Language in Transit

In this groundbreaking history, Amy Kerner explores the critical role of the Yiddish language in defining ethnicity and belonging for Argentina's Jewish diaspora, the largest in Latin America. Jews came to Argentina's provinces and growing cities as immigrants and refugees from Europe beginning in the late nineteenth century. Although Jewish immigrants were multilingual, they nevertheless gave Yiddish a central place in Jewish Argentine culture for over a century. Kerner elucidates how the longstanding influence of Yiddish culture in Argentine Jewish life resulted from national migration policies, urban modernity, populism, and the alliance of Yiddish speakers with Argentine anti-fascism. In turn, Jewish Argentines used Yiddish to document, debate, and respond to events on local and global scales, including the Holocaust, Israeli Zionism, and Latin American state terror. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kerner argues that Jewish Argentines used Yiddish to navigate changing political ideologies and ethnic boundaries across a century of Jewish Argentine history. Untangling the complex interplay of transnational and local politics in shaping the uses and meanings of Yiddish, Language in Transit offers fresh insights for the histories of Jewish culture and language in Argentina and Latin America.