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Hello. Welcome to the new books in Jewish Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat. Today, I'm grateful and honored to be in dialogue with David S.
Kaufman and David MK. Shanein. They are the editors of Promised Lands North and South. He was Canada and Jewish Argentina in conversation.
Published in Light and Neverland's My Grill 2024. David Kaufman is associate professor at York University, where he is the J. Richard Schiff chair for the study of Canadian Jewry. David Shanein is professor of history at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
I'm honored to be with you today. To begin, please tell us about yourselves, where did you grow up? What form of events in your lives inspired the scholars you later become? Well, I'll go first on David Kaufman.
I grew up in Toronto and I suppose I fell in love with thinking as a late teen. I think maybe the penny dropped for me that being a professor would be a good fit for me during a medical anthropology class. I took with a brilliant Helen Young at McGill and then was really affirmed when I took classes at the Hebrew University with Paul Mendesfloor. So after my first master's degree, I worked for a few years in the documentary film business.
And after a year in Yeshiva in Jerusalem, I was offered a too good to refuse fellowship to head back to grad school in New York, where I was mentored in history and American Jewish history by Hossia Diner. Thank you for sharing. So I'll go. I'll go.
David Shannon. Thank you for that question and for doing this, Ari. I grew up at a young and St. Clair in Toronto and I grew up as part of a community that really no longer exists in Canada.
And that is the community in and surrounding the United Jewish people's order, which was the old communist Jewish organization. And that was familiar to both sides of my family. I mentioned it because it's one of the things that attracted me to Argentina. And I know I mentioned this to David Kaufman, that secular Jewish life on the left.
I found much more vibrant when I first went to Argentina in the 1980s and it remained as such than was the case in Canada for reasons that some of the authors in the book get into. So I will say no more at this point and turn it back over to you, Ari. What inspired you to prepare this book? What message do you hope to convey to readers?
The volume grew out of several, several loose efforts over the past few years to put scholars of Canadian Jewish studies and scholars of Latin American Jewish studies in touch with each other remotely. We did this at various conferences, particularly during the pandemic. And then Ron and Ryan, who's a series editor on Latin American Jewish studies at Brill approached my colleague David who approached me about doing this kind of dialogue book. We did something that's kind of unusual, which was try to match up scholars who work on similar questions in the same discipline, you know, historians with other historians, literary scholars with other literary scholars, but who focus on different.
Countries Jews and then ask them to co write essays to come up with insights that they might not have otherwise come up with if they focus exclusively on their own domain. I'd say maybe I'll let you speak as well David, but the main message I think, you know, the one that I'm most, you know, want to get out there most is that it's just valuable to think about Jewish communities in a comparative perspective. And maybe also that the United States is not the best comparable for really any other diaspora Jewish community other than itself on account of its size that's sort of uniquely, instead of unique among diaspora Jewish communities but these other communities, including the ones that are the center of this books attention Canada and Argentina are particularly good fits to compare with one another, since they have similar origins similar origin stories, similar population sizes at least at the beginning of the stories kind of comparable societies at least from a very wide angle. And so, you know, the more you get into the more you discover the important and interesting differences.
What are the primary themes in this book, what story and stories does this book tell? So I'm just going to quickly go back to that last question because I would say that while about half the chapters in the book are single authored, including one by me, I think that the most fun I had and the most interesting part of it was something that David Kaufman touched on was that he has been very creative, not only in the context of this book but in other contexts as well at bringing scholars together to think as a pair and as larger groups and I think that often historians and other scholars certainly in the United States and English speaking Canada work on their own to be a wonderful part of this book, finding ways to ask scholars to ask each other about these different countries. I will go on now to that question that you just asked Ari and I think that there are a variety of themes. One is, I mean there are lots and I'll just focus on a couple.
