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  • Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios ed. by Haim Avni et al.
  • Alan Astro
Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios Edited by Haim Avni, Judit Bokser Liwerant, Sergio Dellapergola, Margalit Bejerano, and Leonardo Senkman. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2011. 870 pp.

If any volume can claim to give a series of diverse snapshots of a discipline, it is certainly this hefty Spanish-language volume on Latin American Jewish studies. It is made up of an extensive editors’ introduction followed by thirty articles, almost all by well-known scholars. Topics covered include the comparison of Latin American Jewry with other Jewish communities throughout the world; political developments as they have affected Jews of Latin America; Jewish education, demography, and organizations on that continent; and Jewish writers from there in Spanish, Portuguese and Yiddish. (For this Yiddishist, the last-mentioned piece, by Perla Sneh, is a particularly welcome component, since Latin American Yiddish literature has been greatly under-studied.)

Latin American Jewish studies has become a significant, if necessarily marginal, subfield of both Latin American studies and Jewish studies. This dual identity of the discipline is reflected in the title of volume, which translates as “Belonging and Otherness: Jews in/of Latin America: 40 Years of Change.” The subjects of study are thus portrayed as caught between belonging to and feeling a sense of otherness from Latin America; but the volume also explores their identification with and alienation from various components of Jewish identity (Jewish peoplehood, the Jewish religion, local Jewish community institutions, Zionism as an ideology, and the actual state of Israel). The en/de in the title (“Jews in Latin America” versus “Jews of Latin America”) is, as the editors themselves admit, a rephrasing of the old conundrum of whether Jews are, first and foremost, Jews or members of the societies where they live. Thus another book by one of the contributors to the volume, Raanan Rein, is entitled Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines (Boston: Brill, 2010). This question becomes epistemologically self-reflexive because, as Rein cogently sets forth, the field itself is loosely divided between two kinds of researchers: [End Page 182] those whose work falls squarely within Jewish studies (considering such topics as the impacts of antisemitism or the relationship of local communities to world Jewish organizations and the state of Israel); and those whose production fits in better with Latin American or diaspora studies. The latter scholars regard Jews as constituting one among several minority groups (such as Italians or Armenians in Argentina or Lebanese in Mexico) in a continent of basically “monistic” societies (Pertenencia, 244) that do not subscribe to ideologies of pluralism and diversity characteristic of their neighbors to the north. (Incidentally, de in Spanish means “from” as well as “of,” so that “judíos de Latinoamérica” may, as “Jews from Latin America,” imply an even greater distance than “judíos en Latinoamérica.” In fact, many of the contributors to this volume are themselves Latin Americans who have emigrated to Israel, and one of the many topics studied is the community that olim from that continent make up—or do not quite coalesce into.)

The “forty years of change” in the title refers in part to the burgeoning research in a field that has benefited much from the vogue first of ethnic studies, then of cultural studies. More importantly: the last forty years are when Latin America went from mostly authoritarian régimes to democratic ones, but also saw great economic instability. The effect on Jewish communities was often quite direct. Thus the Argentinean dictatorship led many Jews to emigrate (to Israel, Western Europe, the United States, and other Latin American countries), and the involvement in leftist politics that put many Jews at risk was often accompanied by an idealization of the collectivist strain of Zionism—even while Israel refrained from criticizing the régime in Buenos Aires. (The issue is further complicated by pressure exerted by Israel in favor of Jewish prisoners, the most famous case being that of journalist Jacobo Timerman.) However, democratic elections have sometimes brought to power populist leaders who are...

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