Jews and American Advertising

American advertising, emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the main, emanated from New York, home to the largest concentration of America’s Jews. In those same years an increasing number of American Jewish men, particularly the sons of central and east European immigrants, received thoroughly American educations and their ethnic community had long been engaged in business. Despite the lack of scholarship, a few necessarily preliminary observations can set the stage for thinking about Jews and the world of American advertising, offering the outlines for what could be a rich subject for historical inquiry.