The Jews of Latin America - Softcover

Judith Laikin Elkin

9781607852315: The Jews of Latin America

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607852314 ISBN 13: 9781607852315

Publisher: Scholarly Publishing Office, U, 2011

The Jews of Latin America examines the role played by Jewish communities in shaping the history of Latin America. It is an ambitious and groundbreaking work that analyzes and describes the varied ecology, ethnicity, traditions, and policies that characterize Jewish life in more than twenty Latin American nation-states. Inserting Latin America into Jewish history expands the traditional boundaries for surveying global Jewish diasporas. In counterpoint, as Professor Elkin writes, “....viewing Latin American societies from a Jewish perspective challenges the traditional notion of these societies as unalterably Hispanic and Catholic, a notion that perpetuates the nationalist view of Jews as disturbers of some ideal society. It is becoming more and more apparent that non-Latin, non-Iberian immigrants played a role in the evolution of the Latin American republics, and that their societies are increasingly pluralistic in reality if not in ideology. Jews are a part of this new reality, and uncovering their life stories reveals the modernizing dynamic they brought with them.”

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From the Back Cover:

THE JEWS OF LATIN AMERICA expands the bounds of Jewish history by making visible the little-known communities of South and Central America. In doing so, the book challenges the notion that Latin American societies are entirely Hispanic and Catholic. Through the life histories of Jews who emigrated to Latin America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author demonstrates that these societies are increasingly pluralistic in reality, if not in ideology. Judith Laikin Elkin maintains a balanced view of this nonconforming minority adjusting to the politcs, economy, and social stratification of countries that have not embraced cultural pluralism as an ideal.

The earlier version of this book, JEWS OF THE LATIN AMERICAN REPUBLICS, quickly became the basic work on the subject. But events of the 1980s and 1990s, and the emergence of new research, underscored the need for a substantially revised edition. In THE JEWS OF LATIN AMERICA, Elkin ensures that book's continued life as a classic.

About the Author:

Judith Laikin Elkin, a historian associated with the Frankel Center for Judiac Studies at the University of Michigan, is the author of numerous books and articles on the Jews of South and Central America and the Caribbean. She is the founding president of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

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