Embodied (Mis)perceptions: Shoulder-to-Shoulder with Jewish Prostitutes at the Yiddish Theatre in Buenos Aires

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Gender and Sexuality

Abstract

Across the early twentieth-century Jewish diaspora, the thriving Yiddish theatres in Buenos Aires were notorious for their unlikely proprietors and audience members: a powerful ring of Jewish pimps. Much to the 200,000-person Argentine Jewish community’s dismay, prostitutes were ardent theatregoers. Theatre reviewers, popular historians, and memoirists frequently described their experiences attending the Yiddish theatres alongside these marginalized Jewish women, often disparaging prostitutes for their excessive makeup, expensive jewelry, and even the sound of their laughter. As I argue, intense communal shame surrounding Jewish involvement in prostitution has perpetuated misconceptions about the undeniable presence of Jewish prostitutes at the Argentine Yiddish theatres. This paper questions unexamined biases about prostitutes’ allegedly ostentatious behavior, debase moral character, and lack of agency. Highlighting the discrepancies between audience members’ expectations about prostitution and Jewish prostitutes’ lived experiences challenges historiographic assumptions about the international twentieth-century Yiddish theatre hub of Buenos Aires, and enable us to see modern Yiddish theatre history anew.

Author

• Tova Markenson