The Latin American Jewish Studies Association annual conference, co-hosted by The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and The Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, presents Populism, Racism, and Antisemitism in the Americas, a keynote lecture by Federico Finchelstein, Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College and moderated by Katherine Ewing, Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. 

Date: Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Time: 7:00 pm

Location: Lerner Hall, Room 555, 2920 Broadway, Columbia University

RSVPs to iijs@columbia.edu. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Race is defined both as a subjective and objective construct. In Latin America, the Jewish experience of race and racial classification bears the marker of a number of social forces. How Jews experience race and the ramifications associated with racial groupings diverge from the portrayal of Jews across national cultures.

The gap between reality and its representations has always drawn the attention of scholars—from literature and art, to anthropology, sociology, and political history. At various moments, a wide range of sociopolitical forces have sought to widen this gap, calling into question the very possibility of representation (as aesthetic and/or political), while at other moments the very same forces attempted to make this gap invisible, obviating the representational aspect latent in any mode of expression. Our own present moment has reinvigorated the debate about representation, and drawn our attention to the overlapping realms of aesthetic representation and sociopolitical representation.

This year’s regional conference explores the relationship between, on the one hand, how Jews and Judaism are imagined and portrayed in literature, the arts, cinema and popular media and, on the other hand, the complex reality of Jewish socioeconomic, political and cultural life in Latin America. It is in the critical space between representation and reality, or images and realities, that the scholar can better elucidate both aspects of this dynamic.