Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios Naomi Lindstrom Leonardo Senkman, Judit Basker Liwerant, Haim Arni, Sergio Della Pergola, Margalit Bejarano, coordinators, Florinda F. Goldberg, translator and text editor. Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert / Bonilla Artigas Editores. 2011. 870 pp. Paper € 48.00. ISBN 9788484895183. The interdisciplinary collection Pertenencia y alteridad is broad indeed in scope. It treats numerous aspects of Jewish life in Spanish America, Brazil, and, in one article each, the United States, South Africa, Europe, and Spain; in addition, many of the primarily Latin American essays include comparative discussion of Israel, Europe, and the United States. The editors define the timeframe that the essays cover as 1967-2007, the forty years since the creation of the Division of Latin America, Spain, and Portugal at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was involved in the making of the volume, and the Six-Day War of 1967, which altered the landscape in many ways. In practice, though, many of the essays range further backward in time. At 870 pages, the volume offers two introductions (a general introduction by all the editors and Haim Avni's overview of scholarship in Latin American Jewish Studies); twenty-nine essays; and a works cited list. The authors come from a number of academic disciplines, including history, demography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and literary studies; in addition, some represent community leadership and the rabbinate, Jewish education, and literary life outside the universities. The contributors range from very senior scholars, such as Avni, the founder of the Division of Latin America, Spain, and Portugal at the Hebrew University and by any reckoning the dean of Latin [End Page 137] American Jewish studies, through a number of highly prominent mid-career figures, to junior researchers. Most of the contributions are, to varying degrees, research essays, relying on documented sources, though there is one notable and worthy exception. "Testimonio," by the late Jacobo Kovadloff, is a personal reminiscence of the era of the Argentine military dictatorship. Kovadloff was targeted as the Director of the South American office of the American Jewish Committee and first he and then his family were forced to flee the country, an experience that the author reconstructs in detail. Also listed as a testimonio, though it also contains the results of research, is Daniel Goldman's account of the years 1959-1984, which Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer spent in Argentina. Goldman is widely recognized as Meyer's foremost intellectual and spiritual heir, so his essay is the admiring homage of a disciple, yet it also reflects research into the history of Jewish community and religious leadership in Buenos Aires over the period that Meyer was active there. Goldman explains the schism, in large measure a generation gap, within Argentine Conservative Judaism that led Meyer to found, in 1962, the breakaway congregation Comunidad Bet-El (since 1992 led by Goldman). This essay also touches briefly on such topics as the relations between Meyer's model of Judaism and the Liberation Theology of some contemporary Catholic clergy; certain aspects of Argentine society that puzzled or disturbed the U.S.-born rabbi; Meyer's founding of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano; his interfaith projects and human rights advocacy; the sensitive issue of Argentine Jewish institutions vis-à-vis the military dictatorship of 1976-1983; and how Zionism and religiosity fit into Meyer's vision. While the compiling of statistics is not often viewed as an exciting topic, one of the volume's most interesting essays is "¿Cuántos somos hoy?" by Sergio DellaPergola, the preeminent demographer of Jewish populations. In a user-friendly exposition accessible to non-specialists, DellaPergola explains the principal controversies and shifts that have occurred in recent decades in the estimation of Latin American Jewish populations. In particular, he clarifies why and how certain figures were revised downward in the 1960s. The most striking example is the once well-accepted estimates of 400,000 to 500,000 for the Argentine Jewish community. DellaPergola explains how a team of demographers from the Institute...