Jewish Latin America – serie

Originally published in Spanish in 1994, this is a humorous yet moving exploration of a Jewish family's history, as seen through the eyes of three generations of women.

Winner of the Jewish Music Special Interest Group Paper Prize of 2018Mazal Tov, Amigos! Jews and Popular Music in the Americas seeks to explore the sphere of Jews and Jewishness in the popular music arena in the Americas. It offers a wide-ranging review of new and old trends from an interdisciplinary standpoint, including history, musicology, ethnomusicology, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and even Queer studies. The contribution of Jews to the development of the music industry in the United States, Argentina, or Brazil cannot be measured on a single scale. Hence, these essays seek to explore the sphere of Jews and popular music in the Americas and their multiple significances, celebrating the contribution of Jewish musicians and Jewishness to the development of new musical genres and ideas.

This volume offers a re-examination of some of the prevalent paradigms in Latin American Jewish Studies and an instigation to further explorations in this area. It sets out from an interdisciplinary standpoint, comprising literature, culture, history, cinematography, music and visual arts. This collection of articles seeks a wider range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives concerning Latin American Jewish experiences, and thereby offers a framework for innovative as well as traditional modes of analysis. It elaborates on themes of Jewish identity as represented in the history, cultures and societies of Latin America in the current era of hybridism and transnationalism.

Congratulations to Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein whose edited volume has been chosen as the winner of the 2013 Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Prize! The New Jewish Argentina aims at filling in important lacunae in the existing historiography of Jewish Argentines. Moving away from the political history of the organized community, most articles are devoted to social and cultural history, including unaffiliated Jews, women and gender, criminals, printing presses and book stores. These essays, written by scholars from various countries, consider the tensions between the national and the trans-national and offer a mosaic of identities which is relevant to all interested in Jewish history, Argentine history and students of ethnicity and diaspora. This collection problematizes the existing image of Jewish-Argentines and looks at Jews not just as persecuted ethnics, idealized agricultural workers, or as political actors in Zionist politics. "This book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in immigration to Latin America, Ethnic History, and Jewish Studies, but its readership could extend to anybody who is interested in this chapter of social and cultural history."Ariana Huberman, Haverford College

In Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina, Dalia Wassner presents an integrated analysis of the civic work and literary oeuvre of Marcos Aguinis, who served as Secretary of Culture during Argentina’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Situating his writings in their historical and intellectual context, Wassner explores Aguinis’s engagement with the dialectic of modernization as a Jewish public intellectual equally dedicated to fostering Argentine democracy and to inscribing himself in the annals of westernization. Encompassing intellectual history, literary criticism, Latin American history, and Jewish studies, Wassner’s work illuminates the intersecting roles of Jews and public intellectuals in bringing democracy to post-dictatorship Argentina.

Unwelcome Exiles. Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 reconstructs a largely unknown history: during the Second World War, the Mexican government closed its doors to Jewish refugees expelled by the Nazis. In this comprehensive investigation, based on archives in Mexico and the United States, Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.” Through her analysis of Mexico’s role in the rescue of refugees in the 1930s and 40s, Gleizer challenges the country’s traditional image of itself as a nation that welcomes the persecuted.This book is a revised and expanded translation of the Spanish El exilio incómodo. México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945, which received an Honorable Mention in the LAJSA Book Prize Award 2013.

Winner of an Honorable Mention in the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA) 2017 Book Award competition for an outstanding book on a Latin American Jewish topic in the social sciences or humanities published in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.Landscapes of Memory and Impunity chronicles the aftermath of the most significant terrorist attack in Argentina’s history—the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed eighty-five people, wounded hundreds, and destroyed the primary Jewish mutual aid society. This volume, edited by Annette H. Levine and Natasha Zaretsky, presents the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary work about this decisive turning point in Jewish Argentine history—examining the ongoing impact of this violence and the impunity that followed. Chapters explore political protest movements, musical performance, literature, and acts of commemoration. They emphasize the intersecting themes of memory, narrative and representation, Jewish belonging, citizenship, and justice—critical fault lines that frame Jewish life after the AMIA attack, while also resonating with historical struggles for pluralism in Argentina.

The New Ethnic Studies in Latin America aims at going beyond and against much of Jewish Latin American historiography, situating Jewish-Latin Americans in the larger multi-ethnic context of their countries. Senior and junior scholars from various countries joined together to challenge commonly held assumptions, accepted ideas, and stable categories about ethnicity in Latin America in general and Jewish experiences on this continent in particular.This volume brings to the discussions on Jewish life in Latin America less heard voices of women, non-affiliated Jews, and intellectuals. Community institutions are not at center stage, conflicts and tensions are brought to the fore, and a multitude of voices pushes aside images of homogeneity. Authors in this tome look at Jews’ multiple homelands: their country of birth, their country of residence, and their imagined homeland of Zion."This volume brings together an important series of chapters that pushes ethnic studies to greater complexity; therefore, this work is critical in laying the foundation for what Jeffrey Lesser has called the new architecture of ethnic studies in Latin America." - Joel Horowitz, St. Bonaventure University, in: E.I.A.L. 28.2 (2017)"Overall, this collection serves as a stimulating invitation to scholars of Latin American ethnic studies. It offers multiple models of scholarship that go beyond and against traditional narratives of Jewish Latin America." -Lily Pearl Balloffet, University of California Santa Cruz, in: J.Lat Amer. Stud. 50 (2018)"These essays manage to bring to the fore stories of Jews whose journeys have been sidelined until now. Their stories demonstrate that identitiesare always a work in progress, a continuous dance between ancestry, history, and culture." - Ariana Huberman, Haverford College, in: American Jewish History 103.2 (2019)

