Yiddish in Argentina from Mass Migration to the Dirty War (1890-1982)

FAIN: FT-285605-22

Amy Kerner
University of Texas, Dallas (Richardson, TX 75080-3021)

Research and writing two chapters of a book on Yiddish in Argentina from the 1890s to the 1980s.

My project analyzes the long afterlife of the Eastern European Jewish vernacular, Yiddish, in twentieth-century Argentina. It challenges narratives that center the death of Yiddish in the Holocaust, by showing how Yiddish persisted for decades in literature, theater, education, daily use and cultural diplomacy. I focus on the capital, Buenos Aires, exploring the ways Yiddish speakers and non-speakers used and perceived the language, and how changing ethnic policies of the modernizing Argentine state shaped attitudes toward Yiddish, from the state-promotion of mass migration from Europe to the new ethno-nationalism of the last dictatorship and so-called “dirty war” in which Jewish Argentines were disproportionately impacted (1976-82). The project reframes the history of Yiddish as a Latin American story, not only a European one, and contributes to work in Latin American studies and across the humanities on language nationalism and on the influence of languages on ethnic identities.