The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone ed. by Adriana Mariel Brodsky and Raanan Rein (review)

Abstract

THE NEW JEWISH ARGENTINA: FACETS OF JEWISH EXPERIENCES IN THE SOUTHERN CONE Edited by Adriana Mariel Brodsky and Raanan Rein. Leiden: Brill, 2014. xiv + 399 pp.The Argentine Jewish community is the largest in the Diaspora after the US. Its history goes back to the nineteenth century, and it is today an integral part of Argentine society. This collection of essays, The New Jewish Argentina, addresses different aspects of its life, paying attention to historical developments and contemporary issues. According to the editors, it aims to analyze aspects that have been marginalized in former studies focused on the Argentine Jewish community. They observe in the prologue the fact that most of the studies so far analyze Jewish life in the institutional framework of communitarian organizations and their political action, setting aside, or even rendering invisible, aspects of social and cultural history.The book presents articles dealing with issues of genre, the overall cultural contribution of Jews in Argentine society, and how they assimilate as full members of the Argentine nation. It also explores a lesser known Jewish underworld, and the way the very existence of Jewish mafias in the early twentieth century affected communitarian life. In fact, the issue of belonging is one that underlies most of the book: is this diasporic community to be considered foreign vis-a-vis the hosting country, taking into account the complex history Jews experienced in their relationship with political power in Argentina, or it is to be considered a community that assimilated very well into all venues of Argentine society?This issue cannot be separated from contemporary events that effect the life of this community: as the article by Natasha Zaretsky points out, recent political events such as the terrorist attack against the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) shape the very notion of political agency and the experience of trauma among Argentine Jews. This attack, which took place in 1994 and is still an unresolved issue in Argentine justice, is currently a hot political topic, which involved the death of the prosecutor (himself a member of the Jewish community) in a grim episode. In fact, as I write this very review, this same terrorist attack, together with the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992, is one of the main points in President Cristina Fernandez's last address to Congress. According to Zaretsky, the trauma experienced as a consequence of this terrorist attack is connected to the memory of the Shoah, and more recently, to the antisemitic persecution carried during the dirty wars.The approaches adopted by the contributors to the collection allow us to appreciate the inherent complexity Jewish actors had towards political power, and more specifically towards Peronismo, the major political force that shaped Argentine politics since General Peron assumed power in the 1946 elections to our day. …