One I would say is the nature of migration and immigration and what did it bring how did it shape each of the two societies and how did it shape Jews in those societies what kinds of immigration and migration have experienced anti-Semitism is another important topic and that emerges in a variety of contexts comparatively the place of Jewish Argentines and Jewish Canadians in larger national contexts what did it mean to be both Jewish and Argentine and Jewish Canadian and how do those identities from one end of the hemisphere to the other relate and then I suppose one other important one is Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust and how it was thought about in each of the two countries. I just quickly that there are, firstly thank you for your compliment David, there are 18 chapters in the book as well as an introduction that David and I wrote about common origins distinctive paths where we sketch out what's to be gained by putting Argentine Jewry and Canadian Jewry into conversation the first place so there are 19 standalone essays that can be read as a whole or bit by bit. What was your guiding principle in preparing this volume? I think that the starting guiding principle was one that David Kaufman that I mentioned before and that was David Kaufman's initiative and that is the idea of bringing two people together and seeing if they how they can ask new questions about each other's work across the continent.
This isn't going to be a very exciting answer but once we were able to enlist excellent people helping them to do their best work and to sharpen arguments and really focus on what they could tell us in specific national context and comparatively. It was a COVID book in the sense that most of the contributions don't surface new archival or literary material, although we ended up getting some of this too so I'm not going to brand new research but some of the contributions basically add like a dimension of juxtaposition that we offer something new by looking at it in a, you know, in a comparative or juxtaposition, you know, juxtaposition, juxtaposition, juxtaposition, juxtaposition, juxtaposition, juxtaposition, whatever, I would say that word got that out. Looking at it a comparative perspective to cast new light and new shadow. So this is a project that we may not have undertaken or may have looked different.
Had we not been engaged in the scholarly process during COVID. What new findings surprised you most about the contributions to this volume? For me that chapter on Jewish support for nationalist movements, really fantastic I say written by scholars run online and Simone Pierre LaCass. They talk about Jews investments and involvements in paranism in Argentina and in Quebec nationalism in the Canadian context.
I thought this was a really wonderful, surprising, provocative, comparative essay. And I also love my co-editor David Changens essay on two Jewish boxers, one from each of the countries in their boxing world and their national worlds was something that I knew very little about before I read his draft and I found that wonderfully surprising and rich and David's a great writer. What makes this work unique as a contribution to comparative history, the transnational history and to immigration history? Well, I would start by saying that, and this goes to an earlier question you had Ari, for a while there were a number of people writing comparative studies of Argentina and Canada because in contexts that may have little to do with Jews specifically, there are a lot of similarities.
Massive immigration from some of the same places in Europe to both countries in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including Jews and many Jews in the United States. Many Jews in Canada have relatives in Argentina and of course vice versa from that period, as well as the nature of what an immigrant society built in each case, an uglier side in the destruction of first peoples and many other sorts of similarities. And often the question arose what of the divergent paths between the two countries in the 20th century, Canadian perceptions at mid century, that is most Canadians perceived of growth and success in the national context as most Argentines, but also in the 20th century. As most Argentines began to perceive of something more grim, but those stopped and I've thought for a while that there's lots of room for more work and I hope that people will pick up from here and do more work on comparative Jewish communities in both places.
And I think it's the only work of this kind for starters. So in terms of the contribution, I can't think of another collection like this in any area of Canadian Latin American studies that provides such depth as David mentioned in the 19 chapters and such breath in terms of the analysis over so many different areas. I'd like to I'm the Canadianist in the conversation and I would love to do a similar book about Australia and Canada as well. Maybe we can maybe you would do one as well on Argentina or maybe broader Latin America and, and the Southern continent.
What were the different waves of Jewish migration to Argentina and Canada, what caused these how large were the respective waves, where did migrants come from, why did they choose these specific locations and destinations. Maybe I'll start here, although David, you want, you want to add some some color, I'll just start by saying that we have a chapter in the book by Robert brim and Ezekiel airday, who are both sociologists and they do something important and fascinating in their essay which is try to give a typology of immigration. So you can take this metaphor that you used of the wave seriously, which is the language that we use all the time a wave of migrants. But then they find that not all movements of migrants were waves or should be, you know, we shouldn't use this metaphor for every kind of situation of the movement of migrants so instead they basically offer a more careful way of thinking about these hydraulic metaphors and to the idea of waves, they add and streams.
