"The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America" with Ilan Stavans

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Comparative Literature, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Location
Bldg. 360, Room 361J (Conference Room)
"The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America" with Ilan Stavans

Over the last five years, Ilan Stavans (Lewis Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Culture at Amherst College) has visited all sorts of Jewish communities in the Americas, including indigenous tribes in the Amazon who believe they are descendants of the Lost Tribes, families of the desaparecidos and the 1994 terrorist attack in Buenos Aires, descendants of Crypto-Jews in northern Mexico, paramilitary groups responding to neo-Nazis in places like Patagonia, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Zionists to Israel from 1948 to the present. His quest has been to understand how fragilely rooted these Jews are, how they understand their history and how the environment reacts to them, and, most importantly, if they have a future at all.