Landscapes of Memory and Impunity : The Aftermath of the AMIA Bombing in Jewish Argentina [1 ed.] 9789004297494, 9789004297487

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Landscapes of Memory and Impunity

Jewish Latin America Issues and Methods

Edited by Raanan Rein (Tel Aviv University) Editorial Board Edna Aizenberg (Marymount Manhattan College) Judah Cohen (Indiana University) Luis Roniger (Wake Forest University) David Sheinin (Trent University) Rosalie Sitman (Tel Aviv University)

volume 6

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/jlam

Landscapes of Memory and Impunity The Aftermath of the amia Bombing in Jewish Argentina

Edited by

Annette H. Levine Natasha Zaretsky

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Illustration: “Stones for Justice,” Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention, Buenos Aires, 2003. A tribute to the Hospital de Clínicas of the University of Buenos Aires for attending to the injured of the amia bombing. Concept for cover design developed with the assistance of Jennifer Burgess. Landscapes of memory and impunity : the aftermath of the AMIA bombing in Jewish Argentina / edited by Annette Levine, Natasha Zaretsky. pages cm. -- (Jewish Latin America, ISSN 2211-0968 ; volume 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29748-7 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29749-4 (e-book) 1. Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina. 2. Antisemitism--Argentina--Buenos Aires. 3. Bombing investigation-Argentina--Buenos Aires. 4. Terrorism--Argentina--Buenos Aires. 5. Buenos Aires (Argentina)--Ethnic relations. I. Levine, Annette H., 1973- II. Zaretsky, Natasha, 1975DS146.A7L37 2015 363.3250982’11--dc23 2015011589

The publication of this book series was supported by Tel Aviv University’s Elias Sourasky, Chair of Iberian and Latin American Studies. issn 2211–0968 isbn 978-90-04-29748-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29749-4 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures ix List of Contributors x Introduction 1 Annette H. Levine and Natasha Zaretsky 1 The Nation’s Bodies: Justice and Belonging in the Aftermath of the amia Bombing 8 Susana Wappenstein 2 Reading Memoria Activa’s Discourse: Demands for Justice and Identity Symbols 44 Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff 3 Remembering the amia Bombing: The Mothers of Pasteur Street and Stones of Memory 59 Edna Aizenberg 4 Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado: Monumental Photographs and Spaces of (Impossible) Return 77 Annette H. Levine 5 Blows to the Heart: Reflections on the Literature of the amia 102 Stephen A. Sadow 6 Struggles of Coherence: Listening as Political Agency in the Plazas and Streets of Memory 125 Natasha Zaretsky 7 Searching for Justice: Citizenship, Human Rights, and Anthropology 153 Karen Ann Faulk 8 So We Don’t Lose Memory: Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires after the amia Bombing 169 Lillian M. Wohl Index 191

Acknowledgements The publication of this volume benefited from the generous support of the Jewish Studies Program at Ithaca College and the Office of the Provost at Ithaca College. An earlier version of Edna Aizenberg’s article, “The Mothers of Pasteur Street,” was published in Spanish in the journal Revista Iberoaméricana, Vol. lxvi, Núm. 191, (abril-junio 2000), and her article, “Stones of Memory,” was published in Iberoamericana (2001-), Nueva época, Vol. 1. No. 1 (2001). We would like to thank Nicole Arocho for her translation of “Stones of Memory” and the editors of these journals for the permission to reprint those articles here. We would also like to thank Jennifer Burgess for her concept for the cover design and the photographer Marcelo Brodsky for permission to use the images taken by Annette Levine of his 2003 installation, Piedras por la Justicia, Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Stones for Justice, Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires. We are grateful as well to Christopher MacNamara for his research and editorial assistance, and to Mark Bast for his copyediting assistance. We would also like to thank Meghan Connolly, Katelyn Chin, and Paige Sammartino of Brill for their assistance, efficacy and dedication. Additionally, we would like to thank Raanan Rein, the series editor, for his comments and support of this volume. This volume would also not be possible without the ongoing support of our respective families (especially our partners, Robert Levine and Oliver Schietinger) for accompanying us during our many years of fieldwork and research trips to Buenos Aires. This work developed through many conversations and dialogues between the co-editors, beginning with a discussion we had during the xii Latin American Jewish Studies Association (lajsa) Conference held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, nh, June 2004, and continuing through many trips to Argentina and lajsa meetings. Most importantly, this collection also emerged through the ongoing and sustained engagement with the questions of memory and impunity that are at the heart of the bombing’s aftermath and central to the lives of our research subjects. We would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of the victims of the bombing and to the ongoing demands for justice. We would also like to dedicate this book to the brave work of Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman and her family and those who regularly attended the commemorative actos in the Plaza Lavalle, Pasteur Street, and the many other sites of memory and justice, including activists like José Blumenfeld, Isidoro Bronstein, Enrique Burbinski, Moisés Dulfano, Laura Ginsberg, Pablo Gitter, Benjamín Guz, Carlos Mañón, Rebeca

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Sacolsky, Fernando Scheitman, Marcos Scherlis, Felisa Sendler, Carlos Susevich, Eugenia Szejer, Diana Wang, and the late Mina Fridman-Ruetter, Bernardo Gruman, Norma Lew, Samuel Sylberberg, and Gabriel Tallaradona. Our deep engagement with these topics is also indebted to the support of Moshé Korin, Shifra Lerer, the late Reizl Sztarker, Jack Fuchs, Ester Szwarc, Anita Weinstein, and Ricardo Feierstein, and to affiliations and research conducted at the amia’s Centro de Documentación e Información sobre Judaismo Argentino Marc Turkow (Marc Turkow Center for Documentation and Information about Argentine Judaism at the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association), the daia’s Centro de Estudios Sociales (Center for Social Studies at the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations), the Buenos Aires iwo (Institute for Jewish Research), the ides Nucleo de Estudios sobre Memoria (Memory Studies Group of the Institute for Social and Economic Development), and the Contested Memories and the Politics of Change research group at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. We would like to especially thank the family members of the victims and their supporters for opening their lives to us and for sharing their struggles. It is their persistent effort to seek justice and articulate their experiences that we chronicle here. May this volume further contribute to the daily struggle for justice and understanding in the aftermath of the amia bombing.

List of Figures 1.1 Blowing the shofar on Mondays at 9:53 am (1999) 21 1.2 Crowds gather for Memoria Activa (1998) 21 1.3 We all are Active Memory (1998) 22 1.4a,b Memoria Activa’s “National Document Against Impunity” (1999) 30 1.5a Button in support of Memoria Activa with the slogan, “Enough Impunity!” (1998) 32 1.5b Button with the slogan: “Justice, justice shalt though pursue” (1998) 33 1.6 Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo head march “For Justice, against impunity, exclusion and discrimination” at the commemoration of the military coup. Some hold pictures of assassinated photojournalist, José Luis Cabezas (1999) 35 1.7 Enough Impunity! Banner in Plaza Lavalle by the Unión de Trabajadores de Prensa de Buenos Aires (Print Media Worker’s Union of Buenos Aires, UTPBA) for a joint event with Memoria Activa (1998) 35 4.1 Andrea, a los tres meses, mirando con asombro un mundo supuestamente perfecto. (Andrea, at three months, looking in awe at a supposedly perfect world.) La gran mentira [The Great Lie] (11) 86 4.2 Andrea, a los cinco años, sonriendo a un futuro promisorio. (Andrea, at five years, smiling at a promising future.) La gran mentira (23) 87 4.3 Andrea, a los siete años, adquiriendo conocimientos para su futuro. (Andrea, at seven years, acquiring knowledge for her future.) La gran mentira (41) 88 4.4 Andrea, a los ocho años, cuando aún éramos una familia (Andrea, at eight years, when we were still a family.) La gran mentira (51) 89 4.5 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 92 4.6 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 93 4.7 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 94 4.8 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. New amia building visible in background. 96 4.9 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. Close-up. 97 6.1 Shofars at Memoria Activa (August 29, 2004) 126 6.2 Testimony at the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) (May 19, 2003) 137 6.3 Familiares Acto at Pasteur Street (December 18, 2003) 141

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6.4 Monument to the Victims of the amia Bombing in the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) designed by Mirta Kupferminc (August 26, 2013) 147 6.5 Plaque at base of what is titled the Monument to the Martyrs of the amia (August 26, 2013) 148 7.1 Monument in the Plaza (2004) 154 8.1 Luis Alberto Spinetta and Fito Páez performing at the Recital por la Reconstrucción, November 30, 1994 172 8.2 Coro Ale Brider in the Café Literario 182

List of Contributors Edna Aizenberg is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and cultural studies, memory studies, Latin American Jewish writing, and the Holocaust in Latin America. Professor Aizenberg, one of the founders of Latin American Jewish literary studies in the u.s. and a former co-president of lajsa, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, inaugurated the first courses on Latin American Jewish literature at the New School University, Princeton University, and Marymount Manhattan College. An internationally recognized scholar of Borges, her books include The Aleph Weaver (1984), El tejedor del Aleph: biblia, kábala y judaísmo en Borges (1986, winner, Fernando Jeno Prize; 1997, second ed.; Borges, el tejedor del Aleph y otros ensayos, 1997), Borges and His Successors (1990), Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff’s Los gauchos judíos (2002), and Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires (2002; paperback ed. 2004). Among Prof. Aizenberg’s current projects is a book on culture, public memory and the Holocaust in Latin America. Karen Ann Faulk is an anthropologist specializing in issues of human rights and justice. She currently teaches for the Global Studies Program in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina, was published as part of Stanford University Press’s Series on Human Rights (edited by Mark Goodale). In addition, she has authored a number of articles and book chapters, as well as a forthcoming edited volume entitled A Sense of Justice: Legal Knowledge and Lived Experience in Latin America (co-edited with Sandra Brunnegger). Her current project explores the idea of birth as a human right. Fernando Fischman teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a researcher for conicet (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas or National Scientific and Technical Research Council). His main research interests are verbal art, performance theory, Argentine Jews, interculturalism, and social memory. He edited Donos da Palavra: autoria, performance e experiência em narrativas orais na América do Sul (2007) (with Luciana Hartmann), Dime

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cómo cuentas…. Narradores folklóricos y narradores urbanos profesionales (2009) (with Maria Inés Palleiro) and Palabras Forjadas, identidades urdidas. Estudios de arte verbal (2013). Annette H. Levine is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Ithaca College. Her research focuses on cultural production (literature, film, art, monuments, music, and theatre) in the aftermath of dictatorships in Latin America. Dr. Levine is an active member of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association and has published several articles devoted to Latin American Jewish authors in the journal Modern Jewish Studies and in the Hostos Review. Her book, Cry for Me, Argentina (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), grapples with literary and cultural manifestations of the Argentine Dirty War’s haunting repercussions. She is an active literary translator and also produces Latin American and Latina/o Theatre in Ithaca, ny. Javier Pelacoff is Adjunct Professor of Social Psychology at the National University of Mar del Plata; he also teaches courses in the Social Sciences Faculty at the University of Buenos Aires, where he is currently leading working groups entitled, “Trends in Contemporary Thought” and “Psychology and Communication.” He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Sudamérica, the Review of Social Sciences; he is also a former member of the editorial board for the journals Argumentos (iigg) and Sambatión. His research has focused on interdisciplinary projects on justice, education, civil society, and Jewish Studies. Stephen A. Sadow is Professor of Latin American Literature and Jewish Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. He specializes in Jewish Latin American literature and art. Among his many books are King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers, winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and his translation of Mestizo, a novel by Argentine writer Ricardo Feierstein; and Unbroken: From Auschwitz to Buenos Aires, the autobiography of Holocaust survivor Charles Papiernik. Sadow has produced four online “Open Source” publications, which include his website of Jewish Latin American art; an anthology of narrative and poetry; and “Identity and Diversity,” artist’s books containing Jewish Latin American poems and art inspired by those poems, edited with Perla Bajder and Irene Jaievsky.

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Susana Wappenstein is Professor-Researcher in the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales/FLACSO-Ecuador (Latin American Social Sciences Faculty). She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and has taught at Johns Hopkins University where she was the William G. Zitzman Fellow in 2012; Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia; the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, ca; and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. In addition to her work on human rights struggles in Argentina, she has written  on violence, citizenship and memory in the Colombian conflict. Her current research focuses on social, political, and cultural practices around “post-conflict.” Lillian M. Wohl is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Jewish Musicology at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, nyc and a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Doctoral Dissertation Write-up Fellowship from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2013–2014. Her forthcoming doctoral dissertation, “Blessed Memory: Jewish Musical Performance and the Proliferation of Memory in Buenos Aires, Argentina” examines the role of memory in Jewish musical performance in Buenos Aires. Natasha Zaretsky is an anthropologist working on political violence, memory, and citizenship in urban diaspora communities in Argentina and the United States. She has taught courses at Princeton University and Rutgers University focusing on human rights, memory, migration, and genocide. As a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Studies of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, she co-leads the Argentina Trial Monitor and chairs the Latin America Working Group. She has several publications focusing on the aftermath of political violence in Buenos Aires, including security practices, Yiddish song, and Holocaust memory, most recently “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experience in the Southern Cone (Brill 2013). Her new research examines testimony and political activism among undocumented migrant youth; she is also conducting fieldwork focusing on post-Soviet Jewish memory and belonging in New York. In addition, she is finishing her ethnography, Disruption: Memory, Violence, and Belonging in Jewish Buenos Aires, and editing a documentary film about Argentina, City of Memory.

Introduction Annette H. Levine and Natasha Zaretsky Eighty-five people were killed when a car bomb tore into the core of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia), the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association, in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994. That event marked Argentina, with its history of military dictatorships and the still recent 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, once again as fertile ground for terrorism and injustice.1 Indeed, the 1994 amia bombing was the most destructive terrorist attack in the history of Argentina (and Latin America more broadly) and one of the worst attacks on a Jewish community since World War ii. The very nature of the bombing and the lack of justice in its wake have further cemented this moment as a key turning point for Jewish life in Argentina, as witnessed in its impact on the community’s political activism, literary and musical production, and the rhythms of everyday life—most notably, the new security measures seen in Argentina and throughout Latin American Jewish communities. While the epicenter of the 1994 bombing was seemingly beyond repair and the sense of citizenship and belonging for Jewish Argentines had been literally rattled, the nation witnessed an immediate response and an unprecedented level of mass repudiation. This set the stage for an even greater struggle for Jewish belonging within the Argentine national fabric. Three days after the bombing, on a rainy Thursday, July 21, 1994, Buenos Aires was inundated with approximately 150,000 concerned citizens who marched in silence to the Plaza de los dos Congresos with their umbrellas. This expression of unity and indignation, known as la tarde de los paraguas (the Afternoon of the Umbrellas), embodied a groundswell of solidarity where banners read “De pie frente al terror. La auténtica solidaridad es la justicia” (Stand up to terror. True solidarity is justice), and “Todos somos judíos” (We are all Jews), a phrase originally penned by Mario Diament in response to the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing.2

1 This is in reference to Argentina’s history of dictatorship and specifically the period of military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, deemed by the military regime as El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, the Process of National Reorganization, which led to approximately 30,000 disappeared—those who were detained, tortured, and killed by the military dictatorship. 2 Mario Diament first published this piece in El Cronista the day after the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing. The continued use of this phrase during the Tarde de los paraguas in 1994 emphasized a critique of the marginalization of the Jewish community in Argentina.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_002

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In the two decades since the amia bombing, the social movements that took shape have become fixtures in the tapestry of human rights activism in Argentina. Since 1994, ongoing struggles over memory, belonging, and justice continue to frame the Jewish experience in Argentina in significant ways. Ethnographers and scholars have paid careful attention to the sustained movements devoted to memory and the pursuit of justice in the aftermath of the attack, as well as the range of cultural expressions (including literature, art, film, and music) that emerged. The first groups to form in the weeks after the amia bombing were family members of the victims and their supporters united in pursuit of information and later justice. Spearheaded by Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas (Family and Friends of the Victims), Memoria Activa (Active Memory), and later APEMIA, Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la amia (Association for the Clarification of the Unpunished amia Massacre), as well as a more recent group, 18 J, we see an emergence of new forms of political activism and engagement of the public sphere. Their activism firmly places Jewish Argentines within the public register of citizenship and the struggle against impunity in a way some would argue is integral to the contemporary Argentine national imaginary. The political dynamics of the Argentine state have transformed dramatically since 1994. When the amia bombing took place, Carlos Menem presided over a nation fully immersed in rising neoliberalism, while the crimes of the military dictatorship (1976–1983) remained in rampant impunity. Twenty years later, in 2014, President Cristina Kirchner prioritized human rights as part of her political agenda, supporting public memorial projects (such as the transformation of the torture center at the ESMA, or Escuela Mecánica de la Armada—the Navy School of Mechanics—into a Space for Memory and Human Rights) and the prosecution of the perpetrators of the crimes committed during the dictatorship.3 Additionally, as a result of the activism of Memoria Activa before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in 2005, Argentina accepted its failure in providing justice for the amia case. Yet despite these significant political changes, two decades later the amia bombing remains in a state of impunity. Recent developments include the sudden January 2015 death of the lead prosecutor in the investigation, Alberto Nisman, who had made strong allegations against President Cristina Kirchner’s government (that her government denied), also putting into question 3 In 1989, President Carlos Menem granted pardons to military officials tied to abductions, disappearances, and murders during the dictatorship period, effectively putting an end to pending trials.

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the controversial 2013 Memorandum of Understanding with Iran that President Cristina Kirchner has supported. Additional juridical investigations are underway. Nevertheless, the questions that plagued the Jewish community and other concerned citizens in the wake of the devastating explosion in 1994 persist twenty years later: Who committed this bombing? Why wasn’t the investigation properly conducted? How can twenty years have passed and the attack remain locked in impunity? The pursuit of answers to these questions has left a lacuna in the community, a collective trauma. In response, Jewish Argentines have turned to juridical advocacy and commemorative practice, evidenced by the creation of monuments, cultural production, and the formation of social movements, in an attempt to achieve some form of clarity and justice. The body of scholarship addressing the aftermath of the amia bombing encompasses a broad range of perspectives and disciplines. Integral to the vision of Landscapes of Memory and Impunity are works that have traced a trajectory of the aftermath and explored the continued search for understanding Jewish identity and national belonging in Argentina, as well as broader questions related to citizenship, memory, and trauma studies. Scholars featured in this volume have lent a critical ethnographic lens to the complex nature of the social movements and the architecture of protest and memorialization as well as to the value of cultural production that developed in the wake of the amia bombing. While there has indeed been continuous scholarship on this topic, this volume is the first comprehensive compilation of works explicitly addressing the aftermath of the amia bombing, as witnessed through original fieldwork conducted at key points in the evolution of the aftermath. These chapters capture the years immediately after the attack as well as critical junctures in the pursuit of justice in the years that followed. Further, we see a range of disciplines—­literature, sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and communication studies—­ represented that allow us to examine the multivalent nature of the aftermath as it manifests in overlapping spheres of Jewish life, including political protest movements, musical performance, literature, and acts of commemoration. What emerges in reading the points of intersection among the chapters are certain critical fault lines in the aftermath—memory, the significance of narrative and representation, Jewish belonging, citizenship, and justice. These fault lines have evolved since the bombing to frame Jewish life as it responds to this decisive turning point in its experience in Argentina, while also resonating with long-term questions of pluralism that have defined Argentina’s history of immigration and nationalism. *

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The chapters in this volume derive from firsthand engagement and fieldwork as “encounters” performed at distinct moments in the chronology of the bombing’s aftermath.4 Some of the key sites emerging in the landscape, though never fully bounded, include the Plaza Lavalle (where Memoria Activa staged weekly protests), Pasteur Street (the site of the bombing and where Familiares y Amigos held monthly commemorative ceremonies), and the newly rebuilt amia building, in addition to other symbolic spaces of representation, such as literature, discourse, art, and music. This volume critically examines memory in contemporary Jewish life in Argentina—a theme that also resonates with the significance of commemoration as a political practice and idiom for Argentines more broadly, especially in the human rights movements struggling against impunity. This collection thus chronicles Jewish Argentine experience as part of a broader legacy of memory as a social practice in Argentina.5 Further, it contributes to memory studies more broadly, an interdisciplinary field that has grown significantly in the last thirty years of scholarship, especially studies that focus on memorial processes responding to trauma, conflict, war, and political violence.6 Many of the chapters address the centrality of memory to understanding the aftermath of the bombing. Aizenberg’s work, “Stones of Memory” and “The Mothers of Pasteur Street,” examines the significance monuments hold in bearing witness to memory and the activism of the victims’ mothers in decrying the injustice perpetrated on Argentine soil. Memory can be seen as a thread in almost every chapter of this volume but one that manifests itself in distinct 4 The idea of encounters in fieldwork as being constitutive to significant critical understandings has been further developed in other ethnographic work, including the Berg series Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge. See, for instance, Parvis GhassemFachandi, ed., Violence: Ethnographic Encounters (Berg, 2009). 5 See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997); Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013); Anreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2003). 6 See Mieke Bal et al., eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1999); Veena Das, et al., eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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ways (e.g., musical performance, monuments, narrative, and photographs). Annette H. Levine’s “Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado: Monumental Photographs and Spaces of (Impossible) Return” further expands on the nature of traumatic memory in relation to what she calls the “boundless spaces of grief” that emerged in the wake of the bombings and the complexity of representation exhibited by public commemorations and memorials. Understanding the ethnographic space of the Plaza Lavalle, where Memoria Activa convened its weekly gatherings, as a space of memory and witnessing is also the subject of Natasha Zaretsky’s chapter, “Struggles of Coherence: Listening as Political Agency in the Plazas and Streets of Memory,” where she explores the experience of those who regularly constructed this space of witnessing and the plaza of memory in their weekly acts of commemoration. While contributing to memory studies in meaningful ways, this volume also addresses the use of narrative and representation in response to violence and impunity. The chapters provide unique insights into expanding the notion of representation as a response to trauma or violence by examining the multivalent natures of representation—literary, discursive, musical, visual, and political. Stephen A. Sadow explores the literary responses to the amia bombing in “Blows to the Heart: Reflections on the Literature of the amia,” providing an overview of the literary landscape that emerged in response to the bombing. Fundamentally, his chapter reveals the significant impact of the bombing on the literary imagination and underlines how literature is another important cultural space of response to the ongoing dilemmas of belonging for Jews in Argentina (as witnessed in the shifting focus of many works to the turn of the twentieth century and early migrations). Levine’s “Vestiges of Memory PostAtentado” mentions literature as well, in a study that addresses more specifically the complexities of transmission in the aftermath of trauma, examining what she terms the “vestiges of memory”—including the writing of Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman (whose daughter was killed in the bombing) and the use of photography (Guterman’s family photos and Marcelo Brodsky’s urban installation “Stones for Justice”) to convey the unsettling use of visual imagery in the production of memorial sites and memory art. Narrative, in terms of literature and testimony, is not the only way to understand the significance of representation to the aftermath of the bombing. In Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff’s “Reading Memoria Activa’s Discourse: Demands for Justice and Identity Symbols,” we see a close reading of the discourse produced by Memoria Activa in its early stages—one that also reveals the tensions surrounding the particularities of Jewish experience along with universal calls to human rights. Music becomes another important form of representation in response to violence and impunity. Lillian M. Wohl addresses

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music and performance in the chapter, “So We Don’t Lose Memory: Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires After the amia Bombing,” which further reveals how Jewish music, both specific concerts related to the amia case and the performance of Yiddish music, became an important way to respond to the bombing and assert a space for Jewish specificity within Argentine national identity. As many of the chapters describe, narrative and representation are critical responses to the violence and destruction of the bombing, while also being spaces for asserting new demands for citizenship and rights. Indeed, it is through narrative practices that we see Jewish Argentines argue for a more pluralistic vision of Argentine belonging within the nation, a question we can trace back to the early years of Jewish settlement in Argentina, as Aizenberg points out in her chapter. The question of “rights” analyzed in Fischman and Pelacoff’s discourse analysis is further extended in Karen Ann Faulk’s chapter, “Searching for Justice: Citizenship, Human Rights, and Anthropology,” highlighting her ethnographic research that reveals the performance of citizenship and engagement with human rights in the Plaza Lavalle—the location of the weekly protests of Memoria Activa, which also plays host to the group Citizens of the Plaza. We also see the importance of the Plaza Lavalle as a space for political narrative, as Susana Wappenstein describes in “The Nation’s Bodies: Justice and Belonging in the Aftermath of the amia Bombing.” Based on her research in the years immediately after the attack, she chronicles the use of narrative strategies to reimagine the nation after the bombing—specifically those developed in the Plaza Lavalle, where Memoria Activa held its weekly protests. Wappenstein, who conducted some of the earliest research on this topic, examines the significance of these assertions for rights by Jewish Argentines, as understood within the broader history of human rights in Argentina and the struggle against impunity. This tension between the particular and the universal, as described in Fischman and Pelacoff’s chapter, has been constitutive to the political struggles that emerged. Within a broader context of impunity, what stands out is the desire for justice, which certainly seemed elusive in the years immediately after the attack during the failed investigation that Wappenstein documents so carefully through her ethnographic work. This struggle for justice continues to permeate the years that follow, as evidenced in Faulk’s research on the pursuit of justice almost fifteen years later and in Zaretsky’s fieldwork as well. Despite the continued elusiveness of justice, these new practices of citizenship have profoundly reshaped Jewish political subjectivity in Argentina, as chronicled in

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Natasha Zaretsky’s “Struggles of Coherence.” There, she describes how the act of listening has become a way to express political agency and citizenship; this attention to listening also highlights a more nuanced understanding of narrative as a response to violence. Indeed, the endurance of these practices, and understanding the legacy of these protests so many years later, raises important questions about what is at stake in contemporary citizenship in Jews in Argentina. * The 1994 amia bombing represents a critical juncture in Jewish Argentine history. From a range of disciplinary perspectives, this volume chronicles the aftermath of this bombing, an event that continues to shape the landscape of Jewish experience in Argentina. The scholarship represented in this volume affords opportunities to witness key moments in the evolution of the aftermath, positioned from different temporal and disciplinary sites. Nevertheless, we see patterns and continuities emerge, especially in the intersections of violence, belonging, and memory that have become key dynamics of Jewish life in Argentina. While examining one of the most significant historical moments in contemporary Jewish Argentine history, the collected work in this volume also raises important questions about memory as a social process. What are the boundaries of memory? What does this volume reveal about the possibilities and limitations of narrative and representation as a response to violence? What can we learn about trauma and resilience? In addition to engaging these important questions of violence, belonging, and survival, Landscapes of Memory and Impunity offers important insights into the longer durée of Jewish existence in Argentina and the persistent questions of pluralism and belonging that animate the desire for full inclusion in Jewish Argentina.

chapter 1

The Nation’s Bodies: Justice and Belonging in the Aftermath of the amia Bombing Susana Wappenstein i

An Unsettling Blast

When the car bomb exploded outside the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society (amia) building on July 18, 1994, a trail of destruction and deceit was left to haunt the survivors and relatives of victims of the blast, the Argentine Jewish community, and society at large. This violent incident fit the profile of attacks on Jewish targets worldwide, though publicly no organization—local or international—claimed responsibility for it. In 2006, after years of failed investigations, Argentine prosecutors formally accused the government of Iran of being the mastermind behind the explosion and members of Hezbollah as the material executioners. Two years before the amia event, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires suffered a similar fate when a bomb exploded outside its building, killing twenty-two people. Failure on the part of Argentine authorities to seriously investigate the blast at the embassy fueled anxiety among members of the Jewish community. The reluctance to scrutinize the bombing of the embassy and to offer some logical explanation or guarantee of security was coupled with the extended and complicated history of anti-Semitism in Argentina, which also cast a suspicious shadow on the amia tragedy. Initial reactions of broad-based social consternation, solidarity, and support were tarnished within days of the blast. While recovery operations were still underway, some media reports differentiated between the “innocent” victims of the bombing (i.e., pedestrians, neighbors, or other non-amia–related, presumably non-Jewish public) and the “guilty” by default, assumed Jewish, intended targets.1 President Menem’s first condolences after the amia bombing were inexplicably directed to the Israeli government—though clearly the amia is an Argentine civilian institution, none of the victims were Israeli, and the blast occurred in the heart of Buenos Aires on Argentine soil.2 The interpretation of the incident within the parameters of global geopolitics, rather 1 Testimonios de una Semana de Horror (Buenos Aires: Ediciones JAI, 1995). 2 Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (cels), Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: cels, 1998), 47.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_003

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than as a national issue, was further reinforced when three days later, at a massive public gathering in the Plaza de los Dos Congresos, the leaders of the Jewish community who organized the rally began by singing the national anthems of Argentina and Israel, did not include any Argentine government representatives as speakers but read messages from the Israeli Prime Minister and Secretary of State, and ended the gathering with a speech from the Israeli ambassador in Argentina. This early and revealing confluence of events produced a narrative around this incident that placed the victims, the event itself, and those possibly responsible outside the boundaries of the nation. This interpretation carried important implications regarding the place of human rights issues in the Argentine landscape of the 1990s. My discussion here does not seek to explain the details of this event, nor do I want to suggest that this incident can be equated with the brutal, systematic, and broad practices of state repression exercised during the years of the military regime. Yet this case resonates with these past violations of rights as well as with contemporary dominant and contestatory practices encompassing a history of human rights. My argument is that the case of the amia and the subsequent struggles surrounding its meanings cannot be understood as disconnected from the country’s history of violence and resistance. And, in turn, this case and a closer examination of some of the key practices and statements of Memoria Activa (Active Memory)—the vocal organization formed after the bombing by survivors, supporters, and relatives of the victims—offer a distinctive opportunity to discuss broad themes regarding human rights and the construction of a national project, especially situated during the particularities experienced throughout the 1990s in Argentina. Through this case, I analyze how categories of belonging were established, how particular narratives shaped identities, how activist practices challenged taken-for-granted meanings and offered alternatives, and how these discourses and practices played out in the spaces of the nation. This analysis centers on the relationship between democratization processes (in particular during periods of neoliberal reforms) and the role of civil society (in particular social movements) in influencing, creating, and defining the spaces of the nation. These processes are traversed by multiple aspects that reflect an enduring battle focused on what “the nation” means after dramatic civil strife or traumatic events and during periods of intense social and political reconfigurations as were the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in Argentina. The case around the amia bombing and Memoria Activa’s activism form part of a broader research project I carried out from 1996 to 2000 in Buenos Aires. During this time, mainly through participant observation, I focused on the activities of several human rights and civil rights organizations in Argentina;

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interviewed activists, staff of human rights organizations, and public officials; and analyzed, in particular, the influence of these discourses and practices in conserving or contesting dominant notions of publicness, belonging, and memory produced and enacted from the 1970s through the 1990s. My analysis here centers on the discourses that operated during these periods to create categories of inclusion and exclusion in the national imagination and, more specifically, how the experiences around the violation and the defense of human rights became a principal element in “imagining” this nation. I focus on how ideas of the nation and the placing of bodies within or outside the “national territory,” both in its metaphorical and physical boundaries, have been used to determine these categories. As Benedict Anderson suggested in his influential text Imagined Communities, though nation, nationality, and nationalism “command a profound emotional legitimacy, [they] all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyze.”3 The purpose here, then, is not to offer a discussion of the broad, complex historical processes by which the Argentine nation or nationalism in general have been constructed but rather to discuss how specific discourses and practices during particular periods constituted the nation as an “imagined political community.” In this sense, I argue that in Argentina the contemporary nation is marked by a public agenda that must constantly respond to the issue of human rights. As others who have pushed the analyses on the question of nationalism and nation building with case studies from Latin America, I understand these ideas and practices to have effects in the everyday lives of individuals and communities and, as in other cultural struggles, to be shaped by “mutually formative” dominant, official practices and oppositional ones.4 This separation is not conceptualized as a 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 3. 4 Ana María Alonso, “The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 33–57; Ana María Alonso, “The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity,” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 379–405; Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico” in Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of the Rule in Modern Mexico, eds. Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, 3–23 (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1994); Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America (London: Routledge, 1996); Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997).

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binary opposition but as a layered set of relationships in constant tension, sometimes in agreement and other times in contention. ii

Ideological Boundaries and Bodies of the Nation

The process of imagining and building the nation involves the constitution of identities that imply a sense of belonging to a broader community, both material and symbolic. A common theme among scholars of nationalism is how national identities often get created in relationship to ethnic and racialized “Others.” Scholars examine how these distinctions get incorporated into state institutions and official practices and, more importantly, how they are introduced and made second nature in the everyday practices of most of the population. The demarcation between an “us” and a “them” is a crucial aspect of nation building that gets reproduced throughout a nation’s existence and uses many mechanisms to determine, according to time and space, how the processes of incorporation and exclusion take place. The concept of “the people,” that is, a collective identity of belonging and sameness, is not a predetermined category but a historically constituted and always shifting categorization imbued by particular relations of power. In Argentina during the 1970s, nationhood was constituted through politicoideological categories dominated by the perspective of military leaders who unequivocally established ideological, internal Others identified as threats to the nation. As Diana Taylor suggests, “The population, confined to spectatorship, was either seduced or coerced into identifying with the military project.”5 By invoking bodily tropes of health and illness, along with traditional military speech and allusions to biblical similes, the military regime established clearly demarcated categories of inclusion and exclusion. It enforced these boundaries through a brutal and well-coordinated plan that acted on individual bodies as well as the social body and, ultimately, through fear and terror, produced a self-censoring and self-policing public congruent with the nation imagined by the military.6 5 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 60. 6 Ibid., 92. Diana Taylor offers a meticulous analysis of the intricate processes by which the military in Argentina used a double mechanism to imagine and to impose a national identity. Her argument, based on performance theory, interconnects gender and nation, which act to produce oppositional and exclusionary identities: “Just as one is male as opposed to female, one is Argentinean as opposed to something else…. Doing one’s nation-ness/gender ‘correctly’ promises privilege and a sense of belonging, yet involves coercive mechanisms of

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Military leaders justified the use of repression against Argentine citizens by defining them as “internal enemies,” consequently placing them, symbolically and materially, outside the realm of the nation and, thus, taking away their rights. General Jorge Rafael Videla, leader of the first military junta, declared in 1977: “The repression is directed against a minority we do not consider Argentine…it is a great offense to want to change our Western and Christian way of life for another one that is foreign to us. And in this type of struggle, a terrorist is not only someone who attacks with a bomb, by shooting or kidnapping, but also a person whose ideas want to change our way of life, ideas that are subversive, that is, they subvert our values.”7 According to the military, thus, this was a necessary and extraordinary struggle to “save” the nation, which required the use of extraordinary, radical measures, what the military itself labeled a “dirty war.”8 The nation was re-created by literally removing from it large sectors of the population and figuratively deterritorializing them. Symbolically, through the so-called “flights of death,”9 the military banned thousands of these bodies from the spaces of the nation by dumping the usually alive and semiconscious prisoners into the estuary of the Río de la Plata—the physical and emblematic boundary and birthplace of the contemporary city of Buenos Aires and the nation itself.10 The authoritarian plan was intended to permeate all aspects and spaces of everyday life. With a tight control over the landscape and its inhabitants, the spaces of the nation were transformed according to the military vision. The colorful, loud, massive populist rallies that had once overflowed Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo and spread out into factories, city streets, and university classrooms were emptied and replaced with an atomized, silenced, and disciplined environment. The disappearances targeted individuals but were clearly

7

8

9 10

identification. National/gender identity is not so much a question of being as of doing, of being seen doing, of identifying with the appropriate performative model.” La Nación, December 12, 1977. Cited in Isidoro Cheresky, “Régimen Estatalde Desapariciones” (paper presented at the Segundas Jornadas de Sociología–uba, 1976– 1996: Veinte Años Después, Buenos Aires, November 11–13, 1996). Martin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1993); Daniel Frontalini and Maria Cristina Caiati, El mito de la guerra sucia (Buenos Aires: cels, 1984). Horacio Verbitsky, El vuelo (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995). David William Foster, Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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directed at the collectivity.11 Diana Taylor pertinently concludes: “Just as bodies disappeared, so did civil society.”12 In order to impose its master narrative of the nation, the military government used an equally virulent public rhetoric that accompanied the physical exclusionary practices. The military was a skillful manipulator of language, style, and symbols. For example, when confronted by international media, emerging groups of victims’ relatives, and human rights organizations, the government defiantly counterattacked by taunting the demand for “human rights,” asserting, in a public campaign with posters and stickers, that “We Argentines are right and human” (Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos).13 Though the names, histories, and bodies of their relatives were disappearing, human rights activists (re)placed these excluded Others in the national landscape.14 At the heart of the demands by human rights organizations was the question of how the nation was redefined by the military project through its categorizations of inclusion and exclusion. The disappeared kept reappearing precisely because all social, political, and cultural rules about bodies, laws, domestic and public spaces, and rituals were attacked by the systematic 11

Nunca Más. Informe final de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1985); Juan Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Pilar Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición. Los Campos de Concentración en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 1998). 12 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 99. 13 Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 78–79. 14 On human rights organizations in Argentina, see Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Marguerite Bouvard Guzman, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994); Alison Brysk, The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1994); Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Elizabeth Jelin, “La política de la memoria: El movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,” in Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina, eds. Carlos Acuña et al., 101–145 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995); Héctor Ricardo Leis, El movimiento por los derechos humanos y la política argentina/1 + 2 (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1989); Emilio F. Mignone, Derechos humanos y sociedad: el caso argentino (Buenos Aires: cels, 1991); Marysa Navarro, “The Personal Is Political: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo,” in Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, ed. Susan Eckstein, 241–258 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Raul Veiga, Las organizaciones de derechos humanos (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1985).

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disappearances and repression. Human rights advocates reterritorialized and renationalized the excluded and made evident what Agamben calls the “state of exception”—a condition, which became the norm during the 1970s in Argentina, in which a determined group is placed outside the realm of the law and over whom “naked power” is exercised.15 For brief periods of time and occupying particular spaces, alternative narratives produced by victims and their advocates entered the national imagination of Argentines. The incorporation of human rights demands for memory and justice on the return to civilian rule were intimately linked to other struggles to redefine the state as well.16 It is not surprising, then, that subordinate narratives—understood in a Gramscian sense as a political force that seeks to contest dominant narratives and construct alternative ones—would be selectively incorporated and made part of the “national refoundation” proposed by the Alfonsín administration (1983–1989). Yet in this mutually formative and dynamic historical process, the narratives that emerged dominant for both the state actors and institutions as well as significant sectors in the human rights movement confined the issue of human rights to specific places, practices, and actors within the nation. Circumscribed to a limited application of justice and sanctioned forms of commemoration, the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion were once again redrawn. The more contestatory questions were placed on the margins of the more dominant discourses about the need for stability, political reconciliation, and economic modernization. Given the internal deteriorating economic conditions, and the international atmosphere dominated by the celebration of global capitalism at the end of the 1980s, the narrative shifted to economics.

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Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1998). On struggles around human rights, justice, memory and democracy, see Carlos Acuña et al., Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995); Adriana Bergero and Fernando Reati, eds., Memoria colectiva y políticas de olvido: Argentina y Uruguay, 1970–1990 (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997); Manuel Antonio Garretón, “Human Rights in Processes of Democratization,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994): 221–234; Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg, eds., Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship and Society in Latin America (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1996); Luis Roniger and Mario Sznajder, The Legacy of Human-Rights Violations in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Hugo Vezzetti, Pasado y Presente. Guerra, dictadura y sociedad en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 2002).

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15

A Neoliberal Nation

Carlos Saúl Menem, the charismatic governor of the province of La Rioja, was elected president of Argentina in 1989 on a platform that skillfully combined references to a nationalist-populist Peronist past with a global modernizing future. Menem presented himself as a pragmatist and not an ideologue; he represented the antithesis of economic stagnation, social dismemberment, and national decomposition. A central element of the Menemista platform was implied in seeking the recognition, internally and internationally, of Argentina as a powerful nation. The myth of the Argentina potencia was recast as dependent on a notion of national unity and collective sacrifice for a common goal. In his inaugural speech in 1989, President Menem announced that he was “arriving to unite the two Argentinas,” which he identified with different pairs of historical antagonisms of the nation: “Rosas and Sarmiento, Mitre and Facundo, Peñaloza and Alberdi, Pellegrini and Irigoyen, Perón and Balbín.”17 In the same tone of great conciliation, Menem sought to provide closure to the issue of human rights and military opposition. He did this through two interconnected strategies. First, he disqualified the importance of human rights under the premises of economic urgency and the “real” threat of hyperinflation simultaneously as he displaced the domain of the human rights movement with a neoliberal discourse about economic (market) freedom. Second, he alleviated the tensions with the military and reestablished the chain of command, which had been continuously challenged during the Alfonsín administration, by granting a general amnesty through two presidential pardons that set all convicted members of the military free in exchange for their constitutional loyalty. Within this context, all political, economic, cultural, and social conflicts were presented by the Menem administration as antithetical to the premise and promise of the globalized and modern Argentina. The main element of this national project was clearly focused on the economy and the comprehensive adoption of neoliberal policies with an emphasis on state divestment, economic liberalization, and private sector preeminence dominant worldwide.18 17 18

Vicente Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Política y poder en el gobierno de Menem (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996), 377. On economic reforms in the 1990s, see Naúm Minsburg and Hector Valle, eds., Argentina hoy: crisis del modelo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Letra Buena, 1995); Vicente Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Políta y poder en el gobierno de Menem (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996); Hugo Nochteff, ed., La economía argentina a fin de siglo: fragmentación presente y desarrollo ausente (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA-FLACSO, 1998); Ana Margheritis, Ajuste

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In the Menemista 1990s, the political Others of the military period were largely replaced by the economically anachronistic, nonmodern Others, which were cast as holding on to the bygone era of inefficient state-led development, unproductive welfare benefits, and ideologically driven debates. Though evidently not based on a practice of brutal political repression as experienced during the military government, the Menem era imposed a narrow version of national identity based on a reconstituted myth of the Argentina potencia and a constrained role for civil society basically reduced to the participation of consumer citizens in the market. This process was not as much the product of the direct elimination and physical exclusion of certain groups, behaviors, and ideas as the effect of a general emptying of the public sphere, an erosion of acquired collective rights, the devaluation of the state as an instance to redress inequality and injustice, and the delegitimization of alternative representations of daily life.19 The totalizing narrative of neoliberalism, in this case, was also built on an idea of “national emergency” due to economic chaos and lack of political leadership, and the solution was presented as inexorable and technical, not political, and thus not subject to critical review. The justification for limiting discussion around restructuring and the parallel dismissing of critiques relied on the appeal to an idea of national unity, through “national pacification” and “reconciliation” devoid of any political or social conflict. As in previous time periods, those relegated to the margins of the master narrative searched for alternative means of participation and representation by taking advantage of the openings and cracks that became available within the apparently monolithic and univocal dominant neoliberal logic. From 1993 on, through unconnected events in various areas (the northern provinces of Salta, Jujuy, and Santiago del Estero; the southern province of Neuquén; the northeastern province of Corrientes; and in the city of Buenos Aires and the Greater Buenos Aires area), unemployed workers, teachers, state employees, lawyers, retirees, disenfranchised youth, and the new poor staged considerable protests focused on: the negative effects of privatizations; labor reforms; state divestment from health, education, and pension plans; and the adoption of austerity measures. A range of collective actions were used, from burning down public buildings and private residences of local politicians in Santiago del Estero to picketing and weeklong road blockades (piquetes y cortes de ruta) in the declining oil towns of Cutral-có and Plaza Huincul in Neuquén to an

19

y reforma en Argentina (1989–1995). La economía política de las privatizaciones (Buenos Aires: Nuevohacer, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1999). Danilo Martuccelli and Maristella Svampa, La plaza vacía. Las transformaciones del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1997).

