The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce Angelina Palmén as the winner of the 2026 LBI Year Book Essay Prize for her essay, Rethinking the Jewish Public Sphere: The Case of the Imperial German Trade Journal Der Confectionair. Palmén’s work will be published in the forthcoming edition of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
In her article, Palmén makes the case for re-evaluating the concept of the Jewish public sphere by using the German trade journal Der Confectionair (1886–1936) as its point of departure. Der Confectionair – renamed Der Konfektionär during the First World War – was the most widely circulated German-language publication for the textile industry during the Imperial period and the pre-eminent journal for the trade on the European continent in the interwar period. While functioning first and foremost as a mouthpiece and communal forum for German commercial clothiers, the paper also addressed issues specific to Jewish business owners and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and issues that were thought to be of interest to women readers, and perhaps Jewish women readers in particular, on the other. Palmén’s essay draws on public sphere theory alongside intersectionality and uses ‘Jewishness’ as an analytic lens to understand how German-Jewish public and communal discourse operated outside of the designated Jewish public sphere of the Jewish press and explicitly Jewish organizations. In line with recent studies in central and eastern European Jewish history, it seeks to move beyond the binary of ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ for understanding the development of Jewish public culture and political communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, the essay forms an empirical contribution to the theoretical debate surrounding public spheres by homing in on their co-constructed nature.
Angelina Palmén is a research fellow at the Department of History at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she is also affiliated with the research and digitisation project Gender and Work. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2024 and was a finalist for the 2025 Coleman Prize for best dissertation by the Association of Business Historians. Her research has been supported by the Center for Jewish History in New York, the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Leo Baeck Institute London, the Posen Society of Fellows, the Waldemar von Frenckell Foundation, and the Finnish Concordia Fund. Her current project, financed by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, focuses on Jewish women and social entrepreneurship in Stockholm and Berlin in the early twentieth century.
We extend our warmest congratulations to Angelina Palmén on this achievement.
A new Essay Prize call for 2027 will be published shortly.
