From the “Land of the Future”: how Latin American Jews became global

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this dialogue, the authors discuss what Latin America has meant to Jewish immigrants, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, and what place Jews and Judaism occupy nowadays in this part of the world. While trying to establish some general traits, the authors focus specific historical and chronological contexts, such as late 19th. Century Argentina or Brazil in the 1940s. The importance of such contemporary issues as globalisation, neo-liberalism and the end of ideologies in Jewish Latin-American life and future are also discussed. The utopian projections connected to Latin America, once seen as a kind of paradise in the imagination of Jewish immigrants, gradually has given way to a more realistic and skeptical assessment of reality, while the increasing importance of economical power in the contemporary seems to determine, more than anything else, the future of Jewish presence in Latin America.