So the 375,000 Jews who left Eastern Europe and came to either Canada or Argentina at the end of 1800s, they called that a tide, a big movement, as was the post war tide of some 20,000 Jewish refugees who came to Canada after World War II. Argentine Jews who went to Israel left Argentina went to Israel or Spain or the United States between the 60s and the end of the most recent century, they called that a wave. And then there are these things called streams, which they say happen over a much longer period of time and have more flow. So these are not movements of migrants that are caused by a sudden change in politics, a political revolution, nor they caused by a very sharp economic downturn that motivates a larger number of people to move in a shorter period of time.
So their essay isn't just about Jewish Canada and Jewish Argentina, but it makes a more provocative argument for a broader social science typology of Jewish migrations over the past 200 years. And then I recommend an essay. Can you elaborate on the history of Jewish boxing? Why is this relevant to Jewish immigration history in Canada and Argentina?
Maybe if I could just add one thing to what David said, and that is we have a great chapter in the book by Adriana Brodsky and Jollond Cohen on Moroccan Jews as immigrants. And I think it's fair to say that the presence of Moroccan Jews in Argentina was more substantially felt in their institutions and in other ways earlier than was the case in Canada. That's not to say that there weren't Moroccan Jewish immigrants in Canada in the early 20th century, but in Argentina, their institutions and their presence was more significant in lots of ways within the Jewish community than was the case in Canada. And as far as the question of boxing is concerned, sports has been written about in Canada, Argentina, United States, and some European countries as an avenue for mainstream membership in society in the formation of national identities.
And that's not only for Jewish immigrants and their children, but immigrants from other areas as well. Boxing is an example of that in Canada, Argentina, United States, to some extent France and Britain as well at different time periods. We see that in lots of ways. So, for example, in one of the Canadian novelist, Mordecai Richler's novels, we see the character of a box or as an expression of that transition from immigrant identity to a national Canadian identity.
And the same is true in lots of other ways in Argentina and Canada. So boxing and how it is consumed by an ethnic public, in this case a Jewish public, but also what it means to those who practice the sport and who were involved in the sport as professionals in lots of different ways tells us something about Jews and Argentine identity and Jews and Canadian identity. I would just add to this that it tells an interesting story to focus on different kinds of sports. So, in a kind of moment in time, that's more or less parallel in Canada and in Argentina, you know, boxing took up a lot more oxygen, a lot more excitement.
It was more likely that Jewish men in particular would be attracted to boxing as a practice, as an avenue for, you know, as a career or just as an activity. And you compare boxing as a sport with late 20th century, early 21st century Jewish sport and recreation activities where you might be more likely to find skiing or golfing or other kinds of activities and you don't find much talk in the present Jewish world about boxing. So, you have some kind of evidence about class transformation as well, and what happens to immigrant communities as they become enfranchised as they do in both these countries. How does this book shed new light on Holocaust memory in North and South America?
That's a great question. I think that we find that perhaps more than we understood previously Jews were thinking about the Holocaust earlier in both places. And in fact, there's been a lot written in the case of Canada and the United States of a kind of forgetting in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and that it took perhaps two decades or three decades and the same in the United States for people to begin to think about it. And speak out about it and reflect on it as Jews as Canadians and the same in Argentina.
And what we found in fact is that the authors in this book showed that there was a great deal of discussion and commentary about the Holocaust and its meaning in each country. In the case of Argentina, this was revived with great force in the early 1990s, 1992, 1994 in particular, when there were two terrorist acts carried out against Jews. Jews as the targets for those who carried out the attacks, 1992 the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and 1994, the umbrella Jewish communal organization in Buenos Aires that goes by the acronym, AMIA. So in short, there's been a lot of conversation discussion.
I might add also that perhaps for Argentine's over the decades, there's been a stronger poignancy in regard to the deterioration of political conditions and economic conditions and a strong perception among Jews and among others that Jews were disproportionately targeted during the military government of the 1970s and early 1980s targeted as enemies of the state as Jews. And you tell us about themes of indigeneity in Jewish Argentinian and Jewish Canadian literature. I'll take that one. So this is a chapter that I co wrote with a literary scholar Stephanie Prigian.
