“A much-needed monograph on the role of Sephardic Jews in Argentina, and . . . an important contribution to the study of Jews in Latin America overall” (Choice). At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East were called Turcos (“Turks”). Seen as distinct from Ashkenazim, Sephardi Jews weren’t even identified as Jews. Yet the story of Sephardi Jewish identity has been deeply impactful on Jewish history across the world. Adriana M. Brodsky follows the history of Sephardim as they arrived in Argentina, created immigrant organizations, founded synagogues and cemeteries, and built strong ties with coreligionists around the country. Brodsky demonstrates how fragmentation based on areas of origin gave way to the gradual construction of a single Sephardi identity. This unifying identity is predicated both on Zionist identification (with the State of Israel) and “national” feelings (for Argentina), and that Sephardi Jews assumed leadership roles in national Jewish organizations once they integrated into the much larger Askenazi community. Rather than assume that Sephardi identity was fixed and unchanging, Brodsky highlights the strategic nature of this identity, constructed both from within the various Sephardi groups and from the outside, and reveals that Jewish identity must be understood as part of the process of becoming Argentine.

Los judíos de la Argentina desde la Inquisición hasta los tiempos de Perón.

Explores the emergence of an Argentine Jewish identity through the study of the Sephardic minorities that settled in Argentine. Focuses on the strategies adopted by Sepharadim in dealing with each other and with the Ashkenazic majority, and thus helps us understand how ethnic and national identities are not contradictory, but can depend upon and compliment each other.

This volume is devoted to Jewish Argentines in the twentieth century, and deliberately avoids restrictive or prescriptive definitions of Jews and Judaism. Instead, it focuses on people whose identities include a Jewish component, irrespective of social class and gender, and regardless of whether they are religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, or affiliated with the organized Jewish community.

Congratulations to Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein whose edited volume has been chosen as the winner of the 2013 Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Prize! The New Jewish Argentina aims at filling in important lacunae in the existing historiography of Jewish Argentines. Moving away from the political history of the organized community, most articles are devoted to social and cultural history, including unaffiliated Jews, women and gender, criminals, printing presses and book stores. These essays, written by scholars from various countries, consider the tensions between the national and the trans-national and offer a mosaic of identities which is relevant to all interested in Jewish history, Argentine history and students of ethnicity and diaspora. This collection problematizes the existing image of Jewish-Argentines and looks at Jews not just as persecuted ethnics, idealized agricultural workers, or as political actors in Zionist politics. "This book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in immigration to Latin America, Ethnic History, and Jewish Studies, but its readership could extend to anybody who is interested in this chapter of social and cultural history." Ariana Huberman, Haverford College

If you attend a soccer match in Buenos Aires of the local Atlanta Athletic Club, you will likely hear the rival teams chanting anti-Semitic slogans. This is because the neighborhood of Villa Crespo has long been considered a Jewish district, and its soccer team, Club Atlético Atlanta, has served as an avenue of integration into Argentine culture. Through the lens of this neighborhood institution, Raanan Rein offers an absorbing social history of Jews in Latin America. Since the Second World War, there has been a conspicuous Jewish presence among the fans, administrators and presidents of the Atlanta soccer club. For the first immigrant generation, belonging to this club was a way of becoming Argentines. For the next generation, it was a way of maintaining ethnic Jewish identity. Now, it is nothing less than family tradition for third generation Jewish Argentines to support Atlanta. The soccer club has also constituted one of the few spaces where both Jews and non-Jews, affiliated Jews and non-affiliated Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, have interacted. The result has been an active shaping of the local culture by Jewish Latin Americans to their own purposes. Offering a rare window into the rich culture of everyday life in the city of Buenos Aires created by Jewish immigrants and their descendants, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina represents a pioneering study of the intersection between soccer, ethnicity, and identity in Latin America and makes a major contribution to Jewish History, Latin American History, and Sports History.

Impure Migration investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jewish people displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitution was one of very few ways they could escape the limited options in their home countries, and Jewish men facilitate their transit and the organization of their work and social lives. Instead of marginalizing this story or reading it as a degrading chapter in Latin American Jewish history, Impure Migration interrogates a complicated social landscape to reveal that sex work is in fact a critical part of the histories of migration, labor, race, and sexuality.