Soft Hands for the Seder: The Portrayal of Gender in the Advertising of the Keneder Adler, 1920-1935

The author argues that images and captions from advertising in the Yiddish-language Montreal daily newspaper Der Keneder Adler gave a generation of immigrant women in the inter-war years an "identity construction kit" from which to refashion themselves as modern Jewish women. She points out that the advertisements were in many ways a mirror of Canadian society. They also offered multiple images of Jewish femaleness, drawing their readers into a common North-American discourse of individualism and providing them with the ideal of the modern female as a woman of leisure. The author points out that the advertisements may have contributed to the compartmentalization of Jewish ritual and to the alienation of women from it.

Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes

Vol. 15

37-52

2007

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