Polacos in Argentina

Polacos in Argentina
Author: Mariusz Kalczewiak
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2019-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817320393

Winner of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Award 2020 An examination of the social and cultural repercussions of Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused the transformation of cultural, social, and political milieus in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands. In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture, Mariusz Kałczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. Most studies on mass migration fail to acknowledge the role of the country of origin, but this innovative work approaches Jewish migration to Argentina as a continuous process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken as a whole, Polacos in Argentina enlightens the heterogeneous and complex issue of immigrant commitments, belongings, and expectations. Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina serves as a case study of how ethnicity evolves among migrants and their children, and the dynamics that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and maintaining commitments to the country of origin.

The World beyond the West

The World beyond the West
Author: Mariusz Kałczewiak
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800733534

No matter how one defines its extent and borders, Eastern Europe has long been understood as a liminal space, one whose undeniable cultural and historical continuities with Western Europe have been belied by its status as an “Other” in the Western imagination. Across illuminating and provocative case studies, The World beyond the West focuses on the region’s ambiguous relationship to historical processes of colonialism and Orientalism. In exploring encounters with distant lands through politics, travel, migration, and exchange, it places Eastern Europe at the heart of its analysis while decentering the most familiar narratives and recasting the history of the region.

Jewish Experiences across the Americas

Jewish Experiences across the Americas
Author: Katalin Franciska Rac
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1683403975

Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The New Ethnic Studies in Latin America

The New Ethnic Studies in Latin America
Author: Raanan Rein
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-03-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004342303

The New Ethnic Studies in Latin America aims at going beyond and against much of Jewish Latin American historiography, situating Jewish-Latin Americans in the larger multi-ethnic context of their countries. Senior and junior scholars from various countries joined together to challenge commonly held assumptions, accepted ideas, and stable categories about ethnicity in Latin America in general and Jewish experiences on this continent in particular. This volume brings to the discussions on Jewish life in Latin America less heard voices of women, non-affiliated Jews, and intellectuals. Community institutions are not at center stage, conflicts and tensions are brought to the fore, and a multitude of voices pushes aside images of homogeneity. Authors in this tome look at Jews’ multiple homelands: their country of birth, their country of residence, and their imagined homeland of Zion. "This volume brings together an important series of chapters that pushes ethnic studies to greater complexity; therefore, this work is critical in laying the foundation for what Jeffrey Lesser has called the new architecture of ethnic studies in Latin America." - Joel Horowitz, St. Bonaventure University, in: E.I.A.L. 28.2 (2017) "Overall, this collection serves as a stimulating invitation to scholars of Latin American ethnic studies. It offers multiple models of scholarship that go beyond and against traditional narratives of Jewish Latin America." -Lily Pearl Balloffet, University of California Santa Cruz, in: J.Lat Amer. Stud. 50 (2018) "These essays manage to bring to the fore stories of Jews whose journeys have been sidelined until now. Their stories demonstrate that identities are always a work in progress, a continuous dance between ancestry, history, and culture." - Ariana Huberman, Haverford College, in: American Jewish History 103.2 (2019)

Acts of Repair

Acts of Repair
Author: Natasha Zaretsky
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2020-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1978807449

Acts of Repair explores how ordinary people grapple with decades of political violence and genocide in Argentina—a history that includes the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976–1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Although the struggle against impunity seems inevitably incomplete, Argentines have created possibilities for repair through cultural memory, yielding spaces for transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery.

The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman

The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman
Author: Nora Glickman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135579059

This book recounts the events involving Raquel Liberman, an impoverished immigrant to Argentina that was forced by circumstances into prostitution, and the powerful Zwi Migdal, which controlled the recruitment and deployment of Jewish prostitutes in Argentina while maintaining mutually profitable relations with corrupt politicians and policemen. Liberman's story is presented as an example of individual courage and determination in the face of the violence and corruption of the prostitution business. Her struggle with the Zwi Migdal and triumphant public victory over her oppressors was widely publicized in newspapers and magazines, and was a political cause celebre in its time. This book gives readers an intimate view of how the affair caught the public imagination, and was interpreted and transformed by the artistic imagination.

El camino de Buenos Aires

El camino de Buenos Aires
Author: Albert Londres
Publisher: Libros del Zorzal
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9875992720

En el año 1927 Albert Londres viajó de incógnito a la Argentina para llevar adelante una investigación sobre la trata de blancas. El camino de Buenos Aires, fruto de esa investigación, es mucho más que una crónica ocurrente o el relato de un viaje por el “paraíso de los rufianes”: constituye un testimonio polémico sobre la Argentina y un precioso documento sobre el circuito internacional del hampa.

The Jews’ Indian

The Jews’ Indian
Author: David S. Koffman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2019-02-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1978800886

Winner of the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore​ Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize​ The Jews’ Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. These two groups’ exchanges were numerous and diverse, proving at times harmonious when Jews’ and Natives people’s economic and social interests aligned, but discordant and fraught at other times. American Jews could be as exploitative of Native cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, and historian David Koffman argues that these interactions both unsettle and historicize the often triumphant consensus history of American Jewish life. Focusing on the ways Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans, this books is provocative and timely, the first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.