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over two-year-long campout by public sector teachers at the “White Tent” (Carpa blanca docente) in the Plaza de los Dos Congresos in Buenos Aires.20 All these manifestations of popular discontent reflected the shifts in collective identities that neoliberalism produced. Stripped of former mechanisms of social inclusion through the workplace and organized unions, state services, and participation in political parties, many sectors in Argentine society developed other political practices that challenged the dominant narrative of the nation. Many of these experiences relied on previous social movement strategies such as the independent and persistent tactics from the human rights movement and, in turn, had cumulative social and political effects, which continued to be significant beyond the event or moment of protest that sparked them. What these protests made evident were the contradictions and conflicts that President Menem so intently wanted to purge from public debate. These demonstrations repoliticized and refocused as a national concern the negative effects of a plan crafted to materially privatize and denationalize the state and to symbolically create an identity akin to an imagined global community based on the primacy of the market. Clearly, Menem’s plan could not escape the specificities of context nor could it simply dismiss as irrelevant the political and social consequences of a poorly resolved national past, which became increasingly manifest and embodied in the numerous cases of police brutality.21 20

21

Some of these protests and their effects are analyzed in Javier Auyero, La protesta. Retratos de la beligerancia popular en la Argentina democrática (Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, uba, 2002); Javier Auyero, Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003); Emilio Cafassi, Olla a presión. Cacerolazos, piquetes y asambleas, sobre fuego argentino (Buenos Ares: Libros del Rojas, uba, 2002); Gabriela Delamata, Los barrios desbordados. Las organizaciones de desocupados del Gran Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, uba, 2004); Maristella Svampa, ed., Desde abajo. La transformación de las identidades sociales (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos–Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2000). Since the return to democracy in 1983, cases of police brutality proliferated all over Argentina. The victims were disproportionately young and poor, and the number of violations committed by police officers out of uniform was also significant (see cels annual Informe anualsobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos). Additionally, throughout the 1990s, there were a few highly publicized cases of murders committed or ordered by wellconnected businessmen or local politicians who remained largely uninvestigated during this time period. Among the best known cases are the deaths of three young people in the suburban neighborhood of Ingeniero Budge; the death and disappearance of Miguel Angel Bru; the death of Cristian Cicovicci after he refused to participate in an extortion scheme run by members of the police force; the arbitrary arrest, torture, and death of

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The focus on economic recovery and its promises not only did not materialize evenly but in fact shifted the target of exclusion to new subjects. The tactics of exclusion operated socially through the marginalization of the poor but also institutionally through the same past practices of repression that had not been purged from the dominant establishment, including the control apparatuses of the sate and sectors within the judiciary. These demarcated patterns, like those dominant during the military regime, were progressively unmasked by the very excluded. Emerging from seemingly weak, isolated, and even unexpected counterpublics, alternative narratives about the nation entered the public sphere of the 1990s, similar to the development of an activist human rights public produced from within the all-encompassing and brutal repression of the military period. iv

The Disruptive Explosion

The bombing of the amia building on July 18, 1994, challenged the strategies put forth by the government through the politics of “national reconciliation.” The failure to respond convincingly to this event encapsulated the state of affairs under what became popularly baptized as Menem’s “regime of impunity.” Considered the worst single incident of terrorism on Argentine soil, and the most significant attack on a Jewish institution worldwide since the Second World War, this explosion cast serious doubt on Menem’s constructed narrative of the Argentina potencia. President Menem engaged with this event in the same manner that he dealt with the disruptive questions of past and present human rights issues: by isolating and excluding it from the national narrative. The most important element that facilitated this strategy in the case of the amia explosion was that the target had clearly been chosen because it was Walter Bulacio after a rock concert; the disappearance and death of eighteen-year-old Sebastián Bordón; the assassination of photojournalist José Luis Cabezas; the death of school teacher Teresa Rodríguez after police opened fire at a protest of unemployed workers in the province of Neuquén; and the well-publicized case of the death of María Soledad Morales, which involved members of powerful political families in the province of Catamarca. Several of these cases sparked massive mobilizations and, at the time, served as a basis for the creation of organizations such as cofavi (Comisión de Familiares de Víctimas de la Violencia Institucional/Commission of Relatives of Victims of Institutional Violence or sometimes Comisión de Familiares de Víctimas Indefensas de la Violencia Social e Institucional/Commission of Relatives of Defenseless Victims of Institutional and Social Violence) and correpi (Coordinadora contra la Represión Policial e Insitucional/Coordinator Against Police and Institutional Repression).

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a Jewish institution. This allowed the Menem administration to immediately resignify the bombing as part of a worldwide phenomena, which was not incorrect, yet by doing so the government was able to reinforce the identity of Argentina as a global player and thus to delink the government from internal responsibility and accountability. Guido Di Tella, the administration’s Minister of Foreign Relations, declared on the day of the explosion: “I believe that terrorist events are, unfortunately, occurring all around the world. No country is spared, not England, nor the United States, nor Italy, even less Spain, and this is a tragedy in which we all have to be in full solidarity.”22 This official interpretation served, on the one hand, to emphasize the underlying goal behind the government’s neoliberal plan regarding the inclusion of Argentina among other first-world nations and, on the other hand, to denationalize the event and its victims by highlighting their apparently intrinsic stateless characteristics as potential targets of this type of violence and thus isolate Argentine Jews as a distinct non-Argentine group. This framing had resonance within Argentine society at large, which has a long and conflictive history with its sizeable Jewish population, a relationship that could hardly go unnoticed in the aftermath of this event. After the explosion, politicians, journalists, other public figures of all political persuasions, and ordinary citizens referred to Argentine Jews as part of the pueblo judío (essentially “the Jewish people,” with pueblo carrying a dual meaning of “people” and “nation”), which also contributed to the common conflation and interchangeable use of Israelite—as in descendent of the ancient Hebrews— with Israeli, that is, a national of the country of Israel. Furthermore, these categories of otherness were often reinforced by sectors within the Jewish community itself who, like other minority groups, also struggled with broader debates around uniqueness and assimilation. In short, the amia bombing involved a range of issues with multiple implications that allow for a discussion of the effects the official framing produced in connection to broader disputes about human rights, conflict, and national identity. Also in this sense, the formation and specific discourse put forth by Memoria Activa made evident some of the underlying logics of the dominant narrative. Memoria Activa was created almost immediately after the amia bombing in order to ask for an official public investigation into local responsibilities and to demand judicial accountability in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and the amia in 1994. Unlike other groups formed at the time, namely Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas del Atentado a la amia (Family Members and Friends of the Victims of the amia Bombing), Memoria Activa 22

Testimonios, 34.

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was not constituted solely by direct victims or their families, and from the beginning it sought alliances with a variety of human rights organizations. More specifically, the practices of Memoria Activa employed strategies directed at recognizing the bombings and its victims as Argentine subjects, analogous to the struggles of human rights organizations during the military dictatorship. Furthermore, by connecting these victims to others in the past but also to debates about impunity and accountability during the Menem government, Memoria Activa challenged the privatization and individualization logic of neoliberal democracy. The case of the amia and of Memoria Activa, thus, must be analyzed in relation to the legacy of past human rights violations and the challenges these represent in the construction of a national project, as well as in the specific context and meanings produced by neoliberal discourses in shaping collective spaces. v

Reclaiming Spaces in the Nation

For over ten years, each Monday morning as Buenos Aires rose to the workweek and subway loads of well-dressed passengers carrying briefcases and folders walked up the stairs to the street level joining others hurriedly entering the imposing building of the Judicial Palace or Tribunales, which occupies one entire city block in front of Plazas Libertad and Lavalle, the howling sound of the shofar—the ram’s horn used in Jewish holidays—broke the routine of this space. Since the mid-1994 event and for the greater part of the remainder of that decade, a mixed group of 150 to 200 people exercised their own routine in front of the Judicial Palace, the main structure representing the nation’s Judiciary. It started at 9:53 a.m. with the blowing sound of the shofar, a sound that acted as a marker of the (Jewish) specificity of the crowd that assembled there, as well as a general reminder of the unresolved nature of the event evoked (the Monday, 9:53 a.m., July 18, 1994, bombing of the amia building; see Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3). After years of botched investigations, no one was charged with the bombing of the Jewish community center, and only a general connection to the Islamist group Hezbollah indicated that someone organized, planned, and carried out this event. This is precisely why the crowd gathered in the “Plaza of Memory” across from the “Palace of Injustice”—as the protestors rebaptized these opposing spaces—every Monday morning beginning two weeks after the bombing. After the blowing of the shofar, done in lieu of a “minute of silence,” three or four guest speakers, usually artists, actors, intellectuals, community leaders, journalists, human rights activists, or high school and university students, addressed

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Figure 1.1  Blowing the shofar on Mondays at 9:53 am (1999) Photo by Author

Figure 1.2  Crowds gather for Memoria Activa (1998) Photo by Author

the crowd with words of solidarity and often critical outrage. Then, a representative of the relatives of the victims and member of Memoria Activa, the organization that carried out these protests, gave a speech recounting and condemning the supposed advances in the official investigation. These poignant speeches did

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Figure 1.3  We all are Active Memory (1998) Photo by Author

more than express sadness at the loss of their loved ones or anger and frustration at the lack of progress in the case; they carefully dissected and disproved key aspects of the official investigation, often disclosing alternative explanations that paralleled the official versions, and updated the listeners on the development of the legal cases in which Memoria Activa was involved. References to individual victims were seldom made in these speeches; instead, the focus of these communications collectively edited by members of Memoria Activa was on a demand for justice in resolving the case. The charge was made without asking for special treatment or preference but in accordance to the existing laws and procedures of an established democratic state to which all citizens have a right. In contrast to President Menem’s attempts to situate the bombing of the amia outside the realm of the nation, Memoria Activa’s weekly gatherings in Plaza Lavalle insisted on placing the event in a physical and symbolic center. The gatherings on Monday mornings were held in a space chosen for its publicness, openness, and “Argentineanness.” With three vigorous shouts of “Justice!”—one for the victims of the equally unresolved 1992 bombing at the Israeli Embassy, one for the victims of the amia bombing, and one for the victims of impunity in Argentina—and a commitment to “meet next Monday,” the crowd broke off and Memoria Activa’s members and their supporters returned to their daily activities.

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Officially registered as a not-for-profit civilian organization in 1997, Memoria Activa’s main purpose was to keep the cases of the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the amia building open within the Argentine judicial system and alive in the public consciousness. The group developed into an independent association that borrowed and resembled many of the characteristics of previous human rights struggles. For example, the organization used certain symbols (the blowing of the shofar in an open plaza, outside the traditional space of the synagogue, was a particularly dramatic illustration) and particular language (the slogan “Basta de Impunidad” or “Enough of Impunity!” created an immediate identification with other concurrent, national issues) to disrupt and resignify the dominant narratives. At the same time, they intervened directly in the political and legal spheres to support their claims. The most visible and highly symbolic activity carried out by the group, whose core constituents included some family members of the victims of the bombings, as well as other Jewish and non-Jewish supporters, was the Monday morning weekly gatherings in Plaza Lavalle in front of the Judicial Palace. Memoria Activa was a vocal critic of the actions (or inactions) of both the government and the hierarchy of the amia and the daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations).23 It broke ranks with official practices when its members hired their own lawyer to carry their case through national and international court systems.24 The discourses and practices of Memoria Activa from the very moment of the bombing targeted tactics sanctioned by the Menem government that underpinned the labeling of the attack on the amia as an isolated, disconnected, and largely foreign matter. Practices by the government aimed at re-creating the bombing of the building of the amia as a story that occupied a place outside the national narrative. 23

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The president of the daia at the time, Ruben Beraja, had a close relationship with President Menem and his government. This connection developed in part because of Beraja’s management as head of Banco Mayo, a private financial institution with close ties in the business-industrial sector. The bank collapsed in October 1998, in some respects anticipating the broader breakdown of the financial system in late 2001. Many believed that Beraja’s close association with Menem impeded Jewish authorities from taking an independent and forceful position regarding the amia investigation. Similarly, this relation allowed the Menem administration to sever the Jewish community into factions and to choose which ones it would discuss the case with. For some of the political intricacies within the Jewish community at the time, see Silvia Chab, Entre la crisis y la esperanza. La comunidad judeoargentina tras el atentado a la amia (Buenos Aires: Catalagos, 2001). Dr. Alberto Zuppi, a respected lawyer best known for his successful participation in the extradition from Argentina to Italy of former Nazi ss captain Erich Priebke.

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By using the Jewish specificity, the demands made on the state for the resolution of this case were marginalized and “privatized.” The state apparatuses’ actions and inactions sought to relegate this issue to the memories of the victims and their families similarly to how past human rights violations were formally consigned to a discrete place in the nation’s history. President Menem never visited the site of the bombing nor did he ever meet with survivors or relatives of the victims. While he and other members of his administration condemned the attack, there never was a forceful commitment to uncover the circumstances of the blast.25 In fact, Menem’s administration systematically stalled the investigation and gradually displaced its significance in the collective history of the nation. Several measures reinforced the deterritorializing strategy crafted through official practices. For example, upon demands of more security around Jewish institutions and buildings, the government dedicated recruits from its border police force (the Gendarmería) to guard these sites. Thus, the conspicuous presence of these uniformed personnel seemed to indicate that Jewish buildings and institutions indeed had a distinct state line that placed them outside the realm of the nation. This impression was further reinforced when authorities from the Jewish community made the decision to place cement barriers in front of Jewish organizations and institutions, including schools and synagogues, and enforced strict access procedures at their entrances. These combinations of outside and self-imposed measures served to symbolically and materially mark Argentine Jews as separate from the rest of society. For the activists of Memoria Activa, the cement barriers that still dot the city landscape represent precisely the lack of security and safety as they are artificial safeguards that cannot replace the true protection that would come only from the clarification of the case, the assignment of responsibility, and 25

Initial investigations suggested that a gang of corrupt policemen might have been involved in the bombing, though from the onset it was clear that, if they were involved, they acted under the orders of others. Suspicions of foreign participation were always present and eventually were traced to Iranian and Syrian support of the group Hezbollah. Ten years after the bombing, and after three years of investigation into an examination of the evidence and legal proceedings, a special investigative commission concluded that serious violations had been committed around the amia case, including a systematic obstruction of justice through deliberate distortion and destruction of evidence, bribery by the principal justice in charge of the case, Judge Juan José Galeano, and a planned cover-up operation that reached the highest levels of the Menem administration, casting direct doubts on the president himself. The commission also concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to link the policemen to the event and set free those who had been held in custody. For a journalistic account of the case, see Roberto Caballero, amia: La verdad imposible (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2005).

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the full application of the law.26 “Security entails a political resolution that has to come from the state and not community organizations,” suggested Laura Ginsberg, at the time one of the most recognized members of Memoria Activa. “This is what leaders of the [Jewish] community should demand from the government, a clear policy regarding security for all its citizens.”27 The tendency to “resolve” this case privately in order to “move on” fit the trend established during these years to eliminate and depoliticize conflict from the public sphere. The bombing of the amia challenged the taken-forgranted meanings expressed both in Menem’s strategies to create a false sense of national unity as well as society’s own level of comfort with unresolved patterns of violence. Insinuations about how “Argentine” Argentine Jews really are, and thus how relevant the resolution of the case for Argentina was as a nation, abounded after the bombing and never stopped. This line of reasoning resembled the frequently used “por algo habrá sido” (there must have been a reason [for the arrest or abduction]) or “en algo habrá estado metido” (he must have been involved in something) used during the military period to justify, isolate, or turn a blind eye to the disappearances. The burden of the tragedy was, thus, placed on the victims and rationalized based on the individuals’ perceived or declared political, religious, or cultural values, which were classified as dangerous or alien to the nation. In the case of the amia bombing, the event itself, its victims, and even the masterminds behind it were placed outside the nation, deterritorialized by the official narrative. Even organizations within the human rights movement were slow to react and to embrace the amia case as a “human rights” cause different from, but simultaneously connected to, their own claims. While there is ample documentation of the anti-Semitic ideology and repressive practices of the military government, neither the human rights community nor representative sectors within the Jewish community systematically addressed this issue at first.28 This occurred partly because 26 27 28

Gerardo Mazur, interview, March 23, 1999. Laura Ginsberg, interview, April 26, 1999. The Nunca Más report produced by the conadep includes a short section on anti-Semitism (pp. 69–75). There are numerous accounts about the military’s affinity for Nazism, torturers’ references to Hitler and the ss, and the particularly brutal and sadistic tortures to which Jewish prisoners were subjected. One of the testimonies by a survivor encapsulates this anti-Semitism in what was often repeated to her by her captors: “The only good Jew is a dead Jew.” See Nunca Más. Informe final de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1985), 74. See also the testimony by newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1981) about his ordeal as a prisoner of the military. Also see Leonard Senkman and Mario Sznajder, El legado del autoritarismo: Derechos humanos y

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the 1994 bombing did not fit the profile of political violence of the 1970s, nor can one claim that it can be equated with the much broader practices of repression (including anti-Semitism) exercised by the military as a matter of state policy. Additionally, the hierarchy of the Jewish community embodied in the leadership of the daia in the mid-1990s did not forcefully confront and demand from the national government more concrete actions regarding the investigations of the bombing, just as they had not taken a clear oppositional stance toward the military regime. Only in the 1997 Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Argentina produced by cels (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, or Center of Legal and Social Studies), considered the leading guide to human rights concerns, does a chapter on the amia case appear, and this happened only after several researchers pointed out this neglect to cels staff.29 Through the years, however, there was increasing collaboration and solidarity between members of Memoria Activa and other human rights organizations. Members of other human rights groups such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo–Línea Fundadora (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Founding Line), Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), cels, H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence), and serpaj (Servicio Paz y Justicia, or Peace and Justice Service) were often invited speakers to Memoria Activa’s Monday morning gatherings. Similarly, Memoria Activa started to participate in events organized by some of the other groups around violations of human rights from the past and, by doing so, also created spaces within the Jewish community to reflect on its experiences during the military period. Part of this collaborative relationship emerged as more and more instances of violence involving “trigger-happy” security forces, scandalous white-collar corruption cases, and generalized patterns of social exclusion dotted the Argentine landscape, and the legal system proved ineffectual in resolving and punishing most cases. Throughout the 1990s, this violence was confounded with the consequences of the changing nature of a state that continued to play a role in repression but did not play one in securing and guaranteeing social benefits with regard to health, employment, education, housing, or justice.30

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antisemitismo en la Argentina contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Instituto Harry Truman– Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1995); and Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, especially Chapter 3, “Life Here Is Normal.” Elizabeth Jelin, personal communication, February 28, 2000. It is interesting that this general pattern was reproduced within the amia tragedy itself. The second largest category of victims (approximately 20 percent), following staff and other employees of the amia, were those seeking support at the amia’s employment service or bolsa de trabajo. In her discussion of some of the internal dynamics within the Jewish community, Silvia Chab also indicates in Entre la crisis y la esperanza that beginning in the late 1980s and

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Neoliberal reforms largely dismantled previous public safety nets. In essence, public policies were no longer “public” since services (including gas, electricity, water, communications, social security, and health) got transferred to private interests and the Menem government did not see the state as responsible for providing such services as a public right. This drop in the “publicness” of social policies was accompanied by an increase in discourses and initiatives focused on issues of “public security,” which criminalized the poor, the increasing number of legal and illegal immigrants from neighboring countries, and other social “undesirables” such as street children, sexual workers, the unemployed, petty drug dealers, and nonconformist youth.31 “Why do rates of violence and insecurity rise?” asked a participant in one of Memoria Activa’s Monday morning events. “Because the number one promoter of insecurity has been the Argentine government, but no one wants to talk about that.” “Security” was clearly not guaranteed by the state as the amia case exemplified; rather, it too was resolved through the privatizing frenzy. Those sectors of the population that could purchase security did so by hiring private guards or living in closed, gated communities.32 The strategy of exclusion that hierarchically situated citizens also permeated the application of “justice,” which appeared to be directed toward members of vulnerable groups but was of little consequence to powerful, elite groups or to state institutions. President Menem’s own immoderate lifestyle, whereby he flaunted his meetings with international rock stars, supermodels, and sports celebrities, emphasized the picture of a government more concerned with a trendy global image than with its citizenry, growing sectors of which did not benefit from the neoliberal program. The space of Memoria Activa in Plaza Lavalle, thus, became an important symbol for many aggrieved by Menem’s “regime of impunity” reflected in situations involving past and present human rights violations. Gerardo Mazur, a member of Memoria Activa, interpreted it this way: Well, there is a peaceful occupation of the Plaza on Mondays to demand our rights. We occupy the Plaza in the sense of being, we are in the Plaza

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through the 1990s, the number of Jewish families seeking support from the social services of the amia grew dramatically as the traditional Jewish middle class shrunk. Horacio Verbitsky, “Estado Penitencia,” Página/12, April 16, 2000; Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (cels), Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: cels, 1995–2000). This process of urban spatial segregation was not unique to Buenos Aires. For a thorough study of this pattern with reference to the case of Sao Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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exercising our inherent rights as citizens and demanding justice by inviting various people representing different sectors of society. This is how we came to organize acts together with the Association of Graphic Journalists over the Cabezas case [the execution of photojournalist Jose Luis Cabezas], or the striking teachers’ union, on Monday we did something with the Mothers [of Plaza de Mayo]. There is a common structure, which is the structure of impunity in Argentina. There is specificity within each human rights organization, the Mothers search for their children, the Grandmothers their grandchildren, all of them searching for justice of course, and we are looking for justice in the attack on the amia and the Israeli Embassy. All within the common space of horror that is impunity.33 Members of Memoria Activa, too, became more politicized through the years as they recognized the same patterns of government inertia present in their case connected to broader human rights struggles. A significant turning point for the organization came after the commemoration of the third anniversary of the bombing. On July 18, 1997, 20,000 people gathered at the site of the blast on Pasteur Street, where Laura Ginsberg, the representative from the victims’ families and at the time a member of Memoria Activa, gave an impassioned, powerful speech in which she directly accused Menem’s government of indolence, coverup, and lack of justice. Representatives from the government, including Minister of the Interior Carlos Corach and Chief of Staff Jorge Rodríguez, along with the president of the daia, Ruben Beraja, who were all present at the act, were publicly jeered and whistled at.34 Memoria Activa’s uncompromising stance and the connections it made between the lack of justice in this case and that of other historical events helped frame the demands of the organization as those of other sectors of the population also wronged by the structure of impunity. The expansion of Memoria Activa’s agenda to address issues of impunity outside of the amia case was constantly delegitimized by Menem, who dismissed Memoria Activa as “a minority group with political interests.” This reinforced the antipolitical official discourse through which the public sphere was redesigned and essentially emptied of nonmarket-driven content during these years. The hierarchy of Jewish organizations grouped under the daia, as well as the other group of bombing victims’ family members, also critiqued Memoria Activa.35 Yet the strength of Memoria Activa developed because it 33 34 35

Gerardo Mazur, interview, March 23, 1999. See the ample media coverage of this date. The other group of family members gathered in the Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas del Atentado de la amia held a monthly public event every 18th at the site of the bombing

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did not remain circumscribed to the amia event, advocating in other cases of impunity and challenging some popular and official discourses stemming from both state officials and Jewish leaders who narrowly interpreted this case as a “Jewish” issue. By placing the organization among the ranks of other human rights struggles, they located their demands within the realm of their shared rights as citizens. Laura Ginsberg explained the connection between past and present events and the links with other human rights organizations: We have always been questioned in Memoria Activa for extending our solidarity to other, non-Jewish, victims or victims of non-Jewish acts of terror but who are victims of police violence, or have been victims of the repression during the dictatorship, or are victims of the economic plan. We all are victims of this impunity that the Menem democratic government itself has imposed, at least it self-describes as “democratic.” But this is not gratuitous, that is, it’s not like one says, “I get together because it is convenient for me” or “I get together so that I don’t have to stand alone.” At the root of all our problems there is a common denominator, which is that in all of them state security forces are involved. There is where one can create networks of support, of solidarity, of dialogue. We know a lot of mothers who have lost their children due to police violence or the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo or the striking teachers. We all suffer from the same ill, and the connections are, unfortunately, very close.36

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on Pasteur Street. At these events, a strong speech demanding justice was usually delivered after the names of the victims were read and a candle lit for each victim along with a red rose placed on a simple wooden altar inscribed with the words “Justicia y Memoria” (Justice and Memory) in white letters. After the ceremony, gatherers were invited to pray in silence in accordance to individual religious belief. This group was more reluctant to criticize the direction of the official investigation fearing that excessive criticism would create more antagonism and less desire on the part of judges to work on the case. The group continued to carry its legal case under the auspices of the amia/daia. Some members used to participate in Memoria Activa, but many found Memoria Activa’s expansion of its agenda to encompass other cases of impunity questionable and too politicized. In 2002, apemia (Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la amia, or Group for the Clarification of the Unpunished Massacre of the amia), a more radical group also constituted of family members and led by former Memoria Activa activist and bombing victim widow Laura Ginsberg, was formed. This organization has held the strongest critique against all Argentine governments since the bombing as well as other organizations, including Memoria Activa, perceived as complacent with the governments’ concealment and deceit and the lack of pursuit of local responsibilities. Laura Ginsberg, interview, April 26, 1999.

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Figure 1.4a Memoria Activa’s “National Document Against Impunity” (1999) Photo by Author

As the name of the Memoria Activa organization itself sought to imply, it is important to highlight these connections without abandoning a referent to a specific Jewish identity. This was appealingly interpreted in one of the Monday morning protests when the speaker representing Memoria Activa explained to the gathered crowd that in the Jewish tradition the act of wasting time is an offense and so should the lack of justice and, thus, the “waste of time” in resolving cases in a democratic tradition, be interpreted as a serious political and ethical transgression. For Memoria Activa the issue of justice in the amia case was closely connected to the history of impunity in the country, and the best hope to keep memory alive or active was to have its claim become that of society as a whole, keeping the specificity of its Jewish markers—as the attack was clearly anti-Semitic—but insisting on the “Argentineanness” of the demand. Emblematically, in 1999, approaching the fifth anniversary of  the bombing, Memoria Activa issued its own version of an Argentine “national id” that granted its holders with a general “national document against impunity,” all of them bearing the same number: 18071994 (18-July-1994; see Figures 1.4 and 1.5).

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Figure 1.4b (Continued) Photo by Author

Concurrently with these symbolic practices that sought to reterritorialize the event and its victims, the core of Memoria Activa’s legal case centered on what was labeled “the local connection.” The reason behind this claim was that regardless of who masterminded the bombing nationally or internationally, it could not have been executed without a national base of support that likely entailed a network of local connections. At the event commemorating the fifth  anniversary of the explosion, Diana Malamud, speaking for Memoria Activa, emphasized: “There are no doubts: The local connection of the amia attack is the Argentine state, which has managed to cover up and protect those responsible so that the truth will never be reached.”37 In April 2000, Dr. Alberto Zuppi, Memoria Activa’s lawyer, indicated—after showing me rooms full of boxes, binders, and piles of papers all related to the legal action—that the only certainty in the case up to that moment was that a Ford Traffic was the vehicle used in the attack. Everything else, even the most basic information, including 37

Página/12, July 19, 1999.

Figure 1.5a

Buttons in support of Memoria Activa with the slogan, “Enough Impunity!” (1998) Photo by Author

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Figure 1.5b

Button with the slogan: “Justice, justice shalt though pursue” (1998) Photo by Author

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the type of explosives used, the definitive number of victims, and who drove the vehicle, was subject to speculation and manipulation. This lack of political will on the part of the authorities was only surpassed by specific strategies to delay and obstruct a valid investigation. Whatever material evidence existed was contaminated or destroyed, and, not in the least disconnected from previous practices of exclusion discussed earlier, the rubble of the building was hauled off in trucks to a vacant lot bordering the estuary of the Río de la Plata and, some years later, dumped (disappearing) into the river itself. It is to the credit of human rights organizations that connections between past violations, present violence, and impunity reentered public discussion in the 1990s. “Impunity” represented not only the lack of justice for issues of the past but also the generalized sense of lack of accountability, responsibility, and punishment for many forms of injustice and violence. President Menem’s disdain, disregard, and sometimes direct involvement in the systematic lack of effective justice contributed to the labeling of his administration as “the regime of impunity.” The struggles to fight such a regime became intricately linked to the very struggles for democracy, as this activist of Memoria Activa indicated: Even if some cases [of impunity] would be resolved this would not mean that a structure of impunity would cease to exist. It is an extension of the structure that existed during the dictatorship and continues under this democracy which, although more educated and couched under different words, continues to be just at an initial stage. It continues to be a democracy with unchanged diapers and thus it has a strong smell of shit.38 Popular discontent was summed up in the slogan of the “fight against impunity,” which originated among human rights activists to condemn the lack of punishment for violations of rights but became the general symbolic catchphrase of this era (see Figures  1.6 and 1.7). The word impunity was before reserved for the more specialized parlance of judges and lawyers but was popularized and made familiar by human rights activists. As Martín Abregú, at the time at cels, suggested, “It is one of the most frequently used words in the Argentine vocabulary.”39 “Fight against impunity,” thus, became the most common manner to express the general frustration with the lack of punishment and accountability for past violations, as in the gross violations perpetrated during the military period, and for the injustices of the neoliberal era, as in the cases of massive layoffs, white-collar and government corruption, police 38 39

Gerardo Mazur, interview, March 23, 1999. Martín Abregú, interview, May 14, 1998.

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Figure 1.6  Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo head march “For Justice, against impunity, exclusion and discrimination” at the commemoration of the military coup. Some hold pictures of assassinated photojournalist, José Luis Cabezas (1999) Photo by Author

Figure 1.7  “Enough Impunity!” Banner in Plaza Lavalle by the Unión de Trabajadores de Prensa de Buenos Aires (Print Media Worker’s Union of Buenos Aires, UTPBA) for a joint event with Memoria Activa (1998) Photo by Author

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brutality, and other forms of everyday violence. In the face of impunity in a wide range of spheres, past experiences of human rights organizations offered society a series of tools, both concrete and symbolic, to confront it. Furthermore, the presence of human rights activists continued to challenge the dominant notions about the nation’s past and present. The actions by Memoria Activa brought to the forefront the contested meanings about the nation’s narratives and the implications of including and excluding some of its members. The struggles over these meanings and identities highlighted the importance of understanding the multiple ways in which human rights practices have an effect in producing social narratives and expanding the role of social movements in the processes of democratic consolidation. The perseverance of efforts by activists of earlier organizations served as inspiration for newer associations, which recognized in previous struggles avenues to articulate frustrations, critique the lack of resolution to acts of violence, and develop new strategies to unravel political and social roadblocks, what I call the cumulative effects of civil society organizing. Memoria Activa is an example of an organization influenced by this trajectory. In publications and interviews, members of this group commonly made reference to the similarity of their struggle and those of other human rights groups. By doing so they emphasized not only the relationship in terms of their objectives but also recognized those groups as their model for organization. Similarly, in opposition to the practice of retreat and individualization exercised by placing cement barriers in front of Jewish buildings, the gatherings on Monday mornings were held in a space chosen because of its publicly recognized significance. “I believe that the street belongs to the people,” suggested S., a member of Memoria Activa, “and we all have rights, just as the Constitution establishes, to express ourselves freely and without censorship. This is what we do.”40 The search for justice was placed not on mechanisms of control and restriction but on transforming specific demands into collective struggles and engaging the citizenry in public participation. The contestations by Memoria Activa and other human rights groups introduced other narratives into public debate and disrupted the official meanings with the experiences of the excluded. At the heart of the possibilities of developing democratic cultures remained the question of justice. In Argentina, the biblical slogan of Memoria Activa continued to echo as a challenge to the nation: “Justicia, justicia perseguirás” (Justice shall thou pursue).

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S., interview, April 13, 1998.

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vi Conclusion I discussed key formations around categories of belonging as they pertain to the creation of the Argentine nation from the 1970s onset of the military government through the neoliberal democratic 1990s with specific references to public debates regarding human rights struggles and demands. I argued that, through specific discursive and material practices, groups of people were presented as Others to the dominant projects of nation building and were systematically excluded from the spaces of the nation. But since hegemonic meanings require constant rearticulation and are always projects in construction, neither the military nor the neoliberal narratives were able to completely control or expel subordinate accounts of the Argentine nation. During the military regime, the dominant narrative was based on political exclusion and was executed through a concerted, violently repressive plan that literally saw people considered threats to the nation disappear. This story was confronted by human rights organizations precisely by rematerializing the lives of those erased by the military and by demanding truth and justice. In the 1990s, a different narrative occupied the Argentine imagination. President Menem’s version of the nation involved a predominance of an economic logic based on the celebration of individualism and the private sphere at the exclusion of the public and collective spheres, including a role for the state. The contestations to neoliberalism emerged from sectors that did not benefit from its promises but also from groups that demanded attention and responses from the state and its institutions in their public responsibility, for example, in the demand for accountability. Nation building is based on notions of territory and space that entail a sense of belonging, ownership, and sameness. I have argued here that in contemporary Argentina the nation was built on the enforcement of these spatial boundaries and social categorizations through explicit processes that deterritorialized bodies, political ideas, and cultural practices. This was obvious during the military government when people disappeared, their bodies sometimes thrown out and expelled outside the national territory. In the democratic neoliberal project this was not explicit, yet the emptying of and the degradation of a political public sphere also served to exclude voices, lives, and experiences not congruent with the dominant project. Contestations outside of what was demarcated as appropriate to a narrowly defined and depoliticized public sphere were seen as threatening and the presence of alternative explanations as disruptive. The bombing of the amia and the activism of Memoria Activa serve to explore the connections between the practices of nation building and

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o­ ppositional struggles in the 1990s. The bombing itself was a disruption that threatened Menem’s narrative, in part because it required a presence of the state that the neoliberal project was intent on weakening. Furthermore, by discursively classifying the bombing as a “foreign matter” or labeling it a “Jewish concern,” the government sought to reestablish the boundaries of nationhood by excluding the event and its victims and by rebuffing demands for state accountability. The biggest disruption, however, emerged from the activism and presence of Memoria Activa. This group challenged official narratives about the bombing of the amia in particular, and the neoliberal experience in general, by occupying public spaces of the nation, formulating alternative explanations, and articulating a collective demand for justice. In the formulation of this counterpublic, Memoria Activa used previous human rights struggles to construct other meanings that challenged the parameters of the neoliberal project. For Memoria Activa and other human rights activists in the 1990s, the demands against impunity were conceptualized within the framework of what participation in a democratic nation involves, which included the right of citizens to place demands on the state. At the center of the demands by Memoria Activa was a claim to the “Argentineanness” of the event, including replacing within the boundaries of the nation the institution that was blown up, the bodies that were in the building, the history that allowed it to occur, and the reactions and policies that were taken in its aftermath. All of it belonged to and in Argentina. Bibliography Acuña, Carlos, Inés González Bombal, Elizabeth Jelin, Oscar Landi, Luis Alberto Quevedo, Catalina Smulovitz and Adriana Vacchieri. Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995. Acuña, Carlos, and William Smith. “The Political Economy of Structural Adjustment: The Logic of Support and Opposition to Neoliberal Reform.” In Latin American Political Economy in the Age of Neoliberal Reform, edited by William C. Smith, Carlos H. Acuña, and Eduardo A. Gamarra, 17–66. New Brunswick: North–south Center, Transaction Books, 1994. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agüero, Felipe, and Jeffrey Stark, eds. Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-Transition Latin America. Miami: North–south Center Press, 1998. Alonso, Ana Maria. “The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity.” Annual Review Anthropology 23 (1994): 33–57.

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———. “The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (March 1988): 379–405. Álvarez, Sonia, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds. Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re/visioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998. Americas Watch-cels. Verdad y justicia en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Americas Watch-cels, 1991. Andersen, Martin. Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War.” Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arditti, Rita. Searching for Life. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Aspiazu, Daniel, ed. Privatizaciones y poder económico. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2002. Auyero, Javier. Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003. ———. La protesta. Retratos de la beligerancia popular en la Argentina democrática. Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas–Universidad de Buenos Aires, serie extramuros 5, 2002. Ben-Amos, Dan, and Liliane Weissberg, eds. Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Bergero, Adriana, and Fernando Reati, eds. Memoria colectiva y políticas de olvido: Argentina y Uruguay, 1970–1990. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997. Biersteker, Thomas J. “The ‘Triumph’ of Neoclassical Economics in the Developing World: Policy Convergence and Bases of Governance in the International Economic Order.” In Governance Without Government, edited by James N. Rosenau, 102–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bouvard Guzman, Marguerite. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Brysk, Alison. The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1994. Caballero, Roberto. amia: La verdad imposible. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2005. Cafassi, Emilio. Olla a presión. Cacerolazos, piquetes y asambleas sobre fuego argentino. Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas–uba, 2002. Caldeira, Teresa. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Calveiro, Pilar. Poder y Desaparición. Los Campos de Concentración en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 1998.

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Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (cels). Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina, 1999. Buenos Aires: cels, 2000. ———. Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina, 1998. Buenos Aires: cels, 1999. ———. Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina, 1997. Buenos Aires: cels, 1998. ———. Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina, 1996. Buenos Aires: cels, 1997. ———. Informe anual sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en la Argentina, 1995. Buenos Aires: cels, 1996. Chab, Silvia. Entre la crisis y la esperanza. La comunidad judeoargentina tras el atentado a la amia. Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2001. Cheresky, Isidoro. “Regimen Estatal de Desaparición.” Paper presented at the Segundas Jornadas de Sociología–uba: 1976–1996 Veinte Años Después, Buenos Aires, November 11–13, 1996. conadep. Nunca Mas: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Corradi, Juan, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón. Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Delamata, Gabriela. Los barrios desbordados. Las organizaciones de desocupados del Gran Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: eudeba–Libros del Rojas, 2004. Doxtader, Eric. “In the Name of Reconciliation: The Faith and Works of Counterpublicity.” In Counterpublics and the State, edited by Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, 59–86. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Feitlowitz, Marguerite. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Fisher, Jo. Mothers of the Disappeared. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Foster, David William. Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins, 1–32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Frontalini, Daniel, and Maria Cristima Caiati. El mito de la guerra sucia. Buenos Aires: cels, 1984. Gamarra, Eduardo. “Market-Oriented Reforms and Democratization in Latin America: Challenges of the 1990s.” In Latin American Political Economy in the Age of Neoliberal Reform, edited by William C. Smith, Carlos H. Acuña, and Eduardo A. Gamarra, 1–16. New Brunswick: North–South Center, Transaction Books, 1994. Garretón, Manuel Antonio. “Human Rights in Processes of Democratization.” Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (1994): 221–34.

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Gómez, Jose María. “Eclipse de la memoria, política del olvido: La cuestión de los derechos humanos en una democracia no consolidada.” Punto de Vista 12, no. 3 (December 1989): 1–7. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Haggard, Stephan, and Robert Kaufman. The Politics of Economic Adjustment. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. How Truth Commissions Around the World Are Challenging the Past and Shaping the Future. New York: Routledge, 2001. Jelin, Elizabeth. “La política de la memoria: El movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina.” In Carlos Acuña, Inés González Bombal, Elizabeth Jelin, Oscar Landi, Luis Alberto Quevedo, Catalina Smulovitz and Adriana Vacchieri Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina, 101–145. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995. Jelin, Elizabeth, Laura Gingold, Susana G. Kaufman, Marcelo Leiras, Silvia Rabich de Galperínb and Lucas Rubinich. Vida cotidiana y control institucional en la Argentina de los’90. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1996. Jelin, Elizabeth, and Eric Hershberg, eds. Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship and Society in Latin America. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Joseph, Gilbert M., and Daniel Nugent. “Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico.” In Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, 3–23. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1994. Jozami, Eduardo, Pedro Paz, and Juan Villareal. Crisis de la dictadura argentina: política económica y cambio social (1976–1983). Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 1985. Landi, Oscar, and Inés González Bombal. “Los derechos en la cultura política.” In Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina, edited by Carlos Acuña, Inés González Bombal, Elizabeth Jelin, Oscar Landi, Luis Alberto Quevedo, Catalina Smulovitz and Adriana Vacchieri, 147–192. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995. Leis, Héctor Ricardo. El movimiento por los derechos humanos y la política argentina/1 + 2. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1989. Lo Vuolo, Rubén M., and Alberto Barbeito. La Nueva Oscuridad de la Política Social. Del Estado Populista al Neoconservador. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila Editores, 1993. Mallon, Florencia. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Margheritis, Ana. Ajuste y reforma en Argentina (1989–1995). La economía política de las privatizaciones. Buenos Aires: Nuevohacer-Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1999. Martuccelli, Danilo, and Maristella Svampa. La plaza vacía. Las transformaciones del peronismo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1997.

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Mignone, Emilio F. Derechos humanos y sociedad: el caso argentino. Buenos Aires: cels, 1991. ———. “El movimiento de derechos humanos en la Argentina y los desafíos del fin de siglo.” Paper presented at diakonia/Instituto de Defensa Legal, n.d. Minsburg, Naúm, and Héctor Valle, eds. Argentina hoy: crisis del modelo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Letra Buena, 1995. Navarro, Marysa. “The Personal Is Political: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” In Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, edited by S.Eckstein, 241–58. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Nelson, Joan M. “Introduction: The Politics of Economic Adjustment in Developing Nations.” In Economic Crisis and Policy Choice: The Politics of Adjustment in the Third World, edited by Joan Nelson, 3–32. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990. Nochteff, Hugo, ed. La economía argentina a fin de siglo: fragmentación presente y desarrollo ausente. Buenos Aires: Eudeba/flacso, 1998. O’Donnell, Guillermo, and Philippe Schmitter. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Olick, Jeffrey, and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–140. Palermo, Vicente, and Marcos Novaro. Política y poder en el gobierno de Menem. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996. Peruzzotti, Enrique. “Civic Engagement in Argentina. From the Human Rights Movement to the ‘Cacerolazos’.” Washington, dc: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2002. Pion-Berlin, David. The Ideology of State Terror: Economic Doctrine and Political Repression in Argentina and Peru. Boulder: Lynne Rinner, 1989. Pirez, Pedro, Natalia Gitelman, and Julieta Bonnafe. “Consecuencias políticas de la privatización de los servicios urbanos en la ciudad de Buenos Aires.” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 61, no. 4 (October–December 1999): 23–42. Pred, Allan. “Memory and the Cultural Reworking of Crisis: Racisms and the Current Moment of Danger in Sweden, or Wanting It Like Before.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 635–664. Radcliffe, Sarah and Sallie Westwood. Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America. London: Routledge, 1996. Rock, David. Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

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Roniger, Luis, and Mario Sznajder. The Legacy of Human-Rights Violations in the Southern Cone. Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Saba, Roberto. “The Human Rights Movement, Citizen Participation Organizations, and the Process of Building Civil Society and Rule of Law in Argentina.” Institute of Development Studies, Civil Society and Governance Project, September 2000. http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/civsoc/final/argen/arg2.html. Sábato, Hilda. “Olvidar la memoria.” Punto de Vista 12, no. 3 (1989):8–10. ——— . “Historia reciente y memoria colectiva.” in Punto de Vista no. 49 (1994): 30–35. Schirmer, Jennifer G. “Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America.” Feminist Review 32 (Summer 1989): 3–29. Silva, Patricio. “Neoliberalism, Democratization and the Rise of Technocrats.” In The Changing Role of the State in Latin America, edited by Menno Vellinga, 75–92. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998. Smith, William C., Carlos H. Acuña, and Eduardo A. Gamarra, eds. Latin American Political Economy in the Age of Neoliberal Reform. New Brunswick: North–South Center, Transaction Books, 1994. Smulovitz, Catalina, and Enrique Peruzzotti. “Societal Accountability in Latin America.” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (2000):147–158. Stepan, Alfred. Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1988. Svampa, Maristella, ed. Desde abajo. La transformación de las identidades sociales. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos–Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2000. Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge, 1992. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003. ———. Disappearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997. Testimonios de una Semana de Horror. Buenos Aires: Ediciones JAI, 1995. Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1981. Veiga, Raul. Las organizaciones de derechos humanos. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1985. Verbitsky, Horacio. “Estado Penitencia.” Página/12, April 16, 2000. ———. El Vuelo. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995. Vezzetti, Hugo. Pasado y Presente. Guerra, dictadura y sociedad en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno editors, 2002. Yerushalmi, Yosef. “Reflexiones sobre el olvido.” In Usos del Olvido, edited by Yosef Yerushalmi, Nicole Loraux, Hans Mommsen, Jean Claude and Giann Vattimo, 13–26. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1989.

chapter 2

Reading Memoria Activa’s Discourse: Demands for Justice and Identity Symbols Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff Starting in the 1990s, the Jewish community reached a level of visibility unpre­ cedented in its long history in Argentina.1 After two tragic events, the attack on the Israeli Embassy in March 1992 and the amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina or Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society) bombing in July 1994, the display of elements characterized as “Jewish” received a level of attention unknown until then.2 Such visibility took different forms. One such form marked the urban fabric—in the name of safety standards aimed at reducing the impact of another possible attack of the same kind—to signal the location of Jewish community institutions. Formerly indistinguishable congregations and schools began to stand out in the city landscape because of yellow cement blocks, pilotes, raised as barriers to car bombs. On another level, increased Jewish visibility took place via the staging of numerous public acts of remembrance devoted to the attacks. Oftentimes those acts were accompanied by the explicit support of non-Jewish public figures. Prominent personalities in the fields of popular music, politics, the

1 This chapter comprises a paper given at the Eleventh International Research Conference of lajsa (Latin American Jewish Studies Association) that took place at Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2002; an addendum written two days before the conference; and an addendum written in late May 2014. The latter addendum contextualizes the first two parts and provides a key for readers who will find a work that, in its original version, dealt with a recent past—1999, the date of the editorial analyzed in the paper—and a later moment, when the piece was written. We have chosen this format in response to the editors’ wish to reflect on the specific period of the twenty years since the amia bombing. While the chapter is listed as coauthored by Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff, due to the editorial obligation to respect the coauthorship of the original version presented in 2002, the process required to revise, translate, update, and further develop some of the original concepts was completed entirely by Fernando Fischman. 2 On March 17, 1992, a bomb destroyed the Israeli Embassy located in downtown Buenos Aires, leaving twenty-nine people dead and over two hundred injured, and on July 18, 1994, the headquarters of amia was attacked and eighty-five people were killed.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_004

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media, and, to a lesser extent, academia, expressed support and solidarity with the victims by partaking of such commemorative performances.3 Although these acts took the form of public performances, not all responded to the same logic. On the one hand, there were commemorations in the metro­ politan area like the unveiling of plaques, naming of squares, planting of trees, and even school activities devoted to the subject—institutional undertakings from both the Jewish community and national and local legislatures. On the other hand, other innovative public interventions, like those carried out by Memoria Activa (Active Memory), without neglecting their commemorative character, emphasized denunciation.4 They did so during weekly public per­ formances held in the Plaza Lavalle, across from the Palacio de Tribunales (Palace of Justice). Such performances blended a symbolic repertoire associ­ ated with Jewish belonging (blowing the shofar, the utterance of biblical phrases in Hebrew) and forms of social protest rooted in the Argentine national political culture (the ritualized presence in a highly marked space on a regular basis with denunciatory speeches). These other forms of Jewish visibility in terms of social protest contributed to gradual alienation from the institutional initiatives of the Jewish community that emerged simultaneously.5 Conse­ quently, they shaped a singular phenomenon out of their ability to combine discursive elements from diverse fields. This chapter examines the discourse of Memoria Activa in order to estab­ lish how it articulates a particular cultural identity and a universal collective demand. Our research focuses on the explicit public discourse, contained in transcriptions of speeches from the weekly demonstrations oftentimes broad­ cast live by cable news channels. Through the analysis of these concrete mate­ rials, we gain an understanding of some of the implications of their protests.6 The specific material we take into consideration for this work is an editorial 3 Richard Bauman, “Performance,” in Bauman, Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, 41–49 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).We understand them to be performances in that they are “an aesthetically marked and heightened mode of communi­ cation, framed in a special way and put on display for an audience” (41). 4 Memoria Activa is a civil association formed by relatives of victims of the attack and other actors of the Jewish community that early on took a discordant position toward the way Jewish leadership—and other relatives—headed the demand for a full investigation. 5 We refer to the commemorative ceremonies that amia carries out every month on the 18th, in the street at the entrance of the building. 6 At the time of the lajsa conference in June 2002 when the original version of this paper was presented, both authors were undertaking individual research projects on Jewish commem­ orative practices that used a corpus of written media sources in their empirical materials.

