Between 1899 and 1914, the Berlin department store N. Israel issued a series of breathtaking illustrated annual publications, which it distributed to its customers free of charge. Compiled using cutting-edge printing techniques, the albums addressed various current issues through text and extravagant and unusual displays of reproduced photographic images – with barely any direct advertising. From 1909, several volumes featured explicit “feminist” themes. These ranged from the valorization of women’s rights activists to visual celebrations of women’s contributions to western modernity in sports, politics, the arts, entertainment, and professional life – among these a female tattoo artist and snake farm owner – appearing almost a decade before German and American women gained the right to vote. 

In her talk, Center for Jewish History Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Research Fellow Angelina Palmén (University of Oxford) in conversation with Dr. Mila Ganeva (Miami University, Ohio), explores how and why an esteemed Imperial German department store and fashion house, owned by an acculturated Jewish family, apparently took a public stance in support of women’s rights. There has been increasing public awareness in recent years about the company’s significant social justice legacy in securing the rescue of thousands of Jews from Nazi era Berlin under Wilfrid Israel, the store’s final director. Two decades before the calamities, however, N. Israel was a flourishing fashion retailer, a self-proclaimed “women’s paradise” at the heart of Berlin, shaping the tastes of German consumers for a century before the First World War. The lecture takes listeners on a journey into the converging worlds of German feminism and a “Jewish” niche in ready-made fashion before the world wars, showing how a prominent Jewish family took a leading role in endorsing and culturally constructing “new womanhood,” in an era when the real-life New Woman remained but a rare curiosity.

This program is funded, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Angelina Palmén is a DPhil candidate in Modern Jewish History at the University of Oxford. Her thesis, "Producing New Women: Work and Consumer Culture in the Wilhelmine Jewish Garment Trade," examines the promotion of feminism and women’s rights by companies in the Berlin industry for ready-made fashion and their mostly Jewish owners and executive directors 1890–1914. She is currently a Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York (2021–22). She has previously held doctoral fellowships through the Leo Baeck program in German-Jewish history by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (2018–9), and the Posen Society of Fellows (2018–20). Her interests in European and Jewish history include conceptions of gender, particularly in relation to women’s labor, feminism, business and entrepreneurship, fashion, visuality, and material culture.

Mila Ganeva is Professor of German and Affiliate faculty member of the Film Studies and Jewish Studies programs at Miami University in Ohio. A graduate of the University of Chicago (PhD 2000), she is the author of Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (Camden House, 2008) and Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: Between Nazism and Cold War, 1945-1953 (Camden House, 2018) as well as numerous articles on fashion history and German film. She contributed an essay on fashion photographers in Berlin of the 1920s to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “The New Woman Behind the Camera” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (July 2021-January 2022). Most recently she published about the costumes and set designs in the popular German TV-series, Babylon Berlin and is completing an article “Dressing Babylon Berlin for a Global Audience: Extravaganza, Glamour, and Grit” forthcoming in 2022. She is currently writing a book-length study on “Cabaret and Film: Synergy and Competition in the Weimar Republic.”