In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of the Shoah by five leading figures in Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean writing - Alberto Gerchunoff, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa - Aizenberg illuminates how Latin American intellectuals engaged with the horrific information that reached them regarding the Holocaust, including the sympathy and collaboration of their own governments with the Nazis. Aizenberg emphasizes how - through fiction, journalism, and activism - these five culture-makers opposed and fought fascism. At the same time, her readings of individual texts confront shopworn cliches about Latin American writing and literature, suggesting deeper and richer dimensions to many canonical works. This interdisciplinary book fills critical gaps in both Holocaust and Latin American studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and students in both fields.

This edited volume places Jewish-Latin Americans within the context of Latin American and ethnic studies. It departs from traditional scholarship that segregates Jews as inhabitants "in" Latin America republics rather than as citizens "of" Latin American republics. The essays draw examples primarily from Argentina and Brazil, the two South American countries with the largest Jewish populations, and span from the late nineteenth century into the 1990s.

By giving primacy to the national identity of Jewish-Latin Americans, the essays included here emphasize human actors and accounts of lived experiences. Lesser and Rein's thought-provoking introduction outlines seven new formulations of the relationship between Jews, the nation-state, and their Diasporic experience. Individual contributors then pursue new perspectives of the Jewish experience, including those of the working class, labor organizing and anarchist activities, women, and the reconceptualization of racism and anti-Semitism.

"Contributors: "
Edna Aizenberg, Marymount Manhattan College of New York
Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University
Roney Cytrynowicz, the Arquivo HistA3rico Judaico Brasileiro
Sandra McGee Deutsch, University of Texas at El Paso
Donna J. Gu, Ohio State University
JosA(c) C. Moya, UCLA and Barnard College at Columbia University
Rosalie Sitman, Tel Aviv University
Natasha Zaretsky, Princeton University
Erin Graff Zivin, University of Pittsburgh