Evolving Images
Evolving Images
Jewish Latin American Cinema
Jews have always played an important role in the generation of culture in Latin America, despite their relatively small numbers in the overall population. In the early days of cinema, they served as directors, producers, screenwriters, composers, and broadcasters. As Latin American societies became more religiously open in the later twentieth century, Jewish characters and themes began appearing in Latin American films and eventually achieved full inclusion. Landmark films by Jewish directors in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, which are home to the largest and most influential Jewish communities in Latin America, have enjoyed critical and popular acclaim.
Evolving Images is the first volume devoted to Jewish Latin American cinema, with fifteen critical essays by leading scholars from Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Israel. The contributors address transnational and transcultural issues of Jewish life in Latin America, such as assimilation, integration, identity, and other aspects of life in the Diaspora. Their discussions of films with Jewish themes and characters show the rich diversity of Jewish cultures in Latin America, as well as how Jews, both real and fictional, interact among themselves and with other groups, raising the question of how much their ethnicity may be adulterated when adopting a combined identity as Jewish and Latin American. The book closes with a groundbreaking section on the affinities between Jewish themes in Hollywood and Latin American films, as well as a comprehensive filmography.
[A] superb collection of essays…All too often we find a statement such as 'this is a 'must book' for all those interested in…' In considering Evolving Images it is warranted, for it points to an equally evolving academic enterprise within Latin American-Jewish studies.
A welcome addition to the English-language literature on Jewish themes in Latin American cinema...highly readable...Glickman and Huberman should be congratulated for putting together a fine collection of essays on the inadequately studied topic of Jewish presence in Latin American cinema.
The editors are to be commended for creating a structure that gives insight into specific aspects of Jewish lives and how these are visually depicted in Latin American countries...Evolving Images is essential reading for anyone seeking to gain insight into Jewish filmmaking in Latin American countries. Those studying or wishing to learn more about how Jewish motives and themes are treated in Latin American film and cinema will find this edited anthology highly informative and engaging. Everyone interested in the depiction of religion, heritage and/or cultural identities on film might also be interested in the collection.
This book is a significant and useful contribution to the prospering field of Latin American Jewish studies. There is no other competing work available on this subject, and thus this book is very much a grounding text for the field. I recommend it enthusiastically, and I am confident that it will be enormously influential.
This book creates a new field of research. The essays demonstrate that Jewish Latin American film, because of its continuity and scope, is itself a genre and not a spinoff from Latin American film in general.
Nora Glickman is a professor of Latin American literature at Queens College and at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Ariana Huberman is an associate professor of Spanish at Haverford College.
- Introduction. Evolving Images: Jewish Latin American Cinema (Nora Glickman and Ariana Huberman)
- Part I. Alternative Identities
- 1. Out of the Shadows: María Victoria Menis’s Camera Obscura (Graciela Michelotti)
- 2. Intercultural Dilemmas: Performing Jewish Identities in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (Elissa J. Rashkin)
- 3. Incidental Jewishness in the Films of Fabián Bielinsky (Amy Kaminsky)
- Part II. Memory and Violence
- 4. My German Friend and the Jewish Argentine/German “Mnemo-Historic“ Context (Daniela Goldfine)
- 5. Dispersed Friendships: Jeanine Meerapfel’s La amiga (Patricia Nuriel)
- 6. Revisiting the AMIA Bombing in Marcos Carnevale’s Anita (Mirna Vohnsen)
- Part III. New Themes
- 7. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation: A Jewish Journey in the Land of Soccer (Alejandro Meter)
- 8. Coming of Age in Two Films from Argentina and Uruguay (Carolina Rocha)
- 9. Waiting for the Messiah: The Super 8mm Films of Alberto Salomón (Ernesto Livon-Grosman)
- Part IV. Diasporas and Displacements
- 10. Geographic Isolation and Jewish Religious Revival in Front (Ariana Huberman)
- 11. Negotiating Jewish and Palestinian Identities in Latin American Cinema (Tzvi Tal)
- 12. From a Dream to Reality: Representations of Israel in Contemporary Jewish Latin American Film (Amalia Ran)
- 13. On Becoming a Movie (Ilan Stavans)
- Part V. Comparative Perspectives: North and South American Cinema
- 14. Jewish Urban Space in the Films of Daniel Burman and Woody Allen (Jerry Carlson)
- 15. Interfaith Relations between Jews and Gentiles in Argentine and US Cinema (Nora Glickman)
- Afterword. Film Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies (Naomi Lindstrom)
- Jewish Latin American Filmography
- Contributors
- Index
