From Hapgood's "The Spirit of the Ghetto" (1902) to Fishberg's "The Jews" (1911)

Guest Lecture with Klara Stephanie Szlezák

Besides the fact that both are early twentieth-century, non-fiction publications, little seems to connect Hutchins Hapgood’s book "The Spirit of the Ghetto" (1902), a detailed portrait of New York’s Yiddish Lower East Side, and Maurice Fishberg’s book "The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment" (1911), a comparative scientific study of the global Jewish diaspora. They vastly differ in their context of origin, their style, their purpose and intent, their target audience, and their circulation. And yet, what the two publications strikingly have in common is the integration of visual materials into the verbal text.
Rather than aiming at a full-fledged comparative approach, this paper seeks to juxtapose the two books in order explore the usage of visual materials in their respective inquiry into and depiction of Jewry and Jewish life. Both books, upon their first publication, interspersed their verbal texts with numerous illustrations. This paper addresses the issues raised by the verbal-visual interaction in these works, contextualizing and assessing the significance of the usage of visual materials, and attempts to trace the possible reasons for and effects of the aesthetic and intellectual choices.

After earning her M.A. and doctoral degree in American Studies at Regensburg University, Klara Stephanie Szlezák is currently a post-doctoral lecturer and researcher at Passau University, Germany. Her first monograph, “Canonized in History”: Literary Tourism and 19th-Century Writers’ Houses in New England, and her first co-edited essay collection, "Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen", appeared in 2015. She has since taken up work on her next project, which revolves around the intersections between photography and Jewish life in the early 20th-century United States.