By the mid-twentieth century, Eastern European Jews had become one of Argentina's largest minorities. Some represented a wave of immigration begun two generations before; many settled in the province of Entre Ríos and founded an agricultural colony. Taking its title from the resulting hybrid of acculturation, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho examines the lives of these settlers, who represented a merger between native cowboy identities and homeland memories. The arrival of these immigrants in what would be the village of Villa Clara coincided with the nation's new sense of liberated nationhood. In a meticulous rendition of Villa Clara's social history, Judith Freidenberg interweaves ethnographic and historical information to understand the saga of European immigrants drawn by Argentine open-door policies in the nineteenth century and its impact on the current transformation of immigration into multicultural discourses in the twenty-first century. Using Villa Clara as a case study, Freidenberg demonstrates the broad power of political processes in the construction of ethnic, class, and national identities. The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho draws on life histories, archives, material culture, and performances of heritage to enhance our understanding of a singular population—and to transform our approach to social memory itself.

This book puts two of the most significant Jewish Diaspora communities outside of the U.S. into conversation with one another. At times contributor-pairs directly compare unique aspects of two Jewish histories, politics, or cultures. At other times, they juxtapose. Some chapters focus on literature, poetry, theatre, or sport; others on immigration, antisemitism, or health. Taken together, the essays in Promised Lands North and South offer sparkling insight and new depth on the modern Jewish global experience.

A sweeping biography that opens a window onto the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy. Baron Maurice de Hirsch was one of the emblematic figures of the nineteenth century. Above all, he was the most influential Jewish philanthropist of his time. Today Hirsch is less well known than the Rothschilds, or his gentile counterpart Andrew Carnegie, yet he was, to his contemporaries, the very embodiment of the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy. Hirsch's life provides a singular entry point for understanding Jewish philanthropy and politics in the late nineteenth century, a period when, as now, private benefactors played an outsize role in shaping the collective fate of Jewish communities. Hirsch's vast fortune derived from his role in creating the first rail line linking Western Europe with the Ottoman Empire, what came to be known as the Orient Express. Socializing with the likes of the Austrian crown prince Rudolph and "Bertie," Prince of Wales, Hirsch rose to the pinnacle of European aristocratic society, but also found himself the frequent target of vicious antisemitism. This was an era when what it meant to be Jewish—and what it meant to be European—were undergoing dramatic changes. Baron Hirsch was at the center of these historic shifts. While in his time Baron Hirsch was the subject of widespread praise, enraged political commentary, and conspiracy theories alike, his legacy is often overlooked. Responding to the crisis wrought by the mass departure of Jews from the Russian Empire at the turn of the century, Hirsch established the Jewish Colonization Association, with the goal of creating a refuge for the Jews in Argentina. When Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, advertised his plan to create a Jewish state (not without inspiration from Hirsch), he still wondered whether to do so in Palestine or in Argentina—and left the question open. In The Baron, Matthias Lehmann tells the story of this remarkable figure whose life and legacy provide a key to understanding the forces that shaped modern Jewish history.

“A much-needed monograph on the role of Sephardic Jews in Argentina, and . . . an important contribution to the study of Jews in Latin America overall” (Choice). At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East were called Turcos (“Turks”). Seen as distinct from Ashkenazim, Sephardi Jews weren’t even identified as Jews. Yet the story of Sephardi Jewish identity has been deeply impactful on Jewish history across the world. Adriana M. Brodsky follows the history of Sephardim as they arrived in Argentina, created immigrant organizations, founded synagogues and cemeteries, and built strong ties with coreligionists around the country. Brodsky demonstrates how fragmentation based on areas of origin gave way to the gradual construction of a single Sephardi identity. This unifying identity is predicated both on Zionist identification (with the State of Israel) and “national” feelings (for Argentina), and that Sephardi Jews assumed leadership roles in national Jewish organizations once they integrated into the much larger Askenazi community. Rather than assume that Sephardi identity was fixed and unchanging, Brodsky highlights the strategic nature of this identity, constructed both from within the various Sephardi groups and from the outside, and reveals that Jewish identity must be understood as part of the process of becoming Argentine.

