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

SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture

Rosemary G. Feal, editor

Jorge J. E. Gracia, founding editor

THE OTHER/ARGENTINA

Jews, Gender, and Sexuality
in the Making of a Modern Nation

AMY K. KAMINSKY

Cover image: Archeology of a Journey , 2018. Mirta Kupferminc. Used with permission.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2021 State University of New York

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Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaminsky, Amy K., author.

Title: The other/Argentina : Jews, gender, and sexuality in the making of a modern nation / Amy K. Kaminsky.

Other titles: Jews, gender, and sexuality in the making of a modern nation

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020031728 | ISBN 9781438483290 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438483306 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: JewsIntellectual lifeArgentina. | JewsCivilizationArgentina. | ArgentinaEthnic relations. | JewsIdentity.

Classification: LCC F3021.J5 K354 2021 | DDC 982/.004924dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031728

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the next generations:

David, Sarah, Adam, and Elliot;

to Jonathan, of blessed memory;

and

in memory of Sarah May

PREFACE

A t the Ottawa Conference of Inter-American Women Writers in May of 1978 I found myself sitting around a table with a bunch of mostly Argentine writers and critics when someone observed that every single one of us in that room was Jewish. I no longer remember who exactly was there: Sal Sosnowski and Pablo Urbanyi, for sure. Evelyn Picon Garfield and Marta Paley de Francescato, Im pretty certain. What was notable about that moment was that being Jewish had nothing to do with why we were at that particular conference. For most of us, beyond our professional interests as writers and academics, another identity issue was part of what brought us there as literary scholars, women, and/or as Latin Americans. But the realization that all of us in that room were Jewish made a momentary difference, a sense of another, unexpected, kind of belonging. And of course, by no means all the Argentines at the conference were JewishMarta Lynch was there, as were Griselda Gambaro, Alicia Jurado, Elvira Orfe, Luisa Valenzuela, and her mother, Mara Luisa Levinson. To my recollection, no one presented a paper dealing with Jewishness in Ottawa. The Latin American Jewish Studies AssociationLAJSAwould not be established for another four years, and feminist studies generally paid little attention to the fact of Jewishness within feminist activism or scholarship. What was perhaps the earliest lesbian-feminist Jewish anthology, Nice Jewish Girls , would be published in the US in 1982, coinciding with the founding of LAJSA. Jewishness was beside the point yet somehow meaningful for those in that room in Ottawa. My own interest in Jewishness as an area of scholarly investigation was decades in the future, a result of my bumping into Jewish-themed texts and Jewish-named writers, filmmakers, and visual artists in my research and teaching, until it seemed inevitable that I pay attention. The present book is the outcome of this slow gestation.

The Other/Argentina is deeply indebted to the growing body of research on gender, sexuality, and the modern nation, especially in relation to the field of Jewish studies in the United States and Europe. At the same time, it has been my intention to push the boundaries of that research, turning its gaze southward. Jewish studies in the US approaches the question of modernity largely by considering the triangle Europethe United StatesIsrael, taking little note of Jewish communities and the way Jewishness means in other parts of the world. For its part, the impressive body of research in Latin American Jewish studies has barely been acknowledged by the US-based scholarly community. Conversely, the development of Jewish cultural studies, which has been revolutionizing Jewish studies in the United States over the past few decades, has thus far had little purchase in Latin America.

By limiting this study to Argentina, I open up some avenues and close off others. Jews are a minority in Argentina, but of all the countries of Latin America, Argentina has historically had the largest number, and proportion, of Jews in its population. Hence this books focus on Jewishness in relation to Argentine self-fashioning, with regard to the position of Jews as simultaneously exemplary of, and the abjected other to, European modernity, and in the context of Argentinas own claim on a European identity in the face of Europes refusal to accept any Latin American nation as its full equal. Argentinas Jewish history is certainly connected to that of other Latin American countries: many Jews leaving Europe or the Middle East who wound up in Latin America were hoping to get to the United States and landed instead in the other America, sometimes Mexico or the Caribbean, Venezuela, Brazil, or Uruguay, and often Argentina. For the most part they reproduced a version of life in the old country in their new places of residencethey built synagogues and formed burial societies, created community centers, learned a new language but did not forget Yiddish and Hebrew, and held on to old rituals as well as to a sense of connectedness with Jews beyond their borders. Nevertheless, Jewish history in Argentina is distinguished by at least three factors: (1) the deliberate creation, by a German Jewish philanthropist, of Jewish settlements designed to create a Jewish homeland far away from the perils of Europe; (2) the immigration policies of postindependence Argentina that, in its desire to bring Europeans to settle, eventually expanded the list of the invited to include Jews; and (3) the Argentine elites belief in their own difference from the rest of Latin Americathat theirs is a modern European nation, with all the attending baggage surrounding Jews as both a part of and apart from whatever it is that constitutes Europe and modernity. These three intersecting phenomena suggest that Jewish ethnicity signifies somewhat differently in Argentina than it does in other parts of the continent.

Still, the very idea of Jewish modernity, even in its least nuanced form, challenges the Catholic Latin America to which Argentina belongs. In that worldview, Jews represent an intensely premodern cultural landscape thankfully superseded by Christian enlightenment. Deeply held prejudices against Jews mark the Argentine cultural imaginary. Jewish and Gentile writers alike make use of the competing cultural, and deeply gendered, myths of Jews as an ancient people and as prototypical of modernity. The Jew is a complex marker: Luisa Valenzuelas liminal Israeli translator who scales walls and is unfazed by locked doors and windows in her 2010 novel El Maana (The Maana) vexes all borders and commonplaces. Erin Graff Zivin, recalling that the wandering Jew is a Christian trope, calls Jewishness the wandering signifier.