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from a July 1999 publication of Memoria Activa, five years after the bombing and thus marking five years of ongoing and relentless protest. Thus, we access an expression that reflectively condenses the various components that would ultimately constitute the singular discourse of this group, one that provided it with an identifiable political voice among the many others that surfaced in a national context of growing social unrest. Memoria Activa’s editorial is performative, a mode of communication with certain aesthetic and rhetorical purposes. It is one among the sequence that occurred through Memoria Activa’s performances, the most visible of which was its weekly staging of diverse semiotic modes. Therefore, by analyzing the editorial, it is possible to trace the path of the social processes that gave rise to it and to examine how it contributed to the generation of new discursive con­ texts as well. Hence, it plays a definitive role in the opening of new possibilities of signification for the audience to which it is addressed. Through the analysis of this editorial, we aim to show the dialogic discur­ sive framework through which a protest arising from a particular group is universalized while being transmitted to the field of public protest. In addi­ tion, we point out how, in the same movement, the demand raised in uni­ versal terms is tinged with particular components associated with cultural elements related to Judaism. Thus, we hypothesize about the continuities and ruptures between this discourse and that of other social protests that emerged in Argentina in the 1990s and about the possibility that such dis­ course may have constituted a key forum for the emergence of new forms of Jewish belonging.

“An Expression of Life”: The Shaping of a Unique Voice

We base our analysis on the premise that discourses are “the precipitates of continuous cultural processes.”7 That is, discourses are the result of social pro­ cesses that leave their mark in the form of utterances.8 In this case, as will be apparent, we deal with a complex array of expressions from varied sources. The following excerpts, noted i–iv, appeared in the second issue of the pub­ lication Memoria Activa, a free newsletter distributed in Plaza Lavalle, five

7 Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, “The Natural History of Discourse,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, eds. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 1–17 (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1. 8 Mijail Bajtin, Estética de la Creación Verbal (México City: Siglo XXI, 1982).

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years after the amia bombing.9 They come from the editorial “Memoria Activa, Movimiento Social” (Memoria Activa, a Social Movement).10

i It is neither a demonstration, nor another institution, it is an expression of life of all men and women of good will, Argentine Jews and non-Jews alike, all those who want to join in this demand for Justice.11

The use of “neither…nor” emphatically states Memoria Activa’s unique iden­ tity. On the one hand, it marks the ephemeral nature of protests that take place in public locations, and, on the other hand, it marks the immutability of estab­ lished institutions. This assertion implies both an affirmation of the enduring nature of the group and a distancing from a number of static organizations.12 In this sense, it is not only about not being an institution but about not being “another institution,” thus rejecting any ascription to the network of estab­ lished institutions that comprise Jewish Argentine organizations. In contrast to the preceding negative definition, the statement “expression of life” as the first positive definition would seem to designate with the highest degree of abstraction an attribute that binds the members of the group with potential supporters (“all those who want to join”). Various adjectives define the degree of inclusiveness to which the call appeals. The first expression, “all men and women of good will,” contains, in regard to this universality, an implicit reference to the Preamble of the Argentine Constitution. However, a specification follows this definition of an extended collective—“Jews and non-Jews”—that introduces the singularity of the collective affected directly by the attack (those who would be moved to

9

10 11

12

The dissemination of written materials has been a steady practice of this organization. The newsletter was one among other means, like the compilation of transcripts of speeches delivered in the public performances that Memoria Activa published in con­ junction with the Página/12 newspaper. We selected these excerpts for this paper because they eloquently illustrate the interdis­ cursive articulation that shapes Memoria Activa’s singular voice. “No es una marcha, no es una institución más, es una expresión de vida de todos los hom­ bres y mujeres de buena voluntad, argentinos judíos y no judíos, de todos aquellos que quieran acompañarnos en este reclamo de Justicia.” This remark should be understood in the context of a debate with other Jewish organiza­ tions about their relationship to the national government, of which this editorial is an expression.

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react) and the possible universalization of the protest through the joining of others not touched openly by it. In addition, the reference to the Preamble of the Argentine Constitution establishes continuity between this group and the foundational moment of the nation in terms of its legal framework. This continuity results in a discur­ sive appropriation that also recognizes as its precedent a previous appropria­ tion—that made by former president Raúl Alfonsín in his campaign speeches of 1983.13 However, far from suggesting this linkage as an affiliation with a par­ ticular political expression, the reference is to the universal validity of indi­ vidual rights and guarantees, which was the motto of Alfonsín’s campaign. These rights and guarantees, whose systematic violation by the state ended with the advent of democratic rule, appear again violated with the perpe­ tration of the attack and with the failure of the state to guarantee security to its citizens. This issue establishes, as will be shown shortly, a sort of “kin­ ship” between the demand for justice by Memoria Activa and the experi­ ence of human rights organizations founded during the military dictatorship (1976–1983).14 In the same vein, it is possible to consider the capitalization of Justice as an emphatic element pointing in two directions. First, it is explicitly linked to the “discourse of rights” mentioned in the previous paragraph, and it emphasizes the signifier “justice” as the content of the demand. Moreover, the emphasis of this term sets up a line of continuity with the quote from Deuteronomy, “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue,” which is uttered at the start of the public demonstrations opposite the courthouse every week and also closes the edi­ torial.15 This recontextualization of a biblical passage establishes a direct link between the specific reference to the canonical texts of the Jewish tradition and that of this editorial. The following segment introduces Memoria Activa as a “popular move­ ment” akin to those that emerged in the 1970s in the military dictatorship and to those that came after them, with their specific traits. 13

14

15

Raúl Alfonsín was the first democratically elected president after the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. In his electoral campaign he recited the Preamble of the Argentine Con­ stitution as a means of assuring the reestablishment of legal order. In 1976 a military coup overthrew President María Estela Martínez de Perón, initiating a period of state terrorism that carried out a systematic abduction of citizens, for the most part young activists, workers, students, union leaders, and intellectuals. We retain the use of the present tense used in our first version as a conference paper in 2002, when Memoria Activa still met every week. In December 2004 the termination of these public demonstrations was announced.

Reading Memoria Activa’s Discourse



49

ii Memoria Activa was and is one of the most important popular move­ ments that emerged in the years after that stunning example of Mothers and Grandmothers as expressions that became social agents able to sub­ limate violence.16

Memoria Activa’s self-categorization as a “popular movement” shows an inflec­ tion with respect to its definition as a “social movement” in the title of the editorial, to the extent that each refers to a different discursive matrix. The term social movement has some continuity within the discourse that, given the implication of the term Justice, accentuates the demand for (individual) civil rights. Further, the shaping of political discourse using the term popular movement has a semantic load that can be broken down. First, it refers to the social base of the movement’s participants. Thus, popular movement applied to Memoria Activa combines a Jewish affiliation with political participation typi­ cal of the Latin American “popular sectors,” a group not usually associated with the social background of an Argentine Jewish population that generally belongs to the middle and upper classes. Also, unlike the focus on individual rights and its legal framework, popular movement refers to the progressive inclusion of diverse groups in the political arena, in the form of successive mass movements and the consequent extension of social rights. Another relevant issue is expressed with the explicit recognition of a conti­ nuity with human rights movements that emerged as a consequence of state terrorism starting in the mid-1970s. The centrality of Memoria Activa’s protests on the public stage is relativized by the use of the phrase “one of the most important” (our emphasis). Nonetheless, the link with human rights organiza­ tions is enhanced by the presupposition of intelligibility that implies the use of the shorter form “Mothers and Grandmothers” to refer to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.17 The definition of these 16

17

“Memoria Activa fue y es uno de los más importantes movimientos populares que sur­ gieron en los últimos años después de ese maravilloso ejemplo de Madres y Abuelas, como expresiones que lograron convertirse en agentes sociales para sublimar la violencia.” Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Madres de Plaza de Mayo) and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) are two human rights organizations founded in 1977 during the dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The former centered its demands on the search for their children who had been abducted—and disappeared— by the military. The latter, aware that there were young women who were pregnant at the time of their abduction, initiated a search for the babies born in captivity. One of the

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organizations as a “stunning example” implies their recognition as a model on several grounds. First, the work of these organizations is for the most part identified with the “testimonial” record, given their family ties with the victims of state terrorism. Then, there is a relationship in their main form of demonstration: public inter­ vention on a regular basis through ritualized protest actions. A certain analogy is also recognized in the institutional implications of the content of their demands. Similar to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s insistence on “aparición con vida” (that they [their missing children] appear alive) aimed directly at the policy of state terrorism, the updated version of the demand, “juicio y castigo” (trial and punishment, another one of the Mothers’ mottos), which connects Memoria Activa with the Mothers and Grandmothers, points to “impunity” as a constitutive feature of the policies implemented in the 1990s, now by a con­ stitutional government.18 Finally, the identification of these organizations’ ability to “sublimate vio­ lence” basically refers to the opposition, stated in the slogans of all human rights organizations, to any feeling of vengeance. In that sense, one political aspect of Memoria Activa’s discursive production is closely related to the abil­ ity to raise its demands in terms that exceed the criminal nature of the event that generated it.19 The filiation with human rights organizations reaches beyond the thematic analogy to include their strategies of public intervention, as stated in the fol­ lowing paragraph from the editorial:

iii Although certain themes do not make it to the headlines, certain social segments, starting from these movements, demonstrated their effective­ ness in transforming their issues into even more heartwarming news. These new social movements, including Memoria Activa, for their tenacity, perseverance and persistence, play a privileged role in promoting new

18

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main forms of protest of both organizations was the weekly rallying in Plaza de Mayo, across from the Casa de Gobierno, the seat of the Executive Power, a form of demonstra­ tion that gave them international prominence and that continues to this day, although their discourse went through successive changes in response to governmental policy shifts. The demand for “juicio y castigo” (trial and punishment) was, throughout the early years after the return to democracy and in the 1990s after the laws of amnesty, one of the mottos of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Perla Aronson, “La ciudadanía en entredicho. El caso de Memoria Activa,” Producciones en estudios sociales de la Universidad Nacional de Villa María 1 (2000): 73–92.

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fields of awareness and tend to create solidarity, a subject little discussed in an Argentina of indifference.20 The transformation of “certain themes,” these organizations’ agendas, into “news,” that is, public events on the media’s agenda, is, according to Memoria Activa, the result of these movements making those themes noticeable. “Tenacity, perseverance and persistence” make for a “privileged role” of Memoria Activa among these movements that promotes both a renewed social aware­ ness and a sense of “solidarity” within the current national setting (“an Argentina of indifference”). Again, this remark interpellates the dominant neoliberal ide­ ology of the 1990s that by that time—the end of the decade—was already being put into question. The “Argentina of indifference” is the nation turned into an individualistic body where nobody—neither the government nor other social actors—seemed to care for the already apparent consequences of an erosion of rights brought about by the policies applied in those years. One aspect of such efficacy is due to the familiarity with some central fea­ tures of media products, particularly with their heightened level of emotional impact. In this sense, any visibility gained by these movements was related to their ability to exploit the sympathy aroused by their presentation in the media. The next paragraph of the editorial specifically addresses the issue of justice:

iv The absence of justice, or mismanaged or corrupt justice, leaves people with a sense of profound helplessness. That is why the demand for justice became a new national articulator that encompasses different social sectors. It’s like a waterfall, upon successive cascade-like unpunished crimes, trust in justice broken, every crime can spark a popular move­ ment because people assume that once more, institutions are either powerless or accomplices and therefore unable to find answers.21

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“Aunque en la información no aparezcan determinados temas, ciertos segmentos socia­ les, a partir de estos movimientos, evidenciaron su eficacia para transformar estos temas en noticias más conmovedoras aún, que la misma información. Estos nuevos movimien­ tos sociales, entre los que Memoria Activa ocupa un lugar de privilegio, por su tenacidad, su constancia y su persistencia, promovieron nuevos campos de conciencia y tienden a la creación de la solidaridad, un tema muy poco tratado en la Argentina de la indiferencia.” “La ausencia de justicia, o la justicia mal administrada o corrupta, deja a la gente con un sentimiento de desamparo muy profundo. Por eso el reclamo de justicia se constituyó en un nuevo articulador nacional que abarca los distintos sectores sociales. Es como una

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In addition to the explanation that the group itself searches for the relevance it has acquired, this paragraph also adds the revelation of a reflexive mecha­ nism whereby the consequences of collective public actions themselves—by definition not fully controllable and predictable—are incorporated into the set of situations in which the protesting collective is involved. In this sense, Memoria Activa’s interventions typify a number of “demand[s] for justice.” These articulate “different social sectors” given that instances of injustice affect citizen rights, social belonging notwithstanding. This points to the justice sys­ tem’s neglect for the violation of rights systematically bringing together diverse social actors who find in their demands for justice a unifying thread that would be unlikely otherwise. In addition, the demand for justice builds relationships initiated with the acknowledgment of the aforementioned human rights organizations as exem­ plary ancestors, upon establishing the affinity between the various protests that recognize among themselves a common appeal to justice. The metaphor of the waterfall indicates that such recognition arises from the construction of a common antagonism (the “cascade-like unpunished crimes”). The construction of antagonism on the semantic axis of justice and impunity leads to a questioning of the institutional power dynamic, whereby judicial “institutions” are identified, by act or omission, as “powerless or accomplices,” as agents of such impunity. Thus, the radical demand of justice resides in the fact that its achievement is beyond the realm of possibility for the accused gov­ ernmental institutions. The development of the waterfall metaphor allows for the reintroduction of the appeal to the “popular,” as a potential for mobiliza­ tion contained in a protest now characterized as a “new national articulator.” Conclusions Following the analysis made here, it is possible to appreciate Memoria Activa’s attempt at creating a distinctive discourse. The basis of their demand for jus­ tice differs from those of the main Jewish Argentine organizations—amia and daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations)—and, at the same time, establishes a complex balance of affinities, distances, continuities, and specificities with respect to those of other groups of collective protest.22

22

catarata, al sucederse en cascada los delitos impunes, quebrada la confianza en la justicia, todo crimen puede desatar una movilización popular porque la gente presupone que una vez mas, las instituciones serán impotentes o cómplices para encontrar respuestas.” daia is the political representation of the Jewish Argentine community.

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The basis of Memoria Activa’s appeals acquires a para-institutional nature with respect to the Jewish community (regardless of the specific links and the network of relationships of some members of the group).23 As a condition for the possibility of gaining distance from the institutional framework of the Jewish commu­nity, and simultaneously as a way to position itself in relation to “Jewishness,” a discursive link with a Jewish cultural tradition is set. It is precisely this call to a relatively diffuse cultural continuity that allows an opening of the para­meters of belonging that spill over into the institutional frameworks of the ­community. This possibility—the extent to which Memoria Activa can emerge as a constitutive reference of Argentine Jewish identity—remains to be seen.24 Two main discursive matrices of Argentine political history have been noted. This hybridization is the result of an alternative and almost equivalent use of two appeals: one that emphasizes the demand in terms of rights and individual guarantees and another that does so from a place of kinship with “popular” manifestations and their potential for mobilization. One can then hypothesize that the politicization of Memoria Activa’s performances, its political impact, lies in connecting with the most entrenched features of Argentina’s political culture, that is, in the group’s capacity to reference the discursive matrix associ­ ated with the term movement and the national—popular—interpellation. In short, this discursive configuration provides Memoria Activa with a dis­ tinct vantage point. By universalizing the demand in terms of human rights violations—that is, placing it as one of many in which government institu­ tions are involved—it avoids being characterized as a body of “Jewish” protest (though it claims the Jewish specificity of the target of the attack). In this way, it contrasts with other entities of varying degrees of institutionalization (e.g., daia and mjdh—Movimiento Judío por Derechos Humanos, or Jewish Movement for Human Rights) that historically have led protests in the name of the Jewish community.25 Articulating elements of the Judaic cultural tradition in the context of a discourse that both uses and arrogates the idea of universal rights increases the visibility of its “Jewishness.” This peculiarity is typical of the Jewish community in its relationship with the larger society and allows 23

This para-institutional nature does not preclude some members of Memoria Activa from being active members of Jewish community organizations. 24 The question of Memoria Activa’s ultimate impact arose during our initial research over a decade ago. As this chapter goes on to explore, political and social changes in the ensuing years also shifted the parameters of these research questions (see Addendums i and ii). 25 The mjdh was founded during the 1976–1983 dictatorship by Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer and Herman Schiller. It was critical to the way Jewish leadership in general and daia in particular handled the protest of state terrorism, specifically the abduction and “disap­ pearance” of Jews.

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for speculation about the nature of a novel political discourse in Argentina. This discourse neither erases its ethnic or religious distinction nor empha­ sizes it as central to a specific problem but uses it as a means to infuse it with signifying power. Addendum i: June 20, 2002 The events of the last few years in Argentina—the years that follow the 1999 editorial we analyze—have been overwhelming. In order to explain a work that may appear outdated given the enormous political changes that have taken place recently, we should mention the political stances or statements that have attempted to respond to the demands of justice mentioned. For a while, the “waterfall” metaphor quoted earlier characterized effective social protest, demanding justice and revealing a broader picture of human rights violations (including the murder of news photographer José Luis Cabezas and the assas­ sination of the soldier Carrasco).26 As protests for justice that demand account­ ability from the state, these demands have brought strong challenges to security forces. In addition, given the characteristics of the damage that gave rise to the denunciations, the possibility of redress, compensation, or satisfaction of the demands arises, at best, as problematic. In this sense, our first hypothesis, worthy of further research, is that in a context of growing social unrest, voicing a series of claims in demanding jus­ tice enabled the development of new protests and the emergence of new pro­ test groups. Many of these new demands could be expressed in the same terms as those already extant in the public arena. In other words, these demands for justice involve overcoming the mere aggregation of denunciations to enable other emerging protests to become demands for justice as well. In this sense, perhaps the most persistent denunciations of the period, and those endowed with higher political impact, have been the periodic marches by retirees in 26

José Luis Cabezas was a news photographer murdered in the summer of 1997. His murder, in which members of security forces were implicated, stirred a wave of protests led by his fellow workers that involved street demonstrations and caravans that protested the lack of clarification of the case. Soldier Carrasco was a conscript serving the mandatory mili­ tary service in 1994. Shortly after he began serving he disappeared and was formally declared a defector. A few weeks later he was found dead in his military base, and it was proven that he had died due to physical abuses common in the military. The case mobi­ lized public opinion, and mandatory military service was abolished soon after.

Reading Memoria Activa’s Discourse

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front of Congress on Wednesdays.27 Also, the teachers’ White Tent, Carpa blanca docente, without strictly subscribing to the nature of the already men­ tioned demands, has allowed them to combine their sectorial demands with a general defense of social rights (education and pensions), and thus a kind of relationship can be established.28 Therefore, one can conclude that the discursive field of the political opposi­ tion was shaped in accordance with the demands for justice. In terms of politi­ cal momentum, this discursive field found its correlate in the rise of frepaso (Frente País Solidario or Front for a Country in Solidarity) as a political force that denounced the corruption and impunity of the political system as a whole and whose electoral call could be characterized as an “ethical vote.”29 However, once this discursive space was created and once electoral forces were reversed by an electoral coalition of frepaso with the Radical Party (ucr), the response to the demand for justice necessarily implied displacement, redefinition, and even its reduction to the terms of legality. The attempt at responding to the demands that accumulated in the 1990s not only did not live up to the expecta­ tions but could not contain the growing protests linked to the phenomenon of increasing unemployment and the foundation of a movement of the unem­ ployed. The emergence of specific organizations linked to this social category shaped an identity, piqueteros (picketers), based on the specific characteristics of their means of protest (the roadblock). It grew alongside the deterioration of general conditions attached to four years of recession, job insecurity, and a process of economic concentration that turned Argentina into a country of highly regressive income distribution. Under these conditions, the political articulation of the “ethical vote” was confronted with the limitations of a coali­ tion built on the electoral force of media regulations and a traditional political party, the ucr, accustomed to the patronage and negotiation practices it was supposed to end. 27 The marchas de los jubilados (marches of the retirees) were protests started in the early 1990s when retirees began to demonstrate across the street from Congress against the government’s privatization of the pension system and in order to ask for an increase in their stipend. 28 The Carpa Blanca was one of the lengthiest and most visible protests of the 1990s. An enormous white tent was erected across from Congress in 1997 in demand of higher sala­ ries for teachers and a higher education budget. The tent was populated by teachers from all over the country and was regularly visited by passersby, artists, and political and human rights leaders. It steadily evolved to encompass larger socioeconomic and politi­ cal issues and an outstanding protest against neoliberal rule. 29 FREPASO was a political organization that gathered opponents to the government of Carlos Menem, led by Carlos “Chacho” Álvarez.

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Finally, in October 2000, just a year after the inauguration of the new gov­ ernment, the political differences within the governing coalition led to the resignation of the vice president, Carlos “Chacho” Álvarez. Later, when Domingo Cavallo, the finance minister of the previous government responsible for the neoliberal policies that disrupted the social fabric, returned to his posi­ tion, it put an end to this joint political discourse. The “ethical vote” proved to be just as frustrating as the realistic feeling that “being honest is not enough” to redress the consequences of the economic policies of the 1990s. Similarly, the amia’s demands for justice, far from their initial articulatory ability, found themselves decentered among the rise of social conflict. Consequently, the public scene, now dominated by issues of unemployment and poverty rather than by demands for justice, positioned Memoria Activa as merely part of the response to the amia bombing, and in that role, it per­ formed its function of monitoring the evolution of the court case. Eventually, the intimidating assault on the house of the judge hearing the case returned Memoria Activa to a semblance of its past prominence. Nevertheless, with regard to political impact, today Memoria Activa has had residual efficacy. The issues of poverty, unemployment, insecurity, and social exclusion have not been alien to the Jewish community. In fact, they have trended in the oppo­ site direction from the one we proposed previously. If the interventions of Memoria Activa could shape an extracommunal Jewish identity appealing to many, the “new Jewish poverty” placed the community institutions back on center stage.30 Beyond its earlier established functions, it now faces the chal­ lenge of meeting the needs of a sustained and increasingly strong demand for social assistance. These community dynamics represent a rupture in the iden­ tification of Argentine Jews with middle-class sectors. However, this same break reveals a structural continuity between the Jewish population and the general population. This is due to the fact that, subject to the same processes, many Jewish Argentine distinguishing features—identification with certain social strata, an alleged protection from exposure to some risks and social pathologies based on a tight-knit net of mutual aid—became “diluted.” These new conditions are the same for everyone and make everyone the same. These final considerations suggest directions for other aspects of this research. First, we see a need to present a comparative study analyzing the intertextual 30

The “new Jewish poverty” refers to one of the most striking consequences of the eco­ nomic policies of the 1990s and of the ensuing crisis of 2001 for the Jewish community: a significant number of the Jewish population who used to belong to the middle and lowmiddle classes lost their jobs or their small businesses and by all economic indicators fell to poorer strata.

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relationships that can be established between the discourse of Memoria Activa and other discursive productions explicitly placed in the political field. Second, we believe that further analysis should address emerging concerns; for exam­ ple, the study of Jewish Argentine identity shaping should include the institu­ tional aspects of the management of social assistance. Finally, the relationship between the notions of the particular and the uni­ versal, studied from the dynamic formulation of demands, may also lead back to the study of access and allocation of welfare services. Thus, it is possible to suggest a continuity between the study of the discourse of community organi­ zations and research and theoretical reflections associated with ngos and the so-called third sector as promoters of citizenship. Addendum ii: May 29, 2014 Twelve years have passed since we presented our original paper in Brazil. Twelve years such as those traversed by Argentine society are indeed many. The paper was written in the context of a massive economic and political cri­ sis. Read in retrospect, it appears that, in addition to an analysis focused on a 1999 editorial published in the institutional publication Memoria Activa, it is a commentary on the events happening in Argentina. At the time, it sought to identify the historical and political factors that converged in this discursive editorial and the effects it intended to achieve. It focused on the work of Memoria Activa, the association that arose in response to the amia bombing, but also dealt with issues concerning the constitution of Jewish Argentine citi­ zenship. Additionally, it referenced wider social processes in which the mem­ bers of the Argentine Jewish community were immersed, as well as fellow Argentines, at a time of profound sociopolitical reconfigurations. For these reasons, we could not help writing an addendum right before fly­ ing to Rio de Janeiro to present the paper on June 24, 2002. We had to speak about the situation our country was going through at that very moment and reframe Memoria Activa both as part of the public demands of the Argentine Jewish community in 1999 and within the social and political movements that emerged from the 2001 crisis. As if our work was aligning with historical events or, more likely, because at that time decisive events took place regularly, when we returned to Buenos Aires on June 26, 2002, we learned that that very day Dario Santillan and Maximiliano Kosteki—members of the Coordinadora de Trabajadores Deso­ cupados Anibal Verón (Union of Unemployed Workers Anibal Verón)—had been murdered during a protest, marking another episode of bloodshed

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involving security forces. The magnitude of the event, with the consequent public uproar, marked the end of Eduardo Duhalde’s interim government and paved the way for early elections in 2003 in which Néstor Kirchner was elected president. On May 25, 2003, Néstor Kirchner took office and began a series of changes and reviews at various levels, particularly in human rights and memory poli­ cies associated with state terrorism during the 1976–1983 dictatorship, among other relevant issues dismissed in the 1990s. The amia case that saw the emer­ gence of Memoria Activa entered a new phase, which went through various stages in the second decade after the attack. The effects of the changes are still under discussion after the Memorandum of Understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2013 signed by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s govern­ ment caused another disagreement and widened the gap between Memoria Activa and the Jewish community leadership in Argentina. As is clear from the preceding paragraphs, a lot has happened in these years and yet almost nothing concrete leading to clarification of the amia bombing. We have not followed the avenues suggested in our Conclusions for continued research, since our respective studies and initial projects have changed. However, looked at today, the general perspectives outlined in our work remain valid as an overview of much of what happened in Argentina in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Bibliography Aronson, Perla. “La ciudadanía en entredicho. El caso de Memoria Activa.” Producciones en estudios sociales de la Universidad Nacional de Villa María 1 (2000): 73–92. Bajtín, Mijail. Estética de la Creación Verbal. México City: Siglo XXI, 1982. Bauman, Richard. “Performance.” In Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, 41–49. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Memoria Activa, “Memoria Activa: Movimiento Social,” July 13, 1999. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban. “The Natural History of Discourse.” In Natural Histories of Discourse. Edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 1–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

chapter 3

Remembering the amia Bombing: The Mothers of Pasteur Street and Stones of Memory Edna Aizenberg

Remembering the amia

“On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 a.m., a powerful bomb blew up a square block in downtown Buenos Aires. The immediate objective of the explosion was the destruction of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, known as the amia, the building housing most of Argentina’s major Jewish organizations. I say the ‘immediate objective’ because, despite its primary intention to murder Jews and burn Jewish property, the bomb did not discriminate. Jews and nonJews—some eighty of them—were killed that day, and apartment houses, schools, and stores in the area were destroyed. Images of the block on Pasteur Street where the amia stood resembled cities like Sarajevo or Beirut or Kosovo, their guts ripped out by ethnic violence.” I wrote these words some twenty years ago, shortly after the horrible event that changed the face of Argentine Jewry, of Argentina, and of Latin America’s Jewish and pluralistic life. But more than an objective, reasoned analysis of the tragedy (a prelude to 9/11), what I expressed was a cry of hurt at the death of my friend Susy Kreiman, buried under the rubble and the symbol of the unending pain of so many other friends and families of the victims. What I expressed was also a cry of outrage at the destroyed Jewish Argentine heritage—Spanish, Hebrew, and Yiddish books and countless documents and folios—the archival and intellectual legacy of the community. How to replace the mutilated treasures? How to rebuild? The challenge was overwhelming. The essays that follow, “The Mothers of Pasteur Street” and “Stones of Memory,” represent my continuing effort over two decades to assuage the pain and to understand the catastrophe. The first is a tribute to the women who refused to give up and who demanded justice—bringing accountability to those responsible for the bombing. The second is an attempt to rethink Latin America’s memory map and to construct a new map that revises our definitions of memory by including Jewish sites of remembrance. Like my book Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires, both essays combine a depth of emotion with academic study. Feelings cannot be left behind; neither can

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_005

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the scholarly mechanisms that may allow us to comprehend, and perhaps prevent, such catastrophes. I dedicate my writings to the memory of Susy Kreiman and to all those who perished. The Mothers of Pasteur Street: The Struggle for Pluralism in Argentina Argentina takes pride in being the most “European” country in South America.1 According to the official rhetoric, Argentina is a homogeneous country populated by inhabitants of European heritage with hardly any “drops” of indigenous, African, or Jewish blood. The armed forces, major players in Argentine politics, have rarely looked kindly on those they perceive as outside Western, Christian civilization. Custodians of the fatherland’s “fundamental values,” they have defended—by “disappearance” and torture, if necessary—a cluster of Hispano-Catholic ideals ultimately derived from medieval Iberia. Those who are not born with these essential qualities cannot be “true” Argentines, Santiago Kovadloff explains in his powerful essay “Un lugar en el tiempo: Argentina como vivencia de los judios” (A Place in Time: Argentina as a Jewish Experience).2 They remain inevitably condemned to marginalization, to being outsiders to the Argentine experience. The bomb that exploded at the amia seven unresolved years ago is painful testimony to the fact that Argentina, like many other Latin American countries, has yet to cohere into a pluralistic national polity.3 Despite its manias de superioridad, its superior European airs—with Buenos Aires styled the Paris of the South—Argentina is painfully Latin American, still struggling with issues of human rights, diversity, and equality for peoples of varying social, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, of different genders and sexual orientations. The mask of Europeanness Argentina wears not only erases the existence of indigenous and mestizo peoples, sometimes contemptuously called cabecitas negras, little blackheads, but also the presence of such non-European immigrants as Afro Asian Sephardic Jews, and Arabs. For instance, the immediate 1 This article previously appeared in Spanish in Revista Iberoamericana and in English as part of the Introduction to Aizenberg’s Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires. It is reprinted here with permission from the author and from Revista Iberoamericana. For the Spanish, see “Las madres de la calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina,” Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 191 (April–June 2000): 339–345. 2 Santiago Kovadloff, “Un lugar en el tiempo: La Argentina como vivencia de los judíos,” Hispamérica 14, no. 42 (December 1985): 79–89. 3 This essay was written in 2001.

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past president, Carlos Saúl Menem, is the son of Muslim Syrian immigrants who had to convert to Catholicism in order to run for the presidency. The mask of Europeanness further erases the divergences among so-called Europeans; not all descendents of Europeans have similar clout. Most of Argentina’s 200,000 Jews, the largest community in Latin America, come from Yiddish-speaking Eastern European stock, but the names Steimberg or Aizenberg or Gerchunoff do not have the same weight as Rodriguez or Ezcurra or Anchorena, nor do their cultural-linguistic heritages. Argentine Jewish writers, among them Silvia Plager, Manuela Fingueret, Reina Roffé, Alicia Steimberg, Ana María Shua, Ricardo Feierstein, Mario Szichman, and Marcelo Birmajer, caustically take on this linguistic and onomastic bigotry. Here is Steimberg from her award-winning novel Cuando digo Magdalena (When I Say Magdalena): Remember how Borges used to say that he would speak to one grandmother in one way and to another grandmother in another way, and that those two ways of speaking were called Spanish and English? [Borges had an English grandmother.] Well, something similar happened to me, except that in my case one way of speaking was Spanish and the other Yiddish. But since Yiddish sounded harsh and unpleasant to me, I refused to speak it. It was a mysterious language that could reveal to me who I really was. From childhood I was expected to hide, to cover up, who I “really” was and to pretend that I was someone else, who, strangely, I also was.4 Her Magdalena is a marginal being, with a Jewish and womanly identity so questioned that even her name is unstable: “When I say Magdalena,” it is just a provisional name. Feierstein presents his attack in “Aventuras de un apellido.” The protagonist, David Schneiderman, converses with a public employee: “Last name?” “Schneiderman.” “What?” The eternal story (experienced since elementary school). “Schneiderman,” you repeat…. “Don’t get nervous. I will spell it for you.” “It would be better…if you write it yourself. I find it difficult to copy foreign names…” “What is your name, sir?” “Héctor García. Why?” “And your name isn’t ‘foreign’, but ‘Argentine’?” 4 Alicia Steimberg, Cuando digo Magdalena (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992), 60–61.

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“Yes…yes, sir.” “You mean to say, then, that you descend from a tribe of Mataco Indians. Or Tobas. Or of the Quarandí Garcías. Perhaps Calfucurá García, an Araucano chief?…” “No sir, I meant to say that I am ‘Argentine’ because I was born here. In this country.” “I too was born here.”5 That is the way it continues, until the employee barks for the next person in line, and David Schneiderman mutters: “To tell the truth, beyond the verbal pyrotechnics…you are the Jew, the minority, for many, marginal.”6 For one hundred years, since the time Argentina pursued a pro-European immigration policy aimed at populating and modernizing the land, there has been an ongoing battle between those forces who wish to retain the discourse of exclusion and those who wish to embrace a discourse of inclusion that mirrors what the nation really is.7 The events surrounding the amia bombing, especially the subsequent investigation, give a good picture of the struggle. First, who planted the bomb? Apparently, it was international terrorists, under the direction of Iran, with the indispensable local support. But nothing is certain. More than seven years after the explosion, there is “still no justice,” to cite the painful title of a report issued by the American Jewish Committee. Those who destroyed Argentina’s main center of Jewish life have not been found; nor, for that matter, have those who perpetrated the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier. Why? Because, most observers believe, powerful Argentine interests are implicated, police groups with ties to the military, to neo-Nazis, to right-wing activists—in short, to those elements in Argentine society who have always viewed Jews as an alien, diabolical body and who have attacked Jewish institutions and denounced “Jewish” professions such as psychoanalysis. The depth of the animosity flowing from this philosophy was driven home to me personally in a chilling letter I received shortly after my op-ed article on the bombing appeared in the New York Times. It read in part: “Listen to me Jewess: It is an affront to all Spanish peoples, especially to us Argentines, to even remotely imply that there is such a thing as Argentine…Jews…. As a former Argentine army officer I am insulted by your inferences that these creatures 5 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizo: A Novel, trans. Stephen A. Sadow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 121. 6 Ibid., 125. 7 See Santiago Kovadloff, “Un lugar en el tiempo.”

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have done anything positive for Argentina. They are known throughout the world as pariahs and manipulators.” The author of the hate missive was surely among those heartened that soon after the bombing several important sports clubs refused to compete with Jewish clubs; neighbors of Jewish schools and synagogues signed petitions asking them to move out; the suggestion was floated to have all Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires moved to a remote area on the abandoned Buenos Aires docks.8 The fires of discrimination had been fanned, and where one group is singled out, it doesn’t take long for another to follow. After a memorial mass for the victims of the bomb, the cardinal primate of Argentina, responding to a journalist’s question on the matter of rights for various groups under a new Argentine constitution being debated at the time, stated that homosexuals might want their own country on an island, with their own constitution! At about the same time, a government planning committee drawing up a new national curriculum was forced to erase references to sex education and to replace the word gender with sex, since gender was perceived by conservative and church forces to be antimarriage, antifamily, and antisocial.9 On the other hand, soon after the bomb there was a mass march in front of the Argentine Congress of tens of thousands of Argentines of diverse backgrounds and creeds to show solidarity with the victims and to repudiate the violence. There were also many expressions of support from the intellectual community, a community that understands all too well the dangers of murder and destruction as forms of political coercion and cultural censorship. Novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez reminded Argentines on the pages of the daily Página/12 that it was not so long before that Argentines disappeared under a brutal military dictatorship, and death squads roamed Buenos Aires. The current evil, Martínez insisted, cannot be disconnected from the past. Argentines want to forget what happened then, to pardon the perpetrators, and they want to forget what happened now as well through cowardly calls for isolating Jews. How do we move on now from our long history of impunities? We hid the impunities of the past without talking too much about them, as was done with the idiots in the attics, but now all of the ghosts are out, harassing us…. If we had not consented yesterday to impunity, it would perhaps be easier to find the guilty today. One looks for a way out even though he 8 “Los clubes judíos, víctimas del temor desatado por terrorismo,” Página/12, August 16, 1994. 9 Jean Franco, “Defrocking the Vatican: Feminism’s Secular Project,” in Cultures of Politics, Politics of Culture, eds. Sonia E. Álvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, 281 (Boulder, co: Westview, 1998).

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cannot see them. The only thing that remains for us is to not forget, but terribly, the forgetting has begun.10 Abelardo Castillo expresses similar sentiments in his article, “La muerte a la vuelta de la esquina”: Perhaps the reader has noted that I have not said amia nor have I said Jews. Very well, it is deliberate. Because to make this into a new killing of the Jews…is to distance ourselves from the problem and to continue thinking that death, criminal violence, and hate have nothing to do with us. What happened yesterday is an Argentine problem…. I know that its name is genocide and that it happened in our country because it was possible.11 His call was echoed by one of Argentina’s great men of letters, Ernesto Sabato, former president of the National Commission to Investigate the Disappeared, whose final report carried the title “Nunca más” (“Never Again”): “We cannot remain silent in light of what we have heard, read, and registered.”12 Many Argentines have said “never again.” “Today,” writes journalist Sergio Kiernan, “a great number of citizens believe that the attack on the amia is not an exclusively Jewish matter. Its resolution is a priority for the Argentine society in general, a symbol of what besets that country.”13 The most vocal group in the fight to remember and to bring those responsible to justice is Memoria Activa (Active Memory), the significantly named grassroots organization of private citizens, most but not all Jewish, most but not all relatives of the explosion’s victims. Memoria Activa accuses the government of allowing those who know something to be indifferent and remain quiet, of concealing the local connection, and of obstructing the investigation supposedly being carried out. Women are the motor behind Memoria Activa, so much so that they have been called las madres de la calle Pasteur, the mothers of Pasteur Street, in analogy with the legendary Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the disappeared who during the seventies dictatorship weekly circled Buenos Aires’ main square clamoring for information about their children, clamoring for justice.14 Every 10 Tomás Eloy Martínez, “El miedo a las víctimas,” Página/12, August 21, 1994. 11 Abelardo Castillo, “La muerte a la vuelta de la esquina,” Clarín, July 20, 1994. 12 Ibid. 13 Sergio Kiernan, Still No Justice: Four Years After the amia Bombing (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1998). 14 Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994).

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Monday since the bombing, Memoria Activa members and sympathizers gather at Plaza Lavalle, across from the Supreme Court, under a banner of the command from Deuteronomy: “tzedek, tzedek tirdof” (justice, justice you shall pursue). Memoria Activa has garnered considerable media attention and significant moral weight. The list of those who have stood with Memoria Activa on so many Mondays, and who have spoken at the vigils, reads like a who’s who of democratic Argentina. Here is what Laura Bonaparte of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo said on Monday, October 20, 1997: Yesterday was Mother’s Day. And this society is trying to put together the broken body of its mother institution. And we have to do this together. Because what happened, happened in each and every one of our homes. All of us found out that state terrorism is alive and well…the terrorism of the state whose silence makes it an accomplice. The amia didn’t abandon us; it was assassinated. Those responsible for the act and for the silence are right here. The legacy of the crime will be perpetuated until such time as the testimony of truth becomes part of the search for justice.15 The conflict between Memoria Activa, the Jewish establishment, and the Menem government became public at the 1997 ceremony marking the third anniversary of the bombing, when the crowd of thirty thousand gave a rousing ovation to the tough speech delivered by Memoria Activa’s Laura Ginsberg and, in the presence of several government ministers, repeatedly interrupted Ruben Beraja, then president of the daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas), Argentine Jewry’s representative body, before the regime and the press. The daia, which groups most of Argentina’s Jewish organizations, was perceived as too conciliatory toward the official investigation. Ginsberg declared: I accuse the government…of consenting to the impunity, to the indifference of those who know but keep silent, to the insecurity, the impotence, the ineptitude…. I accuse the government…of covering up the local connections that helped kill our relatives. I close my eyes and imagine that it’s twelve midnight on that July 18th. We’re all sleeping and dreaming, our families are intact, and we’re all looking forward to living the next day fully, with the wild madness of being alive, with the daring expectation of being alive, with the tantalizing illusion of being alive. But when I open 15

Memoria Activa, Cuatro años de impunidad (Buenos Aires: La Página, 1998), 58.

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my eyes it’s three years later, and I find myself burning with the wild madness of wanting justice, with the daring expectation of finding justice, with the tantalizing illusion of “never again.”16 The power of the speech was such that it has become a foundational text of post-amia testimonial writing.17 Significantly, it appears as the final selection in an anthology of Jewish Argentinian writers published in 1999 in a collection managed by David Viñas and Gisela Heffes. The first selections, of now-classic names like Alberto Gerchunoff, Enrique Dickman, Samuel Eichelbaum, and Carlos Grünberg are not exempt from the disillusionment and the vicissitudes that the immigrants suffered in the Promised Land, Argentina. However, they still project the optimism of the beginning of the twentieth century, of the possibility of a utopian future. The words of Ginsberg, on the other hand, come from a time when the world sank beneath the rubble. They alternate between two developments: the before and after of an unforgettable day and hour, and they invert “the order of things: the open, sleepless eyes look back and transform yesterday into a distant dream, that of closed eyes, that which was consumed by an irreparable present.”18 In May 1999, barely two months away from the fifth anniversary of the unresolved bombing, a new amia building was inaugurated and built, in the words of many, like a bunker meant to resist any future assaults. The dedication of the gray hulk, made of double-reinforced concrete brimming with the latest hightech security equipment, was hardly a healing occasion. Memoria Activa and other groups of relatives boycotted the event. The explosion at the amia raises serious questions about pluralism in Argentina as it attempts to enter the twenty-first century by overcoming outmoded legacies. Argentine cultural critic Beatríz Sarlo puts it bluntly: “Can we find an idea of nation that doesn’t derive from fundamentalism or dictatorship?”19 Will Argentina be a space of oneness—one religion, one language, one color? Or will it be a kaleidoscopic space of multiplicity, where women no longer need to grieve over their shattered dead?

