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

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Abstract

Kerry Wallach explores how Jews interacted with fashionable luxury objects made from fur. She draws on cultural discourses and historical research to engage questions about material culture, links between production and consumption, and different forms of representation. Cultural texts (literary works, films, television shows) produced in Europe and the United States shed light on the gendered elements of depicting Jews and fur, with Jewish women often shown as social-climbing, selfish, voracious consumers. Wallach also looks at stereotypes that rendered Jewish fur wearers ostentatious and especially visible. Motifs from an era of peak fur production and key fashion trends (1890s to 1930s) recurred in the 1950s. More recent debates illustrate the persistence of allegations of Jewish and especially Jewish women’s conspicuous consumption.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (New York, 2014), 22.

  2. 2.

    Several scholars draw an explicit parallel between Gregor Samsa and the protagonist in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. See David Gallagher, Metamorphosis: Transformations of the Body and the Influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Germanic Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Amsterdam, 2009), 119; and Julia Emberley, The Cultural Politics of Fur (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 93–94.

  3. 3.

    See Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison, WI, 2007), 96–97. Many Jews worked as peddlers in Europe, and German-Jewish peddlers were also common in the United States beginning in the 1840s. See Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 28; and Rowena Olegario, “‘That Mysterious People’: Jewish Merchants, Transparency, and Community in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Business History Review 73, no. 2 (1999): 161–89.

  4. 4.

    In addition to being sought after as luxury objects, they served the more quotidian aim of providing warmth. On the everyday use of furs, particularly beaver fur in the United States, see Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York, 2010).

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement, 1882–1914, 2nd ed. (New York, 1969); and Sandra Spingarn, Trade Unionism among the Jewish Workers in the Fur Manufacturing Industry in New York City, 1912–1929 (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamtom, 1994).

  6. 6.

    On stereotypes of the Jewish American Princess, see Riv-Ellen Prell, “Rage and Representation: Jewish Gender Stereotypes in American Culture,” in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston, MA, 1990), 248–66.

  7. 7.

    See, for example, German Romantic writer Achim von Arnim’s 1811 speech “On the Distinguishing Signs of Jewishness,” in which he maintains that it is always possible to spot a Jewish woman based on her tendency to wear jewelry. Achim von Arnim, “Über die Kennzeichen des Judenthums,” in Ludwig Achim von Arnim, Texte der deutschen Tischgesellschaft, ed. Stefan Nienhaus (Tübingen, 2008), 107–28, here 124.

  8. 8.

    See Raymond Henry Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700 (Berkeley, CA, 1943), 196–97; and Francis W. Carter, Trade and Urban Development in Poland: An Economic Geography of Cracow, from Its Origins to 1795 (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 231–35.

  9. 9.

    In some cases, statistics generated by antisemitic groups such as Adefa put the Jewish stake at 55%. See Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford, 2004), 159.

  10. 10.

    Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York, 1987), 93.

  11. 11.

    In 1929, at least half of the roughly 800 fur traders in Leipzig were Jewish, and over 10% of the fur processors and furriers were Jewish. See Wilhelm Harmelin, “Jews in the Leipzig Fur Industry,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964): 239–66, here 255; Jon Gunnar Mølstre Simonsen, “Perfect Targets—Antisemitism and Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919–1923,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 51 (2006): 79–101, here 81; and Barbara Kowalzik, Jüdisches Erwerbsleben in der inneren Nordvorstadt Leipzigs, 1900–1933 (Leipzig, 1999).

  12. 12.

    Kerstin Plowinski, “Die jüdische Gemeinde Leipzig auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer Existenz: Zur Berufs- und Sozialstruktur um das Jahr 1925,” in Judaic Lipsiensia: Zur Geschichte der Juden von Leipzig (Leipzig, 1994), 79–91, here 81; and Barbara Kowalzik, Wir waren eure Nachbarn: Die Juden im Leipziger Waldstrassenviertel (Leipzig, 1996), 33.

  13. 13.

    Simonsen, “Perfect Targets,” 81 and 97.

  14. 14.

    Eran J. Rolnik, Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London, 2012), xxxii, 9–12, 73–86.

  15. 15.

    See Harmelin, “Jews in the Leipzig Fur Industry,” 259–60.

