How advertising has reflected and responded to the changing values of Jews in the US over the past 100 years.
By GLENN C. ALTSCHULERManischewitz wine, Joseph Jacobs Advertising.(photo credit: COURTESY RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS)
In the 1960s, Bill Bernbach, the founder and creative director of Doyle Dane Bernbach, launched an advertising revolution. A Jewish outsider in predominantly gentile Madison Avenue, Bernbach brought to ad campaigns an awareness of Americans’ growing distrust of conformity and corporate manipulation.Based on the proposition that effective ads touched emotions (as much or more than reason) – “Hit ’em in the heart, in the gut, in the funny bone” – DDB used the phrase “Think small” to sell Volkswagen beetles and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” for Alka-Seltzer antacids.For its Jewish accounts, which included Levy’s rye bread, Ohrbach’s department store and El Al, Kerri Steinberg reminds us, DDB “dared to project a Jewish sensibility.”In Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience, Steinberg, an associate professor of art history at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, examines how advertising reflected and responded to the changing values of Jews in the US over the past 100 years. Steinberg profiles three prominent Jewish ad man – Albert Lasker, Joseph Jacobs and Bernbach. Beautifully adorned with black-and-white figures and 12 color plates, the book also describes iconic ad campaigns for Maxwell House coffee, Manischewitz matza and wine, Hebrew National hot dogs, Levy’s “real Jewish” rye bread and JDate.Steinberg’s analysis of market segmentation and mass customization is grounded in the widely accepted assumption that as they shaped preferences for household goods and food products, advertising, marketing and branding “registered and moved the needle” of the cultural engagement of Jews.She also notes that by the 1960s, as the politics of consensus gave way to the politics of identity, advertisements reflected the desire of many Americans to acculturate but not to assimilate. These days, Steinberg writes, to be ethnic “is to be more, not less, American.”At times, however, Steinberg’s ideological predilections lead to sweeping, simplistic and contradictory generalizations.Whereas modernism in advertising delivered “definitive solutions,” Steinberg suggests, postmodernists substituted ambiguity “for absolutes and totalizing systems… Questions replaced answers and the foibles and frailties of the human experience now registered as more authentic than modernism’s insistence on perfection, the utopian, and ultimately, the unattainable.” By “aligning corporate America with the counterculture,” she then indicates, ’60s ad men “effectively extinguished any revolutionary flames by draining countercultural emblems of their dissenting value to make them palatable for the purposes of mass communication.”Elsewhere, of course, Steinberg recognizes that ambiguity was a pose for postmodern advertisers, designed to enable them to fly beneath the radar of consumers – and get them to the checkout counter.Steinberg is at her best when she provides detailed narratives about ad campaigns.The first ad agency to work with major US manufacturers, the Joseph Jacobs Organization, she reveals, created the “K” symbol to denote that a product had been certified kosher. In the 1920s, Jacobs overcame objections that, like other legumes, coffee beans could not be consumed during Passover, by getting a rabbi from the Lower East Side to opine that they were like berries.Moreover, to encourage Jews to serve Maxwell House coffee during the Passover Seder, Jacobs had the company create and distribute Haggadot. They became “a metonym for Passover, American-style.”DDB’s “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” campaign, Steinberg discloses, had a profound impact on non-Jewish consumers.Before the ads appeared, about the same percentage of Jewish and non-Jewish households purchased the product. In 1975, 26.3 percent of New York-area Jews got their rye bread from retail bakeries, compared to 6.8% of non-Jews.Alas, Steinberg’s conclusion – that Bernbach’s ad “spread the ‘Jewish’ word by expressing that Jewishness didn’t matter” – seems not quite right. Especially when she observes as well that it proclaimed “a message of Jewish strength and selfsatisfaction to all who would listen.”Jewish Mad Men ends with Steinberg’s reminder that advertising, “the sine qua non for navigating contemporary life in America,” is “the pabulum of our consumer-based society.” Even political campaigns package candidates. As ads feed the public a steady diet of insecurity and anxiety, conflate wants with needs, promise unlimited choices, and appeal to identities and experiences, directly and indirectly – all in 30-second sound bites – Steinberg emphasizes, it has become virtually impossible to escape their “all-pervasive clutches.”Might some satisfaction be taken, albeit in a perverse way, in the powerful omnipresence of advertising? Despite rising rates of intermarriage and secularism, Steinberg points out that fully 90% of American Jews take pride in their Jewishness.Thus, “so long as there is Jewish life in America,” and multiple pathways of practicing Jewish values and feeling and acting Jewish,” and it appears there will be for quite some time to come, Steinberg writes, “advertising will be there, monitoring, recording and tightening its grip on this most intriguing market.” ■The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
