Becoming Jewish-Argentine in public. The fashioning of traditions for new audiences

FISCHMAN, FERNANDO

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Congreso; "2014 Annual Meeting 'Folklore at the Crossroads'; 2014

American Folklore Society

This paper examines the contextualization of traditional Jewish practices in contemporary public celebrations in Argentina. Specifically, it analyzes ceremonies, festivals and exhibitions organized by institutions of the Argentine Jewish community to celebrate religious holidays in public locations of Buenos Aires at present. It focuses on the implications of such staging for the shaping of new artistic forms related both to a precedent Jewish culture and to current hegemonic discourses about multiculturalism in the context of the national society. In 1983, with the restoration of a democratic rule after a 7-year military regime, government organizations began to carry out events that pursued the recovery of public space as a place for the construction of citizenship. Rallies, as well as artistic performances multiplied in open venues aiming at recovering them for political participation. In recent years, those events expanded their scope to embrace the celebration of multiculturalism attempting to reverse the historical hegemonic neglect of the nation´s diversity. Such events usually involve the staging of folk expressions (music, dance, food, costumes) associated with the identities of different social groups, particularly ?but not limited- to those of migrant origin, with the explicit goal of making visible and enhancing the constitutive plurality of the national society. The Jewish community is one of the groups that is usually invited to participate in those celebrations of diversity, and its institutions usually comply with the exhibition of ?typical? forms, as expected. Besides partaking of those events, several Jewish institutions organize festivals pertaining to their religious calendar (Chanukah, Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and Purim) in streets and parks of Buenos Aires by themselves. They put on stage in events open to Jews and non-Jews alike, practices previously reserved for the family and community institutional sphere. By so doing, Jewish organizations transfer to the public domain practices previously limited to the members of the collective with the concomitant transformations. The celebrations comprise a wide range of expressions, from aestheticized references to religious practices (oral renderings of stories from the Holy Scriptures, recitation of blessings), with current expressions of popular culture that recognize traditional precedents from different sources: Klezmer and Tango music and dance, Israeli folk dances, and stand-up comedy among other forms. The events acquire an aesthetic dimension akin to other current mass performances such as concerts or festivals organized by government agencies. However, they are based not only on the celebration of a diverse society predicated on essentialist terms, but grounded on complex preceding cultural frameworks as well, and on present ideological debates. Instead of a crystallized, static vision of the culture represented, they express the political tensions and conflicts of the Jewish-Argentine collective. Public space appears as a place where the collective?s internal differentiations based on various conceptions of ?Jewishness? acquire new expression. Community institutions use shared public spaces to voice conflicting ideologies about religious beliefs and cultural practices. Thus, public sites become both a locus for the affirmation of diversity in a multicultural society, and a place for the modeling of a plural Jewish identity.