16 17 18 19

Ibid., 16. Gisela Heffes and David Viñas, eds., Judíos/argentinos/escritores (Buenos Aires: Atril, 1999), 307–318. Ibid., 35. Beatríz Sarlo, “La nación en el fin de siglo”: Instantáneas: medios, ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1996), 109.

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Bibliography Aizenberg, Edna. “Alongside the Dead in Argentina.” New York Times, August 2, 1994. Castillo, Abelardo. “La muerte a la vuelta de la esquina.” Clarín, July 20, 1994. Documento nacional contra la impunidad: Memoria Activa-Testimonios. Buenos Aires: Página/12, 1999. Feierstein, Ricardo. “Aventuras de un apellido.” Noaj 2, no. 2 (1988): 4–6. ———. Mestizo: A Novel. Translated by Stephen A. Sadow. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Franco, Jean. “Defrocking the Vatican: Feminism’s Secular Project.” In Cultures of Politics, Politics of Culture, edited by Sonia E. Álvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, 278–89. Boulder, co: Westview, 1998. Guzmán Bouvard, Marguerite. Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994. Heffes, Gisela, and David Viñas, eds. Judíos/argentinos/escritores. Buenos Aires: Atril, 1999. Kiernan, Sergio. Still No Justice: Four Years After the amia Bombing. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1998. Kovadloff, Santiago. “Un lugar en el tiempo: La Argentina como vivencia de los judíos.” Hispamérica 14, no. 42 (1985): 79–89. ———. Por un futuro imperfecto. Buenos Aires: Botella al Mar, 1987. Martínez, Tomás Eloy. “El miedo a las víctimas.” Página/12, August 21, 1994. Memoria Activa. Cuatro años de impunidad. Buenos Aires: La Página, 1998. Nunca más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1986. Sarlo, Beatríz. “La nación en el fin de siglo”: Instantáneas: medios, ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1996. Steimberg, Alicia. Cuando digo Magdalena. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992. Young, Gerardo. “La amia, 1,772 días después.” Clarín, May 27, 1999.

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Stones of Memory: Buenos Aires and the Monuments to the Victims of the amia 1 From the Heights of Macchu Picchu to the Buenos Aires “Lowlands of Fear” When we think about Latin America’s great stones, in its places of remembrance, what emerge are the telluric constructions of the pre-Columbian America: Peru’s Machu Picchu and Mexico’s Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá.20 “High citadel of terraced stones,” wrote Neruda, “mother of stone, sea spray of the condors…. This was the dwelling, this is the site”: this is the place, a lieu de mémoire of American greatness and misery.21 Thus, the poet interrogates in his verse with barely contained rage: “Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?”22 Latin America’s memory map had shifted very little by the end of the twentieth century. Unlike the memorializing landscapes of Europe, profoundly affected by events so close to us that we have lived them, what is distinctive of Latin America—save the triumphant monuments dedicated to discoverers or eminent figures in important plazas, cathedrals, or churches—is still the preColumbian. In Germany, the Berlin Wall possibly was the greatest, although not intended, monument to World War ii; in Latin America, “the wall” is that of Machu Picchu to which Neruda sings (“The wall, the wall! If upon his sleep / each layer of stone weighed down”)23 or the Teotihuacán pyramid evoked by Octavio Paz (“living ruins in a world of living dead”).24 Pilgrimages to these places of memory, be they merely tourist or more sociocultural or political, reiterate this time-honored itinerary. Who travels to Latin America to look for the man or the woman amid the “stone upon stone” of our days? How does the stone upon stone of our days remember the threadbare at its core, the murdered, the disappeared, those blown to pieces by a bomb? With these reflections, I aspire to make room for a wider map of Latin American memory, a contemporary map. My journey takes me not to the heights but to the bottoms; it takes me to Buenos Aires, whose unostentatious 20

21 22 23 24

This article is translated by Nicole Arocho. It was originally published in Spanish and is reprinted here with the permission of Iberoamericana Editorial Verveurt. The original publication features photos of the various monuments outlined in the article. See “Las piedras de la memoria: Buenos Aires y los monumentos a las víctimas,” Nueva época 1, no. 1 (2001): 121–132. Pablo Neruda, Obras completas, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967), 339. Ibid., 345. Ibid., 346. Octavio Paz, Libertad bajo la palabra. Obra poética (Mexico City: fce, 1968), 211.

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“river of drowsiness and mud,”25 as Borges called it, a river with dangerous “Low Lands of Fear,”26 is possibly the appropriate stage to start drafting this alternative map. What brought me to Buenos Aires is its recent history with its load of broken pieces, the history of the last two or three decades, no more than that, even though its roots stretch out to colonial times, or the preColumbian past. I walk through contemporary Buenos Aires, and its memory landscape reminds me with increasing persistence of the great modern capitals (postmodern? postcolonial?), disfigured by the horrors of the twentieth century and, beyond the horrors, marked by the controversial work of architectural remembrance—commemorative murals, monuments, gardens, and public spaces of reflection. Buenos Aires has always bragged of being the most “European” (nowadays it would be the most “globalized”) of the Latin American metropolises, the “Paris of the South.” In a perverse way, it is: walking amid certain streets of Buenos Aires and its surroundings I think of the streets of Berlin with their multiple commemorative plaques, like the one in the Wittenbergplatz metro station with its simple inscription: “Orte des Schreckens, die wir niemals vergessen dürfen” (places of terror that we shall never forget). I think of the head count at concentration camps or the cemeteries at the beaches of Normandy, which I visited in a day of rain and wind, with their rows and rows of crosses and chilling silence. I think of the Yad Vashem grounds in Jerusalem, with its overwhelming body of avenues lined with trees, commemorative sculptures, plazas, halls, and museums that implacably bear witness to the Holocaust through the multifaceted, continuous, and changing work of architectural memory. Maybe these analogies are surprising, so un-“Latin American.” But in the environment of Argentinian dictatorships of the seventies (the euphemistically named Proceso de Reorganización Nacional or National Reorganization Process); of the disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; of the disastrous Falkland Islands War at the beginning of the eighties; of the destruction of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, followed by the analogous destruction of the headquarters of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina; amia), the most important Jewish community center in Latin America, in the nineties; these analogies do not strike me as unreasonable. The ruins we see today, the walls, the inscriptions, the memorials that remind us of so much terror, are infinitely more directly related to that plaque in Berlin—“places of terror that we shall never forget”— 25 26

Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 81. Vlady Kociancich, Los bajos del temor (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992).

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than to the stones of a remote past. This is also part of Latin America; these also are its places of memory. I insist on this because the topic has been very little studied, or not at all. Until now, stones have not been the privileged place of contemporary memory; writing has exerted in Latin America “the holy service of memory” as Mempo Giardinelli said. “Memory and Literature” is the approximate title of numerous testimonials, poems, novels, essays, and critical works. Indeed, the word and the book are spaces of resistance and remembrance. One of the first memorials to the amia victims was an album made by Argentinian poet Eliahu Toker, intended, in his words, a “sort of monument of paper and ink.”27 Here the Latin American tradition connects to the Hebraic; for the yizkor-bijer, “books of memory” in Yiddish, constitute an essential part of the Jewish memory repertoire after the Holocaust. “For the assassinated without tombs,” writes James Young in his piercing study about Shoah memorials, “without bodies to bury, these commemorative books serve as symbolic headstones.”28 But the physical space of memory has been the subject of little commentary. Malls (“shoppings”) and billboards as components of Buenos Aires’ present urban landscape have received more and better critiques than the monuments to the victims, despite the fact that they are also changing the face of the socalled Paris of the South in a painful and profound manner.29 2 Places of Absence and Presence I want to start my tour through that physical space we talk so little about. This will just be the beginning, the first step toward a more complete study and a map that includes the not-yet-inaugurated Memory Park, along the riverfront of Ciudad Universitaria, which will be a place of remembrance for those who disappeared in the “Proceso,” so that no one forgets that “the tawny river was tinted with the blood of the corpses thrown there from naval airplanes.”30 Likewise the map will include a monument in homage to the fallen in the Falkland Islands, a task that fell upon military hands and is thus made in that style: red granite plaques with names of the deceased forming a semicircle 27 28 29 30

Eliahu Toker, Sus nombres y sus rostros: álbum recordatorio de las víctimas del atentado del 18 de julio de 1994 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá/amia, 1995), vii. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1993), 7. Beatriz Sarlo, Escenas de la vida posmoderna: intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994). Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado, “Documento leído en el acto de la colocación de la piedra fundamental del monumento a las víctimas del terrorismo del estado, 24 de marzo de 1999” (1999), 2.

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around a flagpole with the Argentinian flag, located on the traditional Plaza San Martín, beside the equestrian statue of the “Homeland’s Father,” who died exiled in France. It will also include the Democracy Monument that was just inaugurated by Czech Argentinian kinetic sculptor Gyula Kosice, located in the small square of 9 de Julio Avenue and Marcelo T. de Alvear, at the “peak” of Buenos Aires’ geography. The monument consists of a changing and mobile ensemble of concrete, mirror, and water. The water, in the form of a fountain with three mouths, represents freedom, solidarity, and peace; the mirror, a sphere of polished steel, the (changing?) characteristics (and politics?) of the environment. The only monument in the world dedicated to democracy, as Kosice observes, was conceived after the dictatorship, in a time when Argentina returned to democracy. In a future study I will consider the paradoxical honor that Kosice has bestowed on his adoptive homeland. Here I start by indicating the first point of the forthcoming memory map, a place of absence and presence and a reminder of a catastrophe that shook Argentinian society, the amia bombing. This place is part of a triangle of monuments to tragedy, whose points lie in Pasteur Street, the focus of my analysis; Plaza Lavalle, facing the Palace of Justice; and the Tablada Cemetery. The triangle, which perhaps re-creates the lethal and prescient geographical triangle of Borges’s “Death and the Compass,” points out not only the necessity of remembering but also the different ways of remembering and the heated controversies that memory entails. What do we remember? What do we forget? And how and why? 3 Our House is a Mass Grave On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 in the morning, a powerful car bomb destroyed an entire block in the center of Buenos Aires. The immediate target of the explosive was the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association’s headquarters, but the bomb did not discriminate: eighty-five individuals of all creeds and ethnicities died that day, hundreds were wounded, and little was left of the surrounding apartment buildings, schools, and businesses. The images emanating from Pasteur Street looked like something from Sarajevo, Beirut, or Kosovo, from some city disemboweled by sectarian violence. Six years have passed since that heinous day, but the crime has not yet been solved. Political and ideological interests and a tradition of injustice and impunity have come together to prevent exposing and condemning the national and international culprits.31 31

Edna Aizenberg, “Las madres de la Calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina,” Revista Iberoamericana, 191 (2000): 339–345.

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This lack of resolution feeds a powerful need for remembrance. The murdered of the amia, like those of the Proceso and the Falklands, are never forgotten by their relatives, and thanks to their indefatigable insistence, perhaps neither by a nation not always willing to remember. Yet the fact that, save for some minor actors, the assassins are still unknown and walk among us has motivated a memorial work even more intense, more urgent, more obstinate, more combative. The weight of Argentinian history in the last lustrums, the strong memorial component of Hebraic legacy, and the unresolved pain have converged to produce, what in Argentinian history is a short period of time, a combination of monuments and spaces that try to affix the memory and the wound but also serve as an unequivocal call to action. 4 633 Pasteur The site of tragedy is the first lieu de mémoire, the most complex and controversial. Inaugurated in 1945, amia’s building had been constructed as an affirmation of survival in the new world after the catastrophe in the old. The building itself was a kind of monument, for it contained the institutions and libraries that had once existed in Europe and no longer did. The destruction of this living memorial and symbol of resurrection a year before its fiftieth anniversary, in an era that seemed to finally leave behind the terrible legacy of half a century, was symbolic and largely determined the way in which the memory of this place was configured.32 Shortly after the bombing, the building’s ruins were surrounded by a wooden retaining wall, the sort used on construction—or demolition—sites to protect pedestrians. But this commonplace, banal fence, which barely hid the rubble hanging precariously behind it, turned very quickly into a place I would call sacred. Painted black, with victims’ names and the words “justice and memory” emblazoned across it in white aerosol paint, the humble wall was transformed into the Wall: “Please respect this site,” declared the posters affixed to the upper part, and also “Remember the pain that never ceases.” This wall reminds us of the power that can emanate from the spontaneous monument (a “found” monument), as with the Berlin Wall, which has practically disappeared.33 The physical fragility of the wall, its scarce, if not null, aesthetic value, does not diminish its symbolic, almost religious power. On the 18th of every month a ceremony takes place in front of the wall. There, each holding a sign with the face, name, and age of a loved one, the relatives read a 32 Toker, Sus nombres y sus rostros, viii. 33 Young, The Texture of Memory, vii; Burt Herman, “Berlin Wall Goes Back to the Future,” usa Today, August 14, 2000.

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text, and after a minute of silence they name the victims one by one, lighting a candle and placing a rose in memory of each. In an intensely emotional atmosphere, those days culminate with poetry, denunciation, and prayer readings. The wall and the rubble are like the Wailing Wall left after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, said a young man.34 The placards with the faces, names, and ages of loved ones are linked to another commemorative gesture of the recent Argentinian past: the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo holding photos—in the space par excellence of Argentinian power—during the years of the Proceso so that their missing children and grandchildren wouldn’t be forgotten, so that they would be liberated.35 Indeed, bonds have been forged between the Mothers and groups like Memoria Activa (Active Memory) and Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas (Family and Friends of the Victims). In front of the amia wall the Proceso converses with the Holocaust, the old and sacred Wailing Wall of the Holy City with the most ephemeral of all Argentinian constructions. The complexity and discord of memory in this place surpasses that of the other two places I mentioned, the Plaza Lavalle and the Tablada Cemetery, because, going back to Neruda, “This was the dwelling, this was the site.” The provisional wall, thus, couldn’t contain all the weight of memory, which overflowed into the entire block, now transformed into a commemorative promenade planted with eighty-five trees, each one of them with a plaque recording the name of one of the dead. The planting of the trees has a particular meaning: unlike stone, the tree lives and grows and contains the promise of reparation, of a future. The symbolism of Pasteur Street refers to that of Yad Vashem, whose entrance features a promenade bordered by trees, each one with a commemorative plaque of the name of a righteous individual who saved human lives during the Shoah. However, the overflow of the wall into the street didn’t happen without resistance. When Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas petitioned for, aside from the planting, changing the name of the section of Pasteur Street where the building was destroyed to “amia Martyrs” to reinforce the symbolism, the municipality refused the request, proposing it instead as a subtitle, to diminish the (official) weight of pain and guilt. “We do not want it as a subtitle,” insisted Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, mother of Andrea, who died in the bombing. “Truly, we want to give the victims the place they deserve.”36 34 35 36

amia: July 18 and After, 1999–2000. Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, de: sr Books, 1994). amia: July 18 and After, 1999–2000.

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5 How Can We Give Them the Place They Deserve? The conflicts concerning this crucial enigma emerged not only with the Argentinian state, evasive to mark its own crimes just like other states, but also among those closest to the victims. In May 1999, barely two months before the fifth anniversary of the attack, a new amia building was inaugurated, erected on top of the ashes of the other. Now, there are no wounds, no ruins behind the wall; instead, a gigantic mass of grey concrete, an antiterrorist bunker designed with the most sophisticated security system to prevent another bombing catastrophe. And in the open plaza, between the building and the wall, now stands a monument to the amia bombing victims designed by a colleague and kinetic contemporary of Kosice, French Israeli artist Yaacov Agam. At 9 de Julio Avenue and Marcelo T. de Alvear, a changing and mobile ensemble of concrete, mirror, and water to celebrate democracy; at 633 Pasteur Street a changing and mobile ensemble of columns, colors, and shapes to pay homage and remember those whom democracy could not protect. With the splendid building and brand-new memorial, the mnemonic equilibrium of the street has been profoundly altered, in ways that trouble the relatives. “They are building over the blood of our loved ones,” protested one relative. “There was no need to touch the debris, the new headquarters do not represent a triumph of life,” as government authorities argue.37 For these political forces, the wall, the sacred place, has become a visual hindrance; it must be demolished. But if it is knocked down, it seems unlikely that the Agam monument will be able to carry the commemorative density of 633 Pasteur. Consisting of nine multicultural columns erected over a base, the monument invites the observer to walk between the columns, advancing inside a labyrinth of changing images that progress from the destruction (Column i) to the reconstruction (Column ix). “Many people like it because in this space colors attract and hook you throughout the tour,” Anita Weinstein, a survivor of the bombing attack, told me. “But we feel that this is not what is meant to be there, there’s a lack of emotivity; it doesn’t speak to the heart, it doesn’t include a tribute to the victims.” Agam had suggested a more personalized tribute: besides the columns, eighty-five colorful steps along the building would symbolize each of the dead. That staircase (celestial? biblical?) was eliminated from the plan, due to budgetary constraints, it was said, and a modest glass plaque with engraved names replaced it, a kind of rearranging to the background of what was supposed to belong in the forefront. The monument’s lack of “Argentineness” and “representativeness” was also criticized. “It would’ve been more appropriate to appeal to Argentinian artists with a nationwide call for proposals, in this way affirming 37

Gerardo Young, “La amia, 1772 días después,” Clarín 1, no. 19 (May 1999): 18.

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the awareness that this terrorist attack happened to all of us Argentinians,” Marian Shapiro, whose design was chosen in a contest for the amia memorial in the Tablada Cemetery, told me. The people must represent a tragedy that has befallen the people; a catastrophe that occurred because of mistakes of democracy must be remembered by affirming democracy. This was not the case with the Agam sculpture, conceived from the top, by committees, executives, and ambas­ sadors, without consulting relatives or the community. It’s another example, many suggested, of the way in which, by absolutely undemocratic terms, many relevant decisions were made in the Argentina of the last decades. 6 Neruda over the Fence Recently installed, hardly telluric, pluricultural, painful, and controversial, these new memory stones, nevertheless, insist on their Latin Americanness, on their links with the great sculptors of the continent’s conscience and memory. Thus, Neruda is present on the other side of the wall. The following slightly altered version of his poem “Forever,” from Canto General, appeared, handwritten, affixed beside the victims’ names: Forever Though feet may walk on this site for a thousand years they’ll never expunge the blood of those who fell here. And the hour on which you fell will not expire though thousands of voices may cross this silence. A thousand dark-winged nights will fall without destroying the final days of suffering. A just day conquered in struggle, and you, fallen brothers, in silence, will be with us on that vast day, the final day of our struggle.38 Neruda is present beyond the wall but not with his Heights, because what overwhelms here is not the monumental weight of a past culture but the memorial weight of a recent barbarity. The new memory stones painstakingly place us in the here and now, daring us to reconfigure the mnemonic map of Latin America. 38 Neruda, Obras completas, vol. 1, 505.

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Bibliography Aizenberg, Edna. “Las madres de la Calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina.” Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 191 (April–June 2000): 339–45. amia: 18 de julio y después. cd-rom. Buenos Aires: KehilaNet, 1999–2000. Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado. “Documento leído en el acto de la colocación de la piedra fundamental del monumento a las víctimas del terrorismo del estado, 24 de marzo de 1999.” Giardinelli, Mempo. Santo oficio de la memoria. Buenos Aires: Norma, 1991. Guzmán Bouvard, Marguerite. Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, de: sr Books, 1994. Herman, Burt. “Berlin Wall Goes Back to the Future.” usa Today, August 14, 2000. Kociancich, Vlady. Los bajos del temor. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992. Neruda, Pablo. Obras completas. 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967. Nora, Pierre. Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Paz, Octavio. Libertad bajo la palabra. Obra poética. México City: fce, 1968. Sarlo, Beatriz. Escenas de la vida posmoderna: intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994. Toker, Eliahu. Sus nombres y sus rostros: álbum recordatorio de las víctimas del atentado del 18 de julio de 1994. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá/amia, 1995. Young, Gerardo. “La amia, 1772 días después.” Clarín 1, no. 19 (1999): 18. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1993.

chapter 4

Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado: Monumental Photographs and Spaces of (Impossible) Return Annette H. Levine Unlike private mourning for a loved one or a public ceremony held for victims of a fatal accident, a calculated and premeditated act of terror such as the bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia), forever changes the landscape and the memoryscape of the public sphere.1 The ongoing impunity pertaining to the terrorism unleashed at 633 Pasteur Street in 1994 is akin to a bodiless grave and prevents any closure for those intimately tied to and affected by the tragedy. As Jennifer Schirmer has stated in her work about speech acts and spaces of resistance pertaining to the disappearance of individuals due to authoritarian regimes, “While cemeteries are bounded, ‘timed spaces of grief’, the absence of a body creates painful contradictions: a loss with no end, a bodiless grave, an enclosed space waiting to be filled with a grief that has no closure.”2 The persistence of impunity, as in the case of the amia, results in a manifestation of what I call a boundless space of grief, which is exhibited by the proliferation of protest groups, commemoration ceremonies, the ongoing production of cultural and artistic expressions, the dedication of monuments devoted to memory and justice, and parks allocated throughout Argentina in memory of the victims. While conducting fieldwork in 1998 on the topic of memory and justice in the wake of the 1994 atentado, the car bomb that targeted Argentina’s Jewish community by destroying the amia building, and the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing, I was struck by the assertion of memory and its representation.3 1 This chapter, which represents seventeen years of study and reflection on the amia bombing, would not be possible without the encouragement and support of Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, Dr. Patrick O’Connor, and my esteemed coeditor, Dr. Natasha Zaretsky. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Natasha Zaretsky, Dr. Paul Wilson, Dr. Sue-Je Gage, Sarah RubensteinGillis, LCSW, Robert M. Levine, LCSW and Christopher MacNamara for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this work. 2 Jennifer Schirmer, “The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic within National Security States,” in Remapping Memory, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 198 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 3 Fieldwork conducted from 1997 to 1998 was supported by the Tinker Foundation in pursuit of a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Chicago. The 1999 thesis was titled “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.”

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My search for articulations of the aftermath of the atentado in Buenos Aires brought me to the Macabi and Hebraica Jewish centers; to the La Tablada cemetery; to Ciudad Universitaria, where rubble from the building was dumped; to various Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogues; to the vacant lot where the Israeli Embassy once stood; to the interim home for the Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (yivo), on Ayacucho Street, where books recovered from the bombing were being cleaned and restored; to rehearsals with the Coro Guebirtig; and regularly to Pasteur Street and Plaza Lavalle, which ultimately became spaces of return.4 I became attuned to what Elizabeth Jelin describes as “vehicles of memory,” as I have been particularly interested in the “dynamic link between individual subjectivities, societal or collective belonging, and the embodiment of the past and its meanings in a variety of cultural products.”5 Jelin addresses the struggle to make historical meaning and to voice one’s truth when multiple actors are involved in asserting memory and defining the past. Of the many vehicles of memory I encountered during my fieldwork, I have paid specific attention to what I deem the “spaces of return” that are Plaza Lavalle and Pasteur Street and the active movement devoted to sustaining memory and pursuing justice in the aftermath of the amia bombing spearheaded by Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas (Family and Friends of the Victims) and Memoria Activa (Active Memory). In this chapter I address the tensions surrounding representation, departing from the spaces of return. The claiming of space and voice regarding how to advocate and how to remember is a seemingly complex universal problem in the face of injustice. I trace the bifurcation of protest groups in pursuit of justice post-atentado. And, at twenty years since the atrocity, when the terrain of justice is riddled with impunity, I analyze the use of particular vehicles of memory—photographs of the rubble; of the original amia building; and of Andrea Guterman, who was killed in the bombing—and determine that such remains, which I essentially deem “vestiges of memory,” carry a monumental load when framed within certain artistic and commemorative practices. 4 See Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–265 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). 5 Elizabeth Jelin, “Public Memorialization in Perspective: Truth, Justice and Memory of Past Repression in the Southern Cone of South America,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1, no. 1(2007): 141.

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Spaces of Return

At the time of my fieldwork there were two ongoing public commemoration acts taking place: the weekly gatherings of Memoria Activa every Monday in Plaza Lavalle and the monthly gatherings of Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas every 18th on Pasteur Street at the location of the bombing. Both gatherings, or actos, stated as their primary slogan the importance of memory and justice. Over a period of six to eight months I attended the actos regularly and began interviewing select participants. In the years that followed, I was able to return for periods of several months at a time to attend the annual commemorative events on subsequent July 18ths and would make the effort to also attend the monthly and weekly actos whenever possible. These were spaces of return, each distinct from the other yet essential to the task of seeking justice and practicing public memory work. The physical locations in which both of these actos took place are significant to the character of their rituals. Those who actively participated had developed a binding relationship akin to “place attachment” with the physical location of protest and commemoration.6 The appeal to justice that took place in Plaza Lavalle, facing the Supreme Court House of Argentina, was partially shaped by its physical location. The positioning of Memoria Activa’s gatherings in front of the national symbol of justice obligated the group, devoted to a public articulation of memory, to acknowledge the structure of power and justice while denouncing the presence of injustice. The unrequited search for answers evolved into a persistent living monument that kept the terror in the public eye.7 Over time, as many other scholars also document, Memoria Activa extended its cause to broader issues of injustice prevalent in Argentina. Many relatives of the victims, familiares, however, developed greater attachment to articulating memory at the physical location of the atentado and eventually returned only to Pasteur Street to conduct commemorative actos on the 18th of every month. These actos preserved a testimonial space that focused solely on the victims of the amia bombing. 6 Setha M. Low, “Symbolic Ties that Bind,” in Place Attachment, eds. Setha M. Low and Irwin Altman, 165–185 (New York: Plenum Press, 1992). Low describes this relationship as “place attachment”: “The symbolic relationship formed by people giving culturally shared emotions/affective meaning to a particular space or piece of land that provides the basis for the individual’s and group’s understanding of and relation to the environment.” 7 See Andreas Huyssen, “Resistance to Memory,” in Globalizing Critical Theory, ed. Max Pensky, 165–184 (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

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In an earlier paper, I captured the distinct characteristics of these spaces of return and their divergence while pursuing the same ultimate goal of justice.8 I shared my perspective as witness of an act of quiet resistance by Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas that emphatically marked a rift that had been developing over time. It was as if the slogan “Justicia y Memoria,” which had been prominent at both locations, had become divided. Although both memory and justice are copartners in the appeal for truth, it was as if the perceived lack of deliberate memory-work in Plaza Lavalle had created a fissure that ultimately severed a prior allegiance among Familiares y Amigos and Memoria Activa. In a subtle yet powerful act of resistance, Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas stated their claim to “Memory” and did so in a way that excluded members of Memoria Activa.9 Thus, Familiares y Amigos emphatically articulated that their commitment to a ritual of honoring the individual dead, of appealing to justice specifically in relation to the amia bombing, must take precedence over the more encompassing actos advocating for memory and justice in Plaza Lavalle.

The Visibility of the Dead

Now, at twenty years since the atentado, when formal actos are no longer taking place on a weekly or monthly basis, and when the divisions in pursuit of justice are so great that Memoria Activa does not participate in the central act of commemoration at Pasteur Street on July 18 but has initiated its own at Plaza Lavalle at the same exact time, I look to trace the temporal arc of two decades and find that the spaces of return are rarely visited as in the first decade.10 But when they are, the discourse and the architecture of memory is an insistence on the culture of impunity and the lack of justice pertaining to the amia bombing. The unrequited search for answers has fed the persistence of activism beyond the physical spaces of Plaza Lavalle and Pasteur Street and also the further bifurcation of groups in pursuit of justice.11 8 9

10 11

See Annette Prekker, “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Spaces for Separate Spaces,” Modernity (2000), http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. On Monday, January 18, 1999, when both actos were due to coincide, Familiares y Amigos chose not to wait for members of Memoria Activa to arrive, as they usually would, before conducting the monthly acto. See Natasha Zaretsky’s “Struggles of Coherence” in this volume. “Con cuatro actos, conmemorarán el 20 aniversario del atentado a la amia,” Argentina en noticias, October 7, 2014, http://www.argentina.ar/temas/derechos-humanos/30034-con-cuatroactos-conmemoraran-el-20-aniversario-del-atentado-a-la-amia; “Preparan diversos actos

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Twenty years of activism in the face of ongoing impunity have led to the formation of four primary groups of advocates for justice: Memoria Activa has endured but concluded the weekly rituals after ten consecutive years; Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas has virtually dissolved as one family member, Sergio Burstein, developed political allegiances that other family members did not condone—he is now the head spokesperson for a group referred to as 18 J; an independent group of Familiares, excluding Burstein, continues to actively collaborate; and a group called Agrupación Por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la amia (apemia), Group for the Clarification of the Unpunished Massacre at amia, led by Laura Ginsberg, has conducted independent actos since 2002.12 Political differences between the four groups revealed themselves publicly on the nineteenth anniversary of the amia bombing, when the topic of the accord with Iran was ever present. On July 18, 2013, Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, whose daughter Andrea was killed in the atentado, spoke at the central commemoration ceremony on Pasteur Street on behalf of the independent group of Familiares de las Víctimas. Guterman repudiated the pact with Iran that Chancellor Héctor Timerman and President Cristina Kirchner had supported. The accord effectively gave Iran the responsibility of hosting a truth commission regarding the amia. The speech, written by Guterman and Luis Czyzewski and approved by other family members, emphasized the continued impunity and lack of justice pertaining to the bombing. Guterman made it clear that she and the family members for whom she spoke did not agree with Memoria Activa’s and Burstein’s (18  J) support for the accord with Iran: También recordamos que muchos familiares que en ese momento sostenían que con los asesinos no se negocia y hasta pedían que Argentina rompiera relaciones diplomáticas y comerciales con Irán, porque “LA SANGRE DE NUESTROS MUERTOS NO SE VENDE,” hoy aplauden el Memorándum firmado entre los dos países.13

para el vigésimo aniversario de la amia,” Los Andes, July 13, 2014, http://losandes.com.ar/ article/preparan-diversos-actos-para-el-vigesimo-aniversario-de-la-amia. 12 “Memoria Activa deja la plaza Lavalle,” La Nación, December 28, 2004, http://www.lanacion .com.ar/666682-memoria-activa-deja-la-plaza-lavalle. 13 “amia/Aniversario. Discurso de Sofía Guterman en nombre de los familiares de las víctimas,” Iton Gadol, July 18, 2013, http://www.itongadol.com.ar/noticias/val/72360/amia -aniversario-discurso-de-sofia-guterman-en-nombre-de-los-familiares-de-las-victimas .html.

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Let’s also remember that many family members who then alleged that one shouldn’t negotiate with assassins and even asked Argentina to sever diplomatic and commercial ties with Iran, because “THE BLOOD OF OUR DEAD IS NOT FOR SALE,” today applaud the Memorandum signed by both countries. Meanwhile, Memoria Activa and 18 J postulated that all possible steps toward justice and truth are worthwhile and echoed the words of President Cristina Kirchner that portrayed the memorandum as the only way to break the deadlock: Creo que hemos dado un paso muy importante en destrabar una causa que estaba absolutamente inmovilizada, sin posibilidad alguna de poder interrogar a quienes la Justicia argentina ha inculpado, ha incriminado como presuntos participantes del atentado contra la amia.14 I believe we have taken a very important step in unlocking a case that was completely frozen, without any possibility of interrogating those who the Argentine Justice system has accused and incriminated as suspects in the amia bombing. Familiares and apemia have insisted that such an accord permits Iran to further protect the guilty and permits Argentina to wash its hands of the case: Lo único que el Gobierno quiere es sancionar lo antes posible esta ley, que significa un punto final para el tema de la amia. Esto significa que el Gobierno termina definitivamente con un tema que no sabe cómo sacárselo de encima.15 All the Government wants is to authorize this law as soon as possible, which means a full stop for the amia issue. This means the Government is absolutely finished with an issue that it doesn’t know how to get rid of. Guterman’s speech was deemed highly political. However, Guterman was sure to remind the public of the individual victims, and she personalized them for the audience by sharing their names and some of their hopes and dreams never to be realized: 14 15

“Mensaje de Cristina Fernández sobre el memorandum entre Argentina y Iran,” Red Voltaire, February 8, 2013, http://www.voltairenet.org/article179605.html. “Las grietas entre los familiares quedaron al descubierto,” La Nación, July, 19, 2013, http:// www.lanacion.com.ar.

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Hoy vuelven a aparecer en nuestra memoria los sueños de Paola, de ser abogada y de tener dos hijos a los que ya les había dado nombre. Los de Yanina, de ser mejor abogada que su papá, los de Andrea, de educar a sus alumnos en los valores éticos y humanos que transmiten los maestros, los de Naum, de ser cada día mejor padre y esposo y todos los demás sueños que no pudieron concretarse.16 Today our memory is revisited by Paola’s dream to be a lawyer and to have two children whose names she had already chosen; by Yanina’s dreams to be a better lawyer than her father; by Andrea’s dreams to educate her students with the ethical and human values that teachers instill; by Naum’s dream to be an ever better father and husband; and by all the other dreams that couldn’t come to fruition. After emphasizing that the nineteen years of impunity marked the loss of two basic human rights for all Argentines, the right to truth and the right to justice, she then distinguished the experience for those most intimately impacted by the amia bombing: “Diecinueve años que nos valemos de la Memoria como una forma de Justicia. Pero la Memoria es como el vidrio. Los muertos siguen siendo visibles, cercanos, pero ya no hay posibilidad de contacto.” (Nineteen years that we uphold Memory as a form of Justice. But Memory is like glass. The dead are still visible, nearby, yet there is no longer possibility of contact.) The visibility of the dead is unique for those most personally engaged with loss tied to the amia bombing. Guterman reminded the audience that justice has not been served, even at nineteen years since the bombing, and that the injustice is most felt by those who experienced the tragic loss of loved ones: “INJUSTICIA es una falta de acción y es una palabra. Ochenta y cinco muertos están más allá del poder de las palabras. La injusticia nos cachetea directamente a los vivos.” (Injustice is a lack of action and it’s a word. Eighty-five dead are beyond the power of words. The injustice deals direct blows to the living.) Closing her speech with an emphasis on the word injustice and emphatically stating that it is a word, “es una palabra,” was a significant act of enunciation recalling the years of insistence on the word justice (justicia). Years of struggle and hope that justice be served have been trumped by the ongoing impunity. Injusticia is the only word in response to the act of the nation, Argentina, pursuing a formal pact with Iran. 16 “amia/Aniversario. Discurso de Sofía Guterman en nombre de los familiares de las víctimas,” Iton Gadol, July 18, 2013, http://www.itongadol.com.ar/noticias/val/72360/amia -aniversario-discurso-de-sofia-guterman-en-nombre-de-los-familiares-de-las-victimas .html.

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The speech by Familiares, delivered by Guterman, was political and personal. The act of recalling the individual identities of the dead was a reminder of the lives that were lost, the families forever mutilated by the amia bombing, the unique experience of loss for those continually haunted by the absence of loved ones, for whom the dead are still visible. Honoring individual memory illuminates the importance and weight of continuing to give testimony, continuing to speak of the individual lives truncated, and continuing to archive the vestiges of memory so that the human cost of the atrocity not be forgotten. There lies a certain power, a certain monumental power, in the vestiges of memory, in that which remains, that which by its mere existence affirms an otherwise unpleasant truth barely able to resist the weight of oblivion. In his essay dealing with the complex issues of the art and architecture of traumatic memory, Julian Bonder describes monumentality as “the quality that some places or objects have to make us recall, evoke, think, and perceive something beyond themselves.”17 But the essence of their monumentality does not reside solely in the material existence of these places or objects and the archiving of these remains. Rather, the means by which they are rendered visible, by which they are exposed, by which they are experienced, is a complex matter that can both elevate or depreciate their monumental quality. Bonder states: Our work often lies in unveiling—uncovering as well as anchoring— histories and memories. It is in the face of catastrophes, historic traumas, and human injustices that the architect’s and the artist’s roles become increasingly complex, problematic, and necessary…. Neither art nor architecture can compensate for public trauma or mass murder. What artistic and architectural practices can do is establish a dialogical relation with those events and help frame the process toward understanding.18 The complex task of unveiling and anchoring photographs in the aftermath of the amia bombing is exhibited by images of the victims, those who were killed and the building that was destroyed.

Vestiges of Memory: The Monumentality of Photographs

Photographs: of a baby, a child, a daughter, a family. Photographs purposefully mutilated to reflect a mutilated family. In La gran mentira (The Great Lie, 1999), 17 18

Julian Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21, no. 1 (2009): 64. Ibid., 65.

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published in time for the fifth anniversary of the amia bombing, Guterman denounces the fabrication of lies that have prevented justice from being served in Argentina. Interspersed throughout the vignettes, or denunciations, she carefully places photos of Andrea (see Figures 4.1–4.4). While the photos do not play a primary role in Guterman’s narrative, their presence performs a provocative act of denunciation: they represent the fragmentation and mutilation of the body as a result of the bombing. The desecration of the photos ensures that this work be read as a recognition of the injustice perpetuated, of the continued reign of impunity that has forever fractured any potential restoration or reconciliation. Andrea is disfigured in various ways and she is entirely cut out of Figure 4.4. This act of Andrea “disappearing” is especially significant in Argentina, where women, particularly the Madres y Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, have long exhibited photos and silhouettes of the missing to emphasize the absent bodies of disappeared loved ones. Guterman’s use of irony in the captions beneath each altered photo charges them with their belated meaning. Rather than reprinting a photo of a whole Andrea in a book recounting her life and premature tragic death, Guterman tears the photos, dismembering, disfiguring, and even erasing—“disappearing”—Andrea in order to faithfully represent the vicious consequences of the amia bombing. These photos of Andrea now mark her death, her “having [once] been there” before the camera, before the eyes of her mother, before her family and friends, before the reader who at once becomes spectator and witness. Marianne Hirsch speaks to the significance of photos and their phantasmagoric impact: It is precisely the indexical nature of the photo, its status as relic, or trace, or fetish—its “direct” connection with the material presence of the photographed person—that at once intensifies its status as harbinger of death and, at the same time and concomitantly, its capacity to signify life.19 Now these photos of Andrea are markers of her absence and a harbinger of death and catastrophe. The act of marring them denies their capacity to signify life. Perhaps Guterman cannot establish a dialogue with Andrea’s photos, as she had done with Andrea’s drawings in En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir (The Joy of Living Is Reborn Every Spring, 1998) because of the direct connection between the photo and the material presence of the photographed person, of Andrea. These photos in La gran mentira have a more “direct” connection with Andrea’s ­current material presence, her now permanent absence, than do her drawings. 19

Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20.

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Figure 4.1  Andrea, a los tres meses, mirando con asombro un mundo supuestamente perfecto. (Andrea, at three months, looking in awe at a supposedly perfect world.) (11)

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Figure 4.2  Andrea, a los cinco años, sonriendo a un futuro promisorio. (Andrea, at five years, smiling at a promising future.) (23)

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Figure 4.3  Andrea, a los siete años, adquiriendo conocimientos para su futuro. (Andrea, at seven years, acquiring knowledge for her future.) (41) .

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Figure 4.4  Andrea, a los ocho años, cuando aún éramos una familia (Andrea, at eight years, when we were still a family.) (51)

This connection with the photographed person is now the direct connection with the dead person. Therefore, placing the photos as whole, unified portraits would only be the fabrication of yet another lie. Having deliberately desecrated the image of her daughter, Guterman transmits her unbounded grief in such a way that the visual impact unsettles the reader/spectator who becomes a ­witness of Guterman’s loss and a witness of the amia tragedy.

Stones of Justice

Guterman’s use of family photos predating Andrea’s death recalls the photography of Gustavo Germano20 and Marcelo Brodsky.21 Both photographers, 20 21

See http://www.gustavogermano.com/gallery/ausencias. Marcelo Brodsky, Buena memoria: Un ensayo fotográfico (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 1997).

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whose brothers and friends disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship, have become known for their work related to “memory art” as defined by Andreas Huyssen in his essay “The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky.” Huyssen considers this work a type of performance art identifiable by its content, artistic practice, location, and audience: It is a kind of mnemonic public art that is not centered on spatial configuration alone, but that powerfully inscribes a dimension of localizable, even corporeal memory into the work. It is an artistic practice that crosses the boundaries between installation, photography, monument and memorial. Its place can be both in the museum or the gallery and in public space. Its addressee is the individual beholder, but he or she is addressed both as individual and as a member of the nation or the community facing the task of commemoration.22 Brodsky articulates his desired objectives and the intentionality of his photographic interventions. He seeks to make a connection with the onlooker, one that may have a profound impact beyond the transmission of information. In an interview for Fórum Latino-Americano de Fotografía de Sao Paulo (The Latin American Forum of Sao Paulo), Brodsky speaks about the narrative work he achieves through his photographic essays: El trabajo narrativo, la transmisión de la experiencia vivida a las nuevas generaciones, la comunicación de una vivencia marcada por la violencia del estado, que es colectiva, de una generación, no individual, es una tarea que requiere de muchos elementos distintos para poder transmitir emocionalmente la esencia de lo vivido. No basta con contar lo que pasó. Es necesario conectar emocionalmente con el que mira, para que su comprensión sea profunda, no superficial, para que se produzca un aprendizaje, no un mero pase de información. Esa experiencia es la que procuro producir con mi obra fotográfica.23 The narrative work, the transmission of the lived experience to new generations, the communication of a life marked by state violence, that is collective, of a generation, not individual, is a task that requires many distinct elements in order to emotionally transmit the essence of the 22 23

Andreas Huyssen, “The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky,” in Brodsky, Nexo: Un Ensayo Fotográfico, 9 (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2001). Manu Melo Franco, “Marcelo Brodsky,” Fórum Latino-Americano de Fotografía de Sao Paulo, August 30, 2010, http://www.forumfoto.org.br/marcelo-brodsky-2.

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experience. Telling what happened is not enough. It’s necessary to emotionally connect with the viewer, so that their understanding is profound, not superficial, so that learning takes place, not merely passing on information. That experience is what I aspire to produce with my photographic work. When it was determined that an official site would be designated as a parque de la memoria (memory park) in Buenos Aires, Brodsky’s work situated him as an integral member of the Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas de Terrorismo de Estado (The Commission for Monuments to the Victims of State Terrorism). While canvassing the location in Ciudad Universitaria, Brodsky discovered the rubble from the amia bombing, which he decided to photograph: Desde hacía meses, yo había estado fotografiando los escombros que había en ese terreno, donde habían sido arrojados los restos de la amia, porque sabía que esos restos desaparecerían con las obras del Parque de la Memoria y me interesaba preservarlos del olvido.24 For months I had been photographing the rubble found on that land, where the remains of the amia were dumped, because I knew that those remains would disappear with the construction of the Memory Park and I wanted to preserve them from oblivion. He came upon the remains of the marble façade of the amia building while surveying the land with artist William Tucker, whose work had been commissioned for the park. This finding inspired a photo essay that has found its way to various public installations and has been published as “Restos/Remains” in his collection Nexo. In 2003, while in Buenos Aires for the ninth anniversary of the amia bombing, I came upon Brodsky’s installation, “Piedras por la justicia” (Stones for Justice), in Plaza Bernardo Houssay, outside of Hospital de Clínicas, just blocks away from Pasteur Street. The installation, which includes photos that are a part of his photographic essay “Restos/Remains,” displays the recovered pieces of the amia façade and photos of other findings among the rubble, notably the fragment that Brodsky initially believed to be part of a Star of David but was actually a fragment of the letter A in amia (see Figure 4.5).25

24 25

Huyssen, “The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky,” 88. Photos of the installation taken by the author in 2003 are included here with permission from Marcelo Brodsky.

