Latin American Jewish Cultural Production (review)

As David William Foster points out in his introduction to this volume of essays, Latin American Jewish Cultural Production was sponsored by the Latin American Jewish Studies Association that was founded in 1982 to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the Jewish presence and culture in Latin America. In effect, this publication is testimony to a growing interest in Jewish identity in Latin American scholarship.

The book consists of eleven essays that are divided into four sections: "Latin American Jewish Identity," "The Literary Record," "The Plastic Arts," and "Film and Photography." In addition, there is an "Introduction" by Foster who briefly discusses the history and meanings of "Latin American Jewish Cultural Production," and an "Afterword" by Edward H. Friedman that highlights some of the most salient points of the collection which reinforce several of Foster's observations. Thus, readers will find here a tightly organized volume that unifies a very diverse array of topics and critical approaches pertinent to the study of Jews and their contributions to Latin American history through the arts.

As one might expect, cultural assimilation and identity are central to each of the essays, which collectively focus on Argentina and Brazil, and to a lesser degree on Mexico and Chile. Although Foster regrets not offering broader geographical coverage of Jews in Latin America, he explains that Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have the largest Jewish populations in the region and, consequently, the expectation is that Latin American Jewish Cultural Production will motivate other scholars to supplement and complement the material presented.

At a time when multiple social movements throughout Latin America are challenging traditional concepts of nation and national culture by championing the rights of Indians, blacks, women, and gays—among numerous other socially and politically marginalized groups—a collection of essays about Jews in Latin America becomes especially relevant. In one fashion or another, each author addresses the multiple meanings of being both a Jew and a Latin American in countries where the national mestizo project of racial and ethnic inclusion has paradoxically attempted to make invisible and to silence cultural difference. The Jews who emerge in this volume struggle with that historical reality of exclusion in light of a series of circumstances that inevitably remind them of their difference, albeit obliquely and from a distance. The Holocaust, Israel as both mythical homeland and modern state, anti-Semitism, linguistic remnants from Yiddish that persist in present-day Spanish or Portuguese, and myriad religious and cultural traditions are just a few catalysts that awaken a sense of Jewish identity in the imagination and memory of the artists who are studied in Latin American Jewish Cultural Production.

Obviously, readers will be drawn to those essays that speak most compellingly to their specific interests and sensitivities. For this reviewer, in particular, Berta Waldman's piece on Jewish identity in Brazil, Amalia Ran's study on Israel as abstract concept or concrete reality, Marcio Seligmann-Silva's comments on the way some have written about the Shoah (Holocaust) in Brazil, and Naomi Lindstrom's reflections on Jewish cultural traces in Brazil's monumental author, Clarice Lispector, who during her lifetime rarely spoke openly of her Jewish background, resonate for their clarity and provocative interpretations.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these essays along with the others which complete the volume constitute a superficial and anachronistic exercise in religious or ethnic essentialism. Rather, the contributors situate their essays in the broader context of identity politics. While it was quite reasonable for first-generation Latin American Jews to use their art as a means of ethnic affirmation in their newly adopted foreign homes, especially since their memories of the proverbial "old country" and World War II were still vivid, it was also understandable that the younger artists of Jewish heritage, who are products of cultural assimilation and integration, would understand differently their role as Latin American artists. At the same time, this change of artistic identities coincided with the emergence of cultural studies as...