‘Tell Me, Gretchen, Wouldn’t You Like to Be a Jewess?’ The Inter-War Image of Jewishness in a Magazine for Modern, Educated Women

Abstract

A significant contribution to the formation of the image of Jewish culture in inter-war Czechoslovakia was naturally made also by the popular press, both through an intentional shaping of interpretations and through an inadvertent adherence to stereotypes. In this article we focus on Eva magazine, the most prestigious women’s periodical in the Czechoslovak First Republic, which was published from 1928 onwards and as its subheading proclaimed, was targeted at modern and educated women. Eva contained both journalistic and literary texts by eminent personalities from the cultural life of the First Republic, and thanks to its clearly delineated target group it represents an interesting source of cultural history. The thematisation of Jewishness in Eva appears within the framework of short stories, texts of a travelogue character, and reviews of productions and books with a Jewish theme. At times it incorporates whole texts, at others mere phrases such as similes. It ensues from the patterned regularity of media functioning in society that even apparently marginal mentions may become part of the formation of a specific discourse. Consequently this article sets itself the target of answering the question regarding what image of Jewishness the magazine created and by what means it presented this image, or in other words the outlook adopted by the cultural society of the First Republic that contributed to the magazine, as well as by its readership, namely modern and educated women.