And it's an essay that basically compares how Jewish and Argentine writers wrote about indigenous themes and indigenous characters and how they thought about colonialism and the general process of settler colonialism on which both these countries are founded on from, because from the early days of mass migration in the late 19th century, basically up to the present. So the essay treats about 30 different authors. There are, you know, the fiction and memoirs in the early period, mostly from the Canadian prairies and the Argentine pump us, which have a kind of similar way of treating indigenous themes and characters during this early period, which is very explicitly and graphically settler. And then things start to diverge in the middle of the 20th century in the middle decades of the 20th century when when authors started playing around with identity more, you know, in general using appropriation and masquerade and fictional imaginations in order and other kind of literary techniques in order to help answer questions about what it meant to be a Jew in either of these two countries.
And then we basically found that in the widest divergence over the past two decades among Argentine and Canadian writers respectively, where Canadian Jewish writers have become much more self conscious much more cautious much more politically sensitive about the stakes and the political overtones about writing about indigenous people and their historic experiences, which is very much sort of on cue with respect to the Canadian conversation about indigenous reconciliation that is national and scope and you know pretty deep and pretty significant conversation, whereas the Argentine Jewish writers have become you know markedly more quiet about indigenous themes, at least in comparison with the Canadian Jewish writers over the last 20 or so years so I think looking at the literature that Jews have produced about a given theme in this theme in particular is important is a good proxy or a good sort of window for thinking between Argentina and Canada with respect to their national indigenous relations situations about the sort of status of racism and these countries capacities and willingness to think about their own histories more broadly. And of course these countries respective Jewish communities their attitudes towards these processes. You just read the anti Jewish program in 1919 and Argentina known as Simmanat Shakyka sure. The Argentina beginning in the 1890s and in conjunction with what we talked about earlier large scale immigration from Europe underwent rapid social economic and political change.
Really in many ways, I want to keep this brief so i'm going to skirt over some things but in many ways the middle class was enfranchised in terms of political party structure. Women would not get the vote until the late 1940s, but more broadly as Argentina industrialized and grew very quickly created enormous wealth, and by many measures was in broad strokes, a more wealthier country than Canada, a labor movement emerged and the political left emerged as very much stronger than Canada. There was a formidable anarchist movement, a number of very powerful labor organizations, and I would say that as happened in a number of places around the same time, there was a tendency on the political right to scapegoat Jews for the actions of the center left, the left, the revolutionary left, and labor organizations that were not co-opted by the mainstream but for example were prepared to call for a general strike and perhaps more significant protests. As in Canada, after the First World War, there were a lot of working people who Jewish and non Jewish, and of course the canard about Jewish leadership and conspiracy was absolute nonsense in regard to the labor left and the political left.
After the First World War, a lot of working people in Canada, in Argentina, in the United States, felt that they wrote something, they had not benefited in better wages and better working conditions during the First World War. In the case of Canada, they've been asked to defer their expectations in reference to the war in the case of Argentina. The situation was somewhat different. Argentina's economy became far more unstable during those years because in part of the instability of shipping lanes in the Atlantic and the difficulty moving produce to market and bearing in mind the times the difficulty in having payment made, which was often done in shipments by both to Argentina.
When working people found that they were not going to be granted what they felt they deserved in both Canada and Argentina, there were severe labor disturbances in Canada, the Winnipeg General Strike in Argentina, strikes that produced a ferocious response by the police in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. And what you refer to, as the Semana Tráchica, so in police repression of labor unrest in worker unrest, Jews were targeted specifically by police and by military units sent into the street. It was a memorable event for Jews because of the way that Jews were targeted. I would also say it's important for another reason because 1919, 1920 and into the early 1920s marks the beginning of federal authorities using the armed forces, in this case in the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities, but not long after in interventions in the provinces, the appointment of military government, the governors.
