The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory (review)

What sets the Jewish diaspora apart from other nationalities and ethnicities who immigrated to Latin America? Other immigrant groups contended with persistent discrimination, even if anti-Semitism was particularly virulent in certain corners of the region. To be sure, for some immigrants acculturation had been facilitated by a shared religious heritage, but Jews certainly were not the only immigrant group that sought to maintain their spiritual and cultural traditions in their new homes in the face of intolerance. Nor was it their relatively small numbers or their propensity to live in Latin America's cities that distinguished them from other immigrants. This set of thirteen essays by an unusual assortment of scholars, artists, poets and writers from Latin America, Canada, Israel, and the United States—many of whom have lived that diasporic experience first-hand—provides ample evidence that there was not one common Jewish experience. Immigrants were neither cut from the same cloth nor did they leave their homelands for the same reasons. Their motivations for leaving shaped them as much as the challenges they faced in their new homes. As these essays make clear, some countries were unexpectedly welcoming, while in others, the reception was decidedly more ambivalent.

Since nearly half of the region's 500,000 Latin American Jews live in Argentina, it is perhaps fitting that six essays in The Jewish Diaspora explore how Argentine Jews have coped with a persistent anti-Semitism that has refused to abate. Scholars Rosalie Sitman, Raanan Rein, David Sheinin, Beatriz Gurevich, artist Raquel Partnoy and her mother, writer Alicia Partnoy, all contribute essays that, with one exception, focus on the last four decades, a period that encompassed Mossad's capture of Adolf Eichmann, the Dirty War and its aftermath, and the 1992 and 1994 bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA (Israel-Argentine Mutual Aid Association) building, respectively. Rein's, Sheinin's and Gurevich essays explore why anti-Semitism surfaced at discrete moments and how that prejudice elicited a range of responses within the Argentine Jewish community. They also convincingly illustrate that each of these episodes has to be placed in the larger context of the fissures within Argentine society and show how political actors across the spectrum often seized the opportunity to manipulate and inflame public opinion to justify their own policies and objectives. The Partnoys' essays are especially poignant evocations of the Dirty War's pernicious impact; mother Alicia compares and contrasts the Dirty War with the Holocaust, while daughter Raquel describes how art can serve alternatively as a mode of resistance, a method of seeking justice, and a means of personally coming to terms with an unimaginable past. Rosalie Sitman's essay stands out because it goes against the discriminatory grain with a revealing examination of SUR, a literary magazine whose gentile editors spoke out against anti-Semitism between the 1920s and 1940s, while it railed against right-wing reactionaries, the military, and the Catholic Church.

A number of essays examine how Jews struggled to maintain their collective identities while becoming acculturated to their new surroundings. Ilan Stavans offers a nostalgic elegy of his grandmother Bobe Bela, who clung tenaciously to her beloved Yiddish language, while abandoning Polish and Russian since those idioms represented chapters of her past that she preferred to forget. Yet she writes her diary in Spanish and Stavans drafts his reply to her in Spanish as well, attesting to the taproots that Mexico have sunk into them. In Stavans' deft hands, language becomes a tool for maintaining and constructing identity, while selectively preserving and obscuring memories. In "While Waiting for the Ferry to Cuba," anthropologist Ruth Behar offers a revealingly personal account of her making of a documentary video about Cuba's Sephardic Jews. In the process of making that video Behar explores her own hybridic identity while gently coaxing her recalcitrant Cuban-Sephardic dad to unlock sentimental recollections of...