Rights of Passage: The Struggle over Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion in Colombia

This contribution explores the recent debates over Jewish intermarriage and conversion in Colombia, and the extent to which they revived "Old World" and early-immigrant ethnic identities. To this effect it focuses on Bogotá's Sephardic community and tries to elucidate through the speeches, letters, and resolutions stemming from a 1981 High Holiday controversy the non-linear nature of ethnicity and how ethnicity is transformed through struggle. In doing so, this piece also points to a pattern of gendered relations that crossed ethnic and religious boundaries among Jews in Colombia.