Zionism and the New Left: The Mordechai Anielewicz Brigade In Argentina in the 1960s

Abstract

The New Left challenged Argentina’s Jews, both young and old, who in the 1960s numbered more than 300,000. It compelled them to reexamine and redefine ethnic-Jewish, national, and transnational elements of their collective identity. On the theoretical level, the New Left raised intriguing questions that have been a focus of attention for scholars of Latin American Jewry in general and Argentinian Jewry in particular, as well as for writers on hyphenated identities. The scholarly debate revolves around the relative weights of the ethnic-Jewish and general-national civic components of the collective identities of Jews of each specific country. Are they Latin-American Jews or Jewish Latin-Americans?1 The question has been the impetus for a historiographical debate between scholars in two different fields – Jewish studies and Latin-American studies. The former stress the particularistic aspects of the Jewish experience in Latin America. The latter, in contrast, seek to understand the Jewish experience in this region from a Latin-American standpoint. The different approaches taken by these writers and the resulting debate have, over the last three decades, produced a wide-ranging and rich research literature on issues such as ethnicity, identity, and diaspora.