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Figure 4.5 “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 PHOTO BY AUTHOR

Brodsky displays the remains he collected in a way that portrays the traumatic event within a framework of understanding. He includes a photo of the original amia façade, intact, and circles the piece of the original façade that was found abandoned among the rubble at Parque de la Memoria (see Figure 4.6). In a manner reminiscent of his work with the class photo in Buena memoria, Brodsky writes directly on the photo, in red lettering, “Este trozo de la fachada de la amia lo encontré tirado junto al Río de la Plata en el lugar en el que fueron arrojados los restos de la explosión, el mismo en el que se está construyendo el Parque de la Memoria.” (“I found this piece of the amia façade thrown away along the Río de la Plata in the place where the rubble from the explosion was dumped, the same place where the Memory Park is being built.”) Thus, when one looks at the photo of the amia façade in Brodsky’s installation, accompanied by the actual remains of the façade, the onlooker is informed, upon first glance at the photo, that the façade is no longer. Brodsky’s intervention with an authentic photo of the amia pre-atentado is a form he used in Buena memoria, where he renders an old class photo as a historical artifact forever marked by the Argentine dictatorship. His interventions instill these archival photographs, the class photo and the photo of the original amia building, with the quality of monumentality described by Bonder. Bonder’s claim resonates as we consider Brodsky’s aforementioned interview: he purposefully aims to

Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado

Figure 4.6  “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003

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Figure 4.7  “Piedras por la Justicia” [Stones for Justice], Intervención Urbana de Marcelo Brodsky (Marcelo Brodsky’s Urban Intervention), Buenos Aires, 2003 PHOTO BY AUTHOR

engender understanding and a process of learning that goes beyond the mere transmission of information. The installation was intentionally placed in Plaza Houssay, in the heart of the university district of Buenos Aires, because the bodies of the injured and the victims of the atentado passed through it on their way to the university hospital.26 Brodsky sought to recognize the important role played by Hospital de Clínicas by connecting the remains of the destroyed amia façade to the upper façade of the hospital building with a red nautical line, effectively mooring the installation, the remains, to the hospital (see Figure 4.7). The remains and the cord were illuminated by night. Through his numerous interventions and intentionality, Brodsky’s installation bore testimony to the 26

In the catalog for the installation “Piedras por la justicia,” July 15–28, 2003, Brodsky writes, “Instalamos las piedras en Plaza Houssay, en el corazón de la zona universitaria porteña, por donde transitaron los heridos y víctimas del atentado para ser atendidos en el Hospital universitario, que ofreció solidariamente su equipo y sus recursos para socorrer a los afectados.” (We exhibited the rocks in Plaza Houssay, in the heart of the Buenos Aires university district, which had been traversed by the wounded and the victims of the bombing on their way to the university hospital that offered its team and its resources in solidarity to rescue those affected.).

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atentado and to the recovering of remains that contribute to the archive of history.

Impossible Return

“Stones for Justice” took on renewed significance for me the following year, when I attended the events in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the amia bombing. I made sure to arrive at Pasteur Street early on the morning of the 18th so that I could collect my thoughts and reflect before the acto began. When I arrived, I was caught off-guard. The visual landscape of Pasteur was significantly altered. The façade of the old amia building, intact, stood over me. It was not my imagination. A life-size rendition of the old building was mounted at the entrance to the new amia building (see Figures 4.8 and 4.9).27 The physical simulacrum of the building was harrowing, beckoning the onlooker, beckoning me, to a space of impossible entry, or of impossible return. Alongside the re-creation of the old building façade, accompanying the list of names of all who were killed, was printed “Vivirán mientras los recordamos.” (They will live on as long as we remember them.) The bottom read, “Los edificios se pueden destruir. La dignidad y la memoria de las 85 victimas NO. Seguimos reclamando justicia con el dolor del primer día.” (Buildings may be destroyed, but dignity and the memory of the 85 victims may NOT. We continue to seek justice with the pain of the first day.) However, when I stood there on the tenth anniversary in 2004, this statement did not reassure me. I felt an unsettling sense of betrayal. They will live on? Is memory enough? I could not maintain my gaze on the façade—the stark contrast of the old building façade with the new construction looming behind it, the list of names with no descendants to stand behind them—finding myself repelled by it. Though I wanted to photograph it, I could not capture the entire banner if I faced it head-on. And capturing solely the building’s face would be simply too phantasmagoric. I wondered what the response was from those who were intimately tied to the tragedy of the bombing. In an interview with Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman in response to the façade, she stated: Los familiares que fuimos al acto y lo vimos sentimos una opresión en el pecho. Parecía que habíamos retrocedido diez años. Fue un golpe ver esta escena y estar durante todo el acto ante algo que parecía hablarnos. Imaginé dónde hubiera estado Andrea y cómo eran cada uno de los pisos. A veces, provocar a la Memoria resulta más negativo que positivo. 27

Photos taken by the author on July 18, 2004.

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Figure 4.8 amia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. New AMIA building visible in background. PHOTO BY AUTHOR

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Figure 4.9  a mia bombing tenth anniversary commemorative banner at Pasteur St. Close-up. PHOTO BY AUTHOR

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The family members who were at the event and saw it felt a tightness in our chests. It was as if we had gone back in time. That scene and standing before something that seemed to be speaking to us throughout the whole ceremony was a shock. I envisioned where Andrea had been and what every floor was like. Sometimes, provoking Memory can be more negative than positive. I contemplate her reaction. What is it about this photographic intervention that places it in stark contrast with that of Brodsky’s? Why is it more negative than positive? Why does it lack monumentality? Why does it resist Huyssen’s definition of memory art? Does it not cross the boundary between photograph and memorial? Does it not address the viewer as individual and also as member of a larger body, nation, or community, facing the task of commemoration? I find myself pondering the text on the banner: “Buildings may be destroyed.” Was this somehow an institutional justification for the reconstruction of the amia building in the very same location?28 If buildings are disposable and replaceable, why bring back the physical presence of the original building for this event? Can the dead of the amia bombing indeed live on as long as we remember them? How is this accomplished? Why is this photographic intervention repellant while Brodsky’s is not? The unsettling effect of the banner with the original amia façade at the tenth anniversary event and its didactic message shed light on the complexities of figural and abstract representation and the importance of the paratextual elements associated with the banner. I am left troubled by the projection of wholeness over fractured bodies and remains. Whereas Brodsky’s “Stones for Justice” and Guterman’s The Great Lie display an interstice, an authentic representation of visual rupture, the torn photos and the broken façade, and invite the viewer and reader to a dialogical space of contemplation and understanding, the banner, due to its image, size, timing, and placement, thrust itself on the public in a way that re-created the traumatic event for mourners and ultimately had a silencing effect. In Colson’s “Photography as Extension of the Ego,” he explains: “Photography bears a close relation to the process of change and mourning. It allows a partial identification with the lost person through a reinvestment of the fantasies and affects associated with the visual image.”29 28

29

This was very controversial. Whereas the space once occupied by the Israeli Embassy has been preserved as a memorial space, it was determined that the amia would be rebuilt in the exact same location of the bombing. For critique on the monuments to the victims at Pasteur Street, see Aizenberg, “Stones of Memory,” in this volume. Donald B. Colson, “Photography as Extension of the Ego,” The International Review of Psycho-analysis 6 (1979): 281.

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This idea of allowing for a “reinvestment of the fantasies” is precisely what makes so unsettling the casting of a “whole” amia, what makes Brodsky’s and Germano’s photographic interventions so effective, and what makes admissible a mother’s deliberate act of dismembering and cutting her daughter from her photos. Those intimately tied to the trauma may no longer reinvest fantasies—there is no closure as their grief is boundless. I venture to argue that the exemplification of vulnerability and destruction, evident in Guterman’s and Brodsky’s work, is symbolic of the fault line posited by Homi Bhabha, where “identities are performed and contested,” where a “terrain for elaborating strategies of self-hood” is cultivated and the addressee/viewer/spectator/reader/ witness may engage intimately with the material in developing his or her own understanding.30 The life-size tenth-anniversary rendering of the former structure, erected at the very epicenter of the bombing, however, does not benefit from such effective interventions. The amia building’s simulacrum lacks a point of entry and an appropriate anchor to establish a dialogical relationship. The creation of a monument out of the photograph ultimately stripped it of its monumentality only to recall an impossible return. Bibliography Aizenberg, Edna. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and ArgentineJewish Writing. Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002. ——. “Las Madres de la Calle Pasteur: La lucha por el pluralism en Argentina.” Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 191 (April–June 2000): 339–345. ——. “Las piedras de la memoria: Buenos Aires y los monumentos a las víctimas.” Iberoamericana 1, no. 1 (2001): 121–132. apemia. “Documento presentado en el Acto de apemia el 18 de julio de 2013 en el hotel bauen.” http://apemia.blogspot.com/2013_07_18_archive.html#6615926709818229576. Argentina en noticias, “Con cuatro actos, conmemorarán el 20 aniversario del atentado a la amia,” October 7, 2014, http://www.argentina.ar/temas/derechos-humanos/ 30034-con-cuatro-actos-conmemoraran-el-20-aniversario-del-atentado-a-la-amia. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bonder, Julian. “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials.” Places 21, no. 1 (2009): 62–69. Brison, Susan J. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2002. Brodsky, Marcelo. Buena memoria: Un ensayo fotográfico. Buenos Aires: La Marca, 1997. 30

See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

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——. Nexo: Un ensayo fotográfico. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2001. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ——. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Colson, Donald B. “Photography as Extension of the Ego.” The International Review of Psycho-analysis 6 (1979): 273–82. Franco, Jean. Cruel Modernity. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013. Franco, Manu Melo. “Marcelo Brodsky.” Fórum Latino-Americano de Fotografía de Sao Paulo, August 30, 2010, http://www.forumfoto.org.br/marcelo-brodsky-2. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky. Del corazón al cielo. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1997. ——. En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1998. ——. La gran mentira. Buenos Aires: La luz, 1999. ——. Más allá de la bomba. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1996. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997. ——. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photography and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37. Huyssen, Andreas. “El arte mnemónico de Marcelo Brodsky/The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky.” In Brodsky, Nexo, 7–11. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2001. ——. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Resistance to Memory. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2003. ——. “Resistance to Memory: The Uses and Abuses of Public Forgetting.” In Globalizing Critical Theory, edited by Max Pensky, 165–86. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Jelin, Elizabeth. “Public Memorialization in Perspective: Truth, Justice and Memory of Past Repression in the Southern Cone of South America.” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1 (2007): 138–56. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1998. ——. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–73. New York: Routledge, 1992. Nación, La. “Las grietas entre los familiares quedaron al descubierto,” July 19, 2013, http://www.lanacion.com.ar.

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——. “Memoria Activa deja la plaza Lavalle,” December 28, 2004, http://www.lanacion .com.ar/666682-memoria-activa-deja-la-plaza-lavalle. Andes, Los. “Preparan diversos actos para el vigésimo aniversario de la amia,” July 13, 2014,http://losandes.com.ar/article/preparan-diversos-actos-para-el-vigesimoaniversario-de-la-amia. Low, Setha M. “Symbolic Ties that Bind.” In Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, 165–85. New York: Plenum Press, 1992. Prekker, Annette. See Levine, Annette. “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.” Modernity (2000). http://www.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. Red Voltaire, “Mensaje de Cristina Fernández sobre el memorandum entre Argentina y Iran,” February 8, 2013, http://www.voltairenet.org/article179605.html. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schirmer, Jennifer. “The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic within National Security States: The Plaza de Mayo Madres and the Greenham Common Women.” In Remapping Memory: The Politics of Time Space, edited by Jonathan Boyarin, 185– 220. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Holtzbrinck, 1977. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in Buenos Aires.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–65. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

chapter 5

Blows to the Heart: Reflections on the Literature of the amia Stephen A. Sadow The deadly bombing of the amia on July 18, 1994, provoked a swell of protest literature from Jewish writers all over Argentina that lasted for many years. These writings go far beyond “art for art’s sake” and entail a sense of moral outrage and political intent. I focus on three aspects of the force of literature as it relates to the amia. I explore the amia as a place where literature was highly valued, the swift and fierce reply of Argentina’s Jewish poets and novelists to the destruction of the amia building, and my own testimony about how the bombing affected me both personally and as a student of literature. The amia as a Literary Place For me, the original amia building and its replacement were and are primarily a literary place.1 It stood on the site of the Ombú Yiddish Theater where King Lear had been a favorite and to which New York megastars Maurice and Stella Adler came to act in Yiddish theater classics, with an Argentine cast. The Marc Turkow library held books in Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, and English. In 1987, Ricardo Feierstein became the founder and director of Editorial Milá, the amia’s publishing arm. Editorial Milá produced hundreds of titles for the community: Holocaust memoirs, short-story collections, novels, community documents, the works of great Jewish literature translated into Spanish, and huge anthologies of Argentine Jewish writings. For many years, Editorial Milá dominated Jewish publishing in Latin America; its books were purchased in many 1 For Argentine Jews, since the arrival of the first immigrants in 1888, literature has served a crucial role in helping them understand the complex realities of life in the countries in which they live, helping them forge a new identity, and warning them of real or potential danger. In Yiddish and Ladino and then in Spanish, narrators and poets have, sometimes bitingly, sometimes humorously, explored Jewish life in Argentina. Among the most influential writers are Mordejai Alperson, Alberto Gerchunoff, César Tiempo, Ricardo Feierstein, Silvia Plager, Ana María Shua, Alicia Steimberg, David Viñas, and Marcelo Birmajer. Most Argentine Jewish households have a collection of books written by Jewish authors.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_007

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Latin American countries and can be found in libraries in the United States and Israel. The amia building was familiar to most Argentine Jews. Beyond its social service functions, it was a center of Jewish culture, housing an active theater, which played host to musical and artistic events, and also held the archives of the community.2 The amia’s Department of Culture became my center of operations. I remember clearly the black marble façade. I would go into the building that was open to everyone, without as much as a security guard. I noted that people regularly entered the amia to seek assistance from the job placement and pension offices and to use the library. From then to the present, I have made yearly visits to the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. I became an observer and participant in the cultural life of that community. For years, every time I entered Ricardo’s office, he was busy editing that year’s list of publications.3 Moshé Korin, the director of the Department of Culture and an expert on Yiddish literature, and I often discussed the latest in Argentine Jewish poetry and prose. Over time, I came to know dozens of Jewish writers and artists. To a large extent, Jewish cultural production up until the bombing of the amia building, subsequently known as the atentado, was characterized by guarded optimism. In Ricardo Feierstein’s complex novel Mestizo, published in 1994 by the prestigious Editorial Planeta, the protagonist David Schneiderman is finally able to identify himself simultaneously as a Jew and an Argentine.4 The same year witnessed the publication of Ana María Shua’s short novel El libro de los recuerdos (The Book of Memories), which tenderly presents the travails and foibles of the Remitka family made up of Jewish immigrants and firstgeneration Argentines. Under the editorship of Feierstein and Perla Sneh, the amia itself was about to publish El libro del centenario (The Centennial Book), a celebratory history of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. This mood changed abruptly on July 18, 1994. Edna Aizenberg observes: The terrorist attack left a gaping hole in the Argentine imagination. Alongside the dead and broken bodies buried in the rubble were 2 This essay deals with the literary response to the amia bombing. For an excellent discussion of the politics of the attack, see Beatriz Gurevich, “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin American and the Caribbean, ed. Kristen Ruggiero, 86–114 (Boston: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). 3 Ricardo Feierstein retired from the amia in 2007. He now edits for Acervo Cultural. 4 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizo (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1994).

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thousands of Spanish, Hebrew and Yiddish books and countless documents and folios—the archival and intellectual legacy of a community…5 The bombing itself, which profoundly maimed the library, exposed the importance of the amia building as a literary place. The writing of Jewish literature and the creation of Jewish art regained its momentum in the years after the atentado. At first headquartered at a temporary location until the replacement building was ready, Editorial Milá continued publishing books of Jewish interests, though for a time it kept a low profile, avoiding material that might offend its right-wing members and sticking to sycophantic biographies of “Jewish leaders” such as Vladomir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. Other publishing companies such as Acervo Cultural, Norma, and Dunken picked up the slack with a steady flow of fiction, Holocaust testimonies, and serious studies, such as Diana Wang’s El silencio de los aparecidos (The Silence of the Reappeared), a discussion of the problems faced by children of Holocaust survivors.6 Acervo Cultural sponsored a novel-writing contest that brought in fourteen manuscripts from all over Argentina and from Israel. The contest winner, Marcela y Judith by Enrique Amster, is the story of a woman torn between allegiances to Argentina and Israel. Milá and other publishers later brought out other novels from the competition, such as Elías Sherbacovsky’s La Monalisa de Jerusalén (The Mona Lisa of Jerusalem) and Mina Weil’s El ultimo día (The Last Day). In 2002, the amia held a competition for young Jewish writers and presented Clara Klicksberg awards for the best writing by Jewish youth. The amia also sponsored the sculpture project Reconstruimos la amia (We Rebuild the amia), in which artists had to create works of art from bits of the rubble left by the explosion. Important sculptors such as Claudia Aranovich, Danilo Danziger, and Mariana Schapiro took part. Israeli artist Yaacov Agam constructed a highly controversial, multicolored monument to the victims of the atentado for the courtyard of the new building. From August 11 to 14, 2001, the Cultural Department of the amia held an Encuentro, or get-together, to “stimulate Jewish cultural production and to move on from paralyzing complaining to inspiring debate—to invoke hope.”7 The cultural festival was open to all and lasted from morning until late at night. 5 Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002), 1. 6 Diana Wang, El silencio de los aparecidos (Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural, 1998). 7 Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001), 9.

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During these three and a half days, approximately one hundred people participated, some of them from the United States and Israel. It was estimated that more than thirteen hundred attended. The event focused on the meaning of Jewish identity in Argentina in 2001, and the presentations ranged from the history of Argentine Jewish cinema to the origins of the ancient Jewish communities of Sepharad, what is now Spain. Theater and music alternated with lectures. Three new plays were performed: Hombre de dos amores (Man with Two Loves) by Sol Leviton, a short piece about Jewish identity written especially for the Encuentro; scenes from Liturgias (Liturgies) by Nora Glickman; and a farce by Ana María Shua. Musical performances included the jazz-influenced klezmer music of Marcelo Moguilevsky and César Lerner, the Mordje Guebirtig Yiddish choir, and Paloma Sneh, a young saxophonist who interpreted Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Outside the auditorium was an exhibition featuring the work of leading Jewish artists such as Basia Kuperman, Delia Banchik, and Victor Chab. The majority of the scholarly papers dealt with the lingering questions of ethnic and national identity or with the nature of Argentine Jewish literature.8 During the Encuentro, explicit mention of the atentado was remarkably rare but instructive when it did occur. In one presentation, internationally known novelist Silvia Plager declared that the many claims of solidarity with the victims had not alleviated the horrible scars left by the experience. As Natasha Zaretsky recounts, psychologist Diana Wang told of how her mother, a Holocaust survivor, called her to beg forgiveness for having brought her to Argentina. For Wang, the amia bombing was a defining moment. She stated dramatically that she had been born as a Jew on July 18, 1994. Before that time, her Judaism had meant little to her; thereafter, it became central to her life. She helped found and continues to lead a community group that began with a focus on child survivors and later went on to focus on intergenerational dynamics (Generations of the Shoah), including the experience of children of survivors.9 In 1998 she wrote El silencio de los aparecidos (The Silence of Those 8 Daniel Silber’s talk was titled “Judios en la Argentina? Judios de la Argentina” (“Jews in Argentina? Jews of Argentina?”). Laura Kitzis and Enrique Herszcovits speculated on the identity of Argentina’s Jews in the second millennium. Guido Setton pondered whether Jewish Argentine literature really exists. Other topics were more specific: the Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires, the works of individual writers from the early twentieth century playwright Samuel Eichelbaum to the contemporary novelist Marcelo Birmajer. 9 See Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–232 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

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Who Did Appear). Wang became active in Memoria Activa’s protest against the government’s failure to convict those implicated in the atentado, joined a Yiddish choir, and studied Yiddish.10 This stream of artistic activity since the atentado is especially impressive given that, since 1999, Argentina’s economy has been in freefall. The government defaulted on its international debt, froze personal savings in banks, and unpegged the peso from the dollar. The middle class, which encompassed most Jewish families, was particularly hard hit. Jewish poverty, almost unknown until then, became widespread.11 At the same time, Jewish cultural production continued to flourish. In 2002, Editorial Milá published the proceedings of the Encuentro, complete with a recording of all the music.12 Another Encuentro was held at the rebuilt amia in 2003, and, in 2005, a third was held in the city of Rosario.13 After each event, book-length proceedings were compiled and published by Ricardo Feierstein and me. All three volumes are cited regularly in academic studies of the Argentine Jewish experience. *****

Literary Shouts and Echoes

Some of the earliest literary responses to the atentado include poems written by survivors and those who had lost loved ones. The remarkable book Testimonios de una semana de horror (Testimonies of a Week of Horror), edited by Miguel Steuerman, the director of Radio Jai, soon after the attack, includes poems written by survivors who had lost loved ones in the explosion. Most of the book is made up of clips from interviews done by the station during the day 10

11 12 13

See Natasha Zaretsky, “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires,” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experience in the Southern Cone, eds. Raanan Rein and Adriana Brodsky, 315–339 (Boston: Brill, 2013). Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America (Boulder, co: Lynne Reiner, 2013), 146. Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001). See volumes by Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeolatinoamericano 2: Literatura y artes plásticas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004) and Crecer en el gueto, crecer en el mundo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005). The latter contains many papers on Jewish Argentine identity by scholars such as Daniel Feierstein, Liliana Feierstein, Marcos Aguinis, Diana Sperling, Mario Goloboff, Lydia Gil, and Roberto Halac.

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of the bombing and in the weeks that followed. Among the interviewees are Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; Carlos Menem, the Argentine President; leaders of many Jewish organizations; and passersby who witnessed the blast. But what is most stunning is the poetry written during the week of the atentado by everyday citizens. To cite but one example, Diana Malamud, whose husband Andrés was killed on July 18, wrote: Cinco meses. El tiempo transcurre implacable. Por momentos, cuando aún sentimos el calor de la útima mirada, del último beso, de la última sonrisa, nos parece que fue hace sólo un instante.14 Five months, time moves on implacable. For moments, when we still feel the warmth of the final glance, of the last kiss, of the final smile, it seems to us that it was only a minute ago. Following the atentado, many professional Jewish writers and artists, in shock, found it difficult to engage in creative work. Aída Bortnik, the Academy Award– winning screenwriter, argued that speaking out and action were needed more urgently than literature.15 Feierstein, who had lost many colleagues, wrote of the difficulty of thinking and feeling at the same time, of finding words to portray the intensity of emotions provoked by the crime, but he did believe that words were the only way to confront terrorism.16 Over time, poetry and fiction began to appear in response to the communal as well as personal trauma. Daniel Chirom, Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, Ricardo Feierstein, Susana Grimberg, Marcos Aguinis, and many others have created a body of work that grieves, protests, and attempts to explain the disaster. Directly 14

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Diana Malamud, “Cinco meses,” in Testimonios de una semana de horror, ed. Miguel Steuerman, and trans. Stephen A. Sadow, 31 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Jai, 1994). All other translations of poetry are by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow. Aída Bortnik, “Argentinos aquí y ahora,” Raíces 3, no. 9 (Summer 1994–1995): 50. Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizaje y contraexilio (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1996), 17.

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or indirectly, they bear witness and demand equal justice for Argentina’s Jews. They cannot be called a movement; in general they didn’t know each other. Each took on the historical event in a unique way. In their highly charged works, anger, grief, confusion, self-assertion, and hope—the complexity of feelings related to catastrophic loss—are omnipresent. By the end of 1994, Daniel Chirom, one of Argentina’s most important poets, had reacted with the long poem “18 de Julio 1994.” Overtly Jewish, it overturns the four questions from the Passover Haggadah. There is no Passover here, no deliverance from evil oppressors, only questions. In its opening stanzas, the images are stark and evocative. This extended section of the poem contains the ironies, despair, and compassion; it is worthwhile to experience its pounding cadence, its transformation of an ancient text, and the breath of its imagery. 18 DE JULIO* ¿Qué sucede esta noche entre todas las noches? Todas las noches comemos en forma abundante y cantamos y reímos con el vino pero esta noche sólo hay pan ázimo y vinagre pues estamos tristes pensando en el destierro. ¿Qué sucede esta noche que no entonamos cánticos? Todas las noches alabamos a Dios con nuestros mejores acentos pero esta noche el silencio reina porque nuestra hambre es débil y extenso el desierto. ¿Qué sucede esta noche que las sombras ganan nuestras casas? Todas las noches las luces brillan para iluminar la mesa pero esta noche sólo hay un candelabro para que recordemos la oscuridad. ¿Qué sucede esta noche que nuestras manos y lenguas tiemblan? Todas las noches rezamos por el día que vendrá y bailamos al pie de nuestros lechos porque la sangre inocente no deja huellas pero esta noche permanecemos quietos mientras las aguas se desbocan

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y las oraciones son para los muertos que aún nos acompañan. * En esta fecha se produjo el brutal atentado a la amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) que segó la vida de 8617 personas.18 18 DE JULIO* Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights we eat in abundance and we sing and laugh over the wine but tonight we have only unleavened bread and vinegar because we are sad, thinking about exile. Why on this night do we not intone canticles? Every night we praise God as beautifully as we can, but this night silence reigns and the desert is vast. Why on this night do shadows take possession of our houses? On all other nights, lights illuminate the table but tonight there is only one candelabra so that we remember darkness. Why on this night do our hands and tongues tremble? On all other nights we pray for the day to come and we dance at the foot of our bed because innocent blood does not leave footprints. But tonight we stay quiet while the waters flow down and our prayers are for the dead who still accompany us. * On this day, the brutal attack on the amia (Argentine Jewish Mutual Association) that cut short the lives of 8619 people occurred. 17 18 19

Originally, it was believed that 86 people were killed in the attack, a figure later revised to 85 victims. Daniel Chirom, Candelabros (Buenos Aires: Editorial Agora 1996), 24–26. See note above about the revised number of victims, which was changed from 86 to 85.

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Throughout his long dirge, Daniel Chirom inverts the themes of Passover. Among the contrasts in the poem are abundant food/loss of appetite; home and family/the vastness of the desert; bright light/darkness; prayer/quiet or prayers only for the dead; singing/mouths closed; celebration/grief. Chirom does not try to replicate the four questions in the order and form known to anyone who has attended a Seder. Rather, he asks his own questions. And he offers no answers. At the same time, the rhythm and tempo of the Hebrew original is present in every line of the poem. Chirom’s is a powerful statement, filled with anguish and despair.20 A Haggadah was composed in response to the atentado. A survivor of four years in Auschwitz, Charles Papiernik told me how the explosion brought back terrible memories of those years. In his Holocaust memoir, Una vida (A Life), Papiernik recalls that when he first heard of the bombing, his mind was immediately filled with scenes from Auschwitz: “Me encontré otra vez en el Holocausto” (I found myself in the Holocaust once again).21 He had been driving toward the amia on July 18, but a traffic jam caused him to arrive near the scene after 9:53 a.m. He later collaborated with friends to compose their own Shoah Haggadah.22 Unlike Daniel Chirom, Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman is not a famous poet. In fact, when I met Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman in 1998, she insisted that she was not a poet but a mother who uses poetry to stir others to action. Annette Levine, who knows Kaplinsky Guterman well and has served as her translator, 20

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In 2010, artist Perla Bajder, noted for her artwork that deals with children during the Holocaust; Irene Jaievsky, curator of the International Museum of Women; and I collaborated on the creation of fourteen handcrafted artists’ books for a collection entitled “Identity and Diversity: Artist’s Book.” Each book contains a poem on a Jewish theme by a Latin American Jewish poet; a translation of that poem into English, done by American poet J. Kates and me; and an original work of art by a Latin America Jewish artist. In one outstanding artist’s book, Chirom’s “18 de Julio” is featured. This poem inspired Brazilian artist Michal Kirshbaum to create, with a variety of photographic techniques, a picture that seems to be a new redbrick wall—with holes in it. Kirschbaum, a young woman, is familiar with only the replacement amia building. The poem and photo were first exhibited in the Museo Judío (Jewish Museum) in Buenos Aires and then at American universities and Jewish community centers around the United States, the Argentine Consulate in New York, and in a bookstore in a predominately Jewish section of Mexico City. Charles Papiernik, Una vida (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997), 235. Many Holocaust testimonies have been published in Argentina since the amia bombing. It is often difficult to discern whether these books were written as a response to the attack, but it seems likely. Communication with Papiernik. Natasha Zaretsky remembers using this Haggadah while participating in a Passover Seder sponsored by Generaciones de la Shoá. Charles Papiernik was in attendance.

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remarks, “Sofia’s protest and demand for justice is driven by the relentless pain of having lost her daughter Andrea to the amia disaster.”23 Andrea, twenty-eight, had gone to the amia’s job placement office on the morning of July 18. Kaplinsky Guterman’s 1997 Del corazón al cielo (From the Heart to Heaven) is a collection of poems by a mother who has lost her child.24 She puts no distance between herself and her subject: Andrea’s picture is on the book’s cover. The poems are straightforward and unadorned, laden with grief, loss, and rage. There is little imagery, just impassioned speech. The titles—“Mataron a mi hija” (“They Killed My Daughter”), “Te busco” (“I Search for You”), “Palabras para un asesino” (“Words for a Murderer”)—are indicative of Kaplinsky Guterman’s direct, forceful style. She inserts after each poem commentaries that are, for the most part, no less filled with pain. In both poetry and prose, Kaplinsky Guterman describes Andrea’s character, childhood, and dream of running a kindergarten. In “Vida de mariposa” (“Butterfly’s Life”), the mother remembers, “Al describir las cosas nuevas, brillaba tu Mirada/y tu sonrisa, cristalina, resonaba en ecos donde fuera.”25 (Discovering new things, your face would shine/and your smile resonated wherever you went.) The mother imagines the moment of the explosion, the nature of the killers, and the many people who were killed. One poem, “Nuestros amigos” (“Our Friends”), is an elegy for the victims of the amia. She demands justice from the government and thanks her friends and colleagues in the protest group Memoria Activa: “Son nuestros amigos/que en los peores momentos/nos brindaron su apoyo y su aliento.”26 (They are our friends/who in the worst moments/ offered us their support and strength.) The poetry collection Persistentes vibraciones (Persistent Tremblings) by Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, best known for her scholarship on Argentine Jewish literature and music, rages against those who committed the crime and also the lack of justice five years after it took place. Gover de Nasatsky lives in the predominantly Jewish Once neighborhood just a few blocks from the amia. She is reminded daily of the car bombing. In her poem “Reclamo” (“A Demand”) she cries out: No hay paz para los restos de la irracional masacre; no se escuchan sus voces perdidas en el viento. 23 24 25 26

Annette (Prekker) Levine, “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces,” http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. Sofía Kaplinsky Guterman, Del corazón al cielo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997). Sofía gave me a copy of this book. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 84.

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Vehemente y ronco clamor se suma a la marea de la inocente sangre; así reclaman y esperan.27 There is no peace for the remains of those killed by the irrational massacre; their voices are not heard lost in the wind. Vehement and hoarse clamor joining the tide of innocent blood; and so they make their demands and wait. Five years after it occurred, the crime had remained unsolved, and Gover de Nasatsky’s poem highlights the lack of closure for the community. During a recorded interview I conducted with her in 2012, I asked her about her frustration over the slow pace of the investigation of the atentado. Gover de Nasatsky remarked, “For example, a poem I wrote four years after the attack on the amia, another at five years after the attack on the amia, and we’ll soon be at the 18th, and they haven’t investigated, nobody knows anything.”28 Her second book of poetry, Resonancias de Auschwitz (Resonances of Auschwitz; 1999), was inspired by a visit she and her husband made to Auschwitz in Poland. In sparse yet jolting poems, she imagines the inmates of the death camp, especially the children. Gover de Nasatsky wrote two fictionalized biographies, La pasión de un visionario: Theodor Herzl (The Passion of a Visionary: Theodor Herzl; 2004) and Desde la cima: Reminiscencias de David Ben-Gurión (From the Peak: Reminiscences of David Ben-Gurion; 2008). In these novels, Gover de Nasatsky treats two of Judaism’s most revered champions of the creation of a Jewish state. In her writing, Jewish disaster is counterweighted by Jewish success and pride. In contrast to Gover de Nasatsky’s work, psychoanalyst Susana Grimberg’s novel El espejo de las palabras (The Mirror of Words; 1998) is the first published about the atentado and has no Jews among its central characters.29 A social critic, Grimberg presents the atentado as an issue that is not only Jewish but 27 28 29

Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, Persistentes vibraciones (Buenos Aires: Editorial Puma, 1999), 87. Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, interview, August 13, 2012. Susana Grimberg, El espejo de las palabras (Buenos Aires: Editorial Vinciguerra, 1998).

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Argentine. Protagonist Laura Liberti, a non-Jewish Buenos Aires schoolteacher, hears of the bombing while on vacation and urgently returns to the capital. Adding to her shock, she learns that her close friends make anti-Semitic remarks, stating that the attack has nothing to do with them and that Jews always cause trouble. Laura shouts back, “Cualquier atentado es un crimen contra TODA la humanidad pero el hecho es que encima pusieron la bomba en una mutual judía, ¡en una Mutual!” (Any attack is a crime against ALL humanity but the issue is that on top of that they put the bomb in a Jewish mutual association. A mutual association!)30 Back home, Laura Liberti senses that everything in the country has changed forever. She strongly believes that the nation was attacked, not solely the Jews, yet she finds few who share her opinion. Her estranged husband Julio is nonchalant about the amia; it’s not his business. Only old college friend Fernando Hartman, a former political activist and now an attorney, shares her anger and frustration. The novel’s plot mirrors the instability of the times. Laura is in the process of separating from Julio. He is infatuated with Ingrid, who in turn had been Fernando’s lover. Laura’s teenage son Damián is studying Italian and eventually leaves home for Italy. At the novel’s end Laura Liberti emigrates with Fernando Hartman to Spain; for them Argentina is an unfit place to live. Susana Grimberg’s ability to create strong characters is evident. Grimberg is a psychoanalyst, and she brings her insights to her fiction. Laura’s every thought and feeling, choice of clothing, and reasons for her sense of ease or discomfort are described in minute detail. Most pointedly, Laura’s thoughts about justice and equality are emphasized. In a filmed interview I conducted with Grimberg in 2012, she explained, “I always, always try, not only in this novel, to universalize the issue, to try to get away from all that has to do with the idea of the Jews being marginalized, and how to include, let’s say, how it concerns everyone. Despite the attack on the [Israeli] embassy, nobody anticipated a massacre. I call it a massacre, that of the amia.”31 Carlos Levy, a poet and folklorist from Mendoza, near the Andes, goes even further by universalizing the event on Pasteur Street. By the fourth anniversary of the atentado, the bombing had become part of world history. One extraordinary poem, “18 de Julio de 1998” (“July 18, 1998”; 2001), describes the invasion of hatred on an ordinary street, one in which children play and where rabbis, nuns, and vendors might walk: “Sobre esta calle Antonio, desparramó esta

30 Susana Grimberg. El espejo, 37. 31 Ibid.

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mañana llenando el aire de pavura.”32 (On that street, Antonio, hatred let loose a thunderclap that morning, filling the air with fear.) Levy sees Jewish names joined in death with those of Hernández, Fernández, and Abdalla. He compares the scenes of destruction written by Homer to others from Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz, then Bosnia, Korea, and Rwanda: “Mientras flota la pregunta inútil del por qué/cada vez comienza un nuevo día.”33 (While the useless question floats about/each time a new day begins.) Levy places the attack in temporal context. It happened three thousand years after Homer told his tales and hundreds of days before now. “De nuevo nuevamente” (once again, now), a phrase consciously borrowed from the Argentine regional poet Antonio Esteban Agüero, is repeated throughout the poem. Unlike Homer, who is long dead, the Jews are reminded now of what they have seen before. But Jews existed before Homer and will continue to exist in the future. In an interview he did for a local paper, Levy said, “A otro le recomendaría mi traducción al sefardí [ladino] del Martín Fierro que es una de mis más grandes satisfacciones. Porque me permitió unir a la Argentina, que es mi tierra prometida, con esa cultura heredada y enquista en mí.”34 (To anyone, I would recommend my translation into Ladino of Martín Fierro, which is one of my greatest satisfactions. Because it allowed me to unite Argentina, which is my promised land, with that culture, inherited and part of me.) In spite of what happened at the amia, Carlos Levy is so proud of his Argentine heritage that he takes one of the classics of the country’s literature and translates it into his native Ladino (or judeoespañol), as if to say we Sephardic Jews are as Argentine as everyone else in the country. Argentine Jewish history and identity are the themes of Ricardo Feierstein’s La logia del umbral (The Lodge of the Threshold; 2001).35 La logia del umbral begins and ends with the explosion on Pasteur Street. Between these boundaries, a panorama of Jewish life in Argentina jumps, bounces, and goes back and forth in time. Argentina is at first seen as a Jewish homeland. Though there is always some concern about being accepted, Argentina seems to be a safe haven where Jews can maintain their traditions or opt for assimilation. This is a novel about an emphatically Argentine and Jewish family. Israel is relegated to an escape route rather than a shared Zionist goal. 32 33 34 35

Marcos Silber and Carlos Levy, Las doloratas (Buenos Aires: Editorial El Canto Rodado, 2001), 89. Ibid., 89. Carlos Levy, El gaucho Martín Fierro: Tresladado al djudeo espanyol (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005). Ricardo Feierstein, La logia del umbral (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2001).

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It is a historical novel, a family saga, but not quite a realistic one. The author of Historia del los judios argentinos (History of the Argentine Jews; 1993), Feierstein uses his vast knowledge of Argentine Jewish history as weaponry in what is here a polemic. As in Woody Allen’s film Zelig, the characters just happen to turn up at moments that have Jewish historical significance.36 They believe that a family or a people should transmit its history to the generations that follow. When they try to celebrate their history in Argentina, they find themselves once again to be taking part in the history of the nation. The novel’s protagonist is the Schvel family (schvel means “threshold” in Yiddish). Through four generations, they are at the edge of Argentine society, never quite inside. The Schvels are an extended Jewish mishpocha (family or clan) who trace their Argentine heritage to the arrival in 1889 of Moises Schvel and his wife, Juana, on the steamship Wasser, the first commercial vessel to bring Jews to the Rio de la Plata. The members of the Schvel family are prime movers in the founding and development of Moises Ville, the most important of the Jewish agricultural colonies, an enterprise funded by the philanthropist Baron Maurice Hirsh. In a scene reconstructed from a historical event, the progenitor, Moishe Schvel, an immigrant from Russia, becomes the first Jew murdered in Moises Ville. Because of a misunderstanding, he is killed by a gaucho who, in turn, is torn to pieces by enraged Jewish settlers. Moishe’s son, optimistically named Mauricio Argentino Schvel, born soon after Moishe’s death, is the first child born in the colonies. After early travails and some pleasures of rural life, Mauricio Argentino grows up to be the paterfamilias of an enormous clan. Later on, following the historical pattern, most of the family members leave the colonies and move on to Buenos Aires, where they enter business and the professions and become active in political movements. These cousins come in all shapes and sizes. They are physically strong or sickly; devoted to their spouses or womanizers; believers in the occult or realists. More importantly, the characters are emblematic, finding themselves in professions and social situations typical to Argentine Jews. Bernardo Schvel runs a small business. Miryam is a psychologist. Manuel is the most religiously observant. During the Argentine military dictatorship and its “El Proceso,” Solomon Schvel’s life is threatened by anti-Semitic thugs.37 Fearing for his life, he is secreted out of the country and flown to Tel Aviv. These characters in the novel have profound, intense feelings about Argentina. Some remember the satisfaction of rural life; others remember the 36 37

Ricardo Feierstein, Historia de los judíos argentinos (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1993). For a discussion of the treatment of Jews during the dictatorship of 1976–1983, see Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America (Boulder, co: Lynne Ryner, 2013), 233–238.

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security they enjoyed while growing up in an urban neighborhood filled with immigrants from many countries. Manuel Schvel speaks of a culinary blending that signaled entrance into Argentine life: Así crecimos con mate y varenikes, asado y guefilte fish, locro y latkes espolvoreados con azucar, medialunas de grasa y strudel, cafe con leche y te en vaso con terron de azúcar en la boca hasta arribar a la comun y economica polena/momeligue. Una mezcla sabrosa, nutritiva, Ilena de vida y esperanzas.38 And so we grew up with mate and verenikes, asado and gefilte fish, beef stew and latkes sprinkled with sugar, greasy croissants and strudel, coffee with milk and tea in a glass with a sugar cube in your mouth until arriving at the everyday and economical polenta/mameliga. A tasty mix, nutritious, full of life and hopes. After a family reunion held in Moises Ville during its hundredth anniversary celebration in 1989, the Schvel family decides to create a society to promote Jewish status and history in Argentina. Gradually, they build the membership of the lodge, first with family members, then with Jews, and finally with anyone—particularly anyone who considers himself an outsider—who wants to join. The name of the lodge, La Logia del Umbral, also the title of the novel, describes the situation of the Jewish community in Argentina. Jews, as cousin Marcelo says, are both here and not here; they are on the margin. Argentine Jews are an extended family at the edge of full equality as Argentine citizens. The first joint task of the lodge members is to bring a time capsule from Moises Ville to Buenos Aires and bury it in the Plaza de Mayo, the most hallowed of Argentine places and the site where Juan Domingo Perón himself buried a capsule in 1950, to be opened in the magical-sounding year 2000. Among the documents and farming implements, the capsule contains the actual soil tilled by the Jewish immigrants. The voyage they undertake between Moises Ville and Buenos Aires (a distance of 620 kilometers; a map is included in the text) illustrates the spatial dimension of the Argentine Jewish experience, demonstrating its presence in the Pampas, the suburbs, and the capital. As the old men are no longer strong enough to ride horses, the first leg of the trip is done in an oldfashioned sulky; from there, they travel sixty kilometers a day on horseback. Overall, the story moves forward in time, but there is a jerkiness to it, as side themes are introduced and then abandoned; sections that stop the 38 Feierstein, La logia del umbral, 128.

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action seem arbitrarily placed, and then things straighten out in a rush toward the end, as the Schvels and some friends make the ten-day “Jewish gaucho” pilgrimage from Moises Ville to Buenos Aires in which representatives of each living generation ride their corresponding part of the way. Moreover, the pile-up of disparate scenes gives the novel the appearance of a scrapbook. The lodge members had wanted to record a historical event at a historical place, and they run right into history. The novel describes a celebration of Judaism in the Argentine context only to have this literally blown up in their faces. “The Lodge of the Threshold” is, of course, a metaphor for Jewish community. The Schvels have been in Argentina longer than many other immigrant groups. They have farmed and herded cattle on the Pampas. They moved to the city and joined the middle class. They wear their identities as both Jew and Argentine on their sleeves for all to see. The main goal of their lodge is to gain public recognition for what to them is obvious: the Jewish presence in Argentina is worthy of being honored. The Schvels intended to put their own historical records at a place vital to Argentine national history, and on the way their young scion runs right into the most painful moment in the history of Argentine Jews. The time capsule with its valued relics is destroyed along with the community records housed in the amia building. From that point on, the Schvels’ life and Jewish life in Argentina in general will never be the same. Extreme insecurity was once again to become part of the Jewish identity in Argentina. What had finally seemed a coherent worldview is smashed almost beyond repair. Identity found becomes identity lost. The final section of La logia del umbral is titled “¿Llegada? 18 de Julio de 1994” (Arrival? July 18, 1994). The young member of the clan, Mariano Moises Schvel, did indeed arrive—but not where his family had intended. The seriousness of his injures is left unclear. Whether the attackers are homegrown or imported is unknown. The future of the Argentine Jewish community is shrouded in dust and smoke and drowned out by emergency sirens. In the novel’s epilogue, Miryam interprets dreams to find predictions of the future, but her findings are inconclusive. In a 2012 interview, Feierstein told me that the amia bombing was indeed a catalyst for the novel: The Threshold Lodge was motivated—let’s say the desire to write it—by the bombing that destroyed the amia headquarters in 1994, because the main characters of the novel—it is always a novel, it is not only testimony—ask themselves if being Jewish in Argentina is the same after that bombing, with the destruction of the community. On one hand, and on

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the other, the reaction of the Argentines, which was diverse, it was generally supportive but there was a diverse reaction.39 In contrast, in Marcos Aguinis’s novel Asalto al paraiso (Assault on Paradise; 2002), none of the major characters are Jewish. Jews are present only in the short scene describing the amia bombing itself or as they appear in the minds of others. Instead, the novel is an exploration of why and how the bombing was carried out. Aguinis is a master of the historical novel and, in particular, a specialist in the workings of the Spanish Inquisition. Here he writes what could be called a journalistic novel in that the events described happened recently. Moreover, the protagonist is a journalist, the non-Jewish Cristina Tibori. In a manner reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow, Aguinis builds fiction from well-known events. Aguinis both invents material and adds information that heretofore had been suppressed. In this “amia novel” are four main characters: one Catholic and three Muslim. These characters—Cristina Tibori, the journalist; Dawud Habbif, the suicide bomber, who believes self-destruction and murder are the methods to recompense the humiliations he suffered in his native Lebanon; Imam Zacarias Najaf, a resident of Argentina who was a founder of Hezbollah but now preaches peaceful tolerance instead of fundamentalism; and Hassem Tabbani, an Iranian diplomat—are “grown” by Aguinis from bits and pieces of the historical record. Of the four, Tabbani is the only one closely modeled after a real individual. Asalto al paraiso is an intricately structured suspense novel, created with extraordinary attention to detail. Scenes shift swiftly from the bombed Israeli Embassy to refugee camps in southern Lebanon; then from a television-recording studio to terrorist training sessions; and from Buenos Aires’ red-light district and the offices of Argentina’s secret service. The plot begins on March 17, 1992, with the destruction of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, by a car bomb. Television reporter Cristina Tibori is sent by her editor to cover the story. At the scene she meets the imam Zacarias Najaf. The cleric understands the logic of terrorism and tries to explain to Cristina that if perpetrators of the first attack are not punished, a second attack will follow. Cristina does not feel a personal connection to the story until, to her horror, she learns that her sister has died in the attack. Cristina then decides that she must find those who are responsible and prevent the probable second attack. Finding the truth about the embassy’s destruction becomes Cristina’s obsession, but she makes little headway. (In reality, the perpetrators of the Israeli Embassy bombing have never been identified.) Two years later, unbeknownst 39

Ricardo Feierstein, interview, August 12, 2012.