This book was written in loving memory of her beloved father Adolfo Krell, whose story tells of true life experiences of his early childhood. He was a 1st 'generation child' born in the Pampas of Argentina in 1898 to immigrant parents. The family survived the Pogroms of Eastern Europe in the middle late 1800's. Historical records indicate that the Krell family migrated to Argentina to settle in the new land as farmers. The Jewish Settlement on the Pampas was a brave and heroic endevor of the Krell family's legacy.

Between 1905 and 1930, more than one hundred thousand Jews left Central and Eastern Europe to settle permanently in Argentina. This book explores how these Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi immigrants helped to create a new urban strain of the Argentine national identity. Like other immigrants, Jews embraced Buenos Aires and Argentina while keeping ethnic identities—they spoke and produced new literary works in their native Yiddish and continued Jewish cultural traditions brought from Europe, from foodways to holidays. The author examines a variety of sources including Yiddish poems and songs, police records, and advertisements to focus on the intersection and shifting boundaries of ethnic and national identities. In addition to the interplay of national and ethnic identities, Nouwen illuminates the importance of gender roles, generation, and class, as well as relationships between Jews and non-Jews. She focuses on the daily lives of ordinary Jews in Buenos Aires. Most Jews were working class, though some did rise to become middleclass professionals. Some belonged to organizations that served the Jewish community, while others were more informally linked to their ethnic group through their family and friends. Jews were involved in leftist politics from anarchism to unionism, and also started Zionist organizations. By exploring the diversity of Jewish experiences in Buenos Aires, Nouwen shows how individuals articulated their multiple identities, as well as how those identities formed and overlapped.

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 collective volume provides the reader with an exploration of Latin America from an Irish perspective. The contributors have explored the multiple, and sometimes surprising, links that exist between Ireland and Latin America, touching on specific features of these links such as the political and cultural influence of the Irish diaspora and their political relations. These topics are examined through different media, including literature, films, history, poetry and sociology, and offer an opportunity to discover an aspect of Irish culture and history that has not been widely studied. The authors deal with these questions from different cultural perspectives within past and present contexts, exploring two cultures and histories which, at times, are linked through their shared destinies. They also provide the reader with different national perspectives. In presenting the long-lasting and multifaceted relationships between Ireland and Latin America, the contributors have helped to deepen our understanding of a part of Ireland’s historical heritage that deserves more focus.

Drinking yerba mate is a daily, communal ritual that has brought together South Americans for some five centuries. In lively prose and with vivid illustrations, Rebekah E. Pite explores how this Indigenous infusion, made from the naturally caffeinated leaves of a local holly tree, became one of the most distinctive and widely consumed beverages in the region. Latin American food and commodity studies have focused on consumption in the global north, but Pite tells the story of yerba mate in South America, illuminating dynamic and exploitative circuits of production, promotion, and consumption. Ideas about who should harvest and serve yerba mate, along with visions of the archetypical mate drinker, persisted and were transformed alongside the shifting politics of class, race, and gender. This global history takes us from the colonial Rio de la Plata to the top yerba-consuming and producing nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with excursions to Chile, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, where yerba mate is now sold as a "superfood." For readers eager to understand South America and its unique drink, Sharing Yerba Mate is an essential text that delves into an everyday ritual to expose systems of power and the taste of belonging.

In Gauchos and Foreigners: Glossing Culture and Identity in the Argentine Countryside Ariana Huberman discusses the relationship between the gaucho figure and the 'foreigner' in Argentine rural literature. The narratives of William Henry Hudson, Benito Lynch and Alberto Gerchunoff present English scientists and travelers, as well as Jewish and Italian immigrants, in direct contact with the gaucho in the Argentine and Uruguayan countryside. The book shows how the intent to define and translate terms from the national glossary the gaucho, his lifestyle and habitat and from 'foreign' cultures, ultimately questions these terms' capacity to represent a specific culture. It traces a series of writing practices that challenge the concepts of 'native' and 'foreign' as stable categories of representation by conveying identity and culture across multiple linguistic, social and cultural registers. The reading of these unique practices of translation hopes to offer a fresh approach to the multicultural scope of Argentine literature.