The New Jewish Argentina

Argentine Jews are vanishing, if you go by the records of Jewish communities. Affected by a 50 percent rate of intermarriage and by emigration, their numbers, estimated retrospectively at 310,000 in 1960, have dwindled in the intervening 50 years to 182,000. Yet Jews are very much a part of Argentine life. Thousands of “missing” Jewish Argentines, as these essays demonstrate, are dropping their hyphens and integrating into national society. Their active participation in the evolution of argentinidad is explored in this collection of essays.In the introductory essay, José Moya compares the status of Jewish immigrants in Argentina with their status in other countries of the Americas. Moya finds that “the combination of being one of the least diverse Jewish diasporic communities in one of the most diverse settings may be the most distinctive characteristic of Argentine Jewry” (p. 19), noting the scarcity of Sephardic and German elements among them. Comparing the reception of immigrants worldwide, he concludes that a major characteristic distinguishing Argentina from other societies in which Europeans settled is “the extraordinarily low level of xenophobic violence” there (p. 26).Contradictory judgments regarding that violence and the record of the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA) in confronting it during the Argentine military regime of 1976–1983 have not been resolved in 40 years of vituperative debate. Reports by human rights organizations leave little room to question the existence of homicidal attacks on Jews in the Proceso's clandestine prisons. But leaders of the Jewish community at that time denied the existence of government-sponsored anti-Semitism and fended off offers by human rights organizations to intervene on their behalf. Historian Emmanuel Nicolás Kahan proposes that we distinguish public versus clandestine anti-Semitisms operating in parallel. Jewish institutions remained open and functioning during the repression, a boon that was facilitated by the DAIA's collaboration with the regime. But human rights were not on the DAIA's agenda, particularly with respect to people who had been born Jewish but who had separated themselves from the Jewish community, whether through disinterest or by participating in actions of the Left that were defined as subversion. Unfortunately, Kahan writes, many prisoners who had dropped their connection to the Jewish people were “rejudaized” by their torturers (p. 303).Most of the 15 essays describe social networks that engage Jews and non-Jews equally. The authors explore the marketplace, where Jewish businessmen and women interact with non-Jewish competitors, customers, and suppliers, as well as the Jewish bookstores, libraries, publishers, and printers that provide public intellectual meeting places. Dozens of Argentine Jewish writers and artists make their reputations on both sides of a figurative and fictional Jewish/Argentine line, moving from Yiddish or Ladino to Spanish and imparting a Jewish sensibility to public discourse. The collection explores integration by way of beauty contests organized by Sephardic groups in public venues to elect Queen Esthers, who will be fitted out in the latest Argentine style, as well as through Jewish characters in comic strips and film, who gain acceptance as stand-ins for Argentine everymen. One unusual way in which networks can link Jews to a wider public domain is demonstrated by Argentines who experience their conversion to ultra-Orthodox Judaism as therapeutic, in sync with the long-standing Argentine involvement with psychotherapy.Some essays may present difficulties to readers who are unfamiliar with Jewish religious practice. Nevertheless, they reward attentive reading for how they explicate ways in which an immigrant culture accommodates to the majority and, in the process, affects its hosts. Beatrice D. Gurwitz analyses the generational crisis within the Argentine Jewish community in the 1960s, when youth demanded a reframing of Jewishness to include national political issues while a conservative establishment feared that political engagement would lead to assimilation. The contest led to the breakdown of community structures and the emergence of youth from an “indecent parochialism” onto the Argentine political scene (p. 236).David Sheinin's cogent analysis of Argentina's Middle East policy, which he places within a Cold War context, should not be lost sight of owing to its outlier position in this volume. Raanan Rein's essay on political incorrectness describes the controversy that broke out in the 1950s when the prominent writer César Tiempo (who was both Jewish and Peronist, two qualities that the Jewish establishment regarded as incompatible) accepted the post of manager of the cultural supplement of La Prensa, which had been absorbed by the Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina, the powerful labor union. As Rein concludes, “Tiempo ... was trying to offer the Jews of Argentina a concept of identity that would give equal weight to their Jewish and Argentine natures” (p. 229). Such efforts continue and, as this book affirms, have made considerable headway.Students of both Argentine and Jewish history, as well as knowledgeable readers, will be intrigued by the fruitful new approaches to the subject offered by this well-edited and engaging collection

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