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to Cristina, four Islamic terrorists arrive in Argentina from Lebanon and are greeted by functionaries from the Iranian Embassy. In secret, officials of the Argentine secret service and the federal and Buenos Aires police forces, for differing reasons, join in a plot to destroy the Sociedad Hebraica, the largest Jewish cultural and sports institution, by means of a car bomb. Through intimidation and even murder, they aid the Iranians in the planning of an enormous catastrophe. At the last moment, Cristina hears of the plot against the cultural center and is able to abort it. However, the Iranians have a backup plan, and four days later the amia building is destroyed. Asalto al paraiso is structured around two interwoven stories. Cristina Tibori is the courageous journalist obsessed with finding the perpetrators of the embassy bombing and her sister’s murder. Through her investigations, Aguinis examines the most sordid aspects of the Argentine security forces. Paralleling this story is that of Dawud Habbif, the suicidal terrorist (shahid, or martyr) who arrives in Argentina determined to carry out his mission and win the rewards due a martyr in heaven. Through his thoughts and memories, presented in stream of consciousness, Aguinis reveals the mentality of a person willing to die for a religious cause and the historical situation that led him to this intention. In addition to being a novelist, Marcos Aguinis is a psychiatrist. The novel contains both psychological turmoil and interpretation of it. Obsession and anger are omnipresent. Cristina must find her sister’s killer. She is willing to put her career and even her life in danger to do so. Dawud Habbif must destroy the Jewish center and himself; the horrors of his life prepared him for this moment. The imam Zacarias Najaf must follow his religious convictions, even when millions oppose him and many threaten him. And Hassem Tabbani, as a representative of the Iranian Islamic government and because of his own hatreds, must direct the killing of his enemies. Asalto al paraiso is, then, a mystery that mixes fact and fiction, sometimes putting the two in counterpoint. Many Argentine readers would be surprised by the novel’s premise that the Sociedad Hebraica had been the intended target. In the novel, the “facts” of the bombing are gradually made clear to the reader. The reader gets a full-fledged accounting of events, something he cannot obtain from the government or the newspapers. The facts about the atentado have never been obvious or available, and no one has been convicted of so much as complicity in the crime. In her 2014 book-length study of Marcos Aguinis as a public intellectual, Dalia Wassner takes the argument further. She interprets the novel within a historical and global framework: Asalto al paraiso explicitly describes the ideological and methodological ties between the Inquisition in colonial Latin America, the Holocaust of

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the mid-twentieth century and Islamic terrorism…. Aguinis has unequivocally painted an interconnected picture throughout his novelistic career, whereby Jews serve to represent global issues of democracy, diversity, and modernity.40 For Aguinis, the atentado takes on a universal significance going well beyond the fact that it took place in Argentina. It was an anti-Semitic act against Jews, an assault on a nation state, and an act of international terrorism.

My Testimony

For more than twenty years, I have been haunted by the attack on the amia. I am not an Argentine but rather an American professor who specializes in Latin American Jewish literature. In 1982, I received El caramelo descompuesto (The Melted Caramel), Ricardo Feierstein’s first published novel. I was puzzled by the work. It was the second part of a trilogy, and the action took place in an Israeli kibbutz and not in Argentina. I wrote Feierstein, telling him how much I enjoyed the novel and asking about its content. He replied that this work passed the scrutiny of the censors of the military dictatorship because it took place in Israel and therefore was not considered dangerous. The first and third volumes of the trilogy were published in 1984, the year after the military government was overthrown and Argentina returned to democracy. On July 3, 1994, I was chatting with Ana Weinstein, the director of the amia’s Marc Turkow library. I gave Ana some of my books and articles for the library. Her office was on the second floor of the building and faced Pasteur Street. I met Mirta Strier, a member of the office staff. Approximately two weeks later, the car bomb demolished the amia building and many shops that could be seen from Ana’s office. I was back home in Boston when the news came that the amia had been destroyed and many lives had been lost. At first the reporting was garbled. The announcer spoke of the Argentine Israelite center. A bit later, I figured out what had happened and entered a state that can only be called shock. I was terrified that Ricardo, Ana, Moshé, and Mirta had been killed by the blast. In fact, Mirta Strier was. *** 40

Dalia Wassner, Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina (Boston: Brill, 2014), 111.

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I was left with a symbolic yet permanent connection to the tragedy. Though trivial compared to the tragedy that transpired on Pasteur Street, my own papers were buried in the rubble. It was on that day that I resolved to dedicate myself to the study and promotion of the literature and cultural production of the Jews of Latin America. Perhaps naively, I believed I could bring awareness of these Jewish writers and artists, and those of other Latin American countries, to the world. Since then, most of my scholarship, literary translation, and website development have been an effort to reach that goal. My work is, to an extent, affected by the fact that I know or knew almost all the writers whose work I analyze, include in anthologies, and translate. I have coauthored books with Ricardo Feierstein and consulted with poets about puzzling words and lines. In 1995, I saw the rubble where the amia had stood. Thereafter, I repeatedly visited what has now become “Fortress amia.” Then, I saw the yellow concrete barriers in front of the replacement building.41 I went through strict security to enter the “bomb-proof” building. However, I sensed resilience too. In the foyer, there was a sculpture exhibition entitled “Escombros” (“Rubble”) in which both Jewish and non-Jewish sculptors had created artworks from the concrete rubble of the original building. In the following years, I made many treks to the Department of Culture in the rebuilt amia. My personal library contains dozens of books bearing the Milá imprint. Reflections With its libraries, its publishing arm Editorial Milá, and the fact that it afforded a space for writers to converse and present their new books to the public, the amia, both before and for many years after the atentado, was a place where literature was highly valued. The terrorist attack led directly to the swift and fierce response by Argentina’s Jewish poets. In what was a “literature of protest,” each responded uniquely, reflecting personal outrage. The effect of the amia bombing had a profound life- and career-changing effect. Diana Wang returned to Judaism, and Edna Aizenberg went on to write her seminal Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing.42 41

42

These stanchions were meant to protect the amia, Jewish community centers, and schools from car bombs. Instead they have had the effect of drawing public attention to those same buildings and potentially making targeted attacks more likely. Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and ArgentineJewish Writing (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002).

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And I, within days of the attack, invested in my career a private testimony. Since then, I continue to document, write about, lecture on, promote, and make available to the world via the Internet the literature and art created by Jews in Latin America. Bibliography Aguinis, Marcos. Asalto al paraiso. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2002. Aizenberg, Edna. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and ArgentineJewish Writing. Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002. Bortnik, Aída. “Argentinos aquí y ahora.” Raices 3, no. 9 (Summer 1994–1995): 50. Bublick, Armando. Poncho y Talmud. Buenos Aries: Atlántida, 1997. Chirom, Daniel. Candelabros. Buenos Aires: Editorial Agora, 1996. Dolinsky, Dina. Las doce casas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2000. Elkin, Judith Laikin. The Jews of Latin America. Boulder, co: Lynne Reiner, 2013. Feierstein, Ricardo. Alberto Gerchunoff, judío y argentino: Viaje temático desde Los gauchos judíos (1910) hasta sus últimos textos (1950) y visión crítica. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2000a. ———. Consorcio Utopia. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2007. ———. Contraexilio y mestisaje. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1996a. ———. Cuaderno de un psicoanalista. Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2010. ———. Historia de los judíos argentinos. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1993. ———. La logia del umbral. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2001. ———. “Las palabras y las cosas.” Raices 3, no. 9 (Summer 1994–1995): 10. Reprinted in Ricardo Feierstein, Contraexilio y mestizaje: Ser judio en la Argentina, 15–17. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1996b. ———. ed. Los mejores cuentos con gauchos judios. Buenos Aires: Ameghino, 2000b. Feierstein, Ricardo, and Stephen A. Sadow, eds. Crecer en el gueto, crecer en el mundo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005. ———. Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001. ———. Recreando la cultura judeolatinoamericano 2: Literatura y artes plásticas. 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004. Feierstein, Ricardo, and Perla Sneh, eds. El libro del centenario: Comunidad judia de Buenos Aires 1894–1994. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1994. Gover de Nasatsky, Miryam. Desde la cima: Reminiscencias de David Ben-Gurión. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2008. ———. La pasión de un visionario: Theodor Herzl. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004. ———. Persistentes vibraciones. Buenos Aires: Editorial Puma, 1999.

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———. Resonancias de Auschwitz. Buenos Aires: Geminis, 2011. Grimberg, Susana. El espejo de las palabras. Buenos Aires: Editorial Vinciguerra, 1998. Gurevich, Beatriz. “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses.” In The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Kristen Ruggiero, 86–114. Boston: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Kaplinsky Guterman, Sofía. Del corazón al cielo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997. Levine, Annette (Prekker). “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.” http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. Levy, Carlos. trans. El gaucho Martín Fierro: Tresladado al djudeo espanyol. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2005. Melamed, Diego. Los judios y el menemismo: Un reflejo de la sociedad argentina. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000. Papiernik, Charles. La Hagadá de la Shoá. Unpublished. ———. Una vida. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 1997. Sadow, Stephen. “Judíos y gauchos: The Search for Identity in Argentine-Jewish Literature.” American Jewish Archives 34 (1982): 2,164–77. ———. “La colonia judía a través de la ficción argentina actual.” In Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo, edited by Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, 27–39. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001. ———. “Lamentations for the amia: Literary Responses to Communal Trauma.” In Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agosín, 149–62. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. ———. ed. El tiempo y las palabras: Literatura y cultura latinoamericana. New York: Revista Hostosiana/Hostos Review, 2007. A revised version of the anthology can be found at http://iris.neu.lib.edu/books/4/. Sadow, Stephen A., Perla Bajder, and Irene Jaievsky, eds. The Catalogue of Identidad y Diversidad/Identity: The Artist’s Books. http://iris.lib.neu.edu/books/2/. Senkman, Leonardo. “Jewish Latin American Writers and Collective Memory.” In Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writing, edited by Robert DiAntonio and Nora Glickman, 33–44. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Shua, Ana Maria. El libro de los recuerdos. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994. Silber, Marcos, and Carlos Levy. Las doloratas. Buenos Aires: Editorial El Canto Rodado, 2001. Steuerman, Miguel, ed. Testimonios de una semana de horror. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Jai, 1994. Tavonaska, Gregoria. Ydel, el judío pampa. Buenos Aires: Corrigedor, 1998. Wang, Diana. “Lo judio en mi obra.” In Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo, edited by Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen A. Sadow, 311–13. Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2001.

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———. El silencio de los aparecidos. Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural, 1998. Wassner, Dalia. Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina. Boston: Brill, 2014. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires.” In The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experience in the Southern Cone, edited by Raanan Rein and Adriana Brodsky, 315–39. Amsterdam: Brill, 2013. ———. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–64. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

chapter 6

Struggles of Coherence: Listening as Political Agency in the Plazas and Streets of Memory Natasha Zaretsky

Introduction: The Plaza of Memory

On Monday, July 16, 2001, I arrived at the Plaza of Memory in Buenos Aires to find hundreds of people joined to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the bombing of the amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina)—the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society.1 This plaza cannot be found on any map—its official name is the Plaza Lavalle, a space chosen for its location in front of Argentina’s Palace of Justice. Monday after Monday, the group, Memoria Activa (Active Memory), confronted the high courts and transformed this space into what they called the Plaza of Memory to fight for memory and seek justice for the victims of the 1994 bombing of the amia building. And on this Monday, as on every Monday since 1994, this plaza filled with speakers and listeners, in response to the seventh anniversary of the attack. The speaker began the acto (the protest commemorating the attack) by marking off the days—more than 3,000—since the bombing of the Israeli Embassy; then the days—more than 2,000—since the bombing of the amia building; continuing with the number of those killed—eighty-five; and the number of those wounded—hundreds.2 He then prepared us for a moment of silence by voicing the name and age of each person killed. To each rendering,

1 This chapter benefited from comments and suggestions from several readers, including Annette Levine, and, in earlier versions, Leo Coleman and Noelle Molé Liston. I would also like to thank and acknowledge the participants in the memorial movements whom I interviewed as part of this project, whose names have been changed for this publication. An earlier version of this essay was presented as a paper at the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in December 2005. Most of the material in this chapter is based on preliminary fieldwork conducted in 2001 and 2002, as part of longerterm ethnographic research conducted in 2001, 2002, 2003–2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2014, partially funded by a Fulbright iie award and additional awards from Princeton University. 2 Acto can be defined as act or action. I leave it untranslated here to connote the performative and the agentive nature of these practices.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_008

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Figure 6.1  Shofars at Memoria Activa (August 29, 2004) PHOTO BY OLIVER W. SCHIETINGER

the crowd responded with a simple word—“Presente” (here)—invoking the presence of the memory of each victim.3 He then continued with the introduction of the shofar—a ram’s horn traditionally used in Jewish religious ceremonies—which rings out every Monday morning in the Plaza of Memory (see Figure 6.1). He used the following words to provide some context for the public gathered—some of whom were not Jewish: The shofar . . . brings together the people to listen, to know the truth . . . .  The shofar of the people . . . one minute of silence, one minute of remembrance . . . one minute of demanding justice.4 The shofar was blown—the piercing sound momentarily drowning everything out in the urban soundscape as we all stood and remembered. And then he continued: 3 During regular Monday morning actos in the Plaza Lavalle, names were usually not called out. The naming of each victim was something that took place because of the special yearly anniversary. In contrast, at the actos organized at Pasteur Street, the names of the victims were usually enumerated every month and year that an acto took place. 4 Enrique Burbinski, Memoria Activa, July 16, 2001. Translation mine.

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And so the shofar of the people is blown. Just like this, week after week, we listen to its sound, [and] we reiterate our hope that it will break down the walls of impunity in our country. In the Plaza of Memory, [here are] the testimonies.5 * Beginning in 1994, Memoria Activa convened public actos in the Plaza Lavalle, creating a space for citizens to offer their testimonies about the impact of the bombing and impunity more broadly on their lives. Over the years, these testimonies included the words of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, veterans of the Falkland Islands War, artists, activists, Holocaust survivors, and family members of the victims of the amia bombing, among others. The testimonies gathered in this plaza served as a collective response to violence, impunity, and the noted lack of justice emanating from the high courts of Argentina. Although Memoria Activa held their last official Monday acto in 2004, a group of regular attendees, who came to call themselves simply Citizens of the Plaza, continued to gather in this plaza every Monday morning, to blow the shofar and share their narratives. It is this shofar—this piercing sound as a call to gather and to listen—that has marked the beginning of the actos in this plaza every Monday morning since these commemorations began in 1994. Indeed, these actos not only required but demanded listeners, who made these protests both possible and necessary. Those gathered on the outer edges, on the boundaries—the listeners— became the critical interlocutors for those offering their testimonies and for the very development of this space of witnessing. In this essay, I consider the significance of listening as a social practice in these commemorative actos and as a form of agency exercised in the aftermath of destruction—critical to understanding post–amia Buenos Aires.6 Further, listening has become integral not only to the creation of testimonies and the formations of witnesses themselves, but also to the redefinition of the public sphere and the reconstruction of civil society after the bombing. As such, I argue that listening itself needs to be considered as an instance of agency and a force for social change, necessary for formulating narratives in the aftermath of violence and destruction and critical to rebuilding communities and selves. 5 Ibid. 6 I pursue the significance of listening as a social practice in the context of Holocaust testimonies in Natasha Zaretsky, “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires,” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone, eds. Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein, 315–339 (Boston: Brill, 2013).

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1994: Memory and Justice

On Monday morning, July 18, 1994, a car bomb exploded in front of the amia building. This attack killed eighty-five people, wounded hundreds, and destroyed a principal center for Jewish life in Argentina—one that also housed other community organizations and an archive of Jewish history in Argentina. This bombing had profound repercussions for Jewish life in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Only two years earlier, a similar bombing took place at the Israeli Embassy, and for many Jewish Argentines, the 1994 attack resounded with a longer history of violence and anti-Semitism. This included past events in Europe, such as the Holocaust, and experiences in their new nation, such as the urban riots during the Semana Trágica in the early twentieth century and the political repression experienced during Argentina’s state terrorism (1976–1983).7 Fundamentally, this attack also prompted a crisis of belonging—challenging the place of Jews in Argentina. Many Argentines came to question what being Jewish meant and whether it was still safe to participate in Jewish activities. Fears for safety led to the implementation of new security measures at Jewish institutions, incuding schools, social clubs, and temples. Every Jewish building became lined with cement barricades (to prevent future car bombs), and security guards stationed at the doors monitored every person entering. These security measures significantly changed daily life in the city and the landscape of Buenos Aires. Though designed to make people feel safe, the measures also reinforced an atmosphere of exclusion and separation, creating Jewish space as separate in the city. The second significant change in Jewish life consisted of the rise of memory and justice movements dedicated to the victims of the bombing, which combine Jewish practices (such as the shofar) with Argentine modalities of social protests, including the appropriation of central symbolic public spaces as part of their advocacy work. Several social movements formed to advocate for justice after the bombing: Memoria Activa (formed 1994), Familiares y Amigos de 7 Although some question whether Jews were specifically targeted as such by the military dictatorship, they represented a high number of the disappeared and, according to many sources, once captured, were treated differently for being Jewish. See Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York: Vintage Books, 1981); conadep, Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2003), 69–75; Marisa Braylan, Daniel Feierstein, Miguel Galante, and Adrian Jmelnitzky, Report on the Situation of the Jewish Detainees-Disappeared during the Genocide Perpetrated in Argentina (Buenos Aires: Social Research Center of daia, Argentine Jewish Community Centers Association, 2000). See also Emmanuel N. Kahan, Recuerdos que mienten un poco: vida y memoria de la experiencia judía durante la última dictadura militar (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014).

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las Víctimas (Family Members and Friends of the Victims; 1994), apemia (Asociación por el Esclarecimiento del Masacre Impune de la amia or Asso­ ciation for the Clarification of the Unpunished Massacre of the amia; 2002), and the newly formed 18 J (2013). The key differences among these groups are political, especially in their affiliation with the formal Jewish community, their criticism of Argentina and Israel, and their stance on the investigation of the bombing, the trial processes, and recently, the Memorandum of Under­standing with Iran and the sudden 2015 death of the lead prosecutor in the case, Alberto Nisman.8 These groups also pursue advocacy in national and international spheres in different ways; most notably, Memoria Activa pursued a claim against Argentina before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which in 2005 deemed that Argentina failed to provide justice in the amia case. In addition to their advocacy work, these groups organized protests to remember the victims and demand justice in a case that remains in impunity as of this writing. Their forms of protest also have important differences. Memoria Activa staged actos every Monday morning, the day and time the bombing took place, in the Plaza Lavalle facing the high courts of Argentina, where they invited speakers to offer testimonies about the impact of the bombing on their lives. They officially held weekly actos from 1994 to 2004, posting notices in the newspaper Página/12 and inviting media to chronicle their protests for the nation at large. Though they ceased to hold weekly gatherings in 2004, since then, they have returned to the plaza on yearly anniversaries. During the week, however, as noted earlier, a group calling themselves simply Citizens of the Plaza continued to gather on Monday mornings, blowing the shofar and remembering the victims (though not convening local media or the same form of attention). Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas, another group of family members and friends of the victims of the bombings, held their actos every 18th of the month at Pasteur Street, the site of the bombing and the eventual reconstruction of the amia building. At the monthly Familiares protests, rather than a direct dialogue with the Argentine judiciary (as Memoria Activa sought with their location in front of the high courts), the protests focused on the memory of the victims. Here, they regularly named each victim in their actos and ended their commemoration with the Jewish Mourner’s Kaddish (though they also included speeches focusing on justice).9 Later, one of the Familiares members, 8 apemia has taken the most critical stance in relation to the 2013 Memorandum of Understand­ ing with Iran. 9 In addition to the monthly actos, Familiares were also present during the yearly commemorations on July 18 at Pasteur Street, where a family member would often give a speech.

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Sergio Burstein, formed a separate group, 18 J, which convened an acto in the Plaza de Mayo for the first time on July 18, 2014, facing the Casa Rosada (the Presidential Palace). apemia formed in 2002, under the direction of Laura Ginsberg, a family member who had previously been a part of Memoria Activa. apemia does not hold regular weekly or monthly actos but does convene protests on the yearly anniversaries, often choosing public spaces in Argentina with a broader political resonance, such as the Plaza de Mayo and most recently, the National Congress. Despite the political and commemorative differences among these groups, their public actos have created an evolving, heterogeneous narrative in response to the violence of the 1994 bombing. These groups represent new movements within the Jewish community, marking a place for Jews as members of Argentina’s civil society, although some maintain their links to existing Jewish institutions.10 They also represent an emerging Jewish memorial practice—part of a landscape of Jewish memory in Argentina that includes the revival of Yiddish study at the iwo (Institute for Jewish Research), the creation of the Coro Guebirtig (Mordechai Gebirtig Yiddish Chorus), and the resurgence of Holocaust memory.11 Fundamentally, what I have termed memory movements have also become critical sites for negotiating and rebuilding the public sphere and the very boundaries of the “we”—as Argentines and Jews.12 They thereby respond to the personal and collective struggles for meaning and coherence that emerged after the attack—trying to make sense of the violence and simultaneously rebuild their society and nation. By employing Argentine forms of protest, specifically the strategy of appropriating public spaces, they demanded to be included in the Argentine “we” as Jews. Significantly, unlike other Jewish sites, these public spaces are not bounded by barricades but accessible to everyone, enabling the formation of a community of listeners or the special witnesses they seek for their cause. 10

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Some of the movements have greater links to Jewish institutions, such as Memoria Activa whose offices are in the Jewish social and sports club Hebraica. Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas also has greater links to amia as an institution. apemia, on the other hand, does not identify with the Jewish community and is very critical of the formal leadership. See Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–265 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008); also more recently, Lillian Wohl’s chapter in this volume. See Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years after in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, eds. T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, 89–110 (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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One can further compare these movements to other commemorative practices, but I argue that what makes them distinct from memorials, as well as from other social movements in Argentina, hinges on the importance of listening. In this essay, I focus specifically on the actos that depend on such listening. While their practices resonate with the political traditions of groups like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who march in the the symbolically central plaza of Buenos Aires and Argentina, bearing their childrens’ faces on posters and pins, they were also distinct: at the actos of the social movements formed after the amia bombing, in the plazas and streets of memory, citizens came to testify and to listen.

Toward a Theory of Listening and Trauma

In many ways, violence and terror are experiences that fundamentally challenge the fabric of order and meaning that organizes human life. Anthropologists studying violence have described it as diffuse and evanescent, either exceeding the limits of representation or significantly challenging the possibility of articulation.13 The central concern lies in how to narrate an event that resists and often evades the act of witnessing, especially when narration is necessary for personal and collective survival.14 In anthropology, the challenge, shared with the subjects we engage in our ethnographies, is how to represent or narrate that which evades meaning.15 Indeed, many anthropologists of violence are concerned with the consequences of transforming the nature of violence as lived experience (intangible, chaotic, 13

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E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1996); Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction,” in Violence and Subjectivity, eds. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 1–18 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). This question has also been pursued at length about the Holocaust, including the appropriateness of representation and the impossibility of witnessing. See Ernst Van Alphen, Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1997); Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Repre­ sentation: Nazism and the Final Solution. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992); Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92 (New York: Routledge, 1992). Das and Kleinman, “Introduction,” 12–13.

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incoherent, senseless) into a narrative order.16 Yet despite these difficulties, representation or narration is necessary for societies and individuals when attempting to move on and rebuild after suffering violence. Memory, bearing witness, and narration often appear as necessary tools for reconstructing societies following periods of violence, in addition to being sites of contestation between civil society and the state.17 The value of narration following violence can be seen as both an attempt to find meaning and give order to the experience of violence and a fundamentally social act, requiring dialogue with a listener that allows one to begin reconstructing personal ties, the self, and the social sphere.18 Primo Levi, for instance, points to the importance of listeners when he describes the fear he and other Holocaust survivors had upon their return from the camps: “They had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved one, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to.”19 In this way, he points to the critical importance and the obligation of those who were not there to bear witness and to listen.20 Such listeners are indeed critical to the aftermath of trauma, an experience that resists articulation and coherence. By definition, trauma does not register immediately but only in its narration after the fact, resisting immediate comprehension.21 Mieke Bal describes the subject of trauma as lacking a “narrative 16 17

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Nordstrom and Martin, The Paths to Domination, 3–8; E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memory.” Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996); Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–74 (New York: Routledge, 1992). Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Interantional, 1988), 12. Of course, the understanding of survivor is complex and under constant negotiation. Indeed, in terms of Holocaust survivors in Argentina, there has been debate about whether those who were not in the concentration camps but survived the Holocaust in hiding may be considered survivors. For more about the history of Holocaust survivors in Argentina, as well as an exploration of trauma and listening, see Natasha Zaretsky, “Child Survivors of the Shoah”; also Diana Wang, Hijos de la guerra: la segunda generación de sobrevivientes de la Shoá (Buenos Aires: Marea Editorial, 2007). Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Balitmore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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mastery over it that turns her or him into a proper subject” and also as lacking an “addressee”—in other words, survivors find themselves in an uncompromisingly solitary position.22 Yet despite its inaccessibility and the challenge a traumatic event presents to our understanding, it also requires that understanding, “claiming” it in the words of Cathy Caruth.23 Scholars studying violence, war, and psychological trauma, beginning with Sigmund Freud, describe the need to articulate a traumatic event in what also becomes a social act—departing from isolation through the help of a listener.24 While narration and memory have come to be understood as critical to rebuilding societies and selves, it is also clear that in order for the emergence of narrative, one needs a listener, an interlocutor, an addressee.25 Further, an empathetic listener—who shares and becomes implicated in the narration and constitutive of the narrative that emerges—is critical to the emerging networks of reciprocity and accountability that reshape the fabric of belonging endangered by trauma.26 Caruth credits listening as necessary for surviving, literally living on, after trauma, suggesting that “the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another.”27 Dori Laub also 22

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Mieke Bal, “Introduction,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, vii–xvii (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1999). See p. x. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. See also T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (New York: Routledge, 2000); Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Sigmund Freud, “Eighteenth Lecture: Fixation Upon Traumas: The Unconscious,” in General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Rivere, 284–296 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1960). For more about the social dynamics of rebuilding, see Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction,” in Remaking a World; Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years after in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemration, 89–110. On the question of the need for an interlocutor after trauma, see Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness”; Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness”; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Additional practices of listening in Argentina include strikes and escraches connected to the impunity following state terrorism, as staged by the children of the disappeared (hijos). See also Diana Taylor, “dna of Performance,” in Cultural Agency in the Americas, ed. Doris Sommer, 52–81 (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2006). Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See pp. 10–11.

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describes the listener as a blank screen the survivor requires to know the event, in a way, mediating and facilitating its remembering and its re-experience.28 It is in telling one’s story that the healing necessary for survival can begin, leading to knowledge of self gained in the process of dialogue with a listener.29 While listening to the trauma survivor enables a narrative to emerge, this act of listening also becomes one of recognition—just as important to the survivor.30 The audience and their recognition become the necessary criteria for reconciliation and moving forward from other periods of violence as well.31 John Borneman, for instance, describes its value following societal conflicts and violence like ethnic cleansing, though he adds that it must be accompanied by legal accountability.32 In creating a dialogue with a listener, an individual can rebuild social ties, breaking from the isolation inherent to trauma. Narration then becomes critical to moving forward and reconstructing social relationships, and the listener—the addressee—who helps facilitate the process of articulation, plays a key role in that process.33 In the Argentina that emerged after the amia bombing, I argue that such listeners played a critical role in the process of narration following the trauma and violence of the attack. Though they may stand on the edges of witnessing, they have become both integral to and formative of the witnessing that takes place in Buenos Aires—critical interlocutors for the speech acts that have 28 29 30 31

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Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 57. Ibid., 63. See Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness.” Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Fiona Ross, “Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, eds. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 250–279 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); also John Borneman, “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, Affiliation,” in Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 281–304. John Borneman, “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing.” Ruth Leys, “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 103– 145 (New York: Routledge, 1996); Laurence Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 173–198 (New York: Routledge, 1996); Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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been understood as central to the aftermath of trauma, necessary for the testimonies and narratives to emerge.

Listening Toward Social Change: The Plaza of Memory

From 1994 to 2004, every Monday morning, Memoria Activa invited speakers to the Plaza of Memory to bear witness and offer their testimonies to what they experienced as a result of the bombing and to demand justice. When the group first formed, they met in silence; later, rabbis, community members, and others began to speak. They returned, Monday after Monday, to confront the high courts of Argentina. The people who came, the listeners with whom they constructed their narratives, included family members of the victims, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Holocaust survivors, and concerned citizens. Though not with as many numbers as when the group started, every Monday, from 1994 to 2004, Memoria Activa convened actos on Monday mornings in the Plaza Lavalle (a practice to be later continued by the group Citizens of the Plaza). The presence of tv cameras and the media, and the publication of the testimonies on their website, also turned the nation and beyond into potential listeners of these actos. This attempt to create a broader, pluralistic space of witnessing made Memoria Activa’s actos distinct from those of other groups. People come to the plaza on Mondays to bear witness to what they experienced as a result of the bombing—how this attack impacted their lives. In the process, Memoria Activa created an alternative tribunal—open to Jews, non-Jews, survivors and family members, and others. By allowing others to testify, they opened what may have been a personal or communal tragedy to other narratives, including the history of impunity in Argentina. This then enabled individuals to map their own stories within the contours of the 1994 bombing and its aftermath.34 Therein lies the strength and also the greatest challenge for the group—to engage the many other narratives and histories of impunity, while keeping the actos focused on their ultimate goal: justice in the amia bombing. These practices of testifying and listening—for Memoria Activa and the other memory movements—developed to create a community, with a sense of shared obligation for the cause of justice. When people gave testimonies, or came to the plaza to listen, they offered themselves like a Maussian gift, in 34

For an analysis of Memoria Activa’s relationship to other human rights struggles and issues of impunity, see also Susana Wappenstein’s chapter, “The Nation’s Bodies,” in this volume.

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essence, giving themselves: “By giving one is giving oneself, and if one gives oneself, it is because one ‘owes’ oneself—one’s person and one’s goods—to others.”35 In these actos, individuals sought coherence in articulating and seeking meaning after the bombing and also in rebuilding a “we,” pledging themselves to each other, both through the words they offered and through offering themselves as the listeners, without whom the actos would not continue. * When I first came to the plaza to begin my fieldwork in 2001, I tried to stand on the edges, to observe what was happening and not disturb the events—knowing, of course, as every ethnographer does, that I inevitably would. I arrived in Buenos Aires as winter began in June, and I spent every Monday morning in the Plaza Lavalle, watching it transform into the Plaza of Memory. Speakers and listeners gathered—as they did from 1994 to 2004—to count the number of Mondays they had been standing there, to listen to the shofar and the testimonies, and to join in the calls for justice that concluded every acto (see Figure 6.2). It took me several weeks to figure out the dynamics of the different groups gathered, who would join together for the acto and then disperse to various nearby cafés. The leadership of Memoria Activa went to one, whereas the retired schoolteachers from the Jewish school system went to another, and yet another group would go to the Banchero—a coffee shop one short block away, crossing the enormous Corrientes Avenue with a view toward the famous Obelisk. In later interviews, I was told the Banchero used to be famous as the destination many chose for their post-acto coffees, especially in the early days of Memoria Activa, where many attendees joined together the small tables to make one long stretch of activists. By 2001, the group who went to Banchero was smaller—composed of mostly men whom I had noticed stood at the plaza every Monday with the sign “Todos Somos Memoria Activa” (We Are All Memoria Activa). I went to the Banchero by chance one morning after the acto, to have a coffee and warm myself up. One of the men I recognized from the plaza approached me. He was dressed in a sharp wool coat and cap, and he walked straight up to my table and introduced himself to me, asking if I had been at the acto and commending me for being a young person from abroad there to observe the actos. He gladly gave me his phone number when I asked if I could call to follow up with an interview. Fernando [all names have been changed] lived with his wife in the neighborhood of Villa Crespo. Originally from Warsaw, Poland, he worked his entire life 35

Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 1990), 46.

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Figure 6.2  Testimony at the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) (May 19, 2003) Photo by author

in Buenos Aires. When I arrived, he sat me down in his tidy apartment, at a large dining room table, and took out a folder of writings and clippings. He surprised me with his poetry—he had written poems to many of the people he had met during the actos of Memoria Activa. He typed up these poems and then photocopied them. Fernando helped introduce me to the world of those I will call the listeners who regularly went to the Plaza and then to the Banchero café—those who after 2004 would come to be known as Citizens of the Plaza—holding on to the space of the plaza, the Plaza of Memory, for twenty years after the attack.36 It was also through Fernando that I first met Luis. A slight man, perhaps seventy years of age, he would make his way to this plaza every Monday morning by colectivo (bus) with his friend Alberto. They both lived on the outskirts of the city in a working-class barrio that used to be one of the homes to the textile industry in the city. Luis and Alberto invited me to visit them one day, and I went, taking the colectivo from Barrio Norte, a more affluent area close to the city center where upper-middle-class Argentines lived, along with ex-pats 36

See also Karen Ann Faulk’s chapter, “Searching for Justice,” in this volume, for more about the group that became Citizens of the Plaza, as well as her ethnography, Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina. (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013).

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and foreigners. In those neighborhoods, Buenos Aires seemed more like Paris, or at least what one might imagine Paris to be—with vaguely European boutiques, cafés, architecture, and well-dressed women and men. The events of recent years—of the time after the economic collapse of 2001—disrupted that vision. Men, women, and children, who some called cartoneros, now traveled into the city to sift through the garbage and rescue those pieces of paper and cardboard that they could then sell. The poverty was becoming visible in the more affluent areas in a way it hadn’t before. I had never been to their part of the city before; in fact, I usually moved within a narrow stretch that bordered the River Plate, and so I got on the bus they told me to take, my faithful Guía-T in hand. In that small, palm-size guide, the city neatly moved from page to page, divided into grids and lines. I stepped up to the coin machine and dropped in my eighty centavos (at the time, approximately twenty-five cents) hoping none of the coins turned out to be false, a problem that seemed all too common for me in those days, as an outsider who didn’t know how to tell the real from the fake by touch alone. Any time a store clerk returned a bill or coin to me saying it was a trucho, or fake, I was surprised, as they were, in turn, by my inability to know the difference. After successfully paying the fare, I took a seat by the window and settled in for what turned out to be the longest ride I had taken thus far. For over an hour, I looked out the window while following the neighborhoods closely with my fingers in the pages of the Guía-T. As we made our way into the far reaches of the city, the low-lying buildings, houses, and stores all blended into shades of grayish cream. A certain emptiness seemed to linger on the street corners as we passed, and then suddenly we crossed into an intersection bustling with residential life. I had finally arrived. Luis and Alberto were already there, very happy to see me. They warmly greeted me and then took me on a tour of their neighborhood. They began with the main commercial strip and then we walked to the Jewish school and synagogue, where they showed me the classrooms and the space for worship and invited me with pride to come again. Alberto told me that the community in his neighborhood (and by community, he meant the Jewish community) got together after the bombing to form a neighborhood vigil. The bombing of the amia took place in the center of the city—many kilometers away from where Alberto now stood, telling me his story. “Yes,” he noted seriously, “we all got together and stood guard around the school and synagogue. We had to take things in our own hands because we were afraid another attack would happen.” I stood with him in front of that school, far on the outskirts of a city that was one of the southernmost capitals in the Americas, on the margins of many

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North American minds, and imagined what that fear must have been like after two terrorist attacks. After the bombing, in addition to protecting the Jewish spaces in his neighborhood, Alberto, like many others, also chose to go to the heart of the city—to the Plaza Lavalle—facing the high courts of his nation to demand justice. Every Monday morning—at the time and day the bombing took place—they gathered together in front of the Palace of Justice, the Tribunales, the high courts of the land, to hold actos—acts that were partly political action and partly performance, interlinked, together with other listeners. Like many others gathered there, they had not lost anyone directly in the bombing but felt personally implicated in the crisis of belonging that followed the attack and sought to participate in some way in the rebuilding and reimagining of “argentinidad” to include the Jewish. Graciela—another listener in the plaza—would usually arrive early, often walking slowly, perfectly coiffed and dressed neatly, with her leather purse strapped pragmatically across her chest, speaking to as many people as she could and not missing a thing with her sharp blue eyes. During my time in the plaza, she always stood on the same side of the microphone and did not feel shy about voicing her comments and critiques, loudly, about whatever was being said or whoever was speaking, even in the middle of a speech. I observed her from another corner of the plaza for several weeks before someone introduced us. After that, she took me under her wing figuratively and literally, as she took my arm under hers and insisted I stand right next to her during the protests. After the last call for justice in the plaza, she invited me for coffee to one of the nearby cafés. While the protest itself was a moment when everyone came together, afterward, each group dispersed. The organizers of Memoria Activa went to one café, the male retirees who liked to argue with raised voices and hands went to another (the Banchero), and Graciela, with her friends, went to yet another. It was at her café where she told me about her history and how she experienced the bombing. Graciela was born in Poland in the 1930s and arrived to Argentina with her family as a young girl. As she put it, Argentina gave her a place to live and raise a family, but it didn’t “regalar” anything—it didn’t make anything easy or give anything away. On the day of the bombing, she told me that she almost collapsed when she found out what happened. Her niece, who she described as like a daughter to her, worked in the amia building, and only upon learning that she had taken the day off and thus was not harmed did she feel relief. But it didn’t end there for her. She identified with a family history of activism and standing up against discrimination and oppression, and she could not stand idly by after the injustice of the bombing and the subsequent failures of

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her state—of Argentina—to investigate what happened. She thus felt her active participation in the protests of Memoria Activa was an important part of her obligation as an Argentine citizen and saw this activism as part of an important history of human rights in Argentina. As listeners in the Plaza, she and the many others who gathered there, also became the critical interlocutors for the testimonies that emerged as the central platform of Memoria Activa’s public activism.

Listeners at the Wall of Memory (Pasteur Street)

The presence of Graciela, Luis, Alberto, and the many other listeners, was clearly quite important to the Plaza of Memory and the testimonies there. However, testimony as a practice also informed the actos organized in other commemorative spaces, such as the reconstructed amia building. Located in the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Once (pronounced ohn-say), the amia building is on Pasteur Street, itself ordinary and unremarkable—lined with cafés, grocery stores, medical supply stores for the nearby medical school and hospital, and other neighborhood stores. But it is here that the bombing was carried out, and on the 600 block one begins to notice the changes that developed in response to the attack. Eighty-five memorial trees appear on this street, each with a simple plaque that bears a victim’s name. Six thirty-three Pasteur is the paved-over site of the attack, where the amia building has been reconstructed and stands recessed from the sidewalk. A thick brick wall protects it, which also bears the first names of each victim. The protection continues at the door, with security guards, and at the edge of the sidewalk in front of the building, which has been studded with pilotes– cement barricades meant to prevent future car bombs. This street, this building, these trees, the memorial wall—all of these have come to serve as daily reminders of what happened here in 1994. It is also on this street, in front of this building, that the group Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas held their actos every 18th of the month. On those days, the police blocked off each side of the street, not allowing any traffic to enter. Family members of the victims made large posters with the photographs, full names, and ages of some of the victims, which they attached to this wall— photos from other, happier times, with faces that stared out at us as we stood gathered for the acto. They also prepared eighty-five red roses and eighty-five candles. During the acto, a member of the Familiares group read the name of each victim, for whom a candle was lit and a rose placed in a memorial case inscribed with the words “Justice and Memory” (see Figure 6.3).

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Figure 6.3  Familiares Acto at Pasteur Street (December 18, 2003) Photo by author

It was here, at one of these actos, that I met Roberto, one of the listeners. It was raining on that Sunday morning in Buenos Aires, August 18, 2002, as we gathered on Pasteur Street, facing the new amia building and waiting for the commemoration of the bombing to begin. As we stood in a light drizzle, one of the family members of the victims introduced me to Roberto, a good friend of hers who had accompanied them since the beginning. Although he had not lost anyone in the bombing, he participated in the actos and was one of the few regular attendees who was not Jewish. When I asked him, in a later interview, what motivated him, he responded: “I do it because I feel it, and I do it so that the familiares will see, so that the directly affected will see that there will always be someone who will remember. Because a person really dies when no one remembers them.” Roberto did not lose anybody in the attack. But he could have, he told me—anyone could have. As he put it in our interview, he wasn’t “directly affected.” He could not feel the pain of people who have lost their daughter, their son, their husband, their wife, their grandchild. But though he could not cross over that threshold, he also felt an obligation to the family members of the victims and recognized the significance of his own role—as one who stands, listening to their testimonies, remembering with

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them, and facilitating their emerging narratives. He also felt he represented the commitment to assure the family members that others share their struggle. And so he stood, every month, as the listener, on the boundaries of witnessing. Unlike the Monday mornings at the Plaza of Memory, where many different people give testimonies, on Pasteur Street only the family members of the victims spoke. Roberto and others stood on the edges of this witnessing as listeners—listeners who were the addressees of the narratives and who accompanied the family members as they bore witness. Though the listeners did not speak, some did approach the memorial case to place a flower in it and to light a candle—to remember with the families the loss they suffered that day. Roberto, who hadn’t lost anyone in the bombing and never knew those he now remembers, felt a strong sense of duty toward those who died and those who survived. He and the other listeners stood together with the family members to support them as they returned to the moment of loss and destruction; and also, to support them as they departed from it.37 Cathy Caruth signals the same in her work on trauma—suggesting that what narration offers, in returning to the moment of trauma, is also the possibility of departure from the trauma.38 Indeed, here, too, listeners support those bearing witness as they enter the space of loss, violence, and destruction that was the bombing; yet, they also need these listeners to depart from those spaces of trauma as well. In the plazas and streets of Memory—with Memoria Activa at the Plaza Lavalle and Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas on Pasteur Street—the presence of empathetic listeners to their actos became necessary for that departure from trauma. * Memoria Activa expanded the space of the witness—making it more accessible to others who can offer their testimonies and include their own stories within the devastation of the 1994 bombing, often linking it to other instances of impunity in Argentina or personal stories of their loss. Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas needed listeners to hear their narratives and to stand with them and remember the victims. Both groups confronted the challenge of making a cause personal for them relevant to others, especially to society at large, who needed to share in their commitment to memory and justice for their work to be successful. 37 38

By focusing on the role these listeners play for the familiares, I do not want to suggest that they do not have their own experiences to which they bear witness. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” 10.

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The call to listening occasioned by the shofar in the plaza on Monday mornings and the monthly commemorations at the site of the bombing marked points of entry into the space of witnessing. Further, the listeners who gathered at every acto became critical interlocutors for those bearing witness. The memorial trees, monuments, and other commemorative sites in Buenos Aires did not demand listeners like the actos on Pasteur Street and in the Plaza of Memory. In both, listeners became necessary to hear the testimonies given, to respond “Presente” and stand with the family members as they entered—and departed from—the space of witnessing their loss.39

Concluding Reflections on Listening

The speaker who convened the crowd every Monday in the Plaza Lavalle named this space “The Plaza of Memory” and referred to the courts behind them as the “Palace of Injustice.” With their bodies, the listeners gathered disrupted the space of the city and the ordinary rhythms of Monday mornings. Similarly, on Pasteur Street, every 18th of the month, the family members and listeners gathered also disrupting time and space as they sought to challenge the impunity and oblivion that threatened the memory of the victims. Over the years, the Plaza of Memory in particular became a complex social and political field where other claims for addressing human rights and impunity emerged through the testimonies offered at the microphone. These testimonies established this space on the outer edge of the high courts as an alternative tribunal, a space for the truth of people’s experience that seemed to be excluded from the courts within. If justice could not be provided by the state, if society questioned their place as Jews to belong, Memoria Activa and the listeners gathered began to build their answer from that Plaza of Memory—demanding a space as Jews and Argentines and performing a different model of society, a different version of justice, memory, and accountability than that provided by their state. In this essay, I have emphasized listening as a critical practice in the aftermath of the violence of the 1994 amia bombing, necessary for the witnessing and narration of the memory movements and their attempts at finding meaning and coherence. With their presence, these listeners intervened in the discursive spaces of the everyday life of the city and assumed the words of those in power to reshape the vision of the nation. 39

Listeners are critical to the actos that take place in the Plaza of Memory and on Pasteur Street. But it is important to note that people also remember their losses in other, more private moments.

