List of Figures
Acknowledgements
A Note on Place Names
Introduction
1. Europe's Third Most Jewish City
2. Fashioning the Self, Dressing Society: Dress and Identity in Europe's Third Jewish Capital
3. Refashioning the Self: Acculturation, Assimilation, and Clothing
4. Strangers in the City: "Rootless" Jews and Urbanity in Vienna
5. Der kleine Cohn: Dress and the Function of Mocking through Caricature
6. The Man in the Suit: Jewish writers and their Clothing
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Jonathan C. Kaplan-Wajselbaum

Surviving photographs of Jewish Viennese men during the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods - both the renowned cultural luminaries and their many anonymous coreligionists - all share a striking sartorial detail: the tailored suit. Yet, until now, the adoption of the tailored suit and its function in the formation of modern Jewish identities remains under-researched.
Jews in Suits uses a rich range of written and visual sources, including literary fiction and satire, 'ego-documents', photography, trade catalogues, invoices, and department store culture, to propose a new narrative of men, fashion, and their Jewish identities. It reveals that dressing in a modern manner was not simply a matter of assimilation, but rather a way of developing new models of Jewish subjectivity beyond the externally prescribed notion of 'the Jew'. Drawing upon fashionable dress, folk costume, religious dress, avant-garde, oppositional dress, typologies which are often considered separate from one another, it proposes a new way of reading men and clothing cultures within an iconic cultural milieu, offering insights into the relationship of clothing and grooming to the understanding of the self.