Crossing Continents: Jewish Experiences and Identities in Latin America and Oceania

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the multifaceted expressions of Jewish identity across Latin America and Oceania, analyzing how migration, memory, language, and cultural continuity intersect in distinct regional contexts. In Argentina, both literature and cinema offer layered portrayals of Jewish life. Films like The Tenth Man, The Last Suit, and The Red Star depict Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions, grappling with themes of Holocaust trauma, communal belonging, and hybrid identities. Parallel to this, contemporary Argentine Jewish literature by authors such as Fingueret, Feierstein, Shua, Birmajer, and Tenenbaum negotiates Jewish identity amid national upheaval, diaspora memory, gender, and assimilation.
In smaller Latin American Jewish communities (and using Lima, Peru, as an example), post-colonial hierarchies, racialization, and class reshape Jewish self-perception and communal dynamics, challenging the ideal of “whiteness” and development. These identities are continuously reconstructed through local negotiations with global Jewish narratives.
In Oceania, Australian film and literature capture the cultural persistence and psychic costs of Jewish migration. Filmic representations of Yiddish language and postwar cultural life challenge integrationist myths, while Australian Yiddish literature reveals alienation and cultural dislocation as powerful counter-narratives to dominant celebratory discourses.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Hebrew language and Jewish education are sustained in isolation by individual families outside major centers. Through agentive practices, these families forge new meanings of Jewishness and community, revealing a highly localized yet globally relevant form of diasporic resilience.
Together, these presentations reveal how Jewish identities are continuously reimagined through media, literature, language, and community practice across diverse diasporic landscapes.

Sub Track

• Migration, Diaspora, and Transnational Communities

Chair

• Rebecca E Margolis, Monash University

Discussant

• Rebecca E Margolis, Monash University

Individual Presentations

• Representations of Jewish Communities in Argentine Cinema - Mirna Vohnsen, Technological University Dublin

• Jewish Identity in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Memory, Diaspora, and Cultural Continuity - Daniela Goldfine, University of Wisconsin, River Falls

• Yiddish Literature in Australia - Daniel Ari Baker, Monash University

• Hebrew Language in New Zealand - Annabel C Noar, Monash University

Session Organizer

• Daniela Goldfine, University of Wisconsin, River Falls