Jews in Vaudevilles between the Monarchy and the US ca. 1900

The monograph Auf die Tour illuminates the participation of Jews in popular culture around the year 1900. The monograph adopts a global perspective on how Jews in Vienna, Budapest, and New York performed together with non-Jews in music halls, cabarets, and variety shows. It investigates the influence of mobility on these performances and on popular culture more generally. The mass popular culture emerging around 1900 and the simultaneous mass migration movements had a mutual influence on each other and constituted a special framework for encounters between Jews and non-Jews. A new quality of mobility connected Vienna, Budapest, and New York and shaped their societies. This mobility was reflected in popular culture: Mobility was addressed by the artists and determined the discourses surrounding popular culture more broadly. Mobility offered manifold opportunities, for example to discuss prejudices, antisemitism, nationalism, and the boundaries of the sexes. Yet it also invited rebukes and accusations against popular culture, for example the charge that it acted as a cover for clandestine prostitution or entailed the downfall of high culture. Due to the mutual influence they exerted on each other, as this monograph argues, popular culture and mobility need to be examined in unison. Auf die Tour therefore positions itself between the fields of global history, migration research, gender studies, and cultural studies. It aims to examine popular culture as a field of interaction between Jews and non - Jews and to garner insights into the diversity of interethnic contacts in everyday popular entertainment through the application of a set of transdisciplinary research questions. The monograph illuminates the following questions through the lens of conceptual considerations regarding identification, similarity, gender, and the category of space: How did Jews and non- Jews interact in popular culture in and between the metropolises of Vienna, Budapest, and New York? What insights can thereby be won into Jewish/non-Jewish relations? On what levels did migration and mobility influence popular culture? In what ways were artists and the scene more generally mobile? How did mobility affect performance practices as well as the songs and plays? What insights do the answers to these questions allow into identifications and gender attributions?