German-Jewish Women in Journalism and the Visual Arts, 1918–1938

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The Weimar Republic opened up new educational and professional opportunities for women, allowing for greater visibility in the public sphere. Jewish women, too, took advantage of the new era. Leaving behind traditional domestic roles assigned to women in 19th-century bourgeois Jewish families, they pursued university studies or other professional training and embarked on careers as scholars, writers, artists, or in the free professions. Women were also active participants in the so-called Jewish Cultural Renaissance, which was characterized by enhanced literary, scholarly, and artistic activities with regard to specifically Jewish topics, sources, and languages. After the rise of National Socialism, many protagonists of the Jewish Renaissance, both men and women, persisted in their activities – usually with a greater sense of urgency – well into the mid- and even late-1930s.
The integration of the history of women and gender into the field of German-Jewish studies, which occurred gradually and relatively late, went a long way in revealing and reconstructing the stories of such women and their achievements in their respective fields. These studies challenged prevalent assumptions concerning modern German-Jewish history and added new perspectives from the vantage point of women. The present session contributes to this line of scholarship by focusing on the roles of German-Jewish women in the fields of journalism and the visual arts – and the intersections of the two – during the 1920s and 1930s. Kerry Wallach explores how critics and art historians writing for the Jewish press constructed a canon of mostly male artists while also promoting certain Jewish women artists. Aya Elyada examines the contributions of journalist and literary scholar Bertha Badt-Strauss to the discourse on Yiddish ‘Frauenliteratur’ – a discourse that was, until then, exclusively male. Rebekka Grossmann discusses the photographic practices of German-Jewish photographer Martha Maas as providing access points to the study of intersecting experiences of discrimination in Nazi Germany. This session thus brings together gender history, German-Jewish studies, Yiddish studies, visual history, and media history to add new dimensions to the study of German-Jewish writing and culture during the Weimar era and under National Socialism.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Lisa Silverman, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Individual Presentations

• Women Artists and Art Criticism in the Jewish Press in Germany - Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College

• “Actually, It Is Not A Book I Wish to Tell You About”: The Journalist Bertha Badt-Strauß and the Yiddish ‘Frauenlitertur’ - Aya Elyada, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• A Jewish Photographer’s German Stars: The Photo Studio as Space of Encounter in Nazi Germany - Rebekka Grossmann, Leiden University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 11