Argentine Patriots and Decent Jews: Negotiating National, Ethnic, and Gender Identity on the Jewish-Argentine Radio during the 1930s and 1940s

In the 1930s and 1940s, Yiddish-speaking Jewish-Argentines looking for news and entertainment could tune into two dedicated radio shows: Samuel Glasserman’s La Matinee Radial Israelita (Di Yiddishe Radio Matinee) and Tobias Berelejis’s La Hora Israelita (Di Yiddishe Sho). Both were bilingual, with some segments transmitted both in Yiddish and Spanish, and others in only one of these two languages. The shows hosted musicians and singers, comedians, and experts with columns on specialized topics ranging from accounting and finance to love and relationships.

Only Glasserman’s radio show has survived in the archive; transcripts of monologs and entire segments eventually arrived to the Fundación IWO’s archive in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This paper analyses the performance of Jewish and Argentine identities in the radio show monologues and segments, with specific attention to discussions of gender roles. Notions of gender as applied to marriage and relationships were particularly visible in the segment “Di Sentimentale Post,” a love advice column led by a Jewish-Argentine match-maker. 

This paper also considers the role of language, particularly hybridized Yiddish/Spanish, in the show’s identitary juxtapositions. I suggest that the role of Jewish-Argentine media and popular culture in the negotiation of national and ethnic identities reflects broader phenomena of mutual adjustment (between the nation-state and its ethnic and normative populations) in the aftermath of a period of mass migration.