The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation by Amy K. Kaminsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation by Amy K. Kaminsky Lucille Kerr Kaminsky, Amy K. The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation. State U of New York P, 2021. 244 pp. ISBN: 9781438 483290. The Other/Argentina is a masterful meditation on the relationship between "Jewishness" and "Argentineity." In the study, Kaminsky characterizes Jewishness as a "strand" of otherness that is but one of the threads woven into the fabric of Argentina as a modern nation and as "another way of being Argentine" (1, 22). The book illuminates how Jewish-identified cultural production (i.e., literature, film, visual art) weaves Jewishness into the nation's cultural and social fabric while also presenting Jewishness as a "coherent phenomenon" apart from the dominant culture. Kaminsky skillfully navigates through the paradoxical relationship between these key identifiers ("Jewishness" and "Argentineity"), offering "both close and symptomatic readings" (2) of creative works and discussions of critical and historical materials [End Page 159] that ground the primary materials. Even though Jewishness is "not entirely at one with Argentineity" (200), the study offers readers the possibility of understanding how being Jewish is "another way of being Argentine," if not also, somewhat surprisingly, how being Argentine might also be another way of being Jewish (20). Moreover, the study's title prefigures the complex superimposition of identities and differences that inform both Jewishness and Argentineity. As a book —and as a titular phrase— The Other/Argentina stages "the energizing and exhausting tension between unitary solidity on the one hand and instability and internal fracture on the other, not just of Jewishness but of Argentina as a nation" (52). In the book's eight chapters and brief concluding comments, Kaminsky produces conversational clusters among primary and secondary materials, in which she also intervenes with her own corroborative or corrective comments, focusing throughout on both Jewishness and Argentineity. As the study's subtitle signals, these conversations also reveal how "both sexuality and gender, as both lived experience and ideology, help encode" the meanings of the two primary terms (xiii). Throughout the book Kaminsky highlights the complexity and self-contradictory nature of materials by Argentines who have reflected on as well as represented Jewishness, drawing from an array of works by recognized writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and scholars. Among the writers are: Birmajer, Chejfec, Cozarinsky, Drucaroff, Feinman, Feierstein, Gelman, Glickman, Partnoy, Pizarnik, Rivera, Strejlevich, Szichman, Timerman, Viñas. Among the filmmakers: Blaustein, Burman, Lichtman, Markovitch, Neuman, Solomonoff. Among the visual artists: Brodsky, Kuitca, Kupferminc. And, among the scholars: Finchelstein, Goldberg, Jenckes, Ludmer, Rein, Sarlo. Kaminsky's orchestration of dialogue among these varied voices, as it were, is skillful, at times provocative, and consistently illuminating. Chapter 1 ("Planting Wheat and Reaping Doctors: Another Way of Being Argentine") mainly frames "the encounter between Jews and Argentina" via close reading of two foundational works about Jewishness: Alberto Gerchunoff's Los gauchos judíos (1910), "which stakes a Jewish claim to Argentina's iconic pampas" (4), and Julián Martel's antisemitic novel La bolsa (1891), which sees Jews as a threat to the modern nation's social order. Chapter 2 ("Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Anxiety") takes up the meanings of "Jewishness" within the framework of national discourse about modernity and the anxieties inherent in the perception of the nation as modern and civilized. These first chapters also include references to many recent works of narrative and film that dramatize the same "encounter." In addition, these chapters draw attention to issues of gender and sexuality, highlighted in the book's subtitle, and to figurations of masculinity and sexuality analyzed more extensively in the entirety of Chapter 8 ("Troubling Difference: Jewishness, Gender, and Transgressive Sexuality"). Acknowledging that "identity is not unitary" (48), in Chapter 3 ("Provisional Identity") Kaminsky takes up the difficulty of defining Jewish identity, the concept of "provisional essentialism" —which "is makeshift and temporary" but "provides a useful structure for addressing a culturally constructed, but no less real, entity" (53)— and the rationale for the selection of the study's materials. The author declares that because "Jews themselves can claim the authenticity of insider knowledge and [End Page 160] experience...