Jewish Latin America: Seven Essays

The americas are a big place, far bigger than the United States. In shifting our gaze away from more familiar Jewish studies landscapes, we find not only thriving Jewish histories in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking lands to the south but also an instructively broad understanding of Jewish experience and Jewish studies alike. The seven scholars participating in this forum—Adriana M. Brodsky, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Devi Mays, Pablo Palomino, Raanan Rein, Michael Rom, and Ilan Stavans—give a glimpse into the state of the game. The scholars, belonging to different generations and disciplinary traditions, were asked to choose a character in history to showcase the twisting paths along which their research has taken them. Though focused on people active in the twentieth century, the topics addressed stretch from medieval Spain before the expulsion in 1492 to the colonial period and up until recent times.

Latin American Jewish studies often seems oriented more toward general Latin American studies than American Jewish studies. The present forum bears witness not only to the sophistication of this scholarship but also to its interconnectedness with other areas. Remarkable to all these stories is their insistent globalism; the local is distinctively drawn but presumes—and embeds Jewish experience in—expansive networks. The essays make us see how Jewish life is indecipherable outside of the cultural webs that connect not only to Spain but to western and eastern Europe, Africa, the Far East, the Ottoman Empire, and North America. The latter is almost an afterthought. The impact of the northern hemisphere's twentieth century is felt here, though less in the form of the Holocaust and Israel (often the focus of scholars of Europe and the Middle East) and more in the legacies of communism and fascism, which striate Jewish culture, identity, and production. Latin American Jewish studies also offers an alternative model of diaspora studies, one that operates without the gravitational omnipresence of either Israel or the United States' provincialism. These studies introduce a cast of fascinating actors—many of them women, most of them artists and intellectuals—whose ongoing engagement with the world disrupts the linear vectors of immigration or aliyah and sets Jewish Latin America in a dynamic global circulation of people and ideas.