Jews, Gender, and Modernity in Argentina

FAIN: FA-58217-15

Amy K. Kaminsky
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

The fabled Argentine Jewish migratory route, from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the agricultural settlements of the Pampas and then to the urban centers of the nation, is but one of the ways that Argentina’s Jewish history differs from, and thereby illuminates, other Jewish migration and assimilation narratives. This project aims to reconfigure Argentine literary, film, and cultural studies by arguing that the very project of modernity in Argentina relies on the paradox of Jewish otherness in, and identification with, the nation. It claims a central place for Jewish-authored texts and the deployment of Jewishness as an idea deeply infused with discourses of gender and sexuality in shaping Argentina’s cultural landscape. It challenges mainstream Jewish cultural studies to move beyond its current focus on the U.S., Europe, and Israel and takes the growing body of research both in Latin American Jewish studies and on gender, sexuality, and the modern nation in new directions.

Associated Products

Handprints: The Cartographic Vision of Mirta Kupferminc (Book Section)
Title: Handprints: The Cartographic Vision of Mirta Kupferminc
Author: Amy Kaminsky
Editor: Karen Elizabeth Bishop
Abstract: The chapter “examines the maps of exile and diaspora created by contemporary Argentine visual artist Mirta Kupferminc as works of postmemory. A child of Holocaust survivors, Kupferminc draws literal and figurative maps of the trajectories of exile, including a series of maps that she embroiders on her hands. Her work invokes and marks the body […] as a site of intergenerational trauma and memory offered up to a viewer complicit in working out the many ways that meaning is made in the charting of visual space as a visceral and aesthetic project.” (from the editor’s “Introduction”)
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://http://www.worldcat.org/title/cartographies-of-exile-a-new-spatial-literacy/oclc/947837704
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy
ISBN: 9780415714860

“Incidental Jewishness in the Films of Fabián Bielinsky” (Book Section)
Title: “Incidental Jewishness in the Films of Fabián Bielinsky”
Author: Amy Kaminsky
Editor: Ariana Huberman and Nora Glickman, eds.
Abstract: This chapter addresses the phenomenon I am calling “incidental Jewishness” in the content and reception of Nueve Reinas and El aura, the two feature films Fabián Bielinsky made before his death. Bielinsky’s work as an assistant director included Cohen vs Rosi, a film with overtly Jewish content; but neither Nueve Reinas nor El aura has been received as a “Jewish film.” After discussing the vexed notion of identity itself (what might we mean when say that a cultural product is “Jewish”?), I discuss how the meanings circulating around the linked signifiers “Jew”/“Jewish”/”Judaism”/”Jewishness” in the context of contemporary Argentina emerge in and from Bielinsky’s two feature films. I pay special attention to what I think of as the Jewish moment in Nueve reinas, in which one of the con men identifies an elderly woman as Jewish and uses that knowledge to win her trust. I argue that this scene is highly suggestive of the ways that Jewishness permeates Argentina on the one hand and remains inassimilable on the other.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Unveristy of Texas Press,
Book Title: Latin American Jewish Film

The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation (Book)
Title: The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation
Author: Amy K. Kaminsky
Abstract: The very project of modernity in Argentina relies on a submerged and troubled relationship to the paradox of Jewish otherness in, and identification with, the nation. It thereby claims a central place for Jewish-authored texts and the deployment of Jewishness as an idea as well as an identity, in shaping Argentina’s cultural landscape. Planting Wheat and Reaping Doctors is a search for the strands of Jewishness in the fabric of Argentine history and self-representation to discern what patterns of nation and meaning they form in combination with the strands alongside them and those they interlace.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://http://www.sunypress.edu/p-7058-the-otherargentina.aspx; http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1711
Access Model: open access
Publisher: SUNY Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781438483290
Copy sent to NEH?: No

“Fractures and Refractions in Argentina: Prosthetic Memory and Edgardo Cozarinsky’s Lejos de dónde.” (Book Section)
Title: “Fractures and Refractions in Argentina: Prosthetic Memory and Edgardo Cozarinsky’s Lejos de dónde.”
Author: Amy Kaminsky
Editor: Hilene Flanzbaum
Abstract: It is unsurprising that the exploration of Argentina’s willingness to absorb the perpetrators of unthinkable crimes, together with the tension between that nation as a haven for Jewish survivors and as a hiding place for their tormentors, is an important feature of post-Holocaust literature in Argentina. Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 2009 novel, Lejos de dónde (Far From Where?), approaches this thematic by imagining the life of a German woman who evades arrest when Auschwitz is liberated and, passing as a Jew, makes her way to Argentina, and of her son, who never learns his mother's history.
Year: 2021
Book Title: The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture

“Incidental Jewishness in the Films of Fabián Bielinsky.” (Book Section)
Title: “Incidental Jewishness in the Films of Fabián Bielinsky.”
Author: Amy Kaminsky
Editor: Nora Glickman and Ariana Huberman
Abstract: This chapter addresses the phenomenon I am calling “incidental Jewishness” in the content and reception of Nueve Reinas and El aura, the two feature films Fabián Bielinsky made before his death. Bielinsky’s work as an assistant director included Cohen vs Rosi, a film with overtly Jewish content; but neither Nueve Reinas nor El aura has been received as a “Jewish film.” After discussing the vexed notion of identity itself (what might we mean when say that a cultural product is “Jewish”?), I discuss how the meanings circulating around the linked signifiers “Jew”/“Jewish”/”Judaism”/”Jewishness” in the context of contemporary Argentina emerge in and from Bielinsky’s two feature films. I pay special attention to what I think of as the Jewish moment in Nueve reinas, in which one of the con men identifies an elderly woman as Jewish and uses that knowledge to win her trust. I argue that this scene is highly suggestive of the ways that Jewishness permeates Argentina on the one hand and remains inassimilable on the other.
Year: 2018
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Book Title: Evolving Images: Jewish Latin American Cinema

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