El legado del autoritarismo. Derechos humanos y antisemitismo en la Argentina contemporánea (review)

132 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 communities in Europe. Kurlansky has provided a penetrating analysis ofthe problems and hopes ofEuropean Jewry. However, I would emphasize that the author is at his best in describing the fate of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and Belgium. The style of his writing and the examples he selects work best in dealing with those Jewish communities and are probably least successful with French Jewry. Beyond question A Chosen Few is a moving and penetrating account of the problems, hopes, and inconsistencies ofJewish life in Europe over the last sixty years, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Jewish life in Europe. Harvey Strum Sage Junior College ofAlbany EI legado del autoritarismo. Derechos humanos y antisemitismo en la Argentina contemporanea, edited by Leonardo Senkman and Mario Sznajder. Jerusalem: Harry S Truman Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1995. Available from Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, Jose A. Cabrera 3070, (1186) Buenos Aires, Argentina. 397 pp. The period 1976-1983 was one of the most distressing in Jewish and Argentine history. During those years, a military junta undertook an operation they called Proceso de Reorganizaci6n Nacional (known as the proceso), designed to stabilize a highly unstable society by killing off disruptive social forces. The proceso is defended by Argentine conservatives as a necessary cleansing ofthe body politic, befouled by foreign ideologies; the proceso is condemned by others as a global low point in the abuse of human rights. Twenty years after the beginning ofthe "Dirty War," observers, whether sympathetic to the regime's aims or violently opposed, remain puzzled by many of its aspects. Among the most puzzling elements is the question whether or not the regime was antisemitic. Considering that the proportion of Jewish victims was ten times greater than their proportion to the Argentine population, the answer would seem to be clear enough. Yet the Argentine Jewish leadership maintained at the time that the junta was not antisemitic, that it was acting against forces deemed to be subversive, among whom there were Jewish individuals. Jewish· institutions-schools, libraries, synagogues, summer campscontinued to nmction and in general went unmolested. The question remains: to what extent was the imprisonment, torture, and disappearances of civilians at the hands oftheir own government driven by hatred ofJews? In January 1992, a conference on human rights violations was convened in Jerusalem at the initiative ofEdy Kaufman, director ofHebrew University's Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement ofPeace and a respected human rights advocate. This book, the edited and amplified product of that conference, advances our knowledge of the period by Book Reviews 133 clarifying the actions, motives, and psychology ofits major protagonists. The book is divided into four sections. The first looks at Argentine authoritarianism from social, political, and ideological perspectives. The second section deals with the repression from a legal perspective and contains essays by Israeli and Argentine jurists, including some who sat injudgment ofthejunta in the period ofdemocratization.' The third section examines the Jewish and Israeli dimensions of human rights violations by individuals, institutions, and government. The book closes with elegiac essays by the brother of a desaparecido and by the late Rabbi Marshall Meyer, to whom the book is dedicated. In an introductory essay, Mario Sznajder, ofthc Truman Institute's faculty, examines authoritarianism in a global context. He sees the proceso as a legacy of the national security ideology born of the French experience in Algeria and the United States' engagement in the cold war. The object ofthe armed forces was to eliminate the subversion physically, and indoctrination rendered them impervious to criticism oftheir methods. Sznajder points out that knowledge ofthe barbarities being perpetrated did not lead to action to oppose them, on the part ofeither the U.S. government or the Catholic Church. Within Argentine society, there was "insufficient recognition ofthe need to abide by legal norms." As Luis Roniger notes in the following essay, the use of violence and armed force in Argentina to gain political ends was common before the proceso; a generalized acceptance of violence as routine may have prepared the way for greater excesses. Edy Kaufman quantifies and charts the varieties of human rights violations in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and...