Changing the Landscape: The Study of Argentine Jewish Women and New Historical Vistas

Abstract

In September 1941 a diverse set of women in Argentina created the Junta de la Victoria (Junta of Victory). In this organization, Jewish women figured prominently. One of the largest and best publicized of the antifascist organizations that arose in this nation in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Junta recruited an estimated 45,000 women to support the Allied cause in World War II. Yet we know little about it or its Jewish membership. The case of the long-forgotten Junta de la Victoria calls attention to broader gaps in the historiography on Argentina, on its Jews, and on its women. Jewish women have played critical roles in Argentina and its sizable Jewish community, the largest in Latin America and the third largest in the hemisphere. They helped create communal organizations, farm settlements, labor unions, and human rights groups. However, Argentine Jewish women are virtually absent from the secondary his torical sources. Studying them is vital for its own sake, to recover the voices and tell the untold stories of the unheard half of the Jewish population.1 Yet it is also crucial for another reason, as the example of the Junta demonstrates. In the course of my research on the history of Argentine Jewish women from 1880 to 1955, I conducted interviews with Jewish women of varied ethnic and class backgrounds. My informants discussed what was important to them in their own lives,2 and they often raised issues that had not occurred to me. One matter of importance to women of Eastern European backgrounds was their participation in the Junta de la Victoria. Once alerted, I began to find discussion of the Junta in written sources as well. My interviewees belied the notion