Rethinking Polish Jewish Immigration to Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The large majority of scholarship on Jewish immigration to the Americas has focused on the period between 1880 and 1920, and has overwhelmingly addressed Jewish immigration to the United States. This panel will instead consider Jewish mass migration during different time periods and directed toward other destinations: interwar and postwar Latin America. Focusing on the two largest Latin American Jewish communities of Argentina and Brazil, these three presentations will contribute to the rethinking of gender roles, marital relations, and the place of Holocaust survivors in Latin American Jewish societies, politics, and cultures.

Aleksandra Jakubczak will examine transnational responses to the migration of Polish Jewish women to interwar Argentina. Departing from previous studies of the fight against sex trafficking, which have uncritically acclaimed the contributions of Jewish communal organizations to opposing the exploitation of Jewish women, her presentation will instead argue that, by perpetuating paternalistic and prejudiced discourses, the Argentine and Polish states and Jewish organizations actually made Jewish women more vulnerable to prostitution. Lelia Stadler will explore the importance of divorce as an overlooked category of analysis for the study of modern Jewish migration. By considering the divorce practices of Polish Jewish immigrants in interwar and postwar Argentina, her presentation will argue that divorce played a central role in mediating these immigrants’ relationships with the Argentine state and Jewish communal organizations. Finally, Michael Rom will analyze the decisive contributions that Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors made to Jewish politics and Yiddish culture in postwar Brazil. Focusing on three Jewish survivors in particular, his presentation will argue that these survivors were integral to broader battles over communal hegemony during the height of the Brazilian Jewish Cold War.

By employing a thoroughly transnational approach, utilizing previous unexamined sources, and asking original questions about Polish Jewish immigration to Latin America, this panel will offer important new directions for the study of twentieth-century Jewish mass migration.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in the Americas

Chair

• Tobias Brinkmann, Penn State University

Individual Presentations

• “Protecting the Jewish Daughters”: Transnational Responses to the Interwar Migration of Polish Jewish Women to Argentina - Aleksandra Jakubczak, Columbia University

• The Road to Divorce: Between the Argentine State and the Jewish Community, 1919-1947 - Lelia Stadler, Columbia University