This volume is devoted to Jewish Argentines in the twentieth century, and deliberately avoids restrictive or prescriptive definitions of Jews and Judaism. Instead, it focuses on people whose identities include a Jewish component, irrespective of social class and gender, and regardless of whether they are religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, or affiliated with the organized Jewish community.
If you attend a soccer match in Buenos Aires of the local Atlanta Athletic Club, you will likely hear the rival teams chanting anti-Semitic slogans. This is because the neighborhood of Villa Crespo has long been considered a Jewish district, and its soccer team, Club Atlético Atlanta, has served as an avenue of integration into Argentine culture. Through the lens of this neighborhood institution, Raanan Rein offers an absorbing social history of Jews in Latin America. Since the Second World War, there has been a conspicuous Jewish presence among the fans, administrators and presidents of the Atlanta soccer club. For the first immigrant generation, belonging to this club was a way of becoming Argentines. For the next generation, it was a way of maintaining ethnic Jewish identity. Now, it is nothing less than family tradition for third generation Jewish Argentines to support Atlanta. The soccer club has also constituted one of the few spaces where both Jews and non-Jews, affiliated Jews and non-affiliated Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, have interacted. The result has been an active shaping of the local culture by Jewish Latin Americans to their own purposes. Offering a rare window into the rich culture of everyday life in the city of Buenos Aires created by Jewish immigrants and their descendants, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina represents a pioneering study of the intersection between soccer, ethnicity, and identity in Latin America and makes a major contribution to Jewish History, Latin American History, and Sports History.
Congratulations to Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein whose edited volume has been chosen as the winner of the 2013 Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Prize! The New Jewish Argentina aims at filling in important lacunae in the existing historiography of Jewish Argentines. Moving away from the political history of the organized community, most articles are devoted to social and cultural history, including unaffiliated Jews, women and gender, criminals, printing presses and book stores. These essays, written by scholars from various countries, consider the tensions between the national and the trans-national and offer a mosaic of identities which is relevant to all interested in Jewish history, Argentine history and students of ethnicity and diaspora. This collection problematizes the existing image of Jewish-Argentines and looks at Jews not just as persecuted ethnics, idealized agricultural workers, or as political actors in Zionist politics. "This book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in immigration to Latin America, Ethnic History, and Jewish Studies, but its readership could extend to anybody who is interested in this chapter of social and cultural history." Ariana Huberman, Haverford College
Impure Migration investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jewish people displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitution was one of very few ways they could escape the limited options in their home countries, and Jewish men facilitate their transit and the organization of their work and social lives. Instead of marginalizing this story or reading it as a degrading chapter in Latin American Jewish history, Impure Migration interrogates a complicated social landscape to reveal that sex work is in fact a critical part of the histories of migration, labor, race, and sexuality.
“A much-needed monograph on the role of Sephardic Jews in Argentina, and . . . an important contribution to the study of Jews in Latin America overall” (Choice). At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East were called Turcos (“Turks”). Seen as distinct from Ashkenazim, Sephardi Jews weren’t even identified as Jews. Yet the story of Sephardi Jewish identity has been deeply impactful on Jewish history across the world. Adriana M. Brodsky follows the history of Sephardim as they arrived in Argentina, created immigrant organizations, founded synagogues and cemeteries, and built strong ties with coreligionists around the country. Brodsky demonstrates how fragmentation based on areas of origin gave way to the gradual construction of a single Sephardi identity. This unifying identity is predicated both on Zionist identification (with the State of Israel) and “national” feelings (for Argentina), and that Sephardi Jews assumed leadership roles in national Jewish organizations once they integrated into the much larger Askenazi community. Rather than assume that Sephardi identity was fixed and unchanging, Brodsky highlights the strategic nature of this identity, constructed both from within the various Sephardi groups and from the outside, and reveals that Jewish identity must be understood as part of the process of becoming Argentine.
Winner of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Award 2020 An examination of the social and cultural repercussions of Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused the transformation of cultural, social, and political milieus in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands. In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture, Mariusz Kałczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. Most studies on mass migration fail to acknowledge the role of the country of origin, but this innovative work approaches Jewish migration to Argentina as a continuous process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken as a whole, Polacos in Argentina enlightens the heterogeneous and complex issue of immigrant commitments, belongings, and expectations. Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina serves as a case study of how ethnicity evolves among migrants and their children, and the dynamics that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and maintaining commitments to the country of origin.
Traces the shifting patterns of Jewish immigration and Argentine immigration policy Argentina is home to the largest Jewish community in the Hispanic world, the second largest in the Western hemisphere. During successive political and social regimes, Argentina alternately barred Jews from entering the country and recruited them to immigrate, persecuted Jews as heretics or worse and welcomed them as productive settlers, restricted Jews by law and invested them with the fullest rights of citizenship. This volume traces the shifting patterns of Jewish immigration and Argentine immigration policy, both as manifestations of cultural and historical processes and as forces shaping the emergence of a large and energetic Jewish community. Within Argentina, many Jews followed traditional immigration strategies by consolidating communities and institutions in Buenos Aires and other cities. But many others settled on the land, in agricultural colonies sponsored by Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association, a group with far-reaching impact that is examined closely in this book. The Israeli kibbutz movement drew strength from the Argentine farming colonies, when beginning in 1949 groups of Argentine Jews immigrated to Israel to found kibbutzes. Eventually, in the face of political and economic upheavals with anti-Semitic undercurrents, almost 40,000 Jews left Argentina for Israel. A country of absorption became a country of exodus, and Zionism became a central focus of Argentine Jewry, interlocking families and fates separated by oceans and continents.
A primary source analysis of the migration of Jews from Argentina to Israel. Between Exile and Exodus: Argentinian Jewish Immigration to Israel, 1948–1967 examines the case of the 16,500 Argentine Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel during the first two decades of its existence (1948–1967). Based on a thorough investigation of various archives in Argentina and Israel, author Sebastian Klor presents a sociohistoric analysis of that immigration with a comparative perspective. Although many studies have explored Jewish immigration to the State of Israel, few have dealt with the immigrants themselves. Between Exile and Exodusoffers fascinating insights into this migration, its social and economic profiles, and the motivation for the relocation of many of these people. It contributes to different areas of study— Argentina and its Jews, Jewish immigration to Israel, and immigration in general. This book's integration of a computerized database comprising the personal data of more than 10,000 Argentinian Jewish immigrants has allowed the author to uncover their stories in a direct, intimate manner. Because immigration is an individual experience, rather than a collective one, the author aims to address the individual's perspective in order to fully comprehend the process. In the area of Argentinian Jewry it brings a new approach to the study of Zionism and the relations of the community with Israel, pointing out the importance of family as a basis for mutual interactions. Klor's work clarifies the centrality of marginal groups in the case of Jewish immigration to Israel, and demystifies the idea that Aliya from Argentina was solely ideological. In the area of Israeli studies the book takes a critical view of the "catastrophic" concept as a cause for Jewish immigration to Israel, analyzing the gap between the decision-makers in Israel and in Argentina and the real circumstances of the individual immigrants. It also contributes to migration studies, showing how an atypical case, such as the Argentine Jewish immigrants to Israel, is shaped by similar patterns that characterize "classical" mass migrations, such as the impact of chain migrations and the immigration of marginal groups. This book's importance—its contribution to the historical investigation of the immigration phenomenon in general, and specifically immigration to the State of Israel—lies in uncovering and examining individual viewpoints alongside the official, bureaucratic immigration narrative.Scholars in various fields and disciplines, including history, Latin American studies, and migration studies, will find the methodology utilized in this monograph original and illuminating.
