We should thank Judit Bokser Liwerant (JBL) for her unique sociopolitical fresco illustrating her invaluable contribution to defining the boundaries of a research field and filling it with ground-breaking contents. Captions JBL has suggested along her work of many years – encuentro (encounter), pertenencia (belonging), and alteridad (otherness) – capture well the challenge and spirit of the main foundational pacts in the long interactions of Jews with surrounding societies (Bokser Liwerant et al. 1999, 2011). Such interactions and pacts have long been among the capital challenges but also resources in Jewish history and society.

In my response, before outlining some central research issues that emerge from JBL’s perspective, I wish to rejoin those (Gitelman 1992) who already noted the role played by Utopia in that long-term context. In Latin America as well as in other continents, Jews perpetually sought for shelter, security, protection, equality, integration, autonomy, dignity, and happiness. In return, Jews offered their readiness to pay taxes, their unique skills – variable across time and space – and most often their loyalty to constituted power. As a people of migrants, Jews usually joined and had to adjust to pre-existing, consolidated, functioning societies. Jews at any given time and place had to develop modes of coexistence and personal and institutional arrangements with other religious, ethnic, national or cultural groups that most significantly constituted the hegemonic majority.

Throughout the history of mankind – at least in its Jewish version – there is only one unconditional pact where one party puts all at stake ignoring what the possible reward will be, and the other party merely waits to see what happens. That is the biblical narrative of Akedat Itzhak – the binding of Isaac:

By myself have I sworn, said the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thy only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea-shore; and thy seed shall possess the gates of thy enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou has harkened to My voice (Genesis XXII, 16–18).

We note that Abraham’s flat acceptance of the Lord’s supreme order is rewarded through promise of demographic growth, strength and power, and transnational prestige – still coveted goals after thousands of years. All other known pacts – including other contracts in the biblical narrative – occur under predetermined conditions and fear of sanction for non-abidance. Such give-and-take negotiation – yet under conditions of uncertainty – has marked the Jews’ societal position in history from antiquity to our days.

Since the inception of a Jewish existential reality defined by being a diaspora, primary settlement was in areas eventually dominated by Islam. Islamic lands offered Jews (and Christians) a straightforward and stable coexistence model. Jews did receive some space for themselves, provided they accepted subordination to Muslim rule. Protection had its advantages, but second-class status was not negotiable. Jews could embrace the dominant culture, leave, or succumb.

Among the early Jewish settlers in pagan Europe diversity was allowed. But with the rise of authoritarian Christian doctrines, the respective church hierarchies, and their influences on civilian power, Jews suffered economic sanctions, serial expulsions, forced conversions, ghettoization, torture and massacres.

Eastern Europe later emerged as a shelter and occupational niche for the Jewish lost tenure in Western Europe. Semi-rural Jewish inn-keepers and craftsmen in the physical space of the Eastern shtetl enjoyed extraordinary growth, and their descendants became the backbone of world Jewry. But rapid growth generated new internal and external perceptions of a collective increasingly alien to the non-Jewish environment, and eventually prompted the great exodus. In Eastern Europe different Jewish utopias developed (though often led by Western Jews) – socialist and nationalist, religious and secular, autonomist and assimilationist. Under the aegis of Nazi Germany, with the willing participation of local ethnics, annihilation and renewed exodus destroyed not only the physical persons, but their utopias alike. Then came the third, post-Soviet exodus.

In Western Europe emancipation offered a glimpse of Utopia. But citizenship was awarded at the heavy price of giving up Jewish national identity. The anticipating paradigm of Italian Jews epitomized adaptation to many regimes and intense contacts with the majority, while keeping a primary sense of identity. Jews adjusted their synagogue and religion to replicate European Christian church and faith. Many Jews adopted an identity and mentality that I have defined ecumenical-humanistic-progressive – or in updated American-English, multinational-multicultural-liberal. Hope-with-patriotism produced an impressive row of exemplary citizens-of-the-Jewish-religion. Not a sufficient shield facing the rise of coded fascist antisemitism. Shoah did not distinguish between Jews, Israelites, or the converted. After WWII, actually after the Six Day War, Israel’s rise created a new reference pole in a revived and more polarized Jewish identity rainbow. The European Union offered momentary hope, but now Utopia is gone and disenchantment prevails.

