documentary film, rooted in her experience as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Loftus’s mother, Hildegard Basch [1917–2007], was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family but the securities of her comfortable life in Berlin were devastated by the catastrophic events of Nazi Germany. While Hildegard was able to take refuge in England in 1939, the rest of her family—Loftus’s grandparents Sigismund and Herta, and her uncle Heinz—were transported to Auschwitz Birkenau in 1942 and perished in the camp. In August 2021, cultural historian Annebella Pollen visited Loftus’ studio in Brighton, UK, to discuss the enduring themes of her artistic practice and, particularly Loftus’s use of photographs and dress as sources and methods for exploring Jewish identity and post-memory.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"797 - 809"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87264031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dressing Up: “Reading” Costume in the Photograph Albums of Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Jews","authors":"Michele Klein","doi":"10.1080/14759756.2022.2141025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2141025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study draws on over one hundred portrait albums compiled by bourgeois Jews living in the British, Austrian, German, Russian and Ottoman Empires, as well as those living in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century. These photographic albums allow us to study Jewish dress. They show Jews who presented themselves at photographic studios wearing uniform, ceremonial dress, fancy dress as well as in the latest fashions. Sartorial choices in Jews’ photographic collections communicate new facets of Jewish experience as Jews acquired wealth and civil rights. This study contextualizes the portraits within the photographic culture and the political events of the era. It contends that the dress they chose to wear for their portraits articulated new forms of identification, affiliations and national belonging within and/or beyond the Jewish community. It proposes, moreover that the apparel of bourgeois Jews in their costumed images embodied their negotiation of Otherness.","PeriodicalId":32765,"journal":{"name":"Textile Leather Review","volume":"38 1","pages":"571 - 598"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73421770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}