The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone ed. by Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein (review)

This collection of essays succeeds at its basic premise: it offers genuinely new approaches to understanding the Jewish experience in Argentina. The authors state in their introduction that their compilation of essays addresses topics that have either not been discussed before or that are here discussed from a renewed perspective—and they deliver. This book creates a canvas that brings the Jewish experience in Argentina to life. It is unique in its focuses on popular culture and the life of unaffiliated Jews, and on its focus on social and cultural history over political history, even though several of the essays in the volume address political history as well.

The discussions about Argentine Jewish popular culture cluster around specific topics. Three scholars present research on women and gender: Adriana Brodsky's chapter on Sephardi beauty-queen contests, Shari Jacobson's study of newly ultraorthodox women in connection to the culture of therapy in Buenos Aires and the recent legacy of the dirty war in the nineteen nineties, and Mir Yarfitz's piece about community policing on marriage regulation by the organization that helped end the white-slave trade.

Some examples of this book's focus on social history include Mollie Lewis Nouwen's research on crime perpetrated in the "Jewish" neighborhood of Once in Buenos Aires, Alejandro Dujovne's article on the cultural trends produced by Jewish publishing houses, and Ariel Svarch's chapter on the "Don Jacobo en la Argentina" cartoon as representative of the integration of Jews into Argentine mainstream society.

With regards to the lives of unaffiliated Jews, Raanan Rein writes about César Tiempo and how his Peronist views mirrored the identity politics of his time. Tzvi Tal's chapter on Jews in Argentine cinema echoes pieces by Ariel Svarch and José C. Moya that showed the story of Argentine's Jews' comfortable insertion in mainstream society. Tal discusses movies that portray Jews as typical middle-class Argentines. Moya's contribution stands out in the book for his broad comparative perspective of Jewish life with other immigrant communities in Argentina and Jewish communities abroad.

Emmanuel Kahan and David Sheinin also offer cultural comparisons. Kahan challenges the general consensus about the differential treatment Jews received during the 1970s Dirty War and Sheinin discusses Argentine foreign policy in the Middle East in relation to the Cold War. Finally, Beatrice Gurwitz looks at the intergenerational conflicts that arose as Jews became more politically involved at the university.

There is also a group of essays dedicated to the representation of the Holocaust by Argentine Jewish intellectuals. Edna Aizenberg's article explores the connection between the written word and illustrations in Alberto Gerchunoff's early public condemnations of the Shoá in the printed press, Federico Finchelstein's study of Jorge Luis Borges's intellectual intervention against the local and global effects of fascism, and Natasha Zaretsky's chapter about the community organizations that responded to the Amia bombing in 1994. She reflects on the role of testimony on identity formation and political activism.

As a collection, this book transforms the traditional image of Argentine Jews as "persecuted ethnics, idealized agricultural workers, [and] political actors in Zionist politics" (p. 5). I believe it succeeds in portraying a highly layered, complex, and accurate portrait of the lives of Jews in Argentina.

The most valuable contribution of this volume to the fields of History and Cultural Studies is its celebration of the fact that Jews in Argentina identify as a group for many reasons other than being victims of anti-Semitism. This book manages to balance a controversial comparison of Jewish life in Argentina with mainstream culture and other ethnic groups, while at the same time depicting unique cultural and social aspects of the lives of Jews in Argentina in the last century.

This book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in immigration to...