“I believe,” wrote the German-Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin in 1932, “that I would gain numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards, if I were to leaf through it again today.”
As for many of his generation, Benjamin related to his collection of postcards as an archive of memories. Images on cardstock served as touchstones of childhood recollections and familial nostalgia; of trips taken, postcards sent, and experiences shared. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as folklore scholar Galit Hasan-Rokem teaches, postcards were also markers of mobility. The memories Benjamin and others captured in their personal histories of epistolary exchange also pointed to their lives as defined by movement, whether traveling for leisure, to migrate, or when forced.
The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture is pleased to announce the recent donation of the Barbara R. and Steven M. Balkin Judaica Post Card Collection—a collection that contains over 250 postcards depicting Jewish life from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Postcards in this collection depict everyday scenes of modern Jewish culture from around the globe—from Wolfie’s Restaurant and Sandwich Shop in Miami Beach, to the once grand synagogue of Verdun, France, to a bustling street scene in the le quartier juif (The Jewish Quarter) of Oran, Algeria. Particularly prominent in the collection are Yiddish-language greeting cards. Alongside whimsical New Year cards, the collection includes loves notes of various kinds—some for romantic partners, others for children to send to their mothers.
Over the past year, digitized cards from the collection have been uploaded in a series of curated galleries first organized by Lily Gray (Class of ’21). To access the galleries, including the inaugural “Greetings from America!,” please scroll down. In September 2021, we will also launch a gallery featuring New Year’s Cards from around the world.
For researchers interested in accessing the physical cards, please contact the Director of the Mayrent Institute. All cards are held at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies Library.
The Balkin Postcard Collection has been made freely available to the public as an educational and scholarly resource by the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture. Please contact the Mayrent Institute if you are interested in reproducing any of the postcards contained in the collection. Some of the postcards in the collection also contain handwritten notes. We welcome inquiries from the authors and recipients of these notes, as well their descendants.
For more information on the history of Jewish postcards, see sources below:
Deitsch, Elka, and Sharon Liberman Mintz. Past Perfect: The Jewish Experience in Early 20th Century Postcard [an Exhibition October 7-December 30, 1997]. New York City: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1998.
Hasan-Rokem, Galit. “Jews as Postcards, or Postcards as Jews.” Jewish Quarterly Review 90, no. 4 (2009): 504–46.
Smith, Ellen. “Greetings from Faith: Early-Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards.” In The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, 229–48. University of California Press, 2001.