So the use of the military to buttress potentially unstable civilian governments that did not work out well for Argentina in the 20th century as the military increasingly became part of governance in Argentina. And I would say that you could argue that the Semana Tráchica attacks on Jews was the beginning of that. In Argentina, history, can you tell us about the Desert Campaign of 1833 and 1834 and the Desert Conquest Initiative of the 1870s and 1880s? Why were they noteworthy?
Sure. Well, here again as a parallel with Canada, they were noteworthy for a couple of reasons. As in Canada, Argentines have, on the one hand, traditionally imagined their frontier areas and as in Canada in the United States and Australia, frontier is an imagined space. It's not a real place with borders.
Argentines and Canadians both imagine frontier as emptied so that this was open space for European settlers to come. But in fact, on the other hand, Argentines and Canadians knew full well that these were populated spaces populated by first peoples and we see that on the dates in question but even before that, the beginnings of a campaign and you raised the term desert as in the United States, for example, and to some extent in Canada, these lands were referred to as a desert, not so much in the sense of the Sahara, but rather in a place that was deserted and not really very useful unless occupied by Europeans who might make the soil useful for agriculture and livestock raising. So we see a campaign that lasted really, Argentines focus on the late 1870s as the culmination of that conquest really did not end in practical terms and in military terms until the late 1920s, at least, and in terms of the conquest of indigenous people. And I would say that like Canada, there is a kind of comfort narrative in historical writing that says, well, you know, we conquered the first peoples and out of sight, out of mind.
They were gone and really not thought about again and this could reinforce the notion of an empty space and a place that was open for European arrivals. The last thing I would say is that actually I have two more points to make about this. One, that kind of contradiction in Argentina, that idea of an open space but one where in many ways, Argentines knew that there was a subversive, a racially subversive indigenous presence that is white, urban Argentines had that sense, defined the nature of racial tensions in Argentina. And for decades and even until now, the second last point that I want to make has to do with the figure of the Jewish Gao Cho.
So the Gao Cho is the Argentine cowboy, a figure that is somewhat different from the Canadian cowboy in lore. So the Gao Cho is a conflicting and conflictive figure representing racial tension on the one hand, imagine sometimes as a white Argentine on the plains bringing a kind of a civilized society to the plains. And sometimes thought of as indigenous or a racial mix of indigenous and white and therefore part of a kind of subversive presence as white, urban Argentines often saw the situation. Jews began to arrive in rural parts of Argentina in the late 19th century, and many assume a kind of a cowboy identity, pardon me, which was not unusual, or all sorts of ethnic groups and racial groups who arrived on the plains of Canada, Argentina, or the United States.
And it's complicated in many ways, the narrative of a racial binary of indigeneity versus whiteness by their presence. And so the Jewish Gao Cho has been a subject of interest for Jews and non Jews in Argentina for over a century. I'll just add quickly that there's a wonderful essay in the book that's devoted to this topic is actually the second essay in the book by a wonderful literary scholar named Amy Kaminsky. And then there was a lot of other exceptions of deo Bolshodism quote unquote in Argentina.
What was unique about Argentina, because of the Canada and because of the other countries. I'm not sure that there was a lot that was unique. Let me start with that and then I'll say there were some differences and I'll say why. I'm not sure that there was a lot of Jewish Bolsheviks or Bolsheists or maximalists.
There are a range of terms that were used in the 1910s and 1920s by Argentines by Canadian authorities, and by others, including American diplomats in both countries who were also sounding a kind of racist alarm. And so this is a universal sort of trope and you see it in many parts of Europe as well with similar sorts of arguments and arguments that were expressed in Argentina were coming in a lot of instances from European countries that had also seen a rise in labor activism strikes working class protests, and that had also seen a kind of growing fear of what elites saw as potential revolutionary activity in their countries. There were Jews involved in labor organizing, maybe in numbers slightly disproportional to their population, but surely not in any way that would suggest anything reasonable about those racist tropes where I think that there's an important, and I might add, for example, before I'm going to say what I want to say next, in Canada, we see a persistence of this after the Second World War. So the padlock law applied and disproportionate cases to Jews that the law that allowed the RCMP and police authority sorry Royal Canadian Mounted Police, other police authorities to padlock organizations on the left, including Jewish communist organizations that were seen as potentially revolutionary when in fact they were nothing of the sort going back to Argentina, it resonated more severely.