In the United States of America the world’s greatest society offered Jewish immigrants nearly unlimited upward social mobility, clean of the European original sin of prejudiced tribalism. Not without pain and effort, reception by the majority took off – especially since the 1960s. As one measure of the successful outcome, today Jews serve more than proportionally as public representatives of that majority. The price of growing participation in the US Utopia was a subordination of Jewish to American identity. For those who did, in the transition from American Jews into Jewish Americans the underlying mutually exclusive feel of Jewish peoplehood was de-rubricated to a cultural attribute of American-ness: incidentally, a Jewish culture increasingly lived in its universalist, not its more particular ethos. Change occurred through diminished tensions, frequent peaceful interaction, and love. Americanization also meant distancing from the extra-American options of Jewish identification. The smaller Canadian and Australian variations of the US model, perhaps with somewhat less intellectual tension, possibly also benefited from greater intimacy, less frenetic competition, and less emotional stress.

Finally, in their own land of Israel naturally Jews sought for shelter, sovereignty, integration, dominance, and peace. Utopia looked close, achieved through blood and heroism, only to eventually discover that the real seed of life was the Knesset finances committee. Spiritual and cultural life could not subsist without hardly fought, negotiated, and often extorted financial bases. Being run by human beings – sometimes inspired men and women, sometimes shallow, selfish, if not corrupt characters – Utopia lost much of its terseness, charm, and viability.

In Latin America too – the sub-continent JBL has explored the most – Jews did nurture fascinations with Utopia. Eldorado sparkled beyond the horizon, not in the greedy sense of the rush for gold, but for the appeal of an unlimited niche of ethno-cultural civic expression. The southern continent admittedly was for many an alternative to the preferred northern destination. But if there was a place where the closest to the Zionist project was created – a quasi-Jewish state – that place was Argentina. All the parameters of real Jewish autonomy existed: rescue of the land and productivization of the Jews, a school network with all possible shadows reflecting the dialectics of Jewish political discourse – socialist and revisionist, secular and religious Zionist, communist, Bundist, Yiddishist, and more recently Haredi and Americanized. The Jewish cultural, recreational and sports center was one paramount contribution to the modern and contemporary Jewish experience. Historical sub-ethnic divisions received space – Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and more. Emerging religion-ization reflected indeed the competition of US and Israel hegemonic forces across the Jewish world.

Offering premium over the US, Latin America praised the local ethnic enclave while also allowing the loftier dream of Jerusalem. Jews found the right synthesis between protective self-inclusion and participation in civil society although while Western Europe had its dose of Jewish prime ministers, in Latin America the glass roof was presidential wives and ministers of finance. But resurgences of nationalism, populism and totalitarianism periodically erupted in the Latin American republics. In the worst case, political and economic instability led to dictatorships, some of which persecuted Jews as in the guerrasucia – the dirty war. In the best case, Raúl Alfonsin, the first democratically-elected president after more than seven years of military dictatorship, in response to Jewish leaders advocating ethno-religious pluralism, shouted: “There is here one and only one thing: the Argentine nation!” For sure Alfonsin knew the preamble of the Argentine constitution: “We, the representatives of the people of the Argentine Nation […]establish this Constitution for the Argentine Nation”. Nine years later came the AMIA bombing and massacre.

Jews ever sought for a promised land, where to be and where to belong. The combination of being and belonging was Utopia. Sometimes Jews clearly knew it was not that, in a couple of instances they were sure they had got to it. In the end, all utopias proved to be virtual dreams followed by rude awakenings. For Jews on all continents what remained was to continue the fight for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Utopia.

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Short of Utopia was the Project, and part of the Project was trial and error. And at the center of the trial-and-error Project was academic investigation. Well aware of this background and of its frustrating limitations, but also rewarding opportunities, JBL has guided us throughout Latin American Jewry and well beyond, elucidating a Jewish existential project that was – or perhaps more exactly, could have been – very special on its own continent and unique among world Jewry. JBL indeed leaves us with a sense of nostalgia and longing for a magnificent unaccomplished Jewish collective project at the continental level. In clarifying such complex subject matter, her highly sophisticated and theory-driven analyses much insist on the need to enlarge the view from the specific to the global. She traces the roots from, and ramifications to other cultural and geopolitical areas – boosted by intense bilateral migrations. Her reading turns local Jewish visions – sometimes limited by Jewish institutional logics and constraints – into a multidisciplinary, transnational, multifaceted prism.

