Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880-1955 by Sandra McGee Deutsch (review)

Since the field of Latin American Jewish Studies emerged in the United States during the 1980s, a rich and diverse body of scholarship has appeared. As Jeffrey Lesser, Raanan Rein, and Judith Laikin Elkin have discussed, scholars have in recent works been rethinking the field by linking the history of Jews with that of other ethnic groups. In doing so, they look beyond the experience of Ashkenazi Jews and consider the experience of Jews for whom being Jewish is not the primary identity. If community-based studies predominated in the early years, Latin American Jewish history is now incorporating Jewish history into national—and transnational—history, and vice versa.

Sandra McGee Deutsch’s important book on Argentine Jewish women fits into this trend. By shifting the lens of Jewish history to the history of Jewish women, the book transforms our understanding of Argentine Jewish history and provides a new perspective on the formation of the Argentine nation. A central focus is the ways that Jewish women negotiated and contested exclusion, whether stemming from anti-Semitism, class barriers, or the patriarchal norms marking Jewish communities. Jewish women appear here not only as crucial players in their own families and communities but also as actors who intervene in and shape Argentine national identity and the history of labor, immigration, and the Left. The book provides a complex view of Argentine Jews, emphasizing their diversity in terms of geographic origins (Central and Eastern European, and Mediterranean), economic and social status, educational achievement, language use, religious sentiment, and political affiliation. Readers will encounter everything from culinary expertise and courtship rites to antifascist mobilization, philanthropy, and Zionism.

No discussion of Argentine Jewish history would be complete without consideration of the agricultural colonies established under the auspices of the Jewish Colonization Association. Chapter 1 provides a dense description of labor and cultural life in the colonies and adjoining towns. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to Buenos Aires, where the majority of Jews lived by 1947. The hub of their heterogeneous communities (more varied in national origins than those in the countryside), was the neighborhood called Once; however, pockets of many other neighborhoods were also Jewish, and Buenos Aires boasted no exclusively Jewish neighborhood.

Contact with non-Jews on a day-to-day basis was a key factor in Jewish women’s evolving cultural, occupational, and political lives. Through engaging vignettes, Deutsch shows their strategies for survival, upward mobility, and engagement in and outside of the home. In the process, she also provides a comparative perspective on Jewish women’s public presence and leadership roles in rural and urban realms. Subsequent chapters explore the lives of women in various occupational, social, and political spheres. Deutsch underscores Jewish women’s formative role in labor unions and leftist movements and highlights their complicated relationship to Peronism. One crucial turning point was the rise of right-wing nationalism and more virulent forms of anti-Semitism in the 1930s. The Peronist period of the 1940s and 1950s was also a watershed, as a Jewish middle class began to take hold.

Deutsch emphasizes that Crossing Borders is primarily women’s history, rather than gender history. But the book’s in-depth treatment of Jewish women’s varied experiences also provides a compelling gendered perspective on immigration and nationalism in Argentina. A central theme is the way that the inclusion and exclusion of Jewish women revolved around the judgment and control of sexual life and reputation. Deutsch debunks some of the stereotypes of Jewish women as prostitutes but also shows that real and fabricated association with prostitution made women’s standing an urgent concern of Jewish communities bent on inclusion in the Argentine nation. Because sexual transgression was viewed as a sign of Jews’ lack of fitness for the nation, community leaders policed behavior zealously. Work with charitable institutions garnered respect for some Jewish women, even as...