  16. 16.

    Arthur Ray, The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age (Toronto, 1990), 135. See also Anne Schenderlein’s contribution to this volume.

  17. 17.

    Doron Niederland, “Areas of Departure from Nazi Germany and the Social Structure of the Emigrants,” in Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. Werner E. Mosse et al. (Tübingen, 1991), 57–68, here 62.

  18. 18.

    For example, Adolf Felsenstein, a Leipzig fur trader, retrained to be a plumber in order to immigrate to Palestine in 1935. See Fred Grubel and Frank Mecklenburg, “Leipzig: Profile of a Jewish Community during the First Years of Nazi Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42 (1997): 157–88, here 185. See also Jeffrey Veidlinger, “One Doesn’t Make Out Much with Furs in Palestine: The Migration of Jewish Displaced Persons, 1945–7,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, nos. 2–3 (2014): 241–52.

  19. 19.

    A 1939 study of Canadian Jews found that fur workers were the second largest occupational group (after women’s ready-made clothing) among Jews in 1931; they numbered about 1300 workers and constituted nearly one-third of all workers in the industry. Louis Rosenberg, Canada’s Jews: A Social and Economic Study of Jews in Canada in the 1930s, ed. Morton Weinfeld (Montreal, 1993), 178–79.

  20. 20.

    The United Hebrew Trades organized the first Jewish fur workers’ union in 1892, though this union dissolved in 1893. Eleven years later, in 1904, the UHT launched the International Fur Workers Union of New York. Epstein, Jewish Labor in U.S.A., 410.

  21. 21.

    Robert D. Leiter, “The Fur Workers Union,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 3, no. 2 (1950): 163–86, here 167. Moses Rischin notes that the number of fur goods establishments grew parallel to the clothing industry, and that between 1890 and 1900, the number of fur goods establishments in New York grew from 60 to 232. By the beginning of the First World War, there were 912 fur shops. See Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 63, 67.

  22. 22.

    These studies were conducted in 1911 and 1915. See Philip S. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers Union: A Story of Dramatic Struggles and Achievements (Newark, NJ, 1950), 41; and Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 15–16 and 376, n31.

  23. 23.

    Sources differ on the exact amount raised by the Forward, between $20,000 and $40,000. See Foner, Fur and Leather, 46; and Spingarn, Trade Unionism, 111, 132–33.

  24. 24.

    Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse, NY, 2007), ix.

  25. 25.

    Cited in Sandra Spingarn, “Jews and the International Fur Workers’ Union,” Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, ed. Eunice G. Pollack and Stephen H. Norwood (Santa Barbara, CA, 2008), 362–65; and Spingarn, Trade Unionism, 111, 132–33.

  26. 26.

    See, for example, A. Steinhorn, “Jewish Strikers and Jewish Union Men,” Fur Worker, Jewish edition, February 20, 1917. Cited in Spingarn, Trade Unionism, 166. Occasional columns also appeared in the journal in Italian, German, and French. Foner, Fur and Leather, 61.

  27. 27.

    Polenberg, Fighting Faiths, 14.

  28. 28.

    Neal Gabler, Frank Rich, and Joyce Antler, Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (New York, 2000), 5. On Zukor, see also Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988), 15–18.

  29. 29.

    On the history of Russeks, see Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York, 2005), 3–8. Arbus’s own supposed fascination with fur is also the subject of a bizarre film, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, directed by Steven Shainberg (2006), starring Nicole Kidman.

  30. 30.

    Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945 (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 147. See also Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, CT, 1996), 20.

  31. 31.

    Helene Sinnreich, “Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives of World War II–Era Ghettos,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (New York, 2011), 115–24, here 116–17.

  32. 32.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1995), 11–12.

  33. 33.

    Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago, IL, 2003), 51–54.

  34. 34.

    See Ritchie Robertson, The “Jewish Question” in German Literature 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents (New York, 1999), 33–34.

  35. 35.

    Heinrich Heine, Über Polen, ed. Michael Holzinger (Berlin, 2014), 7–8.

  36. 36.

    Eric Silverman, A Cultural History of Jewish Dress (New York, 2013), 120–23.

  37. 37.

