Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards by Salo Aizenberg Michael Berenbaum

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 3 Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards by Salo Aizenberg foreward by Michael Berenbaum University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2013. Illustrations, bibliography, index. 248 pages. $31.95 cloth. There are moments in cultural life when hate speech weds with ephemera to produce a perfect tempest in a dainty teapot: big bigotry on an itty-bitty scale. A torrential outpouring of anti-Semitic picture postcards, as authoritatively selected in this attractively produced volume, appeared first at the end of the nineteenth century. The Dreyfus Affair that roiled France and spilled over to its European neighbors stimulated the formation of explicitly anti-Semitic political parties, first riding and then building a wave of popular suspicion and resentment against Jews. One ugly result was a veritable boom in the production of the cheapest and most quickly communicable medium, the anti-Semitic picture postcard. Readers may be shocked to see the thematic variety of such postcards, ranging from the vicious to the morbid, from the grotesque to the inventive,usually produced with a humorous flair to make the bile go down. Readers may furthermore be shocked that examples range widely,including Germany,France,Great Britain,the United States,and other countries. Useful chapters are devoted to the main stereotypes and canards, from the Spa Towns of Karlsbad and Marienbad,to Nazi-era postcards and, finally, to anti-Israel postcards. The stigma of old-fashioned scholarly snootiness has been removed from cultural studies. We are now, alas, free to revel in the minor horrors of old daily hatreds.And quite a revel it was:200–300 billion postcards were sold during the so-called Golden Age of postcards, from 1895 to the end of World War I. Scholarship cannot quantify what percentage of this outpouring was anti-Semitic. But Hatemail: Anti-SemitismonPicturePostcardsmakesaconvincing case that,especially (though not exclusively ) in its heyday, the nasty little sub-genre of the anti-Semitic postcard was quantitatively prolificandqualitativelyvariegated.Mostof the visual images played on standard features of the hook-nosed, sneering, physically unattractive Jew,while their content ranged from the overtly political to the subtly cultural, from the crassly comical to the portentously theological. While the bulk of postcards reproduced in this volume were“humorous,”by the 1930s the tone turns decidedly dark. The postcards shift from a mildly noxious culture practice into a new world, an unremittingly angry world. Instead of jokes,which had been the key feature of pre-Nazi anti-Semitic postcards, readers are confronted with digestibly bite-sized (if still no less disturbingly effective) adjuncts to genocide. The joke goes dark, then shades into pitch-black altogether. Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards , profusely illustrated with full-size, fullcolor reproductions,is perversely entertaining in its exceedingly dark comedy, surprisingly informative in forgotten byways of once popular practices. The first volume devoted its subject, this book belongs in the collection of any library interested in Judaica cultural studies, the history of hate speech, and media studies in general. Steven M. Wasserstrom Reed College The Elusive State of Jefferson: A Journey through the 51st State by Peter Laufer Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, Connecticut, and Helena, Montana, 2013. Photographs, maps, notes, index. 253 pages. $18.95 paper. Many Oregonians have some familiarity with the 1941 secession movement to create a new ...