Along with significant advancements in the uncovering and interpreting of major facts and changes in the lives of Jews in the Latin American context (Avni et al. 2011), studying the Jewish experience on the continent has become the subject of a lively historiographical and social scientific debate. Central to the debate are several main research issues, all related to the national or transnational character of our subject matter in one way or another (DellaPergola 2013).

  1. 1.

    Is there a preferred disciplinary approach to the study of Jews on the Latin American continent: historical, literary or social science; qualitative or quantitative?

  2. 2.

    Are there available pieces of investigation capable of assessing the whole range of Jewish experiences in Latin America broadly and neutrally, covering both the affiliated and the non-affiliated segments of the Jewish population?

  3. 3.

    Does Jewish regional particularity exist? How do the social-structural and cultural-identification patterns of Latin American Jews compare with those of other ethno-religious groups on the continent?

  4. 4.

    How do the social-structural and cultural-identification patterns of Latin American Jewry compare with those of other Jewish communities worldwide?

  5. 5.

    Is there a geographical analytic framework capable of providing the truer picture of Latin American Jews: national within a given country of residence, or transnational within a broader comparative context?

These basic questions bear relevance for the study of Jewish population and society anywhere worldwide and, mutatis mutandis, for the study of comparative ethno-religious-cultural communities and identities in general. Notably, though, not all of these propositions enjoy full support in a research community that sometimes seems to prefer methodological nationalism to a broader comparative perspective (Lesser and Rein 2006; Rein 2014). These disagreements are not trivial in that like other forms of social knowledge, our insights develop through the interaction of two fundamental axes: one determined by the changes in the object of study itself, that is by changing structures, practices, processes, procedures, subjects, actions, and meanings; and the other shaped by the specific dynamics of the scientific and theoretical inquiry which is constituted before, during and after observing these transformations. A permanent dialogue between different conceptual approaches, precedent or contemporary, is essential to configuring the conceptual and methodological arsenal and guiding investigators in their endeavors. In what is perhaps the most systematic review of the issues at stake and the options available to researchers, JBL and her collaborators (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2011) defined a research road map for the future. In telegraphic succession, such a road map should consider:

  1. 1.

    The intellectual and technical challenges that derive from the construction of a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary field;

  2. 2.

    The identification and enlargement of the referents for comparative analysis within, between and outside of Jewish societies;

  3. 3.

    The conceptualization of collective identities and the challenge of accommodating but also distinguishing between cultural and structural, individual and institutional, private and public determinants and consequences;

  4. 4.

    The validity of the multidimensional cognitive, behavioral and affective criteria for the definition of identities, namely the normative ritual; peoplehood; family and social network; educational and cultural, organizational and philanthropic, civil and political society; and Israel-oriented options;

  5. 5.

    The validity of the contributions of different approaches and paradigms in the evaluation of contemporary Judaism and their contribution to the quality of ethnic, diaspora, cultural, political, sociodemographic, and Jewish studies;

  6. 6.

    The search for appropriate and multiple spatial levels of investigation, from the micro of the residential neighborhood through all possible intermediate frameworks to the global macro;

  7. 7.

    The validity and limits of organizational frameworks for the study of Jewish life, namely the impact of and on affiliated and unaffiliated populations, and on society at large;

  8. 8.

    The mechanisms of inclusion-exclusion and the search for adequate balance in the study of acceptance-rejection dynamics, including the role of antisemitism and anti-Zionism;

  9. 9.

    The resources and research instruments needed and the ability of our area of investigation to convene them, namely academic institution building and human capital training and development;

  10. 10.

    The need to create an epistemic community with a systemic vision of the field of investigation and with a sincere commitment to highest standards in the profession.

This is a wide-ranging and ambitious program to which one additional item can be promptly added: the challenge and engagement to make research materials and resources fully conversant and relevant for policy purposes (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2015).

In these diverse strands, Judit Bokser Liwerant has long been at the forefront of a growing group of interested and competent practitioners and lay persons. Her contribution in showing, enlightening, and sometimes breaking the path has been unique, and receives due recognition on this occasion.