From the Americas to Latin America: Regional Context and the Argentine-Jewish Community, 1955–66

In the years after Juan Perón’s 1955 fall, the Argentine Jewish community re-evaluated the nature of the Argentine nation and what it meant to be Jewish in Argentina. It transitioned from seeing Argentina as similar to any other country in the “new world” to seeing it as defined by its Latin American context. As it made this transition, the Jewish community also transitioned from seeing itself as similar to any other Jewish community in the new world, particularly the one in the United States, to seeing itself as defined by the local and continental realities.

Most Argentine-Jewish institutions rejoiced at the overthrow of Perón believing that Argentina had returned to its pluralistic and liberal roots. It was this traditional political culture, they contended, that had allowed the Jewish community to thrive in Argentina and across the New World. Nonetheless, several processes in the early 1960s led community members to question this framework and to construct a Jewish identity more attuned to the Latin American context. First, an upswing of anti-Semitism forced reevaluations of Argentina’s liberal credentials. Jewish activists began to analyze Argentina as part of a continent replete with structural inequalities that allowed Jews to be scapegoated and nationalist movements to thrive. Second, Jewish youth, who were more inspired by the Cuban Revolution than Israel, more concerned with inequality than Jewish continuity, attacked Jewish leaders for being detached from the Latin American context. In response, these activists reframed the community as equally consumed with Latin American and Jewish concerns. Finally, the efforts of certain Jewish organizations based in the United States to “enhance” Jewish life in Argentina led to an anti-imperialist response and efforts to define the nature of Argentine Jewry, and Latin American Jewry more broadly, as antithetical to the bourgeois, assimilationist, Jewry in the United States.