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Such political practices of narration and representation, such struggles for coherence, are critical both to finding meaning and to rebuilding the self and society. However, limits do exist—moments when the boundaries between witness and listener contract, or close, when experience cannot be shared, or the listener may not want to enter that space of the witness or perhaps shouldn’t. There are also moments when listening fails. Over the years, the number of Memoria Activa’s listeners has diminished, and despite many years of struggling against impunity, many doubt the possibility of justice or encountering the true perpetrators. It is also important to remember that neither narrative nor the practices of listening that are critical for generating narrative can fully resolve traumatic experiences. Indeed, certain narrative genres or contexts of witnessing exclude aspects of experience. Fiona Ross’s work on South Africa suggests the need for understanding how narratives are constructed in a different context, such as daily life, and the different forms of telling employed, in her case, by women. She also suggests considering silences and gaps as powerful testimonies to their experiences.40 Anthropologists have further remarked on how the usual interlocutors for those who are survivors and victims of violence, such as the media and international human rights organizations, also condition a particular telling and do not allow a space of expression for the nuances of everyday life, not to mention what happens after testimony.41 Furthermore, these narratives and practices may not necessarily entail an undifferentiated or contiguous coherence. For instance, the memory movements formed after the 1994 bombing have four divisions as of this writing—not unlike other human rights movements in Argentina. Although these divisions have not necessarily worked against their causes, an emphasis on coherence runs the risk of obscuring the way division itself and struggles over memory are in themselves critical to rebuilding civil society following a period of violence.42 * Yet the significance of listeners in the struggle for coherence—both personal and national—remains. Listeners were central to creating a shared fabric of belonging and mutually accountable citizenship in the actos of the family members convened on Pasteur Street and in the Plaza of Memory. In that 40 41 42

Ross, “Speech and Silence,” 272. Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction.” See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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plaza, the actos of Memoria Activa echoed the commemorative and political practices of other human rights movements in Argentina, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose regular protests in the Plaza de Mayo (the central plaza of Argentina) helped shift the national consciousness about the disappearance of their children during the military dictatorship. That model of protest and resistance remained powerful in Argentina as an idiom for change, and Memoria Activa followed along those lines in their weekly actos. Fundamentally, they required the presence of active listeners—as did the actos on Pasteur Street—thus turning listening itself into a practice of citizenship important to rebuilding a fractured civil society.43 In the case of Argentina in the wake of the 1994 bombing, listening itself, as much as narration, has become integral to rebuilding the “we”—the society— following violence and impunity. Listening is not only significant for the family members of the victims of the bombing, or for those who have survived violence, but for those who are listening. As a practice, it is not only critical for the formation of narratives but also for developing a civil society where people feel mutually implicated (following Caruth) and are not mere spectators.44 Although the principal objective of these new social movements may be to understand what happened in the bombing and to seek justice and memory for the victims, it might not be possible. The true perpetrators may never be discovered or prosecuted and the violence of that day will never make sense. Indeed, many people continue to cross the Plaza Lavalle (the Plaza of Memory) and walk along Pasteur Street without looking or listening. However, although justice may not be attainable, and memory may be a struggle, the other function of narration—rebuilding the social sphere, social ties, and the self—may be one of the greatest contributions of these actos. These movements have 43

44

For additional analysis of the differences between these two spaces, see also Annette Prekker (Levine), “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces,” Modernity 2 (2000), http://castle.eiu.edu/~modernity/prekker.html. See also Annette Levine’s chapter in this volume, “Vestiges of Memory Post-Atentado.” For more on the idea of implication in trauma, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24. For the question of spectacle in relation to political violence, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997). The personal involvement of the researcher in the study of situations of violence or trauma can be seen in many works, including Susan G. Brison, Aftermath; Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History; Julie M. Taylor, Paper Tangos (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1998). In this essay, I have not developed my own role as a listener in this ethnographic context; more broadly, the role of the anthropologist as a listener in these contexts merits further exploration.

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developed political spaces and practices of listening—where people offer themselves to others as interlocutors, as addressees, as the listeners necessary for rebuilding citizenship from the plazas and streets of memory.

Postscript: 2006 and 2014

Memoria Activa officially left the Plaza Lavalle in December 2004, no longer holding weekly actos. Since that time, despite several attempts at judiciary closure and clarification, the amia case remains in impunity, nowhere closer to knowing or understanding the truth of what took place. In 2006, I returned to Buenos Aires for the first time after Memoria Activa had officially left the plaza (in 2004). I was curious to see how the space had changed and what had happened to the listeners. Though I had expected some changes, the emptiness surprised me. Unlike other Monday mornings, with the plaza buzzing with the activity of media gathered to chronicle the acto, it was relatively empty. I stood at the edge of the plaza, quietly observing the Monument to the Victims of the amia bombing that stood almost at the center of the plaza, seeming to anchor the space (see Figure 6.4). The monument itself, shaped almost like a sundial, was designed by the artist Mirta Kupferminc to be durable to the elements, to withstand and survive in a public, outdoor space. Yet, signs of abandon abounded. For a while, the only other person in the area was a homeless man who had been sleeping on a patch of grass. I stood near the monument as he noisily arose from his slumber and began to stretch himself awake. Other passersby were just walking their dogs. Yet others were office workers, their arms stacked with papers and files, walking briskly across the plaza. The first person to arrive that morning was Sara, wearing a bright wool coat to withstand the cold winter day that greeted us. Although she had a cold and was bundled up, she told me that she felt she needed to be there. Only about fifteen to twenty people continued to go to the plaza on Mondays, so she explained that each one who wasn’t there made a difference. Another listener in the Plaza had told me that Sara had survived persecution during Argentina’s state terrorism, though she rarely spoke about it to me directly. Instead, we talked at length about the state of affairs in Argentina, and she continually looked at her watch as the minutes stretched past 9:53 a.m., wondering aloud where everyone was. Since those who regularly attended these actos were primarily elderly, there could have been any number of health reasons why they weren’t there. Finally, they started arriving. When Luis saw me from a distance, he was amazed, and after asking about my own life and family, he started telling me

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Figure 6.4  Monument to the Victims of the amia Bombing in the Plaza of Memory (Plaza Lavalle) designed by Mirta Kupferminc (August 26, 2013) Photo by Juan Pablo Chillón

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about the plaza. As we talked, he showed me the plastic they had installed over the plaque at the base of the monument designed by Kupferminc, something they put in to protect what was underneath. That morning, it was covered in dirt and what appeared to be pigeon droppings. Luis carefully took out a tissue from his pocket and moistened it before trying to wipe away the accumulated remains of the week that had preceded this Monday, making the surface new again and the words beneath clearly legible (see Figure 6.5). Alberto also arrived, this time wearing a yarmulke and carrying a shofar. Since Memoria Activa left the plaza, he had studied how to blow the shofar so that he could continue this tradition. After greeting almost everyone there, I stood off to the side, curious to see how this acto might be different from my previous visits. They began the acto in a similar way, convening the crowd to listen, and then Alberto blew the shofar. He put his entire body into the exercise, his air pushing up into the ram’s horn, moving the sound out in bursts. He breathed heavily when he finished, and people congratulated him for a job well done. Then, something occurred that hadn’t happened in the earlier years of my fieldwork: those formerly gathered to listen now began to offer their testimonies, sharing their experiences related to the impunity and injustice following the bombing before ending the acto with a call for justice.

Figure 6.5  Plaque at base of what is titled the Monument to the Martyrs of the amia (August 26, 2013) Photo by Juan Pablo Chillón

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* I have returned to the plazas and streets of memory many times since my very first trip in 2001. Over those years, I, too joined in listening (indeed, many would describe anthropologists as professional listeners) and thus became a part of the social practices in the Plaza of Memory and on Pasteur Street and the other memorial spaces that emerged in the wake of the 1994 amia bombing. Even as the political and economic landscape shifted quite dramatically from 2001 to my most recent fieldwork in 2014, the ongoing presence of the listeners who continued to gather in the plazas and streets underline the significance of listening as a form of political agency after the bombing. Such listening became critical to the struggle for personal coherence experienced by those who lost their family members in the bombing, who needed empathetic listeners to form their own narratives after trauma. Furthermore, listeners also helped rebuild the collective coherence of a community and nation fractured by the bombing—establishing a sense of mutual belonging and accountability from the ground. During those Monday mornings and those 18ths when everyone stood listening, remembering, and fighting for justice, despite their differences, perhaps for a moment, the boundary between self and other, between Jew and Argentine, might collapse or shift. Perhaps, for a moment, that aperture might permit a moment of mutual identification, a moment of a common “we” critical to the struggle against impunity in this case and many others in Argentina.45 Such a common “we” has become integral to the desire for memory and justice that organizes these groups and to those who join them, week after week, month after month, year after year, to remember and to listen, as they struggle to rebuild a sense of personal and collective coherence deeply fractured by the bombing and the ongoing impunity that followed. Bibliography Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambek, eds. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ashplant, T.G., Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds. The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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I borrow the term aperture as an analytical frame from conversations with Carol Greenhouse.

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Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, vii–xvii. Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1999. Borneman, John. “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, Affiliation.” Public Culture 14, no.2 (2002): 281–304. Braylan, Marisa, Daniel Feierstein, Miguel Galante, and Adrian Jmelnitzky. Report on the Situation of the Jewish Detainees-Disappeared during the Genocide Perpetrated in Argentina. Buenos Aires: Social Research Center of daia, Argentine Jewish Community Centers Association, 2000. Brison, Susan G. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2002. Caruth, Caruth. “Introduction.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ——. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Balitmore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. conadep. Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2003. Daniel, E. Valentine. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1996. Das, Veena, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds. Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Das, Veena, and Arthur Kleinman.“Introduction.” In Violence and Subjectivity, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 1–18. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Faulk, Karen Ann, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013. Freud, Sigmund. “Eighteenth Lecture: Fixation Upon Traumas: The Unconscious.” In General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, translated by Joan Rivere, 284–296. New York: Washington Square Press, 1960. Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992. Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Translated by Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Jelin, Elizabeth, and Susana G. Kaufman. “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years after in Argentina.” In The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, edited by T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, 89–110. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kahan, Emmanuel N. Recuerdos que mienten un poco: vida y memoria de la experiencia judía durante la última ditadura militar. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014.

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Kirmayer, Laurence. “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation.” In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 173–98. New York: Routledge, 1996. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–74. New York: Routledge, 1992. ——. “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York: Routledge, 1992. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage Interantional, 1988. Leys, Ruth. “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory.” In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, 103–45. New York: Routledge, 1996. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. London: Routledge, 1990/1950. Minow, Martha. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and JoAnn Martin. The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Prekker (Levine), Annette. “Memoria y Justicia: Separate Places for Separate Spaces.” Modernity 2 (2000). Ross, Fiona. “Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 250–79. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Spitzer, Leo. Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997. ——. “dna of Performance.” In Cultural Agency in the Americas, edited by Doris Sommer, 52–81. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2006. Taylor, Julie M. Paper Tangos. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1998. Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Translated by Toby Talbot. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wang, Diana. Hijos de la guerra: la segunda generación de sobrevivientes de la Shoá Buenos Aires: Marea Editorial, 2007.

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Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan, eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Child Survivors of the Shoah: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires.” In The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone, edited by Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein, 315–39. Boston: Brill, 2013. ——. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–65. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

chapter 7

Searching for Justice: Citizenship, Human Rights, and Anthropology Karen Ann Faulk

Ethnographic Mo(ve)ment

It’s a dull gray morning in the city. I arrive at Tribunales a few minutes early and climb out of the subway tunnel, walking down the subterranean hall past the young guy busking with his bandoneón, past the women selling the brightly striped socks so popular this season, past the stream of billboards publicizing English institutes, theater productions, or the city government’s new campaign to improve waste collection (remember, only put out your garbage between the hours of 8 and 9 p.m.!).1 I get to the steps to the street, nodding my head to the guy selling tissues and mints and to the ancient shoeless woman’s outstretched hand, all of them daily fixtures at this stop on the D Line. The only thing that changes regularly are the advertisements on the walls. Climbing the final set of stairs, I emerge directly in front of the imposing faÇade of the Palace of Justice (Palacio de Justicia), though my companions in the plaza prefer to call it the Palace of Injustice. I walk carefully, avoiding the ubiquitous dog excrement on the sidewalks. I have heard many residents of Buenos Aires report their surprise upon traveling abroad and noting the lack of this permanent porteño fixture. Nonetheless, attempts by the city government and some neighbors to curb this freedom of canine expression are largely ignored. Crossing Talcahuano Street to enter the plaza, I notice how much more crowded it is than usual. I’m reminded of the murga practices that happen here in the summer months, as the neighborhood group refines its rhythms and energetic kicks in the days leading up to Carnival. But it’s fall now, and the pounding drums sound more methodical than the playfully expressive music of the murgueros. A street protest, clearly, another near constant fixture in the city, though this plaza sees fewer than the nearby Plaza de Mayo or the Plaza del Congreso. This concentration is directed at the entrance to Tribunales. Reading the signs the protesters hold, I realize that they are some of the family members and allies of the young people killed in the December 30, 2004, fire in the discotheque Cromañón, mobilized today while the 1 My thanks go to the editors of this volume for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter.

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members of the band that played that night give their legal declarations. Behind them, alone in his folding chair as he has been for the last few weeks, sits a man from the interior province of Jujuy. The sign at his side announces his entrance into the fortieth day of a hunger strike, undertaken in a lonely struggle against some unclear instance of suffered injustice. Several meters to his left, past the now-bare monument to the lawyers disappeared during the last military dictatorship (the solid bronze plaque wherein their names had been etched had been stolen, perhaps as a political statement but more likely for its resale value as a raw material), lies the now-ragged tent of the Cooperativa San Telmo (Ex-Padela), a housing cooperative whose residents suffered eviction from the building they had occupied and who had installed themselves months previously in a tent in this plaza, living beneath the elements while awaiting government resolution. The middle of this section of the plaza is where the monument in honor of the amia victims is located (Figure 7.1) and where I find my companions, the self-named Ciudadanos de la Plaza (Citizens of the Plaza). ***

Figure 7.1  Monument in the plaza Photo by the author, 2004.

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My face-to-face engagement with family members of amia victims and the broader community concerned with remembering and securing justice for the attack took place over several sessions, during the (southern) winters of 2000 and 2001, from October 2004 to March 2006, and during brief return visits in September 2009 and December 2012. Between visits, I maintained contact electronically with key members and continued to read and review media releases and press coverage of events. While there, I was able to observe and participate in weekly memorials/protests (actos) held by the group Memoria Activa (Active Memory), including the final weeks of Memoria Activa’s official organization of these actos, the monthly memorial events held in front of the amia, yearly events by these and other groups, and the creation of the group Citizens of the Plaza. In addition to formal interviews and informal conversations with participants, I also attended other relevant events during these time periods, including the trial that led to the eventual disrobing of prosecuting judge Juan José Galeano. One of the things that struck me throughout my time participating in these moments was the intermixing of the languages both of citizenship and human rights. In this chapter, I provide an overview of this mixing and explore some of the broader theoretical implications that this “rights talk” has, both in contemporary Argentina and beyond. I show what the linkage of these languages of rights looks like and the importance it holds, both in terms of philosophical premises and actual lived expression.2 I also reflect on the ethnographic moment, my engagement with the events described, and the way the production of anthropological knowledge is often, and perhaps inevitably, anachronistic, displacing time as well as space through the creation of (de)contextualized description.

Justice and Human Rights

The struggle for justice in the amia case is, in many ways, a struggle for rights. What these ideas of rights are, and what matters to those most deeply affected, cannot be taken for granted but must be explored through detailed discussion 2 Portions of this chapter also appear, in a different form, in Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013); Karen Ann Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights.” In Human Rights: Critical Dialogues, ed. Mark Goodale, 98–110 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and, Karen Ann Faulk, The Walls of the Labyrinth: Impunity, Corruption, and the Limits of Politics in Contemporary Argentina (PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 2008).

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and analysis with those involved. For the past several decades, Argentine lawyers, activists, and politicians have been key in the formation and formalization of transnational human rights law and institutions. As an exporter of human rights tactics, ideas, and experts, Argentina has been a source of innovation and protagonism in the field of human rights.3 These innovations were in part the product of an intense focus on human rights in public discourse in Argentina, which intensified throughout the 1990s. Though the idea of human rights gained initial popularity through the disappearances and torture during the dictatorship (1976–1983), it is now used broadly, in conjunction with a host of issues, including, for example, the right to dignified work and rights surrounding gender identity.4 The long years since the amia bombing have seen family members of victims mobilize to fight for their right to justice by publicly questioning the government’s conduct in the investigation. Justice, in this context, is seen as both a right of citizenship and a human right. Memoria Activa has been particularly vocal in articulating its demands for justice in these terms. For more than a decade, Memoria Activa held weekly public protests demanding a full and impartial investigation into the amia and Israeli Embassy bombings. The organization, which also acted as a plaintiff in the criminal trial, was instrumental in drawing and maintaining attention to the irregularities in the official investigation and ultimately pushing forward the removal of Judge Galeano from the case and his eventual disrobing. The words and actions of Memoria Activa draw on the rhetoric and practices of other Argentine human rights organizations in asserting justice as a fundamental human right, in contrast to the impunity and corruption they see as characterizing the handling of the investigation. In developing their actos, Memoria Activa drew on the language and forms of protest developed or popularized by established human rights movements. Adopting familiar patterns such as weekly protests in public plazas helped establish its cause as part of the generalized problem of impunity for human rights violations. Though the 3 Kathryn Sikkink, “From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights,” Latin American Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2008): 1–29. 4 Ley 26.743 from May 2012 establishes the right to gender identity. In the words of Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (cha) secretary Pedro Paradiso Sottile, “With the passage of this law, Argentina acts in accordance with its national and international obligations and responsibilities and we find ourselves once again in the global vanguard on the road to full citizenship, in which the rights of all are respected and guaranteed, without any discrimination whatsoever” (emphasis added, my translation). See http://www.cha.org.ar/ley-de-identidad -de-genero-ley-no-26-743-promulgada-y-publicada-en-el-boletin-oficial-el-24-de-mayo -de-2012.

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group has had little formal or technical support from organizations concerned with the “dirty war,” it frequently appeals to their symbolic alliances, made visible through such actions as the presence of one of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the weekly events. By locating its demands for justice in the Israeli Embassy and amia bombings as part of the larger human rights movement, it is arguing that these attacks are not a problem for Jews or the Argentine Jewish community alone but a problem for Argentine society as a whole. For example, the closing act of the weekly events was the repetition of some variation of the following call for justice: For the 30,000 disappeared, victims of state terrorism in our country, we demand JUSTICE! For the children, stolen from their homes during the last military dictatorship, who are still today searching for their real identity, we demand JUSTICE! For those killed in the Israeli Embassy bombing, we demand JUSTICE! For our friends and relatives, victims of the brutal attack on the amia building, we demand JUSTICE! tze · dek tze · dek, tir · dof—justice, justice, you will seek [Deuteronomy 16:20]. Until next Monday… This constant feature of the weekly actos also demonstrates how Memoria Activa locates its search for justice within the broader context of Argentine identity. The move to define the bombings and the struggle for justice as problems for all society is not a denial or an effacement on the part of Memoria Activa that the movement arose from the Jewish community, as seen by the use of the biblical phrase as the close of this important invocation. Indeed, the movement also publicly valorizes its identity and location as based within a Jewish tradition, however diverse and multivocal the definitions of and identifications with this community may have been, in ways that simultaneously work to creatively reinterpret or reactivate that tradition.5 The passage from Deuteronomy is also inscribed on the monument erected to the dead in the Plaza Lavalle and frequently appears in Memoria Activa’s documents. In using this biblical passage, Memoria Activa is affirming that the struggle for justice is 5 Beatriz Gurevich, “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, ed. Kristin Ruggiero, 86–111 (Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); Ibid., Passion, Politics, and Identity: Jewish Women in the Wake of the amia Bombing in Argentina (Buenos Aires: Universidad del cema, 2005).

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a moral injunction as well as a social responsibility. This appeal to theological justification allows Memoria Activa to assert a religious identity, even while discursively inserting itself and its struggle within a broader national context of human rights movements.

Rethinking Citizenship

In this way, the attack on the amia has contributed to the expansion within Argentine society of the idea of justice as a human right, to be asserted and protected for all. The attack has also led to an increased articulation of rethinking the meaning of citizenship. Memoria Activa, for example, combines elements of Jewish ritual with an insistence on the attacks as not being a “Jewish” issue. Rather than seeing the attacks as perpetrated against Jews, with Argentine soil being a displaced battleground for a foreign conflict, through its actions Memoria Activa locates the Jewish community as an integral part of the nation, while simultaneously asserting the right to Jewish specificity and difference. In calling for recognition of Argentine Jews as full and integral members of the Argentine nation, the movement is proposing a redefinition of the national imaginary as essentially plural, multiethnic, and multicultural. In aligning with this focus on the role of Argentine Jews within the Argentine nation, the family members of the victims of the amia bombing also use the language of citizenship in articulating their demands. As one member said during one of Memoria Activa’s weekly actos: We wanted to remember; we wanted to practice memory, but we wanted to do it in an active way, exercising our rights as citizens, as members of a community, as free men [sic] that seek to live in freedom, and we could only achieve that through justice. For that reason [we have] our name, to practice our memory actively, for that reason [we come] to this place, in front of the Palace of Justice that does not honor its name.6 This highlighting of the victims, their families, and the broader community as citizens is also taken up by another group that has organized and engaged in public action after the amia bombing. A new group formed when Memoria Activa, after more than ten years of continuous weekly protests, made the decision to end this form of action and, as it argued, focus more on the legal sphere and the cases, petitions, and briefs it was intricately involved in pushing forward. 6 Recorded by the author, March 8, 2004.

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For many of the longtime participants, however, the idea of “abandoning the plaza” was too difficult to accept. Thus, a small number of these participants continued meeting in the Plaza Lavalle every Monday morning and communally decided to take on the name Citizens of the Plaza (Ciudadanos de la Plaza).7 An essential feature of this new group’s exercise of citizenship was their physical presence in the public space of the plaza. Writing on the practices of citizenship in urban, highland Bolivia, Sian Lazar has argued that citizenship is not just “an abstract status or category of belonging, but concrete, physical, and embodied, involving a sense of collectivity which includes a common relationship to place.”8 In this way, citizenship is expressed and enacted through the collective, physical occupation of space and realized through the public display of ritual action. While in the case Lazar describes the ritual action involves a neighborhood fiesta, I argue that Citizens of the Plaza are likewise performing and forging their citizenship through the collective practice of continuing the weekly actos in the Plaza Lavalle. I was in Buenos Aires for the end of Memoria Activa’s weekly actos and the formation of Citizens of the Plaza, and I accompanied them for the first fifteen months. What follows is a series of brief portraits of the participants in Citizens of the Plaza. These are designed to illustrate the meaning they attribute to their practice and to provide a temporally located ethnographic chronicle of the moment. Names have been changed, and in some cases individuals sharing similar characteristics have been combined into composites. However, the descriptions retain enough of the original to endow an accurate sense of who chooses to keep going to the plaza and why. All of the participants (except this anthropologist and the occasional university student or journalist) are ages fifty to ninety-five. Most are middle class, though some count on more resources than others. There is a nearly even gender ratio, with women represented only minimally more than men among regular participants. The group as a whole would generally split into two or three smaller groups who would gather in separate nearby coffeehouses after events. These were usually segregated by gender (excepting the anthropologist, who accompanied each group on a rotating basis), though on several special occasions (e.g., birthdays, my farewell party) the participants met as a whole. 7 See also Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–265 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). 8 Sian Lazar, El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 208), 143.

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Edith. “I’ve been coming since the very first moment. Not since the first week [of Memoria Activa’s actos] but from the very first moment. I was walking close to the amia when the attack happened. I immediately began to walk in that direction, to see what help I could be. When I got to Tucumán [Street], the sidewalk was covered in glass. All of the windows had been blown out. You couldn’t even walk there.” Born in Poland, Edith speaks Yiddish, German, and Spanish and came to Argentina as a child escaping Nazi persecution. One of her four sons was killed by the dictatorship while he was as a student at a provincial university. She lost her life savings with the economic collapse of 2001. A voracious reader, she is capable of providing thoughtful commentary on a wide variety of themes related to contemporary politics. Nonetheless, she is soft-spoken and rarely speaks in a group, maintaining a low profile. She is also one of the few participants who does not join any of the others for coffee after the weekly actos. For Edith, her presence in the plaza is an act of resistance, solidarity, and (in my eyes) profound courage. Las maestras (the teachers). A significant number of the regular participants in Citizens of the Plaza are retired schoolteachers, from both public and religious institutions. They tend to move together as a group, with one woman holding a minor leadership role among them and often speaking for the whole. Los del Banchero (the Banchero group). Most of the male participants meet afterward in a nearby restaurant known as El Banchero (one in a chain of restaurants with that name). In the early days of Memoria Activa, many of the attendees would gather here after the actos. Thus, some of those who still did during my fieldwork had been doing so for many years and recalled wistfully the days when they occupied the entire back portion of seating. They viewed the reduction in numbers as a lack of commitment to and engagement in the fundamental duties of public citizenship. Now numbering from six to ten, this group discusses politics, Argentine history (two of their number being historians and all having lived there throughout most of the twentieth century), and local and international events. They differ strongly in their political convictions and personalities, but all value the opportunity to share the time and space for what are often heated conversations on these Monday mornings. Sara. Through her activism as a former detainee she has accepted a degree of public visibility that furthers her cause by providing a human face to the horrors suffered by those in her position. She was a held prisoner (detenida) by the most recent military dictatorship when she was already in her fifties. Her advanced years, like those of a number of others, made her continued weekly presence in the plaza, regardless of rain or winter cold, a true effort she nonetheless tirelessly undertook. Forceful but not aggressive, she is one of the strongest defenders of the importance of memory in the group. She also, like many of

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the others, participates in the monthly memorials organized by another group of family members of victims. As she told me, her activism is part of a persistent and determined effort to confront and overcome the injustices in society. David. David is one of only three participants who also actively attends meetings and events by another of Memoria Activa’s splinter groups, apemia (Association for the Unpunished Massacre of the amia). Though in an initial interview he told me he had never belonged to or participated in any organized political party, months later he confided to me that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (literally, card carrying. He pulled out his wallet to show me the card). He admitted to having feared that I might be a cia operative but had finally decided I was probably not. He relates having been briefly incarcerated during Perón’s presidency for his political activism. In addition to his regular presence at amia-related events, he also attends the weekly demonstrations held by one of the groups of retirees demanding an increase in pensions.9 Originally part of the Banchero group, he stopped attending Citizens of the Plaza altogether after getting into several fights with other participants. These fights came about when he accused the man who learned to play the shofar of showing off, arguing that such demonstrations of Jewish identity, greatly approved of by nearly all the other participants, were unnecessary and no more than ostentatious displays. His political activity was a constant marker throughout his life, and to the end he sought ways to practice politically engaged citizenship. Esther. Esther comes to the Plaza Lavalle on Monday mornings from a district of the province, the trip taking well over an hour each way. Elena. Elena is the mother of one of the main lawyers for Memoria Activa. This makes her continued presence in the plaza especially significant, both for the attendees and for her commitment to “preserving the space.” She is an accomplished seamstress, and her deceased husband had owned a textile store in the traditional neighborhood of Once. Jorge. One of the participants most often called on to speak during the actos, Jorge was also an active supporter of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Linea Fundadora) (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—Founding Line) and other human rights organizations. He was also on numerous occasions called out in the group as a symbol of the broad nature of their struggle, as he continued to frequent the events “even though he isn’t Jewish.” This served for them as support of the idea that the attacks were not a Jewish concern but one affecting all of Argentine society. 9 For an analysis of these organizations, see Lindsay Dubois, “Activist Pensioners, a Contradiction in Terms? Argentina’s Jubilados,” in Anthropology & Aging Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2013): 170–183.

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Emanuel. Emanuel was not quite as old as some of the others (another faithful participant turned ninety-four during my fieldwork; in fact, his birthday was July 18, the same day as the amia attack). However, he always seemed to have felt the effects of his years more than the others in many ways, and in part because of this, I know little of his personal history or circumstances. He was generally accompanied to the plaza by one of the Banchero group who attended his same synagogue, and this man would help him when he became overexcited or disoriented. Emanuel would often break into heated diatribes, most often against things not clearly connected to the present situation in ways the rest of us could readily perceive. However, once in a while his injunctions did seem relevant to the moment and in a few key instances were especially pertinent for me. On several occasions, he vocally questioned my presence and motives. He accused me of coming to Argentina and being with them in order to take away their stories and histories, to take them abroad (llevarlas al extranjero) and use them for my own benefit. A charge, put that way, that I could not deny but would try to cast in a different light or at least relativize with appeals to my desire to contribute to the group. However, ours was not a dialogue but a one-sided screaming match, intensified by his invectives on my not being Jewish. Those around would try to silence him or smooth over the things he said. Nonetheless, I appreciated his openness, and I suspect he articulated feelings that others held as well, even though by the end I know many of them had come to also value my presence and care for me as I did for them. I was moved one day long into my fieldwork when Emanuel, who often refused to join the other men at the café, blaming his financial troubles and decrying the high prices of modern times, insisted in spite of all my refusals to pay for my coffee. The anthropologist (me). One of the few and meager ways in which I was able to make an immediate and direct contribution back to those who so generously shared their time and feelings with me came when the Citizens of the Plaza decided to pool their resources and replace the bronze plaque that had accompanied the monument to the victims that formed the nodal point for their gathering. They very much wanted to repeat the same inscription on the plaque as it had had previously, but the long span of time since its theft meant that no one in this group remembered the exact words. Having both copied and photographed the inscription in an earlier trip to Buenos Aires, in diligent anthropological obsession with detail, I was able to provide them with a copy of the original. This gesture was appreciated, though I felt that it also fed their confusion over my purposes. My interests, as in what I found interesting or important, differed so incomprehensibly from theirs that I received constant questions, at first, and later only a quiet acceptance filled with occasional sideways glances, wondering why I would be interested in what I was asking. Who was I that I could combine

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access to such information (the inscription, in this case, but also in my attendance at the various trials and legal proceedings, which members of this group did not get involved with, leaving such matters to the provenance of the inner circle of Memoria Activa) with a foreigner’s inability to understand some of the most basic things (repeatedly proven by my questions considered to be irrelevant or ignorant)? The category of “anthropologist” was to some degree an empty signifier to many of them; when introducing me to others, one key member invariably and to the end called me a journalist (periodista), in her own way conflating the variety of researchers/writers/investigators who had approached the plaza over the years into the one that made the most sense to her. Nonetheless, whether or not I succeeded in making my purposes and desires fully understood, I know that many of the group did come to trust me, and I hope that I have managed to find ways to write about their lives and the stories they shared with me in ways that do them justice.

Citizenship and Human Rights

Each of the participants in Citizens of the Plaza had his or her own reasons and personal trajectories that led to continued participation in the group, often at a high personal cost—physical, emotional, or otherwise. Yet running throughout their stories is a commitment to an active and engaged practice of citizenship, a dedication to poner el cuerpo in ways deeply meaningful for them.10 As demonstrated by their stories and the earlier portion of this chapter, the activism provoked by the amia bombing has been noteworthy in its multiple engagements with ideas of citizenship and human rights. Another way in which the languages of citizenship and human rights are intertwined in the amia bombing comes with the case Memoria Activa brought against the state of Argentina in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (iachr). In July 1999, five years after the amia attack, Memoria Activa filed suit with the iachr against the state of Argentina.11 The iachr and the Inter-American 10

11

Barbara Sutton, “Poner el cuerpo: Women’s Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina,” Latin American Politics & Society 49, no. 3 (2007):129–162. Sutton highlights how the term poner el cuerpo is used to describe the embodied nature of collective protest and activist struggle, the importance placed on the physicality of acts of struggle and resistance, and as a way of referencing dedication to a cause and the coherence between words and actions. Coverage of this case (12.204) and documents relating to it can be found on the website of the iachr, http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/default.asp.

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Court of Human Rights are the organs within the Organization of American States (oas) for the promotion and protection of human rights. Functioning since 1979, they operate according to legal instruments, principally pacts or conventions, as well as a small but significant set of established precedents. By this time, the iachr had a strong reputation among Argentine human rights groups for its rulings against the so-called impunity/immunity laws that halted prosecution for dictatorship-era human rights violators, which it deemed incompatible with the 1978 Convention on Human Rights.12 Memoria Activa brought two major counts against the state of Argentina, each for violating the state’s obligations as a signatory of the American Convention on Human Rights, or the Pact of San José, which Argentina ratified in September 1984 upon the official return to democracy. The first accusation concerned the right to life and physical integrity of the victims of the amia, as guaranteed under Articles 4 and 5 of this convention. Memoria Activa argued that, following the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, the Argentine state had the obligation to foresee the possibility of another attack and respond appropriately in order to prevent such an occurrence. It contended that the Argentine state “failed to adopt the necessary measures to prevent the attack,” charging that the police protection of local Jewish institutions was inadequate and noting the intelligence services’ lack of attention to indications and warnings of a second attack. The second count concerned the violation of the rights of the victims and their families to obtain justice through local tribunals, as guaranteed by Articles 8 and 25. It denounced numerous irregularities in the investigation carried out by Judge Galeano and his office (juzgado), claiming that the Argentine state had “violated to the detriment of the relatives of the victims the right to the judicial guarantees that assure that the causes of the events that produced the damage be effectively investigated, the right that a regular process be followed against those responsible for having produced the damage, and that as part of this process the guilty be sanctioned and the victims compensated.”13 In taking its case to the oas, Memoria Activa effectively removed the question of citizenship rights from a closed state-citizen relationship and drew on 12

Tom Farer, “The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime: No Longer a Unicorn, Not yet an Ox,” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1997): 510–546; Robert Goldman, “History and Action: The Inter-American Human Rights System and the Role of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2009): 856–887. 13 From the presentation by Memoria Activa in front of the iachr, case 12.204, amia-Argentina.

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the international codification of human rights in bodies like the iachr. In appealing to the iachr, it did so fundamentally as citizens—citizens of a state that had failed to fulfill its obligation to guarantee the protection of human rights. The iachr, in this case, is being asked to intervene, serving as an additional, international layer of protection for people whose countries fail to uphold the requirements and conditions agreed to upon joining the international organization. This intertwining of the idea of citizenship with normative transnational regimes of human rights has broad theoretical and practical implications.14 The demands Memoria Activa articulates before the iachr demonstrate its concern for broader institutional changes that will lead to greater security for society as a whole, based on an inclusive vision of the rights of citizenship and a core and ineludible commitment to the protection and promotion of human rights.15 Accordingly, the group demands structural and institutional changes designed to build a particular vision of democracy. More broadly, and throughout the actions taken by both of these groups, the linkage of rights of citizenship with human rights in the aftermath of the amia bombing draws attention to the ways in which these two concepts are linked in their philosophical bases as well as their practical expressions. Within the current structure of the international system, the state holds primary responsibility for the protection of rights, and states are the focus of international pressure to increase and sustain such protections within their borders. The importance of the state as the main guarantor of rights was highlighted by Hannah Arendt when she argued that the rights of man, or human rights, in spite of the best intention to safeguard the basic humanity of all peoples, are in fact incapable of guaranteeing such rights to those who lack the protection of a state. She pointed to the lack of practical utility of a notion of rights of humanity for those denied the right to belong to any state or national community. Equality, she said, is formed through the right to participation in a public sphere—that socially created space that is at once built on and denies the individuality of persons. Stateless peoples “lack that tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from being citizens of some commonwealth.” As such, the paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in 14

15

Mark Goodale, “Introduction: Locating Rights, Envisioning Law between the Global and the Local,” in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, eds. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 1–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). I extend this argument in Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism.

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general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself— and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within an action upon a common world, loses all significance.16 Human rights, for Arendt, must be based in rights to be a citizen. Partha Chatterjee made a similar point by identifying the nation-state as the specific form created to realize the universal ideals of modern citizenship, based on freedom (sovereignty) and equality.17 I have argued that a recognition of the continuing entwinement of citizenship and human rights is not only a pragmatic reality of the contemporary world but also contains the potential to transcend the limitations that each contains due to the lingering influence of their historically particular, Enlightenment-era liberalist foundations. By focusing on citizenship, conceived of as a dual relationship of responsibility and accountability between citizens and the state, as the primary conduit for the promotion and protection of human rights, we are able to firmly locate the collective obligations of all members of society in the mutual construction of social well-being.18

Ethnography as Anachronism

In this chapter, I have attempted, as anthropologists often do, to convey the meaning and broader implications of the actions of those I met and worked with, in this case the family members and allies of the victims of the amia bombing. I have sought to analyze and interpret their words and actions in terms of their conceptual force and their potential for rethinking or revitalizing the way we approach fundamental notions and ways of being self-in-society and enacting social change, here as relates to citizenship and human rights. In addition, I have sought to do so by conveying the texture and feel of the place, time, and space that provided the context for their actions and activism. But the act of writing ethnography often (though not always) requires displacement in space. 16 17 18

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 297–298. Emphasis in original. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University, 2004), 29–30. Karen Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights,” in Human Rights: Critical Dialogues, ed. Mark Goodale, 98–110 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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In order to approach the emic perspective of those whose thoughts, actions, and contexts we hope to understand, we frequently inhabit their spaces, placing our bodies in the work much as protest movements themselves rely on poner el cuerpo to achieve cohesion and strength in their demands. But it also, perhaps inevitably, entails a layering of time. I was in Buenos Aires during a number of specific moments, though my engagement didn’t end when I was away. Indeed, my thoughts and attention were often there even when my body could not be, and I maintained contact by phone, Skype, and e-mail with certain people and by reading and watching local media sources. This would on happy occasion be accompanied by the arrival into my hands of select material objects, generously brought by others whose paths had led them through Buenos Aires. Even so, physical distance both limited my sense of connection and enabled me to write. Separated by distance, writing is frequently separated by time as well. Even when doing fieldwork “at home,” at some point anthropologists often need to close off a period of research in order to write about it effectively. As such, my own writings cover certain moments and not others. Added to this layering of time comes the long process of revision and publication, followed of course by the temporal distance separating publication from the moment the reader reads what is contained therein. The events themselves occur at specific moments, in physical and temporal contexts. I sit here in 2014, rethinking arguments articulated mostly from 2007 to 2011, on data collected from 2000 to 2009, though later revisited, corroborated, and discussed with participants and colleagues. Building a chronicle, then, is an inherently anachronistic practice. Ethnog­ raphy captures better than many other forms of writing the embedded temporality of events but in writing removes them from their temporal location and places them in another. My reflections here on the use of the languages of citizenship and human rights in the search for justice after the amia bombing show how this usage has both broadly relevant, decontextualized theoretical implications for considering the evolving nature of the state-citizen relationship and is deeply embedded in the particular (ethnographic) moment. The long aftermath of the amia bombing provides a chance to see both the chronicity of the lack of justice and the layers of time and space that the illness of impunity has traversed and pervaded. Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

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Dubois, Lindsay. “Activist Pensioners, a Contradiction in Terms? Argentina’s Jubilados.” Anthropology & Aging Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2013): 170–83. Farer, Tom. “The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime: No Longer a Unicorn, Not Yet an Ox.” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1997): 510–46. Faulk, Karen Ann. In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013. ———. “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights.” In Human Rights: Critical Dialogues, edited by Mark Goodale, 98–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ———. “The Walls of the Labyrinth: Impunity, Corruption, and the Limits of Politics in Contemporary Argentina.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008. Goldman, Robert. “History and Action: The Inter-American Human Rights System and the Role of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2009): 856–87. Goodale, Mark. “Introduction: Locating Rights, Envisioning Law between the Global and the Local.” In The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 1–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gurevich, Beatriz. “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses.” In The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, edited by Kristin Ruggiero, 86–111. Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005a. ———. Passion, Politics, and Identity: Jewish Women in the Wake of the amia Bombing in Argentina. Buenos Aires: Universidad del cema, 2005b. Lazar, Sian. El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2008. Sikkink, Kathryn. “From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights.” Latin American Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2008): 1–29. Sutton, Barbara. “Poner el Cuerpo: Women’s Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina.” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 3 (2007): 129–62. Zaretsky, Natasha. “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish chorus.” In Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, edited by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–65. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

chapter 8

So We Don’t Lose Memory: Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires after the amia Bombing Lillian M. Wohl

Introduction: Hearing the amia, Experiencing Music

The day after the amia Recital por la Reconstrucción (Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia) held on November 30, 1994, in the Estadio Obras Sanitarias—the “templo del rock porteño” (temple of Buenos Aires rock)— Argentine newspaper coverage widely applauded this benefit concert as a spectacle of solidarity in response to the attack on the Jewish community center and mutual aid organization, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia).1 With a musical lineup consisting of Fito Páez, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Ignacio Copani, Patricia Sosa, Sandra Mihanovich, Fabiana Cantilo, and Andrés Calamaro, the amia event hoped to raise money and awareness for the reconstruction of the amia building, which was destroyed in the shocking terrorist attack that took place just four and a half months earlier on July 18, 1994 (see Figure 8.1).2 The participation of these popular musicians—who represented a mix of iconic legends of Argentine rock nacional (national rock) and 1 I owe a very special thanks to Sarah Green for reviewing the translations in this essay and giving me much appreciated feedback and editorial advice. I would also like to thank Sabrina Charaf at the Centro de Documentación e Información sobre Judaísmo Argentino and Marc Turkow for directing me to the archive of photos and press clippings from the Recital por la Reconstrucción. In it, articles about the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia appear in newspapers such as Clarín, La Nación, Crónica, and Página/12, among others, including Luís Bruschtein, “Rock ‘para no olvidar’ en obras en solidaridad con la amia,” Página/12, December 1, 1994; “Emotivo festival para reconstruir la amia,” Clarín, December 1, 1994; “Los sonidos del silencio,” Clarín, November 27, 1994; “Un antídoto contra el olvido,” Página/12, November 30, 1994; “Por la amia, un recital bárbaro,” Crónica, December 1, 1994; Daniel Amiano, “Otra apuesta musical por la vida,” La Nación, December 2, 1994. See also “Estadio Obras,” http://www.estadioobras.com. 2 The amia building was reinaugurated on Wednesday, May 26, 1999. See Fernando Rodríguez, “Hoy será inaugurada la nueva sede de la amia,” La Nación, May 26, 1999, http://www .lanacion.com.ar/139796-hoy-sera-inaugurada-la-nueva-sede-de-la-amia.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004297494_010

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popular artists whose fame would later be solidified throughout the 1990s— brought a critical visibility to the project, launching the cause for the amia into the realm of greater civic and national consciousness while elevating certain “musical labors of memory” to unify participants around familiar frames of political engagement linked to the discursive and performative practices of artistic resistance associated with the aesthetics of rock nacional.3 According to Pablo Vila and Paul Cammack, rock nacional played “an extremely important part in the socialisation and re-socialisation of broad sectors of Argentinian youth during the military period,” contending that rock nacional was responsible for “restoring truthful communication regarding the real country, salvaging the meaning of life in a context of lies and terror, consolidating a collective actor as a means of counteracting an individualistic model of life, [and] counterposing a supportive community of actions and interests to the primacy of the market.”4 Likewise, the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia shaped Jewish and non-Jewish perceptions about the amia cause by socializing the public through these style aesthetics. By spotlighting powerful political narratives of memory and forgetting invoked by these musicians and their songs, the benefit concert format created a public arena to address the amia attack in its aftermath, thus claiming and confirming memory as the “appropriate way” to unite support for the cause.5 Under the banner of “Para Que No Perdamos la Memoria” (So We Don’t Lose Memory), this benefit, fund-raiser, and commemoration concert was advertised throughout Buenos Aires. As co-organizer Elio Kapszuk stated in an interview with the newspaper Página/12, “I know there are artistic factors that are undoubtedly involved in the show—that Spinetta hasn’t played in a long time, and that Páez attracts his own crowd—but I assure you that at the box office, people were asking for tickets to ‘the amia show’, nothing else”—a statement spotlighting the centrality of the cause to the concert experience while anticipating criticism about the factors contributing to the program’s 3 See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and Labors of Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 5. Jelin distinguishes between memory as a passive practice or unconscious intrusion and memory as a “labor” required to transform social worlds through intentional, active, and productive efforts “involved in the processes of symbolic transformation and elaboration of the meanings of the past.” 4 Pablo Vila and Paul Cammack, “Rock Nacional and Dictatorship in Argentina,” Popular Music 6, no.2 (1987): 129–148. 5 Kip Pegley and Susan Fast, “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” in Music, Politics, and Violence, eds. Kip Pegley and Susan Fast, 41 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

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success.6 The Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia draws critical attention to the role of music and musical performance in making the amia cause visible around a concept of memory. Just two years after the bombing of the Israeli Embassy, the 1994 attack on the amia confirmed the anti-Semitic—not just anti-Israeli—sentiment fueling violence against the Jewish community of Buenos Aires, while initiating a profound crisis of identity and belonging on a scale never before experienced there.7 By symbolically reinforcing both the Jewishness and the “Argentineness” of the amia cause, the concert assembled, shaped, and voiced public dissent after the attack not just as “the problem of an ethnic and religious group living in Argentina” but as a “matter of state”—a point absent from official narratives until former president Néstor Kirchner took office in May 2003.8 The selection of musicians more well-known for their contributions to “national” music rather than ethnically or religiously marked “Jewish” music thus buffered the event from easy categorization on the basis of its “Jewishness” or as “Jewish music” in Buenos Aires, and since the concert, the amia has continued to feature musical performance as a central part of its strategy to renew the spirit of the Jewish Argentine community after this tragedy.9 In this essay, I discuss how musical performance serves the amia in manifold ways to project the amia’s cause to broad public audiences and to unify 6 “Un antídoto contra el olvido,” Página/12, November 30, 1994. Kapszuk states: “Yo sé que hay factores artísticos que necesariamente están implicados en el show, que Spinetta hace mucho que no toca, que Páez convoca a su público…pero te aseguro que de venta, la gente pedía sus entradas para ‘lo de la amia’, nada más.” 7 Fernando Fischman and Javier Pelacoff, “Demandas de justicia y marcas de identitdad: manifestaciones públicas de los judíos de Buenos Aires después del atentado a amia,” presented at the Eleventh International Research Conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, June 23–26, 2002. 8 Beatriz Gurevich, “After the amia Bombing: A Critical Analysis of Two Parallel Discourses,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, ed. Kristin Ruggiero, 99 (Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). 9 Fernando Rodríguez, “Hoy será inaugurada la nueva sede de la amia,” La Nación, May 26, 1999, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/139796-hoy-sera-inaugurada-la-nueva-sede-de-la-amia. As Rabbi Ben Hamu, then chief rabbi of the Comunidad Israelita Argentina, stated at the reinauguration ceremony, “Volver a casa simboliza el espíritu de nuestro pueblo. Es nuestro reclamo por la vida y significa que, aún cuando las 86 víctimas dejaron en nuestros corazones un vacío que jamás podremos llenar, ninguna bomba podrá destruir nuestro espíritu.” (Returning home symbolizes the spirit of our community. It is our demand for life, and it means that even though the 86 victims left our hearts with a void that can never be filled, no bomb will ever destroy our spirit.). Originally, it was believed that there were 86 victims; that figure was later revised to be 85.

