Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans

The field of Latin American Jewish Studies has been dominated by works about different Jewish communities that stressed the exceptionality of the Jewish experience in Latin America, and focused on the growth of Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Israeli – Latin American relations. The new collection of essays Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Ranaan Rein seeks “to provide a new way of thinking about ethnicity in Latin America through a focus on Jews” (p. 4), and to open up neglected areas of inquiry such as the study of Sephardim, of women, and of unaffiliated Jews. To counter the prevalent emphasis on the exceptionality of the Jewish experience, the essays in this book propose that both in their diasporic and their national conditions Jews are “much like everyone else” (p. 5). Lesser and Rein hope that the questions asked in this book will inspire scholarship about the ten million Latin...