It resonated more severely because Argentina's economy was more unstable, because Argentina's political system in the late 1910s and 1920s was less responsive to working people and to middle class people than was Canada's. This is not to say that Canada was perfect, but Canada also produced more economic opportunities for workers through those years, and a large reason for that was its proximity to the greatest economy in world history in that is the United States. Argentina did not have that advantage. Its economy began to become much more unstable, making its political system much more unstable.
These sorts of instabilities, as we've seen elsewhere, 1930s, Germany is one example, tend to produce more racist arguments, more of these sorts of accusations against Jews and against other groups. Can you tell us about the growth of anti-Semitism in Argentina under the military who invented dictatorship? Sure. I, a lot of people disagree with me on this one, but we shall see.
There is a kind of an accepted narrative that Jews were treated especially poorly under the dictatorship, and I would say that that's true. But I would also say that there were disproportionate numbers of Jews in Argentina, as there were in Canada, among professions that the military argued were subversive and would have a tendency to be more supportive of left wing initiatives politically. And otherwise that is teacher, social workers, psychologists and others. This is not to justify the persecution of psychologists, Jewish or otherwise, but I've never seen a sort of study that invokes the kind of statistical analysis that Robert Grimm and a Seykel, and they use in their different context to examine that question of persecution of Jews.
There were without a doubt military officers, politicians on the extreme right who were anti-Semitic, and there's no doubt that they had an impact on how the military prosecuted its internal war against left wing subversion. So yes, there was anti-Semitism. I don't think that it was systemic within the Argentine military. And one of the things that a lot of authors have not wanted to deal with, and we don't have an essay in the book on this, and I don't think there is a good essay, is Jewish support for the military dictatorship.
And there was significant Jewish support. This is often written off, and leaders of Jewish community organizations that supported the military are accused of being a kind of union hut. I think there's more there, and I think that we have tended to dismiss the possibility of Jewish support. And by the way, there were Jewish conscripts in the Argentine military, and we have testimony from some who had a horrible time and experienced anti-Semitism.
We also have testimony from conscripts non-commissioned officers who have good memories of their time and work within the armed forces during those years. So it's complex and we need someone to go and work on that. Can you tell us my Jews who were among the Esaperes Cidos in Argentina? There were certainly lots of Jewish Esaperes Cidos, people who were illicitly picked up, detained in some cases killed.
And this is not to erase the significance of what I just said. Some of those were members of revolutionary groups, like the Montonero's and others, who were involved in the killing of about 2,000 people between about 1970 and 1975. There were also men, women and children. There was a revolutionary left.
There was an insurgency of different groups whose objective was a kind of Cuba in Argentina. If that's something that one supports, whether that's justifiable, I suppose, but there, and again, this is not to justify the illicit torture, detention and killing of people. And circumstances were complicated. And not every person that was engaged in conflict with the military was someone completely divorced from political activity.
Some were, some weren't. And again, I want to reemphasize the military government engaged in horrific, illicit, extrajudicial killings, torture, detention of Jews and non-Jews. And you tell us about Mordhai Rijler's novel, Solomon Korski was here from 1989. I can tell you a little bit about it.
So this is a best-selling I-89 author by one of Canada's most beloved Jewish writers and beloved Canadian writers in general, Mordhai Rijler. The novel is a pretty wacky romp. It's a fictional telling of a fictional Jewish family, the Gerzkil family, who the author makes up this multi-generational, genealogical family narrative, or Yarn, who's history stretches to the early settler years of the family that goes to Canadian North as fur traders and establishes a fur trading empire. It's got lots of raunchy and sort of literally risque intersections between Jews and indigenous people, so you have indigenous people learning to speak Yiddish and lots of interracial sex and sort of blending of families.
