Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880 – 1955

2011; Duke University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1416846

1527-1900

Raanan Rein,

Race, History, and American Society

In 1932, blonde, 18-year-old Ana Rovner became Miss Once, named for a Buenos Aires neighborhood with a considerable Jewish population. She then became Miss Capital, hoping to become Miss Argentina and enter the Miss Universe contest. Although Rovner did not refer to her Jewishness, her background was never a secret. A couple of years later, President Agustín P. Justo attended a solo performance by Berta Singerman at the Teatro Colón, the temple of elite porteño culture. Singerman, who had begun her career in Yiddish theater, acquired national and international fame for her recitations. At the peak of her career, she performed for 70,000 people in Córdoba. These anecdotes illustrate the visibility of Jewish-Argentine women in both popular and high cultures in 1930s Argentina, precisely at a time of growing nationalism and xenophobia in both Europe and Latin America.In the masculine public space of Argentina during the first half of the twentieth century, more than a few Jewish women participated in Socialist, Anarchist, Communist, or union activities, or worked toward the establishment of a Jewish home in Pales-tine. Beyond comprising the largest Jewish women’s group, the Organización Sionista Femenina Argentina (OSFA) also became the largest Jewish group in this country.In this pioneering book on Argentine Jewish women, Sandra McGee Deutsch analyzes a wide variety of sites, both in the Argentine countryside as well as in the cities, where Jewish women interacted with Jews of different origins and non-Jews alike. Very little has been written about the history of immigrant women of any ethnic background and their descendants in Latin America, therefore this remarkable volume should be of interest to anybody interested in the immigrant societies of this continent and their hybrid identities. By putting women at the center of the stage, the focus is not on institutions and discourses but on the daily lives of many individuals with a variety of backgrounds and trajectories.Studies of Jewish women in Latin America have too often focused on prostitutes or novelists. Indeed, Argentine Jewish prostitution is probably the aspect of Jewish women’s lives that has attracted most attention on the part of scholars, writers, and filmmakers. Deutsch does not ignore the disproportionate number of Jewish prostitutes in Buenos Aires until the early 1930s, but she is much more interested in exploring the ways in which Jewish women crossed many borders and how they negotiated the boundaries between private and professional lives and between the respectable and disreputable.The eight chapters in this volume deal with the fundamental roles played by Jewish women in all aspects of rural and urban societies, in both the domestic and the public spheres. Women transmitted linguistic, culinary, musical, and other kinds of heritage to their children and thus created a kind of ethnic enclave in their homes. At the same time, the gradual adoption of local customs, food, and manners transformed these homes into Argentine ones. In the streets, schools, and workplaces, Jewish women contributed to the formation of argentinidad. As to racial relations, Deutsch concludes that, although not always successful, “[a] spectrum of Jewish women, ranging from colonists to prostitutes, claimed whiteness by setting themselves apart from criollos” (p. 244).At any rate, as students and teachers, in the liberal professions or political activities, through human rights groups or Zionist organizations, Jewish Argentine women fought against exclusion within the Jewish community and without, and demanded to be an integral part of Argentine society. Deutsch correctly points out that “even as Jewish women aided their communities and the nascent state of Israel, they highlighted their Argentine identities and expanded the sense of who belonged to the nation” (p. 235).Attention is given in the book to both working- and middle-class women, Ashkenazi and Sephardic alike. Too many studies have tended to overemphasize the supposed separation between Jews of Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins, as if there was hardly any contact between them in their daily lives. By contrast, Deutsch points to several contact zones between members of the two groups, such as their participation in Zionist and philanthropic associations.Unlike many studies on the Jewish experience in Argentina, anti-Semitism is not a main axis of discussion here. Deutsch is right to point out that, except at certain moments, Jewish women in Argentina “experienced relatively little anti-Semitism until the 1930s, although their status and race were ambiguous” (p. 10).Based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, written documents and oral history, this book is highly recommended to anyone interested in Latin American ethnic studies or in the history of women in this region. It will be particularly helpful to students and scholars of Jewish Latin America.