    Because Peretz’s story contained a negative depiction of a Hasidic Rabbi and old religious traditions, this story was commonly taught in Yiddish curriculum in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as a way of rejecting the old world. See Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival (New York, 1988), 181.

  38. 38.

    I. L. Peretz, “The Shtrayml,” in Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, ed. Ken Frieden (Syracuse, NY, 2004), 137–46, here 142–43. This story was translated by Ken Frieden.

  39. 39.

    Warren G. Breckman, “Disciplining Consumption: The Debate about Luxury in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 3 (1991): 485–505, here 486.

  40. 40.

    Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Das Mahl der Frommen,” in Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild (Wiesbaden, 1986), 61–76, here 72–73. This edition is a facsimile of the original text from 1892, which was published in Verlag J. Bensheimer.

  41. 41.

    David Biale, “Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 2 (1982): 305–23, here 313. It is possible that Sacher-Masoch had one or more Jewish ancestors; scholars disagree as to whether his in-depth knowledge of many Jewish texts and customs had a basis in his ancestry or identity. See Irving Massey, Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Tübingen, 2000), 17–19; and Samuel Spinner, “Anecdotal Evidence: Local Color and Ethnography in the Shtetl Stories of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,” Studia Rosenthaliana 41 (2009): 65–79, here 66.

  42. 42.

    Sacher-Masoch, Jüdisches Leben, 91–103.

  43. 43.

    Sacher-Masoch, Jüdisches Leben, 145–57, here 154.

  44. 44.

    Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, trans. F. H. Lyon (London, 2012), 74.

  45. 45.

    Fräulein Else, directed by Paul Czinner, restored by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, ZDF, and ARTE (1928/20; Rome, 2004).

  46. 46.

    Cited in Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (London, 2010), 23.

  47. 47.

    Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie von Ankum (New York, 2002), 37, 51.

  48. 48.

    Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York, 2001), 149–69, here 169.

  49. 49.

    Social investigator Beatrice Webb made this observation in a publication from 1902 to 1903. Cited in Adam D. Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York, 2015), 210 and 284, n6.

  50. 50.

    On sumptuary laws in premodern Jewish communities, see David Biale, “Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” in Longing, Belonging and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer (Leiden, 2010), 23–38, here 33–35.

  51. 51.

    See Silverman, Cultural History of Jewish Dress, 59–60; and Jay R. Berkovitz, “Social and Religious Controls in Pre-Revolutionary France: Rethinking the Beginnings of Modernity,” Jewish History 15, no. 1 (2001): 1–40, here 9.

  52. 52.

    Max Grunwald, “Luxusverbot der Dreigemeinden (Hamburg—Altona—Wandsbek) aus dem Jahre 1715,” Mitteilungen zur jüdischen Volkskunde 25 (1923): 227–34, here 228. On early modern sumptuary laws, see Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire, 6–7.

  53. 53.

    Adolf Asch, Auszug aus Memoiren von Dr. Adolf Asch (Die Inflationsjahre 1919–1928), 3, file no. 2 (Adolph Asch), Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Translation cited in Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978), 183. On self-discipline and the policing of German-Jewish women’s attire, see Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI, 2017), 102–10.

  54. 54.

    “Jüdische Frauen!,” Der Schild, I. Beilage, no. 10, October 1922, 4.

  55. 55.

    See “Walter Rathenau über die Frau,” Die jüdische Frau 1, no. 2, May 22, 1925, 6; and Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2003), 247.

  56. 56.

    Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men (Boston, MA, 1999), 43, 163. On American Jewish women and excess, see also Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 181–87.

  57. 57.

    Dyhouse, Glamour, 77.

  58. 58.

    Darcy Buerkle, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 4 (2006) 625–36, here 631.

  59. 59.

    “Großes Preisausschreiben!,” advertisement, C.V.-Zeitung, no. 30, July 24, 1924, 455.

  60. 60.

    As Paul Lerner has noted, Mendelsohn designed buildings for a number of notable Jewish clients, many of whom he met through Jewish connections. Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 163. On Herpich, see Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 141–50; and Cyril Reade, Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Bern, 2007), 187–91.

  61. 61.

    See Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 15. The Herpich fur stole referenced here is part of the C. Jahnke Collection in Vancouver, Canada.

  62. 62.

    Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (New York, 1993), 115.

  63. 63.

