Chapter Nine

Politically Incorrect: César Tiempo and the Editorial Staff of the Cultural Supplement of La Prensa1

Raanan Rein

Around the end of the 1960s, Jacobo Kovadloff, then president of the Socie- dad Hebraica (Argentine Jewish Society), decided to invite the writer César Tiempo to give a talk at the club. This invitation aroused furi- ous debate among the members of the society’s board of directors, some of whom argued that they should not invite a Jewish intellectual who had sold out to Peronism. In the end Tiempo did lecture at the Sociedad Hebraica, but his partisan-ideological identity did not appear politically correct to many in the Jewish-Argentine establishment. A quick look at the inventory of César Tiempo’s correspondence, archived at the Biblio- teca Nacional (National Library of Argentina), shows that Hebraica sent Tiempo many letters and invitations in the course of the 1930s, but only one letter during the Peronist decade.2 A few years later, in the 1970s, the intellectual Samuel Rollansky invited several Jewish academics to a meeting at the library of the Instituto Científico Judío (IWO—Jewish Scientific Institute). In the course of his conversation with them, Rollansky mentioned the fact that none of César

1 I completed this article during my stay as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at in Atlanta. I would like to thank the director of the Center, Martine Watson Brownley, as well as my colleague in the His- tory Department there, Jeffrey Lesser, for their support and hospitality. Thanks also to Alejandro Dujovne, Claudio Panella, Eliezer Nowodworski, and Rosalie Sitman for their comments and suggestions, and for the support of the Sourasky Chair for Ibero-American Studies at the University of Tel Aviv. 2 That letter was an invitation to a lecture by Marcos Satanowaski entitled “The ‘Young’ Nation of : Impressions from a Recent Trip” (see letter from the president and sec- retary, Guillermo Cracovski and Bernardo Mayantz, 29 June 1954, Archivo César Tiempo, Biblioteca Nacional, ). In the mid-1960s, when Jacobo Kovadloff was presi- dent and Bernardo Ezequiel Koremblit was cultural director, Tiempo was again invited to participate in events at Hebraica, and in January 1964 he was also asked to contribute an article to be published in issue number 101 of the literary journal Davar, in honor of the centennial of the birth of the Jewish-English intellectual Israel Zangwill (see letter from Bernardo Ezequiel Koremblit, 31 Jan. 1964, Archivo César Tiempo). 214 raanan rein

Tiempo’s books could be found in the IWO library’s catalog. The same Jewish writer who in the 1930s had led the campaign against the director of the Biblioteca Nacional, Gustavo Martínez Zuviría, who was also the anti-Semitic writer known as Hugo Wast, still did not rate shelf space in the IWO library.3 These anecdotes illustrate the main arguments of this article, which seeks to disprove or at least fine-tune three of the clichés associated with the historiography and popular image of Peronism: that all Jews were anti-Peronists, that all eminent intellectuals distanced themselves from justicialismo,4 and that the cultural supplement of La Prensa lost all value and cultural importance once it fell into the hands of the CGT (Confeder- ación General del Trabajo, the Argentine labor federation), because it was dismissed as propaganda.5

Jewish-Argentines and Peronism

The history books tell us that despite Juan Perón’s efforts to eradicate anti-Semitism and his cultivation of close relations with the State of Israel throughout the Peronist decade of 1946–1955, he failed in his attempts to enlist the support of significant sectors of the Argentine Jewish community. Historians and commentators assert that most Argentine Jews remained hostile to Perón,6 and that Perón’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the community—for example, by setting up the Peronist Jewish organi- zation known as the Organización Israelita Argentina (OIA—Argentine

3 César Tiempo, La campaña antisemita y el director de la Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires: Mundo Israelita, 1935). See also Graciela Ben-Dror, Católicos, nazis y judíos: la Iglesia argentina en los tiempos del tercer reich (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Lumiere, 2003), 108–115. 4 The political movement based on the ideas and programs associated with President Juan Perón and his second wife, Eva Perón. 5 Flavia Fiorucci, “Neither Warriors Nor Prophets: Peronist and Anti-Peronist Intellec- tuals, 1945–1956” (Ph.D. diss., Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, 2002), 49. 6 See in this respect Raanan Rein, Argentina, Israel, and the Jews: Perón, the Eichmann Capture and After (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2003), Chs. 1–4; Susana Bianchi, Historia de las religiones en la Argentina: las minorías religiosas (Buenos Aires: Sudameri- cana, 2004); Daniel Lvovich, “Entre la historia, la memoria y el discurso de la identidad: Perón, la comunidad judía argentina y la cuestión del antisemitismo,” Indice—Revista de Ciencias Sociales 24 (2007): 173–188; Emilio J. Corbiere, “Perón y los judíos,” Todo es Historia 252 (1988): 6–35.