And it's a kind of, it's one of rich there's tools for grappling with some of the contemporary questions of late 80s Canadian Jewish life about Zionism, about nationalism, about belonging to Canada, about Canadian federalism and conflict between French and English in Canada, sort of working through this vehicle of this family life and reconstructing a fake family history. I would just say that in general, not only has, you know, we picked this novel as one of the many fictional works that were in this chapter that compare indigenous and Jewish or Jewish Jewish writers treatments of indigenous themes, but Rijler is not the only, in fact, he's, you know, he's one of the most beloved Canadian Jewish authors but other well known writers and think mostly of the decline and of Leonard Cohen and other writers, both in Yiddish and in English, who wrote about indigenous themes and use them as vehicles to work through questions about Canadian Jewish life. Can you comment on Gao Cho themes in Jewish Argentinian literature. Yes, but I want to quickly comment on that last case to what I like about that novel is it bears a parallel to a very important Argentine novel.
So, Richler has commented that one of the reasons he wrote that novel is because he had to use fiction to write the history. He had been commissioned earlier on to write a biography of Sam Bronfman and the Bronfman family was uncooperative and it ended up not happening because he couldn't get at the real story. So he argued that to really get at the history of this family he had to do a fictional version. There's a novel by Thomas Eloy Martinez called the La Novella de Perón and Eloy Martinez said something very serious, similar.
It is an novel about the Argentine president Juan Perón and he had been commissioned earlier on to write, help write Perón's memoirs and he also found that it became impossible to actually get at the history because of Perón and his entourage. So he wrote a novel to get at the history and I kind of like that where fiction and history overlap. Did you ask me about Gao Cho themes or Jewish? Yes.
Gao Cho themes. So, in Argentine literature, the Gao Cho traditionally has been a figure that has brought a kind of noble, ethereal quality to life. And so, as Argentine's perceived their society as becoming more and more complex and I think there are versions of this in Canada and the United States as well as urban society became more industrialized and as people in cities became nostalgic for a kind of life that their ancestors may or may not have known in the countryside and one that was literally whitewashed of the racial problems in those societies in the case of Argentina in rural areas and even among immigrants who had not experienced or whose families have not experienced in rural life, this nostalgia extended to an ongoing celebration of the Gao Cho as someone who was simple, but at the same time had profound understanding and knowledge of civilization. So, Argentine writers used the figure in the Gao Cho as someone to project something good, something higher morally about their societies and Argentine's consumed that literature in that context.
So, I would say that this goes to the persistence of a certain kind of anti-Semitism in Argentina, regularized anti-Semitism. I also want to quickly underscore that in all my experience in Argentina, but with everything I've read, I never found that anti-Semitism is greater in Argentina than in Canada. So, I think that's a little bit different for most of Canadian history. It's been a little bit more under the surface.
So, the Amia bombing, everyone from the FBI to Argentine authorities have concluded that Hezbollah was responsible for that attack in 1994, and that almost certainly this was the result of pressure from the government of Iran unhappy that the Argentine government had pulled the plug on a nuclear reactor project that had been involved in there. And so, targeting Amia and a Jewish site in Argentina was seen as a soft target compared to other sorts of sites. There has been a disgraceful inability in Argentina to really bring perpetrators to justice. And I'm afraid that I would need another hour to go through the comings and goings of the Argentine police and judicial system in its rampant failure over the years to address these issues, including false paths followed, including corruption, including the limited ability of prosecutors and others involved in the case.
So, really, it's been a mess. And of course, one of the points about the Amia bombing is that when it happened, the president of Argentina famously called the Prime Minister of Israel to express his condolences, and it was pointed out by many people that this was ridiculous. The people who died were not Israelis. They were Jewish Argentine.
So, why was the Argentine president calling the Prime Minister of Israel? And that hints at a kind of anti-Semitism that runs through Argentina, I think to some extent Canada, but perhaps traditionally it's been a little stronger. In Argentina, this notion of Jews is a kind of a suspect presence, a community whose allegiances might be more toward Israel than Argentina, of course, that's total nonsense. I just had one quick and important difference here as well in between the two countries that the co-authors of the chapter on the subject, Marissa, I'm sorry, Brelan, and Ira Robinson point out, one of which is that the Canadian Jewish community has figured out a better way of enumerating and keeping track of the data of anti-Semitic incidents as community agencies, but also with the help of the state.