    The play on which The Shop Around the Corner was based was written by Miklós László, a Hungarian Jewish émigré who arrived in the United States in 1938; its screenplay was by Samson Raphaelson, author of the play on which the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer, was based. Another Lubitsch film replete with furs is Trouble in Paradise (1932), which represents the peak of Art Deco glamour. Sabine Hake has argued that, “like Gaston and his ploys, the beautiful objects/images appeal to the spectators and draw them into their circle of deceit.” Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 187.

  64. 64.

    Several of Lubitsch’s early films contain both implicit and explicit references to Jewishness. See Valerie Weinstein, “Anti-Semitism or Jewish ‘Camp’? Ernst Lubitsch’s Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) and Meyer aus Berlin (1918),” German Life and Letters 59, no. 1 (January 2006): 101–21; Valerie Weinstein, “(Un)Fashioning Identities: Ernst Lubitsch’s Early Comedies of Mistaken Identity,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 120–33; and Richard W. McCormick, Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch (Bloomington, IN, 2020).

  65. 65.

    Fannie Hurst, “White Goods,” in The Stories of Fannie Hurst, chosen and introduced by Susan Koppelman (New York, 2004), 67–91, here 71, 79.

  66. 66.

    Both Hurst stories were first published in the 1919 collection, Humoresque and Other Stories. Many of Fannie Hurst’s short stories provided the basis for the Jewish-themed “Ghetto Film” genre of the 1920s. See Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 87. See also Susan Koppelman, “Introduction,” in The Stories of Fannie Hurst, xix; and Prell, Fighting to Become Americans, 42–43.

  67. 67.

    Anzia Yezierska, “The Fat of the Land,” in Hungry Hearts (Boston, MA, 1920), 133, 134.

  68. 68.

    See Lester D. Friedman, “A Forgotten Masterpiece: Edward Sloman’s His People,” in Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Detroit, MI, 2013), 19–34.

  69. 69.

    Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill, Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present, and Future (London, 2015), 149–50.

  70. 70.

    See Barbara Sicherman, “Reading Marjorie Morningstar in the Age of the Feminine Mystique and After,” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia R. Diner, Shira M. Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010), 194–209, here 198.

  71. 71.

    On Bess Myerson’s Jewish identity, see Kerry Wallach, “Recognition for the ‘Beautiful Jewess’: Beauty Queens Crowned by Modern Jewish Print Media,” in Globalizing Beauty: Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne (New York, 2013), 131–50.

  72. 72.

    Marsha F. Cassidy, What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s (Austin, TX, 2005), 212.

  73. 73.

    Fake furs first became immensely popular in the 1960s, when young people eschewed the “minks that mother wore” for fabrics made of synthetic fibers. Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 164.

  74. 74.

    See Emberley, Cultural Politics of Fur, 24–33; and Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 149–69.

  75. 75.

    In fact, one remark by Isaac Bashevis Singer supposedly inspired PETA’s highly controversial 2003 “Holocaust on Your Plate” traveling exhibition, which juxtaposed images of animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms with images of humans in concentration camps. See “Humane Kosher,” PETA, http://www.peta.org/features/kosher-vegetarian/; and “PETA Germany’s Holocaust Display Banned,” PETA, March 27, 2009, http://www.peta.org/blog/peta-germanys-holocaust-display-banned/. Silverstone has contributed to PETA campaigns and has published articles on her website about fur. See, for example, “My Thoughts on Fur…,” The Kind Life, http://thekindlife.com/blog/2011/09/my-thoughts-on-fur/.

  76. 76.

    See, for example, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, “The Religious Case Against Wearing Fur & Leather!,” Jewish Journal, January 26, 2015.

  77. 77.

    See Orna Rinat, “Denmark, Israel and the Deathly Stench of Fur,” Ha’aretz, May 7, 2015, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.655245.

  78. 78.

    On Ruth Madoff, see, for example, Mark Seal, “Ruth’s World,” Vanity Fair, August 4, 2009. http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/09/ruth-madoff-profile.

  79. 79.

    On Mad Men’s treatment of Jewishness, see Kerri P. Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience (New Brunswick, NJ, 2015), 6–8.

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Wallach, K. (2022). Buy Me a Mink: Jews, Fur, and Conspicuous 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_6

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