Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards
In this handsome, full-color volume, collector Aizenberg has assembled an utterly chilling array of postcards from around the world in which Jews are reviled and mocked. Many of the selections are from the “Golden Era” of the postcard – the 1890s through the end of the First World War – but later eras are well represented. There are chapters devoted to the Dreyfus affair and to Nazi and anti-Israel postcards.
Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of examples from prewar Germany, but France, Great Britain, and the United States have a prominent place in the collection as well. In the American chapter, Aizenberg devotes several pages to postcards advertising “restricted” resorts, lodgings, and communities, from which Jews were excluded.
Produced by respectable businesses and sent out by ordinary people who found them amusing, these postcards are a powerful and disturbing reminder that hatred can be as marketable as a commodity as a scenic view.
