SECTION II

THE JEWS IN LATIN AMERICA

LLIWERANT_f7-107-124.inddIWERANT_f7-107-124.indd 107107 22/13/2008/13/2008 1:29:041:29:04 PMPM WANING ESSENTIALISM: LATIN AMERICAN JEWISH STUDIES IN ISRAEL

Raanan Rein

Several months ago I went with my wife to the cinema to watch a documentary entitled El año que viene . . . en Argentina (Next year . . . in Argentina).1 Among other issues, the movie dealt with the almost ‘taboo’ question of Jews who had made aliyah but later decided to return to their home country. The fi lm portrayed several families of Argentine Jews—whom elsewhere I have dubbed ‘Jewish-Argentines’ (Lesser and Rein, 2006). Each had discovered that the Argentine component in the mosaic of their individual identities was strong enough to pull them back to their country of origin. The discussion that followed the screening of the fi lm was even more interesting. Several people in the audience expressed clear hostility toward the movie and its creators, Jorge Gurvich and Shlomo Slutzky, who were present in the hall. Gurvich and Slutzky were accused of not being Zionist enough and, by extension, not Jewish enough. An elderly person in the audience stated that after moving to Israel, he had become fully identifi ed with the Jewish national project and therefore, unlike the producers of the movie, had never felt the need to even visit his native land, Argentina. Like several other Israelis, whether of Latin American origin or not, such people fi nd it diffi cult to understand how the long series of politi- cal upheavals, economic ups and downs, and social crises experienced by Argentina in recent decades have not produced a major exodus of Jewish Argentines to Israel. Moreover, another Jewish-Argentine movie entitled Un abrazo partido (A Lost Embrace) was far from being a box-offi ce success in Israel.2 The movie tells the story of a lower middle-class Jewish family in Buenos

1 Jorge Gurvich and Shlomo Slutzky, El año que viene en . . . Argentina, Israel 2005, 62 Min. 2 Daniel Burman and Marcelo Birmajer, Un abrazo partido, Argentina 2003. The fi lm won a Silver Bear for best actor (Daniel Hendler) and the Jury Grand Prix at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie was also Argentina’s nomination for Best Foreign fi lm at the Oscars in 2004.

LLIWERANT_f7-107-124.inddIWERANT_f7-107-124.indd 109109 22/13/2008/13/2008 1:29:061:29:06 PMPM