At first glance, this book might appear to be yet another study on anti-Semitism in Argentina, supplementing those portraying this Southern Cone country as a Nazi shelter and perpetrator of anti-Jewish acts. Accounts of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983), which was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of people of Jewish origin, have contributed to this image. Memories that Lie a Little, however, challenges this view, shedding new light on Jewish experiences during the military dictatorship. Based on extensive archival research, it maps the positions of a wide range of Jewish organizations toward the military regime, opening the way for a better understanding of this complex historical period. If, then, the dictatorship was not actually anti-Semitic in the strictest sense of the term, why is it remembered as such? Historical research is complemented here by a reconstruction of the ways in which the notion of the regime’s anti-Semitism was crafted from early on, and an examination of its uses, as well as the changes that this narrative underwent in the following years.

Scholarship on ethnicity in modern Latin America has traditionally understood the region’s various societies as fusions of people of European, indigenous, and/or African descent. These are often deployed as stable categories, with European or “white” as a monolith against which studies of indigeneity or blackness are set. The role of post-independence immigration from eastern and western Europe—as well as from Asia, Africa, and Latin-American countries—in constructing the national ethnic landscape remains understudied. The contributors of this volume focus their attention on Jewish, Arab, non-Latin European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and their experiences in their “new” homes. Rejecting exceptionalist and homogenizing tendencies within immigration history, contributors advocate instead an approach that emphasizes the locally- and nationally-embedded nature of ethnic identification.

A Jewish weapons manufacturer during the American Civil War, a Jewish-Canadian chair of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Board, and Jewish-Argentine guerrilla fighters—these are some of the individuals discussed in this first-of-its-kind volume. It brings together some of the best new works on armed Jews in the Americas. Links between Jews and their ties to weapons are addressed through multiple cultural, political, social, and ideological contexts, thus breaking down longstanding, stilted myths in many societies about Jews and weaponry. Anti-Semitism and Jewish self-defense, Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and Jewish-American gangsters as ethnic heroes form part of the little-researched topic of Jews and arms in the Americas.

This is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the failed struggle to extradite war criminal Walther Rauff and to the years of the military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. By the 1970s, Israel seemed a strong pro-Western barrier to the expansion of communism and Islamic fundamentalism.

How can a child born in the Russian Pale at the end of the 19th century become one of the most celebrated journalists in Latin America and a writer admired by Jorge Luis Borges? In this biography, Mónica Szurmuk, delves into the different aspects of the life of writer, journalist, and politician Alberto Gerchuinoff. Thoroughly researched in four different continents, this book is as much an account of the life of Alberto Gerchunoff, as an investigation into the Jewish world of the first half of the twentieth century, and the different spaces where Jewish and Latin American cultural and political life intersect.

This book puts two of the most significant Jewish Diaspora communities outside of the U.S. into conversation with one another. At times contributor-pairs directly compare unique aspects of two Jewish histories, politics, or cultures. At other times, they juxtapose. Some chapters focus on literature, poetry, theatre, or sport; others on immigration, antisemitism, or health. Taken together, the essays in Promised Lands North and South offer sparkling insight and new depth on the modern Jewish global experience.

Aside from the prominent perpetrators such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele or Klaus Barbie, there were numerous other cases of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers from Germany and Austria who ended up in Latin America after 1945. Their life trajectories, professional activities, and contacts to local elites in their new homes have hardly been subject to systematic research to date. Their new lives in Latin America, their careers e.g. as diplomats, secret service agents or scientists are therefore a main focus of this volume. The biographies of these people and their networks are woven into the larger political, social, and scientific contexts of postwar Europe and Latin America, especially in the early Cold War period."...its most notable achievement is shedding light on lesser known figures: scientists, university professors, government officials, diplomats, spies, arms dealers, businessmen, and even amateur Nazi hunters in South America." Ernesto Bohoslavsky, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, April 2025

“The book represents an innovative and outstanding contribution to the economic, social, and business history of Argentina. It focuses on the factors that conditioned the emergence and development, between 1930 and the early 1960s, of large industrial enterprises founded by Jewish immigrants, with emphasis on the absence of community financial institutions to support their creation and expansion. lt is characterized both by the relevance of the issues it addresses and by the author'sability to conduct original and solid research based on a non-dogmatic conceptual framework, on the analysis of a wide variety of unexplored sources, and the virtuous combination of different scales of observation.”Professor Dr. María Inés Barbero, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Coming of Age as Syrian Jewish Mexicans is a linguistic ethnography of Shami and Halebi Jews in contemporary Mexico City. Through a focus on language in everyday life – including narrative, humor, and Arabic and Hebrew “heritage words” - the book explores how young adults negotiate oft-stigmatized, diasporic identities amid national shifts toward neoliberalism and the transnational expansion of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy. Accessible yet richly theorized, the book introduces linguistic anthropological concepts and guides readers through their application to audiovisual data. This innovative approach promotes empathetic understanding of a lesser-known Jewish Latin American context and opens new lines of inquiry into the phenomenon of diaspora in a rapidly changing world.