The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce that Joseph Malherek is the winner of the 2016 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize in German-Jewish Studies for his article Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Post-War Ideal, featured in the 2016 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
His article examines the role of émigré architect Victor Gruen in advancing a social-democratic ideology that would find an unlikely application in the context of consumer capitalism in the United States. It argues that Gruen was able to channel the ideals of social democracy into his vision of the shopping centre, intended as a recreation of the best aspects of urbanity in a suburban ‘desert’ that lacked any community centre. The article focuses on the formation of Gruen’s values in interwar Vienna and his early experiences in the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s, where he embraced his identity as a Jewish refugee by managing a theatre troupe of exiled Viennese, and where he established himself as an architect and designer in part through his contacts in the community of émigré Jews in New York.
Joseph Malherek holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and is the author of Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968 (Central European University Press, 2022). He specializes in the history of capitalism.