And that this is in market contrast with the sort of accounting of and the social scientific possibilities of understanding, kind of, or measuring how much anti-Semitism there is in Argentina, which has been far weaker as that less cooperation from the state and is sort of worse state of organization. The end-to-need plan is discussed, I think, in your book. Can you tell her, listeners, about it? Are there any Canadian parallels to this?
None that featured so prominently. Like other anti-Semitic nonsense arguments, there's certainly parallels in other parts of the world. And in fact, there were parallels among people who supported early Zionists but did not see a possibility for Jewish state in Israel. That is the notion of Jews forming a state somewhere else in the world.
And there is a long standing anti-Semitic right-wing nonsense argument that Jews somehow want to form a Jewish state in southern Argentina. And this even has a name. It's called Andenia. It's utter nonsense.
It is about as sensible as the protocols of the elders of Zion. The problem is, and what makes it significant is that it keeps appearing over and over again in Argentine society. I would say one thing about Andenia, and one other thing too about anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism, and the extent to which it's tolerated and how it manifests itself, Canada and Argentina had very different experiences during the Second World War. Canadian troops fought and died against Nazi Germany.
And this did not eliminate anti-Semitism in Canada, but it had a profound impact for years. Maybe not until now. I'm not sure we're seeing developments even as we speak. But it had a profound impact in the post-Second World War era.
In terms of what could be reasonably said and not in the public sphere in Canada, people understood what Naziism and anti-Semitism had led to. In Argentina, that experience was not shared. Argentina did not have troops participate in that fight in that way. And I would say that that's part of what allowed anti-Semitism to fester more openly for longer and to produce long standing nonsense like the Andenia plan.
As we bring today's dialogue to a close, can you tell us where your time and attention have gone since completing this book? Sure, I'll go first. So, well, I've spent a great amount of time over the past year working on the conflict over the conflict on campus since last October. But I have spent some time engaged in scholarly practice as well.
I wrote a piece on a very interesting Ukrainian Catholic Canadian painter named William Corelic, who painted a series of paintings about Canadian Jewish life in the mid-70s. I wrote another essay that's about to come out about the prospects and hurdles for allyship between Jews and indigenous people. And then I added a journal I had at Canadian Jewish Studies, and we've managed since this book came out to publish three volumes, including two special volumes, one on Jewish education in Canada. That's due out in August, later this month, August of 2024.
And another one that came out a couple of months ago. I was a survey report actually by one of the contributors to this volume, Bob Brim, about Canadians attitudes towards Jews in Israel. And I'm at work this summer on a book about the history of Jewish mayors and Jewish Jews and their exercise, political power at the level of the city, so municipal power, absence of anti-Semitism, the nature of multiculturalism, as a kind of study about the almost 100 Jewish mayors who have served as Jews who have served as mayors in Canadian towns and cities over the last century. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for asking. I would add everyone should read. Well, I want to read everything David Kauffman writes because he's routinely excellent, but the piece on curlec is fantastic and I knew I thought I knew William Curlec's work and I didn't. I've done a couple of things I'm working with a colleague on a book on the history of memory in Argentina or rather memory and history in Argentina.
Also another book come out on statues and memories of combat athletes in the Americas and two of the chapters I wrote in that book were one on the fist, the monument to Joe Lewis in Detroit, and I wrote another one on the history of the rocky statue in Philadelphia. Thank you for sharing that sounds like phenomenal work. Thank you so much for having us. I was so honored and grateful for the privilege of your time and attention throughout today's dialogue.
I'm so fortunate for the thorough and detailed responses you provided throughout our dialogue and could hardly thank you enough for all the silent sacrifice that went into producing this remarkable book. Thank you, as we end today, I'm signing off as Ari Bartollette, your host on the new books and Jewish studies podcast today, being a dialogue with David Kauffman and David Shannon regarding their edit volume promise lands north and south Jewish Canada and Jewish Argentina in conversation. Published in London, Netherlands by Brill 2024 David Shannon is Professor of History at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. David Kauffman is Associate Professor at York University.
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