Unwelcome Exiles. Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 reconstructs a largely unknown history: during the Second World War, the Mexican government closed its doors to Jewish refugees expelled by the Nazis. In this comprehensive investigation, based on archives in Mexico and the United States, Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.” Through her analysis of Mexico’s role in the rescue of refugees in the 1930s and 40s, Gleizer challenges the country’s traditional image of itself as a nation that welcomes the persecuted. This book is a revised and expanded translation of the Spanish El exilio incómodo. México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945, which received an Honorable Mention in the LAJSA Book Prize Award 2013.

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)

This book analyzes how national and international dancers contributed to developing Mexico's cultural politics and notions of the nation at different historical moments. It emphasizes how dancers and other moving bodies resisted and reproduced racial and social hierarchies stemming from colonial Mexico (1521-1821). Relying on extensive archival research, choreography as an analytical methodology, and theories of race, dance, and performance studies, author Jose Reynoso examines how dance and other forms of embodiment participated in Mexico's formation after the Mexican War of Independence (1821-1876), the Porfirian dictatorship (1876-1911), and postrevolutionary Mexico (1919-1940). In so doing, the book analyzes how underlying colonial logics continued to influence relationships amongst dancers, other artists, government officials, critics, and audiences of different backgrounds as they refashioned their racial, social, cultural, and national identities. The book proposes and develops two main concepts that explore these mutually formative interactions among such diverse people: embodied mestizo modernisms and transnational nationalisms. 'Embodied mestizo modernisms' refers to combinations of indigenous, folkloric, ballet, and modern dance practices in works choreographed by national and international dancers with different racial and social backgrounds. The book contends that these mestizo modernist dance practices challenged assumptions about racial neutrality with which whiteness historically established its ostensible supremacy in constructing Mexico's 'transnational nationalisms'. This argument holds that notions of the nation-state and national identities are not produced exclusively by a nation's natives but also by historical transnational forces and (dancing) bodies whose influences shape local politics, economic interests, and artistic practices.

This special issue focusses on refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British colonies, dominions and overseas territories. It deals with aspects like internment, identity and cultural representation in not well-known destinations of forced migration like India, New Zealand, Canada or Kenya.

Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow illustrates the ways in which Sokolow's choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s-1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Drawing upon extensive archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow's statements for workers' rights, anti-racism, and the human condition through her choreography for social change alongside her dancing and teaching for Martha Graham. Tracing a catalog of dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies the Negro Cultural Committee, New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Federal Theatre Project, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Cl sicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow's work in conjunction with developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the US, Mexico, and Israel.

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War inaugurates a new field of research in literary and Jewish studies at the intersection of Jewish history and the internationalist cultural phenomenon emerging from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Republican exile, and the Shoah. With the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure, this volume proposes a definition of Jewish textualities based on the entanglement of multiple poetic modes. Through the examination of a variety of narrative fiction and non-fiction, memoir, poetry, epistles, journalism, and music in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and English, these essays unveil non-canonic authors across the West and explore these works in the context of antisemitism, orientalism, and philo-Sephardism, among other cultural phenomena. Jewish writings from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. They offer perspectives on memorial and post-memorial literatures triggered by transhistorical imagination, and many were written against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to tune with the anti-fascist fight. This book revindicates the polyglossia of Jewish cultures and literatures in the context of genocide and epistemicide and proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature.