Project Narrative

Buenos Aires is a city of immigrants. An early Argentine statesman, Juan Bautista Alberdi, concerned over what he perceived to be the underpopulation of what had been a backwater of the Spanish colonial empire, asserted: "To govern is to populate." Ever since the final decades of the nineteenth century, immigrants have poured into Argentina, but principally into the port city of Buenos Aires. The interest in promoting immigration was grounded on the repudiation of what was considered to be the stagnant nature of an inherited Spanish society and the need to provide the new Argentine Republic with the dynamism of new blood, new skills, and inhabitants committed to “making it in America.” The result was that in both Buenos Aires and surrounding rural areas, the traditional Hispanic base was, in little more than a generation, transformed into a society that was non-Hispanic in many ways.

In recent decades they have included Koreans, people from Southeast Asia (the former Indochina), and immigrants from other Latin American countries. But between 1880 and 1930 (the beginnings of World War II stanched the trans-Atlantic flow), millions of Europeans sought their livelihood in Buenos Aires. Italians (both Northern and Southern) and Jews (who mostly came from East European countries like Poland, Russia, Hungary, today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Romania) constituted the two largest groups, although immigrants did arrive also from a broad array of other countries. So steady was the influx of Jews that Buenos Aires has become the largest Jewish center of Latin America (followed by São Paulo and Mexico City), as well as one of the major Jewish urban concentrations of the world. The purpose of the seminar will be to examine the enormous impact of Jewish immigrant on the social, economic, political, and, especially, the intellectual and cultural life of Argentina. This can only be done effectively by actually going to Buenos Aires, where it will be possible, in addition to the close reading of key texts, to meet writers and intellectuals and to visit the forums of Jewish cultural production. Today, the Jewish community remains large and significant, despite the fact that many Jews have left Argentina in the last sixty years--first during the Peronista period (1946-55), then during the neofascist dictatorships (1966-73; 1976-83), and most recently because of the country's erratic economic situation. Depending on how one defines an individual to be a Jew (a perennial topic of debate), best estimates identify 150,000 Jews in the greater Buenos Aires area. Certainly, the great Jewish institutions of the city remain to serve the still strong population base, despite the consequences of exodus for reasons of politics, economics, commitment to Israel, and professional opportunities abroad.

Most Argentine Jews come out of a conservative and often an orthodox background, but a high percentage are nonpracticing, except for some lingering observance of the High Holy Days. Some individuals of Jewish heritage may opt not to call themselves Jews because they are nonpracticing, although the overwhelming majority of nonpracticing Jews are “cultural Jews.” That is, they recognize the Jewish heritage, the ongoing family contacts, and their consciousness of having spheres of knowledge that derive from traditional, historic, and folkloric Judaism. (It might be noted that Argentina is nominally Catholic, but that the majority of Argentine Catholics are also nonpracticing). Reform Judaism has had little presence in Argentina, despite the contributions made by U.S. Reform Jews to human rights issues during the so-called Dirty War of neofascist military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Some temples, however, have attempted to woo younger members, and there is in many Jewish sectors the concern over the loss of Jewish identity that modern assimilation and postmodern identity relativism have promoted. Yet, synagogues and other institutions remain as eloquent if silent witnesses of this historic Jewish presence in Buenos Aires. The purpose of this seminar will be to examine, through a careful analysis of principal literary works, the role of Argentine Jews in what remains today one of the great immigrant societies of Latin America. In this sense, the focus on Jewish Buenos Aires will function as a case study of the larger question of the role immigration plays in the constitution and character of Argentina.

Jews began to make their presence felt in the cultural life of the city from the time of their initial arrival. While most Jews who reached Argentina were bitterly poor and had to labor under many harsh conditions for their survival, their children promptly began to enter the liberal professions, aided in large measure by the creation of a free and open secondary-school and university system that encouraged the studies of immigrant children as a way of assimilating them into national life and promoting their contribution as fully endowed Argentine citizens. Jews have, therefore, been long associat­ed with Argentine cultural production, and particularly so in Buenos Aires (it is often said that "God is everywhere, but he only holds office hours in Buenos Aires"). There was, by the beginning of the twentieth century, a journalistic, literary, and theater production in Yiddish, and hundreds of books have been published in Buenos Aires in Yiddish. Yiddish-language newspapers, Yiddish theater, concert hallperformances, and Yiddish poetry and narrative all prospered until well into the twentieth century.

But Jews also began early to enter the mainstream of Argentine cultural production in Spanish, and Alicia Steimberg, a noted contemporary Jewish novelist, has said that "An Argentine Jew is someone who says shalom in Spanish." To be sure, there was an early and abundant literary production, and Alberto Gerchunoff's sketches of rural Jewish communities in his 1910 Los gauchos judíos (The Jewish Gauchos) is now considered a founding work of an Argentine immigrant identity (many recently arrived Jews were settled in the fertile Mesopotamian area north of Buenos Aires, although their sons and certainly their grandsons made it back permanently to the port city where their forebears had first entered the country, and the rura lcommunities are all but gone: Argentine Jews are predominantly urban). By the 1930s, Jews had made enormous inroads into the theatrical community, making the transition from Yiddish theater (which in its day was strong: Molly Picon performed in Buenos Aires) to Avenida Corrientes, the Argentine Broadway. To this day, many theater people--actors, directors, producers, techni­cal people, dramatists, critics, professors of theater--are Jewish, and the recent hit production of the Buenos Aires restaging of Mel Brooks's The Producers was something like an implied homage to the so-called Jewishness of the Argentine stage.

Argentina had one of the first commercial radio stations in the world, and it was led by Jewish interests, as much of the enormous range of cultural and journalistic radio in Buenos Aires still is. As in the United States, Jews were very important in the inaugu­ration of Argentine television in the early 1950s. Large segments of cultural talent in the Argentine Jewish collectivity have been a part of the emigration to Israel (Argentines have contributed extensively, in person as well as monetarily, to the Return and the growth of Israel) and the United States (principally), which has affected the literary and intellectual community very much. It has also affected the plastic arts, another important Jewish cultural sector. Yet the performing arts community has by and large remained. Yet, one of Hollywood filmmaking's most acclaimed composers of musical scores and theme music is Lalo Schriffrin, who exemplifies those who began to migrate to the United States during the Peronista period.

Although Jews gained steadily in most sectors of politics, economics, and culture in the early part of the twentieth century, they did suffer reversals from the fascist-inspired military regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. There, it was a welcome relief when Perón demonstrated that he had use for their support in return for a new institutional acceptance. However, with the neofascist regimes that came to power beginning in 1967, Jews, interpreted as Christ-killers, unwholesome outsiders, and progenitors of iconoclastic threats to ordered society such as Marx, Freud, and Einstein, were routinely persecuted and often singled out for "special attention" in the torture chambers. Many Jews left Argentina during this period also, particularly those who had professional or technical skills that were marketable abroad. With the return to constitutional democracy in 1983, Jews begin to become part of the mainstream of Argentine society in a way in which they never had before, occupying many positions of authority and influence, often to the perceived detriment of Jewish communal interests. Jews played a heavy role in the government of the so-called Syrian-Lebanese president, Carlos Menem, in the 1990s, and saw worse institutional violence than during the dictatorship, with the still unsolved bombings of the Israel Embassy in 1992, with over two dozen deaths, and the bombing of the headquarters of the AMIA, the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Aide Society, in 1994, with over a hundred deaths. (The AMIA has been rebuilt on the same location but with far greater security, while the site of the Embassy—the latter relocated to a more secure site in an outlying neighborhood of the city—is now a small memorial park.) It, therefore, remains ambiguous the extent to which these bombings were the result of internal anti-Semitism and the extent to which foreign agents were responsible. The bombings are such a part of the cultural imaginary of Jewish Argentina precisely because this ambiguity remains unresolved.

Today, Jews are well integrated into the socioeconomic structures of Argentine society and they continue to play the same influential role they have for over one hundred years in the spheres of cultural production. It is this history and this current status of Jewish Buenos Aires that this seminar will explore.

Plan

The seminar will bring together 15 college and university teachers selected on a competitive basis. We will spend three weeks together in Buenos Aires, which will serve as our research lab, so to speak. We will meet four times a week for three hours in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays, the participants will meet with the Seminar Director to discuss their individual projects, which may include original research essays, curricular development, or the revision of prior research on the subject. The Director will serve to facilitate appropriate academic and intellectual contacts and access to pertinent resources. Every Thursday and Saturday we will lunch with an important intellectual or artist, which will enhance the meaning of the texts examined in the formalmeetings of the seminar. These individuals will drawn from the Director’s extensive contacts in the community, many of whose writings he has published. They will include the writers Ana María Shua and Alicia Steimberg, who have published separately and together; novelist and architect Ricardo Feierstein; Eliahu Toker, scholar of Jewish culture and Argentine Yiddish traditions; Silvio Fabrykant, portrait photographer who has worked with most important Argentine politicians; journalist-photographer and human rights activist Marcelo Brodsky, who has been involved in organizing several memory projects in the city; Diego Melamed, journalist who has written extensively about Jews in recent Argentine politics; Gabriel Valansi, known for his photography of the detritus of the Argentine night; Marianna Eppinger de Helft, who owns the second largest personal art collection in Argentina; David Maldavsky, psychiatrist and former Jewish university dean; Mabel Burin, feminist scholar of psychology; Ricardo Talesnik, dramatist and theater empresario; Beatriz Seibel, theater scholar; Oscar Steimberg, professor of mass media studies.

Formal classroom contact will involve the examination of major texts in Jewish culture in Argentine, and classroom meetings will be supplemented by afternoon visits to Jewish institutions, museums, and other sites of interest. These will include the local Museum of the Holocaust, the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Aide Society (AMIA), the memorial at the site of the bombed Israel Embassy, the Memorial Park to the Disappeared on the banks of the Rio de la Plata estuary, various synagogues, the David Wolfson Jewish Day School, the Holocaust Museum, the Idischer Folks Teater. Of course, it will also be necessary to place Buenos Aires Jewish culture in the larger social context, and we will therefore visit important institutions such as the National Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the Recoleta Arts Center, the Cervantes National Theater and the Municipal San Martín Theater complex, the Colón Opera House, the San Telmo colonial district, the Boca district of Northern Italian immigrants, the Ecological Park, the newly renovated old port area of Puerto Madero, the Eva Perón Museum, and the city zoo (the first Munich-style, “scientific” zoo in Latin America). We will arrange one weekend to visit the former Jewish agricultural communities and the Jewish Museum in the town of Moisés Ville.

The language of the seminar will be Spanish, and applicants will be expected to have an advanced level of skills in, at least, reading and understanding the spoken language, although written materials may be generated in either Spanish or English.

The seminar will focus on the close reading of major cultural texts. We will want to examine how Jewish life in Buenos Aires (and in Argentina on a larger scale) has been interpreted, eulogized, criticized, and deconstructed by its authors, intellectuals, and artists. Rather than reading the texts as transparent “representations,” we will consider them as complex documents that are not easily reducible to facile messages of hope or despair, support or disavowal, romantic sentimentality or harsh disengagement. Such readings will seek to transmit the enormous range of Jewish experience in the city and the ways that experience has overlapped with or been significantly different from that of other immigrant groups in Argentina (notably, Italians, Arabs, Spaniards, and Germans). There will be an insistence on seeing such texts as both Jewish and Argentine, always bearing in mind that they are—or ought to be viewed as—integral to Argentine social and cultural history. Jews in Argentina are not a ghettoized minority, but a strong and vibrant community whose interests and whose writings and art are woven into the very fabric of national culture, which would be impossible to comprehend were they withdrawn from it. Thus the double dynamic of thinking and feeling Jewish, but writing and speaking Argentine will constitute the foundation of the seminar.

The specific week-by-week outline will run as follows:

Week I - Arrival in Buenos Aires and tour of the city in general, but with specific emphasis on the Jewish institutions and communities. We will begin with a classroom discussion of Ricardo Feierstein's Historia de los judíos argentinos, a major treatise in Spanish on the Jews of Argentina, with emphasis on their cultural production in literature, academic studies, art, film, theater, and music. We will then turn to Gerchuoff's aforementioned Los gauchos judios, which is a founding—while yet highly sentimentalized and ideologically slanted—text concerning Jewish farming communities in the Entre Ríos area of the country. Built on what is virtually an oxymoron—the Jewish Gauchos—Gerchunoff's text inaugurates the dispute over assimilation vs. Jewish autonomous identity, which becomes problematical both for nationalist causes (in turn, from both the right and the left) and for Jews themselves. The guiding theme of this week will be the character and extent of Jewish communities in Argentina and Buenos Aires.

Week II - Jose Rabinovich's Tercera clase (Third Class; 1944), while mostly forgotten, is nevertheless a classic narrative of the pain, drudgery, and travails of Jewish immigrants in Buenos Aires, whose experiences of poverty were also compounded by an anti-Semitic racism that extends from the circumstances of their arrival, in third-class steerage, to their treatment in Argentine society as third-class citizens. We will continue with Germán Rozenmacher's monumental play of the struggle between identity and assimilation, Réquiem para un sábado a la noche (1964), which is perhaps one of the most wrenching plays of Jewish life in Argentina. Although we may not be lucky enough to coincide with a revival of the play, we will certainly complement the study of the play with a theater excursion that involves Jewish culture, such as perhaps recent reviv­als of the Yiddish theater in the city. The week will be rounded out by an examination of the writing of Jorge Luis Borges that deals with Jewish themes. Although not formally a Jew, Borges claimed Jewish ancestry and evinced in his fiction and essays a deep interest in various strains of Jewish culture. The guiding theme of this week will be the issues of difference and assimilation between Jewish communities and often antagonistic hegemonic social, political, and religious stances.