The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean - 9781845194147

"These Fragments of Memory û of alienation, identity, and resistance û contribute significantly toward a phantom reconstruction of the multifaceted Latin American Jewish experience."-Judith Laikin Elkin, University of Michigan; a Founder of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association

"Editor Kristin Ruggiero has assembled essays by keen interpreters of the Jewish experience in Latin America, furthering the interdisciplinary exploration of four prominent themes in the history of the respective Jewries: memory, identity, anti-Semitism, and violence. The contributors' disciplines include history, anthropology, literature, sociology, and art, which underscores the multifaceted ways of describing Jewish life in Latin America."-American Historical Review

"Topically, the volume tackles a multiplicity of contradictory forces and trends: anti-Semitism and Judeophilia; cultural hybridity and separation; terrorism (of various ideological hues) and communal self-defense; collective memory and amnesia. The result iis a broad and vivid portrayal of the Jewish presence in Latin America."-Jose C. Mova, UCLA, Department of History; Chair, Latin American. Studies Program

"This interdisciplinary collection explores and celebrates individual lives and collective Jewishness...it is a book of passionate commitment to portraying the Jewish presence in twentieth-century Latin America and the Caribbean."-Revista Eumpea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe

"These essays provides ample evidence that there was not one common Jewish experience. 1 Immigrants were neither cut from the same cloth nor did they leave their homelands for 1 the same reasons. Their motivations for leaving shaped them as much as the challenges they faced in their new homes."-The Americas

"This book is an important contribution to an ongoing scholarly and artistic effort to excavate, document and communicate the multifarious diasporic experience of Jews in Latin America during the twentieth century...Essays here depict and probe the very processes of fragmentation which characterize the experiences of Jews in the Diaspora, as well as their attempts to retain and narrate these experiences."-European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Kristin Ruggiero is Professor of History, Director of the Center for Latin American. and Caribbean Studies, and an Associate Director of the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2004) and And Here the World Ends: The Life of an Argentine Village (Stanford University Press, 1988).