Challenging the “Establishment”: 1960s and 1970s Youth Rebellion in the Argentine Jewish Community

While the 1960s and 1970s are known for generational tension, Argentine Zionist youth groups actually shared certain goals with their elders in the Jewish community. Both were deeply concerned with supporting Israel and combating the assimilation of left-wing Argentine youth. Nonetheless, Zionist youth groups brought the generational conflicts of the period into the Jewish community, confronting their elders’ understandings of Zionism, Jewishness, and Argentinidad. This paper will track how the conflicts between Jewish adults and youth escalated over the 1960s and 1970s as local political and generational schisms and trends throughout the Jewish Diaspora were refracted in the Argentine-Jewish sphere. As Argentine youth in general became increasingly radical and confrontational in the late 1960s and early 1970s and as the 1967 Six-Day War led to reevaluations of Jewishness and Zionism worldwide, these Zionist youth groups became increasingly disdainful of the Jewish “establishment” as they came to call. They lodged two common critiques. First, Jewish youth were dissatisfied that the establishment merely issued pro-Israel statements rather than encouraging Aliyah (immigration to Israel) and thereby undermined the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and the socialist potential of Israel. Second, the adults were too detached from the Argentine revolutionary struggle, and the third-world struggle more broadly, allowing the Jewish community to seem a protector of the status quo rather than on the side of revolution. In defining themselves in contrast to the older generations, these youth groups offered new articulations of what it meant to be Jewish and Zionist in Argentina that responded both to the political moment in Argentina and the post-1967 fervency for the Israeli cause across the Diaspora. While the mainstream adult institutions did absorb this new discourse to an extent, in the eyes of the youth, the adults never proved themselves champions of the revolutionary struggles.