Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans ed. by Jeffrey Lesser, Raanan Rein (review)

Book Reviews These minor critiques should not detract from the book’s importance. Rausch has provided an important decentering of Latin American history, explaining Colombian history from the periphery and from the middle. Further, it analyzes the emergence of a significant center of social, economic , and political importance, one of many such cities throughout Latin America that boomed in the second half of the twentieth century. Hopefully more studies like this one are forthcoming. Nathan Clarke Department of History Minnesota State University - Moorhead RETHINKING JEWISH-LATIN AMERICANS. By Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, eds. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2008, p. 304, $27.95. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein have vast experience in the field of Jewish Latin American literature and culture, and in this book they come together to bring new light to different aspects of Jewish Latin American ethnicity. As the editors explain in their introduction, this collection of essays tries to address the gap between discourse of state and political organizations, on the one hand, and social realities and practices, on the other. Most sources tend to emphasize xenophobic attitudes towards Jews in Latin America, as well as often times vacillating between claims that Jews are highly integrated into their societies and at the same time ghettoized. The literature in this area has, to a large extent, marginalized the Jewish experience in Latin America (4). The editors propose new approaches to the study of Jewish Latin America to bring clarification and correction to the existent bibliography. The different authors invited to contribute address questions about ethnicity, national identity, and Diaspora. They show that “Jews are not unique” (5) but it is their Diasporic condition that makes them “like everyone else” (5). Latin American Jews are studied under a national context while their particular ethnic, national, and Diasporic experience is respected. With that in mind, Latin American Jews are not only Diasporic but also national, like any other minority that composes the rainbow of Latin American societies. Argentina and Brazil receive special attention as the countries with the largest Jewish-Latin American populations; nevertheless , each chapter presents questions and research approaches that can be applied to any minority group in any country. The editors present two essays that offer some useful historical information regarding the immigration of Jews to these countries, providing clarification to the reader less familiar with the subject. In chapter two, “New Approaches to Ethnicity and Diaspora in Twentieth-Century Latin America,” Lesser and Rein elaborate how the almost ten million Latin Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East, Asia, or Eastern Europe, or whose ancestry was characterized 79 The Latin Americanist, June 2009 religiously as non-Catholic, can be seen and studied. Academic production on ethnicity has given little attention to these minorities. The authors discuss the critical aspect of descriptive language in scholarship on ethnicity , the contents of scholarship on the Jewish past, and finalize with new approaches to implement Jewish-Latin American studies. Lesser is the author of chapter three, “How the Jews Became Japanese and Other Stories of Nation and Ethnicity.” Here Lesser makes a crossethnic comparison among Jewish, Arab, Japanese, and Koreans immigrants in Brazil, focusing on the question of national culture and how it creates similarities in some areas of ethnic life. This article calls the reader’s attention to many myths and misconceptions common in Brazil. In chapter four, “What’s in a Stereotype? The Case of Jewish Anarchists in Argentina,” José C. Moya offers a very detailed study of what it meant to be “Jewish” in early twentieth-century Argentina. Like other immigrants, Jews occupied a broad socioeconomic spectrum within the host society (80). At a time when three quarters of the population had been born somewhere else, Jewish ethnicity could not be constructed; their immigration and adaptation experience represented the norm in a society of foreigners and newcomers. “Beyond the State and Ideology, Immigration of the Jewish Community to Brazil, 1937–1945” by Roney Cytrynowicz describes a period when Jewish institutional activities flourished in spite of discursive xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Contrary to what many historians have depicted, Jews were in fact able to apply several successful strategies to confront the rules of...