A New Exhibit at the Museum at Eldridge Street Showcases 'The Jewish Ghetto in Postcards'
Fellow devotees of postcards and stamps! You can get a good fix at a nifty small exhibit at the Museum at Eldridge Street in New York called “The Jewish Ghetto in Postcards.” It presents cards from the Blavatnik Archive, a non-profit foundation that preserves ephemera related to 20th century Jewish and world history.
Once upon a time, postcards were all the rage. “The Golden Age of the Postcard” was from 1905 to 1915—over 300 billion were produced in that decade alone. (One of my great joys is visiting thrift stores with boxes of old postcards; I have a nice little collection from the early 1900s of images of my home state of Rhode Island, and when I’m visiting family in Milwaukee, I look for postcards of old New York City, which are harder to find around these parts.) The earliest postcards had no room for a message; the recipient’s address took up the entire back of the card. People sometimes sneaked a cramped line of text into whatever white space they could find on the picture side.