Jewish Experiences Across The Americas

Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

2020 Natan Notable Book Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards Best Travel Book Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.

Scholarly survey covers Old World origins; profiles of New World cultures of German and Eastern European Jews; the effects of changing political and economic climates; and immigrant settlement on the Lower East Side settlement.

A respected rabbi discusses the major issues facing American Jews, including their social history, culture, politics, personal experiences, and connections with Israel and Zionism

An overview of the history of American Jewry using primary sources from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States Jews Across the Americas is a groundbreaking sourcebook capturing the historical diversity and cultural breadth of American Jews across Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Featuring primary documents as well as scholarly interpretations, Jews Across the Americas builds upon new developments in Jewish Studies, engaging with transnationalism, race, sexuality, and gender, and highlighting the lived experiences of those often left out of Jewish history. Jews Across the Americas features an impressively broad and far-reaching range of historical sources, including artifacts and objects that have not previously been featured as integral to Jewish history in the Western hemisphere. Entries teach readers how to understand everything from wills and advertisements to sermons, and how to interpret photographs, domestic architecture, and comics. Whether it’s a recipe from Brazil that blends Moroccan and Amazonian foodways, or a text about the first non-binary Jew to cross the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, each entry broadens our understanding of Jewish American history.