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Figure 8.1  Luis Alberto Spinetta and Fito Páez performing at the Recital por la Reconstrucción, November 30, 1994 Photo courtesy of the Centro Marc Turkow.

Jewish participation in amia events as a process of transforming ethnic heritage into a culturally “expedient” tool in the aftermath of ethnic violence. “The role of culture,” argues George Yúdice, “has expanded in an unprecedented way into the political and economic at the same time that conventional notions of culture have been emptied out,”10 and it “underpins performativity as the fundamental logic of social life today,” showcasing how “culture-as-resource” is mobilized to address matters of political, economic, and social importance.11 As ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier notes, “the relation between expediency, performativity, and care of the self is seldom smooth or successful.” She argues, “While the paradigm of expediency might be useful for interpreting how this music enters into circulation through live performances and recordings, it does not help us to understand why and how some musicians themselves experience this music.”12 By focusing on the role of music at 10 11 12

George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. Ibid., 28. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, “Disencounters Between Music’s Allure and the Expediency of Culture in Colombia,” special issue, Latin American Research Review 48 (2013): 14.

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the amia in Buenos Aires while approaching the 1994 bombing as a transformative moment in the history of Jewish Argentine arts and cultural expression, I discuss how the experience of music is multifaceted, at once recognizing and reaffirming remembrance in its links to commemoration, but also expanding beyond it to showcase memory as an everyday force of musical engagement.13 As historian Raanan Rein notes, “Most Jews in Latin America are ‘Jewish’ in the cultural sense—not the genetic, religious, ideological or communal sense— and define themselves as such”; Jewish Argentines “perform” their Jewish identities, with musical performance serving as a key mode for the circulation of these ideas.14 Furthermore, the emergent meanings of Jewish music in Argentina showcase an eclectic approach to musical programming and musical identity that considers a wide variety of musical styles constituent of Jewish Argentine cultural identity. At the amia, this eclectic repertory centralizes a transnational and transhistorical canon and concept of Jewish music that bridges the cultures of Jewish memory with the politics of music and memory in Latin America.15 How, then, does Jewish musical performance remember at the amia? How do artists and audiences use performance to make political claims or to contest struggles for justice, and what do (can? should?) musical responses to trauma sound like to uphold a community space as a critical site of memory? 13

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A series of conferences entitled Recreando la cultura judeoargentina were organized by historian and novelist Ricardo Feierstein and literature professor Stephen Sadow in the late 1990s and early 2000s, attracting international attention and fostering greater local interest in projects addressing Jewish Argentine cultural expression, from art to literature, music, theater, and film. See Ricardo Feierstein and Stephen Sadow, eds., Recreando la cultura judeoargentina, 1894–2001: En el umbral del segundo siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2002) and Recreando la cultura judeoargentina 2: Literature y artes plásticas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2004). In 2004, a conference was held to focus on Jewish musical engagements in Argentina and beyond, organized by Mario Benzecry. See Mario Benzecry, Aporte del pueblo judío a la música: Encuentro Internacional Recreando la Cultura Judía: dedicado a la música, diciembre de 2004, auditorio amia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2009). See also Stephen Sadow, “Lamentations for the amia: Literary Responses to Communal Trauma,” in Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosín (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 149–162. Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Diaspora (Boston: Brill, 2010), 4. See Agosín 2005; Aizenberg 2002; Jelin 2003; Meter and Huberman 2006; Roniger and Sznajder 1998; Sarlo 2006; Spitzer 1998; Taylor 1997, 2003; Yerushalmi 1982; and Zaretsky 2008a in this chapter’s bibliography. This list is by no means exhaustive of the many excellent articles, essays, and full-length volumes now dedicated to the subject of art, culture, memory, and politics in Latin America.

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Constructing Jewish Musical Performance through Commemoration: “El Arte Junto a Memoria Activa”

In spite of being largely forgotten today, the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia marks a point of origin in the trajectory of “public spectacle” characterizing Jewish Argentine musical performance since 1994 and its use as a catalyst for musical-political action.16 Following its example, additional benefit concerts have been held for the amia cause, organized by groups such as Memoria Activa (Active Memory)—an independent grassroots advocacy group of friends and family members of the victims of the amia attack—to demand a clarification of the facts and to seek justice for the attack. Memoria Activa has often held critical positions in opposition to the leadership of the amia and the daia (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations), asserting its independence as a hallmark of its political aims. In 1999, one of these concerts was held in the Teatro Gran Rex, a historic theater in downtown Buenos Aires.17 The show drew an impressive lineup of musicians such as León Gieco, the klezmer duo César Lerner and Marcelo Moguilevsky, Ignacio Copani, Victor Heredia, Los Destakados del Pelle, Gabriela Torres and Lucho Gonzalez, Alejandro Lerner, violinist Damián Bolotin, Julia Zenko, the Coro Kennedy, and Opus Cuatro. Unlike the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia, the Memoria Activa event, called El Arte Junto a Memoria Activa (Art and Memoria Activa), relied more heavily on the presentation and performance of Jewish Argentine cultural and religious expressions to engage participants in keeping with their motto “justicia, justicia, perseguirás” (Hebrew: ‫ ;צדק צדק תרדף‬English: justice, justice, you shall pursue), the biblical command from Deuteronomy 16:20. As anthropologist Karen Ann Faulk argues, 16

17

See Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997), iv. As Taylor argues, “Public spectacle is a locus and mechanism of communal identity through collective imaginings that constitute ‘nation’ as ‘an imagined political community’” (iv). While exploring the issue of gender and its relationship to the violence of the military dictatorship government during the “dirty war,” she believes that “understanding spectacle, then, is dependent on a complex scene of interface: understanding both the local cultural specifics of national dramas and the way that national and international spectacles interface and produce each other” (xi). José Blumenfeld, interview, December 2011. I would like to thank Memoria Activa member José Blumenfeld for sharing with me information about the concerts and providing me with a compact disc recording of the show. Blumenfeld remembered that the first show was held in 1997 when Mercedes Sosa, the beloved Argentine folklore singer and member of the Nueva Canción (New Song) movement, was the headliner of the event.

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In using this biblical passage, Memoria Activa is affirming that the struggle for justice is a moral injunction as well as a social responsibility. This appeal to the theological justification allows Memoria Activa to assert a religious identity, even while discursively inserting itself and its struggle within a broader national context of counterimpunity movements.18 Although León Gieco sang nationally recognized protest anthems like “Solo le pido a Dios,” this commemorative event held almost five years after the attack featured musical performances intentionally selected to highlight Jewish sound and musical traditions. For example, the first performance by Damián Bolotin was a virtuosic violin arrangement of the Yiddish folksong “Oif’n Pripetchick Brennt a Feier,” written by Mark Warshawsky, followed up by a communal sounding of the shofarot—ritual horns named in the Bible as one of the earliest musical instruments used by the Jews.19 The shofar is an iconic symbol of Jewish sound and of the Memoria Activa organization, who met each Monday morning in the Plaza Lavalle in front of the Supreme Court Building to blow the shofar at 9:53 a.m., the time of the amia attack, and to give speeches and testimony in protest of the lack of justice for the bombing (until their ritual meetings ended in 2004).20 During the show, the duo of César Lerner and Marcelo Moguilevsky performed two klezmer freilachs (an Eastern European Ashkenazic Jewish dance form) as jugglers and street performers wandered through the crowd, transforming the arena into a “carnivalesque” atmosphere.21 As the liner notes to the Libro cd Testimonio (cd Booklet of Testimony) describe, the event was intended to be a full spectacle, performing memory “not as a rally” but as

18 19

20

21

Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013), 96. Bathja Bayer, “Music—Biblical Period,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 14, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 641–643 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007). “Oif’n Pripetchick Brennt a Feier” is perhaps one of the most well-circulated of all Yiddish folksongs after being featured in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and this song even appears as a unifying musical theme in the 2009 Argentine film Anita, a fictional account of a young girl’s journey through Buenos Aires in the immediate aftermath of the amia attack, directed by Marcos Carnevale and starring Norma Aleandro and Alejandra Manzo. José Blumenfeld, interview, December 2011. Furthermore, after 2004, the shofar remained an important symbol of protest, blown by those who still gathered in the plaza and called themselves the Citizens of the Plaza. See Natasha Zaretsky, “Citizens of the Plaza: Memory, Violence, and Belonging in Jewish Buenos Aires” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008a) and Natasha Zaretsky’s chapter “Struggles of Coherence” in this volume. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941).

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“an expression of life of all men and women of goodwill, Argentine Jewish and non-Jewish, of all who want to join us in this claim for justice.”22 It was an evening when things were to happen and happened. Living statues, people on stilts, mimes and jugglers, true representatives of street art, were waiting at the theater hall to deliver the National Document against Impunity No. 18071994 (the date of the bombing), a small object, a symbol that synthesizes the search for justice that cannot be given up.23 Drawing on a variety of aesthetic forms, Memoria Activa organized this benefit concert as an interactive, performative musical and theatrical experience—a show designed to engender participation and to foment Jewish attention and action not only toward the amia cause but also back toward Jewish Argentine cultural expression.

Songs of Memory for the amia

Beyond the Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia, the Art and Memoria Activa concert, a handful of song and dance performances addressing the amia and the Israeli Embassy bombings detail the different ways in which a particular song or an individual musician has accrued meaning for the amia cause through the active and discursive labors of musical memory. For example, León Gieco’s song “La Memoria” from the 2001 album Bandidos Rurales is sustained as an anthem to Argentina and Latin America’s victims of domestic terror during military dictatorship governments (and other human rights atrocities throughout the continent) during the twentieth century. In it, Gieco names the amia bombing alongside these tragedies as a poetic argument contending that memory accrues value and potency as the “weapon of life and history,” subsequently writing Jewish history into the greater narrative of Latin American history of the twentieth century. Similarly, Ignacio Copani’s song “Memoria Activa” has become an anthem appropriated for the amia cause; it was recently used by the dance troupe Grupo Agshamá under the direction of choreographers Ariadna Faerstein and Leandro Díaz for the show amia Sombras—a shadow ballet danced behind a white sheet as a screen to narrate a series of tableaus portraying key symbols of 22

Memoria Activa, El Arte Junto a Memoria Activa, Buenos Aires: Latín Gráfica, 1999, compact disc. 23 Ibid.

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the amia cause. When I saw this dance routine performed at the 2013 Acto de Iom Haatzmauut (Celebration of Israeli Independence Day), it stood out as a performance intervention not only making direct reference to the attack itself by re-creating the event through coordinated movement in sound, but it imaginatively reassembled Jewish Argentine bodies motioning through the movements of remembrance with deeply affective resonances.24 Juan Martín Rago’s ballad “Cada 18,” a musical setting of Sofia Guterman’s poem “Cada Día 18,” is an emotive and plaintive cry of grief over the loss of a daughter.25 Even contemporary pop singer-songwriter Kevin Johansen, teaming up with Argentine comic artist Ricardo Liniers, debuted their own homenaje (homage) to the victims of the bombing, with the song “Candombito del recuerdo,” set to lyrics especially devised for the anniversary of the attack and arranged from an earlier composition simply titled “Candombito” from Johansen’s 2002 album Sur o No Sur. Singing, “la sombra de tu despedida / Como un tambor a resonar / Para las vueltas de tu vida / Y volverá a su lugar” (The shadow of your departure / Like a drum resounding / For everything you lived in life / And it will return to its place), Johansen places the act of remembrance in the work of music and the musician, positing the beating of the tambor as an actor serving to fill the void left by the passing of the victims while becoming a musical beacon to guide the memories of the dead for the living. Juxtaposing the sounds of the repique drum typical of candómbe to the return of the memory of the lives of the loved ones lost in the amia bombing, Johansen and Liniers’s work centralizes musical labor as an act of remembrance.26 In a video produced by Elio Kapszuk and Gabriel Scherman for the commemoration event, Johansen sings and strums on his guitar while Liniers paints a watercolor painting entitled 85 puntos de color (85 Points of Color) in the patio space of the outdoor gallery within the amia complex. Seated just in front of Israeli artist Yaacov Agam’s iconic eight-­paneled, multidimensional optical sculpture Monument to the Memory of the Victims of the Terrorist Attack on amia, the gentle guitar chords and consonant harmonies sounded in the prerecorded, partially diegetic track are peaceful and texturally uniform, projecting a sense of intimacy as Johansen and Liniers are shown finishing their pieces and touring the gallery space as spectators.27 24 25 26

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I attended this event with the Guebirtig Choir on Monday, April 15, 2012, at Club casa. This recording is available in the archive at the Centro Marc Turkow. One of three candómbe drums of medium size, larger and flatter sounding than the chico (small) and smaller and sharper sounding than the piano. Candómbe is especially important to Uruguayan musical and national identity. This video is available on many websites. I consulted the official amia video posted to msn Video by msn Música, July 16, 2010.

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wohl “Candombito del Recuerdo” Kevin Johansen

“Little Candómbe of Memory” Kevin Johansen

Te fuiste como despidiendo La otra vuelta que te vi Ahora debés estar sonriendo Parece que seguís aquí

You left as though you were saying goodbye The last time that I saw you Now, you’re surely smiling It seems like you’re still here

La sombra de tu despedida Como un tambor a resonar Para las vueltas de tu vida Y volverá a su lugar

The shadow of your departure Like a drum resounding For everything you lived in life And it will return to its place

Volverá A su lugar Na na na na na Que volverá a resonar

It will return To its place Na na na na na It will resound again

Y ese repique de tambores Por el camino que andarás Ese latir de tus amores Que volverá a resonar

That repique of drums On the path that you will walk That beating of your love It will resound again

Volverá a sonar Volverá a su lugar

It will resound again It will return to its place

Na na na na na

Na na na na na

(Source: Transcription from the official amia video posted to msn Video by msn Música, July 16, 2010.) Transcription of lyrics by author.

(Translation by author with Sarah Green.)

As acts of “musical reclamación”—that is, musical protests, demands, commemorations, homages, and tributes to make reparations or to address matters of distress in reference to an act of violence or response to conflict—these songs, dance performances, and concerts associated with the amia attack both commemorate and mourn the victims in different ways. For example, public performances of “amia Sombras” by Grupo Agshamá and the video of

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Johansen’s “Candombito del Recuerdo” exemplify a style of representation found in artistic commemoration, in which expressive practices directly engage with symbols of the attack. These types of songs and performances are representative of what musicologist Amy Wlodarski calls a “testimonial aesthetic,” wherein secondary witnesses later give voice to a “postmemorial” phase of remembrance representationally distinct from primary accounts.28 Other musical examples such as the benefit concert format leverage the individual personalities and profiles of key musicians to realize what ethnomusicologist Jonathan Ritter observes as a “self-referentiality within the testimonial song tradition today, allowing meanings to stack upon meanings, remembrances upon remembrances, to accrue and sediment to particular texts and songs.”29 Moreover, all of these expressive forms deal with the question of the politicization of memory as an act of public commemoration and the ways in which musical performance opens up a space for public debate.30 However, not all musical practices referencing the amia tragedy or occurring in its memorial auditorium directly address the attack or locate the importance of the role of musical forms in the frameworks of primary or secondary witness. In fact, one critical outcome of the varied uses of musical performance after the amia attack—focused on understanding the experience of the uses of music—is that everyday musical performances and regular musical programming events at and coordinated by the amia emerge as a critical site of memory after this collective trauma. As ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman insists, “The identity of Jewishness depends on where Jewish music takes place”—a key point that lays a critical foundation for understanding how musical performance is experienced at the amia.31 While musical labors of commemoration establish the amia as a site of memory, the everyday programs taking place within its 28

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Amy Wlodarski, “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 109; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Hirsch addresses the role of the visual medium of the photograph to mediate what she calls “postmemory”—the means of remembrance through secondhand means of the transference of memories, which she locates in the transmission of information and affect taking place through, especially, familial relationships. Jonathan Ritter, “Complementary Discourses of Truth and Memory: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Canción Social Ayacuchana,” in Music, Politics, and Violence, eds. Kip Pegley and Susan Fast, 214 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012). Ritter, “Complementary Discourses”; Pablo Vila, “Argentina’s ‘Rock Nacional’: The Struggle for Meaning,” Latin American Music Review 10, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1989): 1–28; Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Philip Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxxii.

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walls—in its theater, on its outdoor patio or the street nearby, or in the library or art gallery space—no longer need to repeatedly reference the tragic past to elevate Jewish Argentine heritage in the service of memory.32 By serving the cultures of memory persistent at the amia, musical performance has been used by organizers for a different type of memory work—that of collective memory to unite and serve the tastes and interests of the religiously and culturally diverse Jewish Argentine community. As anthropologist Paja Faudree argues in Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico, “Understanding the political dynamics of modern—and postmodern— entities such as the nation requires ethnographically examining how people experience activities that are only sometimes read in political terms, and that relate to ideas about the nation in oblique and hidden ways.”33 While far from hidden, but perhaps rather literally tucked into the now carefully guarded headquarters of the amia building at 633 Pasteur Street in the bustling neighborhood of Once, the expansion of everyday musical programming as a part of the amia Cultura Department (formerly known as the Departamento de Cultura/Department of Culture) opens up musical performance and expressive culture to an expanding public at the amia while retaining its political dimension.

Addressing the Ethnographic Present: Jews, Music, and Collective Memory in the Café Literario and the Auditorio amia

Over multiple trips to Buenos Aires to conduct ethnographic and archival research on Jewish Argentine musical practices from 2010 to 2014, I have observed how different processes of musical remembrance overlap to define the amia as a key location in the network of Jewish performance spaces in Buenos Aires. Given the amia’s symbolic and real importance as a central Jewish organization in Argentina, the amia also plays a critical role in centralizing a musical repertory of songs, instrumental works, themes, artists, and creative practices, thus demonstrating the dynamic and elastic ways in which contemporary Jewish Argentine identity is negotiated through the labors of musical memory. My research is deeply tied to my personal experiences as a foreign researcher visiting the amia to attend performances in the Café Literario salon on the second floor and in the subterranean performance space 32 33

See Breckenridge 2009; Huyssen 2003; and Winter 1998 in this chapter’s bibliography. Paja Faudree, Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013), 8.

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of the Auditorio amia, a position from which I learned about the tragic history of the bombing and the multiple meanings of memory in contemporary artistic practices there. As I routinely visited the amia, passing through the security process and exiting into the courtyard separating the security wall from the main office building, I often noted how the main building is dressed in the history of Jewish Argentine cultural expression; golden plaques and full-color posters hang on building walls commemorating the history of Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires, while insulating this transitory space with tangible reminders of the social life of art, music, theater, and dance.34 In the Café Literario, the room used for performances is adorned with an old upright piano and built-in bookshelves packed with volumes on the subjects of Jewish history and Jewish culture. On an evening in December 2011, I watched as the multiuse space was transformed into an energetic theater for a show by the Dúo Guefiltefish (Gefiltefish Duo) and the Yiddish Coro Ale Brider (All Brothers Choir). That night, the fifteen or so middle-aged to elderly members of the Coro Ale Brider milled about excitedly on the right side of the room as Horacio Liberman and Mirtha Zucker (of the duo) welcomed the audience, introducing themselves to the relaxed crowd who appeared to be mostly friends and family. Coro Ale Brider began by singing a popurrí of well-known Yiddish folksongs, including “Vi Nemtmen a Bisele Mazl,” “Tumbala Laika,” “Bai Mir Vistu Shein,” “Taiere Malke,” “Az der Rebbe Zingt,” and “Dona Dona,” appearing uninhibited while cheerfully combining their slightly out-of-tune and somewhat out-of-synch voices with purposeful attention to articulation, enthusiasm, and personal enjoyment (see Figure  8.2).35 The popurrí is an important formal musical structure often found in the repertory of Yiddish choirs in Argentina. This cross-section of well-known portions of multiple songs (usually the refrain) is a unified arrangement of stylistic components and lyrical content.36 In this way, choirs are able to reference more folksongs— or “chestnuts” of Yiddish folksong—in a set performance time that triggers individual participation.37 As a compositional practice, the popurrí is related 34 35

36

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Natasha Zaretsky, “Arriving in Buenos Aires,” in Violence: Ethnographic Encounters, ed. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, 107–118 (New York: Berg, 2009). Yiddish spellings of these particular songs reflect the titles of the songs as they appear in the Coro Ale Brider repertory that I collected during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires in 2011–2012. Francisco José García Gallardo, “El ‘popurrí’ en las murgas o chirigotas del carnival de Huelva,” Trans Iberia/Revista Transcultural de Música 1 (1997), http://www.sibetrans.com/ trans/articulo/316/el-popurri-en-las-murgas-o-chirigotas-del-carnaval-de-huelva. Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 76.

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Figure 8.2  Coro Ale Brider in the Café Literario Photos by author.

to the musical “remix” as an intertextual form; however, rather than expressly focusing on creating new musical meanings, the popurrí is a series of samples of easily recognized musical motifs directing audience responses back toward the past and to the original version of the song. For a popurrí to successfully engage an audience, it must include tunes and lyrics familiar to the intended audience as a technology of memory drawing on the soundscapes of shared history communicated by collective engagement. The Coro Ale Brider’s first song set this tone of participatory engagement with the invocation of this popurrí, “Idish 1,” establishing the centrality of a transnational canon of popular Yiddish folksongs in Argentina. With their feathered endings and unequal balance of male and female voices, the audible, aesthetic qualities highlighted the emphasis on unison singing for social pleasure.38 Following up the popurrí “Idish 1,” the choir then moved on to sing a version of “Basavilbaso” by Jevl Katz, a Lithuanian immigrant and Jewish folk musician

38

Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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who arrived in Argentina in 1930.39 This strophic folksong narrates scenes of rural Jewish life in the eponymous colony located in the Entre Ríos province, established by Baron Mauricio von Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Agency (jca) in 1887.40 The song “Basavilbaso” is a sonic reference to the history of Eastern European Jewish colonization, a program that drew tens of thousands of Jews to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The song presents portraits of social and familial life in Basavilbaso, while parodying the confrontation between religious ritual—representing old-world lifestyles and values—and the processes of modernization attached to the secularizing forces of Argentine nationalism, which promoted the assimilation of new immigrants. Once centered in the interior provinces and rooted in a harsh agrarian lifestyle, the Jews, like other ethnic groups in Argentina, were pulled into the process of rapid urbanization that swept the country in the early twentieth century, bringing waves of migrants and other foreign immigrants to Buenos Aires.41 As ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay argues, “Song texts and tunes encode memories of places, people, and events past; in this manner the songs are intentionally constructed sites for long-term storage of conscious memories from the past.”42 The present-day performance of “Basavilbaso” highlights Shelemay’s point, demonstrating how the song narrative, the repetitive stanzas, and the melodic simplicity of this folksong make it easily sung by amateur singers, serving not only as an homage to the Jewish Argentine agrarian past or to the composer—Jevl Katz—but also reinforcing Jewish Argentine social bonds through the embodied practice of remembrance in communal singing. Audience participation during a Dúo Guefiltefish show is intentionally crafted to extract a positive emotional response to the communal singing event, 39

40 41 42

In the past five years, excellent new research on Jevl Katz has been published by Zachary Baker, “Gvald, Yidn, Buena Gente Ievel Katz, Yiddish Bard of the Río de la Plata,” in Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage, eds. Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 202–222. See also Ariel Svarch, “Mucho lujo: Jevl Katz y las complejidades del espectáculo étnico-popular en Buenos Aires, 1930–1940,” Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional 53 (Summer 2013) and Mollie Lewis Nouwen, Oy, My Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). Eugene Sofer, From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982). Victor A. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1930: In Search of an Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6.

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and the repertory of the Coro Ale Brider is deliberately curated by Horacio and Mirtha to access these personal connections. As Horacio explained to me, It is much more difficult to curate a choral repertory in Yiddish because you have to realize that, unfortunately, there are few people who speak Yiddish. The majority of our listeners have heard some traditional songs in Yiddish, and when they are sung, what you do is to take them to some moment of their life that was, almost always, happy. And so, the person enjoys listening to something that he or she likes and hasn’t heard in a while. It’s like smelling a perfume that evokes a pleasant memory of a moment in your life. And so, that is our role—finding those songs.43 By incorporating extramusical gestures and forgoing the use of repertory folders—instead insisting that choir members memorize all song lyrics—the choir is able to relate to audiences in ways that reach beyond the sonic material to create an inclusive atmosphere not solely dependent on linguistic acuity but driven more by the symbolic currency of the postvernacular musical resonances of Yiddish.44 Throughout Buenos Aires, Yiddish choirs have played a special role in sustaining Jewish Argentine cultural expression, and as anthropologist Natasha Zaretsky argues, some have also participated as key actors in the “social movement” of protesting the amia and Israeli Embassy attacks, as her study of the 43

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Horacio Liberman, interview, February 2012. Liberman states, “Es mucho mas difícil hacer un repertorio para un coro en idish porque tenés que saber que es poca la gente que conoce el idish lamentabemente…. La mayoría de nuestros oyentes han escuchado canciones en idish, bien tradicionales y cuando se las cantan, lo que hacés es llevarlo a algún momento de su vida, que casi siempre fue feliz. Entonces disfruta de escuchar algo que le gusta y que hacía mucho no escuchaba…. Es como oler un perfume que te lleva al recuerdo de algún momento agradable de tu vida. Entonces, esa es nuestra function—encontrar esas canciones.” For more on Yiddish literature and expression in Argentina, see the writings of Eliahu Toker. See also, Silvia Hansman, Susana Skura, and Gabriela Kogan, Oysfarkoyft: Localidades agotadas (Buenos Aires: Del Nuevo Extremo, 2006); Perla Sneh, “Ídish al sur, una rama en sombras,” in Pertenencia y alteridad: Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios, eds. Haim Avni, Judit Bokser Liweant, Sergio DellaPergola, Margalit Bejarano, and Leonardo Senkman, 657–676 (Orlando: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011); and Fernando Fischman, “En la conversación fluía. Arte verbal, consideraciones emic y procesos conmemorativos judíos argentinos,” Runa 29 (2008): 123–138; “Using Yiddish: Language Ideologies, Verbal Art and Identity among Argentine Jews,” Journal of Folklore Research 48, no. 1 (2011): 37–61; “‘Religiosos, no; tradicionalistas, sí’: Un acercamiento a la noción de tradición en judíos argentinos,” Revista Sambatión 1 (2006): 43–58.

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Guebirtig Choir demonstrates.45 The social justice mission of the Guebirtig Choir was a central impetus for its formation under the leadership of music teacher Reizl Sztarker, who initially brought together a group of friends to sit together and sing songs in Yiddish while processing the aftermath of the attack.46 This group would go on to include hundreds of members at the height of its popularity in the late 1990s, participating in choral functions, actos,47 and concerts throughout Buenos Aires and the interior provinces.48 In contrast to the Guebirtig Choir, the Coro Ale Brider was founded without such explicit political aims. Instead, it originally grew out of the regular meetings of friends gathering together after Kabalat Shabat (Friday evening) services to discuss the impact of the Argentine economic crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which left many people without work in the city. Horacio and Mirtha led and participated in these gatherings every Friday night to share a pizza and to play games, eventually incorporating group singing into their regular routine and featuring folksongs in Yiddish and Spanish. By the mid2000s, the Coro Volver a Empezar, and later the Coro Ale Brider, were founded and began performing regularly in the amia and other Jewish institutions throughout Buenos Aires. Since the early 2000s, the Dúo Guefiltefish have performed all over Latin America and in Israel, becoming the official representatives of the amia on a fund-raising trip to Miami in 2006 during the fallout of the Argentine economic crisis. At the Dúo Guefiltefish’s tenth anniversary concert held in the Auditorio amia in December 2012, former director of the Departamento de Cultura 45 46

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Natasha Zaretsky, “Citizens of the Plaza: Memory, Violence, and Belonging in Jewish Buenos Aires” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008a). Natasha Zaretsky, “Singing for Social Change: Nostalgic Memory and the Struggle for Belonging in a Buenos Aires Yiddish Chorus,” in Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, eds. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 231–255 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008b). Karen Ann Faulk translates the Spanish word/concept “acto” as “protest-memorials.” See Karen Ann Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013). As a part of my dissertation research, I worked extensively with the Guebirtig Choir, observing and participating in weekly rehearsals and attending various concerts. Their work should be considered a key example of a group using musical performance to process, mourn, and recontextualize the amia bombing. Yiddish spellings of these particular songs reflect the titles of the songs as they appear in the Guebirtig Choir repertoire I collected during my fieldwork from 2011 to 2013. See also ethnomusicologist Abagail Wood’s 2013 book, And We’re All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2013).

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(Department of Culture) Moshé Korin spoke fondly of the group to open the show. “You should know,” he stated, “that Liberman, Zucker—Mirtha and Horacio—are not only singers, great singers from the Coro Kennedy, but they have a spectacular stage presence, giving audiences what they want, and for me, providing great joy and happiness.”49

A Mode of Conclusion: The amia and Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires

As the current director of Cultural Programming for amia Cultura, Gabriela Wilensky, informed me, the current purpose of cultural programming at the amia is manifold: amia’s Department of Cultura’s mission is twofold. On the one hand, it sets out to spread Jewish culture within the Jewish community and society as a whole and on the other hand, to bring general cultural activities to the Jewish community. And to develop this double mission, it organizes shows, concerts, activities, courses, and a number of other events, just as frequently at the amia as in other institutions, public spaces, or in public life. Since our dual mission is to be able to bring culture to the community and to society in general, our purpose is also to develop all of this and to guarantee the diffusion and continuity of the Jewish Argentine community.50 Since the retirement of former director Moshé Korin at the end of 2012, Wilensky and her team have rebranded the Departamento de Cultura as “amia Cultura,” and she has worked to reorient the mission of the cultural programming unit to direct a “puesta en valor” (program of restoration of cultural patrimony) aimed at attracting more youth and young families to amia 49 50

Moshé Korin in the Auditorio amia, December 2012. My emphasis. Gabriela Wilensky, interview, March 2014. Wilensky states: “El Departamento de Cultura de amia tiene una doble misión. Por un lado, se propone difundir la cultura judía en la comunidad judía y en la sociedad en su conjunto y por otro lado acercar la cultura general a la comunidad judía y para desarrollar está doble misión, organiza espectáculos, conciertos, actividades, cursos y una cantidad de eventos tanto dentro de amia que en otras instituciones y en la vida pública o en espacios públicos. Porque la doble misión es poder acercar la cultura a la comunidad, a la sociedad y la cultura general y para desarrollar todo esto y guarantizar la difusión y la, digamos, continuidad de la comunidad judía argentina.”

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Cultura–sponsored activities. The amia bombing played a major role in the transformation of the form, content, and direction of cultural programming at the amia. As Wilensky told me, “After the attack—this year marks the twentieth anniversary of the bombing—there was an opening of the amia’s doors to all of society, which also opened up the cultural events it could offer…giving the institution increasingly greater visibility and participation.”51 Although seniors still remain the most steady and stable audience consuming cultural programs at the amia, Wilensky is committed to lowering the average age of participants to sustain future amia events (while continuing to serve existing audiences). She named musicians such as the klezmer duo Lerner y Moguilevsky, the Orquesta Kef, and dj and musician Simja Dujov (Gabriel Dujovne) as critical to the achievement of these aims. Hearing the legacy of trauma and violence in reference to the amia requires a consideration of practices of musical commemoration and testimony as well as the practices of musical memory that shape experience on a quotidian basis. These musical performance repertories outline more general connections between the Jewish Argentine community and the greater Jewish Diaspora while designating the amia as a site of hybridization through memory, exemplifying how, as historian Katharina Schramm argues, “the process of the identification of memory with place is not at all self-evident, as it implies the complex entanglement of procedures of remembering, forgetting and the production of counter-memories.”52 Through the legacies of trauma, the physical space of the amia itself—including the Café Literario and the Auditorio amia—are imbued with the capacity to inflect musical performance with memorial meaning that, in turn, is reflected back on the amia to reinforce and resacralize this space through narratives and gestures of ethnic heritage, highlighting different facets and key symbols of Jewish Argentine identity. Ethno­ musicologist Judah Cohen argues that, as a Jewish musical process, sacralization is “the act of creating musical material objects specifically to enhance Jewish religious rituals.”53 Yet songs commemorating the amia attack and musical programming functioning within the amia building itself operate outside of 51

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Ibid. Wilensky states: “Después del atentado…que este año es el 20th aniversario del atentado, a medio de alguna manera abre las puertas, hacia toda la sociedad. Abriendo la oferta cultural también. Abriendo todo—abriendo también la oferta de los servicios del empleo, una cantidad de cosas, pero abriendo también la cultura también se abrió a la sociedad y empieza cada vez mayor visibilidad y participación.” Katharina Schramm, “Introduction: Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space,” History and Memory 23, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 5. Judah Cohen, “The Jewish Sound of Things,” Material Religion 3 (2007): 337.

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the musical world of sacred song and religious activity, serving a sacralizing function by drawing from both religious and nonreligious sonic objects entering the public sphere through musical performance to uphold the amia as a critical site of Jewish Argentine memory. The amia attack had a profound impact on the presentation of Jewish Argentine cultural expression in Buenos Aires, opening up new spaces for artistic expression to reembody Jewish Argentine heritage and identity. Jewish Argentine musical production crystallized in the late 1990s and early 2000s, during the neoliberal phase of intense political, economic, and social transformation, making audible the complex character of this economically, religiously, and culturally stratified group struggling to redefine itself publically in ethnicized terms in the aftermath of violence.54 While musical performances at the amia or organized by amia Cultura can be joyful acts empowering the voices of a community or sorrowful exercises of painful, nostalgic remembrance as expressions of grief, Jewish Argentine musical performance in Buenos Aires now actively mediates the politically efficacious uses of memory and forgetting, demonstrating how memory is a productive labor to experience the complexities of Latin American modernity in Argentina today. Bibliography Agosín, Marjorie, ed. Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Aizenberg, Edna. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine Jewish Writing. Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 2002. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941. Bayer, Bathja. “Music—Biblical Period.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 14, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 641–43. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007. Bohlman, Philip. Jewish Music and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Breckenridge, Janis. “Text and the City: Design(at)ing Post-Dictatorship Memorial Sites in Buenos Aires.” In Latin American Jewish Cultural Production, edited by D.W. Foster. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Cohen, Judah. “The Jewish Sound of Things.” Material Religion 3 (2007): 336–53. Faudree, Paja. Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013. 54

Alejandro Grimson and Gabriel Kessler, On Argentina and the Southern Cone: Neoliberalism and National Imaginations (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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Index 18 J 2, 81–82, 129–130 85 puntos de color (85 points of color) (Liniers, Ricardo) 177 Abregú, Martín 34 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (see Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) ix, 13, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, 49–50, 85 Accountability 19–20, 34, 37–38, 43, 54, 59, 133–134, 143, 149, 155, 166, 168 Active Memory (see Memoria Activa) ix, 2, 4–6, 9, 19–32, 34–38, 44–53, 56–58, 64–67, 73, 78–82, 101, 106, 111, 125–130, 135–137, 139–140, 142–146, 148, 155–161, 163–165, 174–176 Activist; activism vii, xii, 1–2, 4, 9–10, 13, 18, 20, 24, 29, 34, 36–38, 48, 62, 80–81, 113, 127, 136, 139–140, 156, 160–161, 163, 166, 168, 174 Acto de Iom Haatzmauut (2013) (Celebration of Israeli Independence Day) (also see Israel) 177 Actos (also see Marches; Monday morning gatherings; Protests; Rallies) vii, ix, 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 12–13, 16–18, 20–23, 26–28, 30, 35–36, 39, 42–43, 45–50, 52–55, 57, 63, 65, 74, 76–81, 95, 99, 101–102, 106–107, 111, 121, 125–131, 135–137, 139–146, 148–149, 153, 155–161, 163, 167, 175, 177–178, 184–185 Adler, Maurice and Stella 102 Advocate; advocacy 3, 14, 29, 78, 80–81, 128–129, 174 Aftermath vii–viii, xii–xiii, 2–8, 19, 38, 78, 84, 99, 127, 132, 134–135, 143, 145, 150, 165, 167, 170, 172, 175, 185, 188 Agam, Yaacov (see Monument to the Memory of the Victims of the Terrorist Attack on amia) 74–75, 104, 177 Agamben, Giorgio 14, 38 Agency 5, 7, 125, 127, 133, 149, 151, 183 Aguinis, Marcos (see Asalto al paraíso)  106–107, 118–120, 122, 124 Aizenberg, Edna (see Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires) 103, 121–122, 173, 188 Alfonsín, Raúl 14–15, 42, 48 Allen, Woody: Zelig 115 Alperson, Mordejai 102 Álvarez, Carlos “Chacho” 55–56

American Convention on Human Rights (See Pact of San José) 164 American Jewish Committee (ajc) 62, 67 amia (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) (also see Jewish community organizations) viii–x, 1–9, 18–20, 22–31, 37–40, 44–45, 47, 52, 56–85, 89, 91–92, 94–99, 101–106, 109–114, 117–121, 123, 125, 127–131, 134–135, 138–141, 143, 146–149, 154–158, 160–181, 184–189 amia bombing (also amia attack; bomb; disaster; explosion; tragedy; also see atentado) vii–xi, 1–9, 12–13, 18–20, 22–26, 28–31, 37–38, 41, 44–48, 53, 56–68, 71–75, 77–85, 89, 91–92, 94–100, 102–107, 109–114, 117–123, 125, 127–131, 134–149, 155–158, 160–171, 173–179, 181, 184–185, 187–189 amia building (see façade) ix, 4, 8, 18, 20, 23–24, 34, 36, 38, 45, 59, 66, 72–74, 77–78, 84, 91–92, 94–96, 98–99, 102–104, 106, 110, 117, 119–121, 125, 127–129, 139–141, 155, 157, 160, 169, 171, 177, 180–181, 187 amia case; amia investigation; amia cause 2–3, 6, 8–9, 18–31, 34, 45–46, 54, 56, 58, 62, 64–65, 77, 82, 112, 119, 129, 146, 149, 155–156, 158, 163–165, 170–171, 174, 176–177 amia Cultural Activities, amia Departamento de Cultura (amia Department of Culture) 103–104, 121, 180, 185–186, 188 amia Memorial (in La Tablada Cemetery) (see Marian Shapiro) 75 amia Recital por la Reconstrucción (Concert for the Reconstruction of the amia) x, 169–171, 174, 176 amia Victims (also see Martyrs) vii–viii, x, 2, 4, 8–9, 13–14, 17–26, 28–29, 31, 34, 38, 45, 50, 59, 63–64, 68, 70, 72–75, 77–79, 82, 84, 91, 94–95, 98, 104–105, 109, 111, 125–129, 135, 140–147, 154, 158, 161–162, 164, 166, 170–171, 174, 176–178 Auditorio amia (amia Auditorium) 105, 173, 179–181, 185–187

192

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“amia Sombras” 176, 178 Amster, Enrique 104 Anderson, Benedict (see “Imagined communities”) 10 Anti-Semitism; anti-Semitic 8, 25–26, 30, 113, 115, 120, 128, 171 APEMIA (Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento del Masacre Impune de la amia) 29, 81–82, 99, 129–130, 161 Aranovich, Claudia 104 Architecture 3, 80, 84, 138 Arendt, Hannah 107, 165–166 Argentina vii, xi–xiii, 1–19, 22–23, 25–28, 36–44, 46, 49, 51, 53–55, 57–67, 69–71, 75–77, 79–83, 85, 99, 101–102, 104–106, 108–110, 113–125, 127–135, 137, 139–140, 142, 144–146, 149–152, 155–157, 160–164, 168–171, 173–176, 179–186, 188–190 Consulate of 110 “Argentina potencia” 15–16, 18 Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (yivo; also iwo) viii, 78, 130 “Argentineanness;” Argentineness; argentinidad (also see Identity— Argentine identity; see also Identity— national identity) 22, 30, 38, 74, 139, 171 Art; artist; artistic x–xii, 2, 4–5, 20, 55, 70, 74, 76–78, 84, 90–91, 98, 100, 102–107, 110, 121–123, 127, 131, 146, 151, 170–171, 173–174, 176–177, 179–181, 184, 188 “Arte Junto a Memoria Activa, el” (Art and Memoria Activa) 174, 176 Asalto al paraíso (Aguinis, Marcos) 118–119, 122 Ashkenazi; Ashkenazic 78, 175 Atentado (see amia—amia bombing) 5, 19, 23, 28, 40, 70, 76–82, 92, 94–95, 99, 103–107, 109–110, 112–113, 119–121, 145, 171, 187, 189 Auschwitz xii, 100, 110, 112, 114, 123 Ayacucho Street 78 “Az der Rebbe Zingt” 181

Barrio Norte (Neighborhood in Buenos Aires) 137 “Basavilbaso” (Katz, Jevl) 182–183 “Basta de Impunidad” (“Enough Impunity”) (also see Impunity) ix, 23, 32, 35 Begin, Menachem 104 Belonging (national belonging; social belonging; also see Identity) xii, 1–3, 5–11, 37, 45–46, 52–53, 78, 101, 105, 124, 128, 130, 133, 139, 144, 149, 152, 159, 168, 171, 175, 185, 190 Beraja, Ruben 23, 28, 65 Berlin Wall 68, 72, 76 Bhabha, Homi 99 Birmajer, Marcelo 61, 102, 105 Blumenfeld, José vii, 174–175 Body; bodies; embodiment; embodied; reembody v, 1, 3, 6, 8, 10–13, 17, 26, 37–38, 51, 53, 62, 65, 69–70, 77–78, 85, 94, 98, 101, 103, 107, 135, 143, 148, 159, 163, 165, 167–168, 177, 183, 188 “poner el cuerpo” 163, 167–168 Bohlman, Philip 179, 188 Bolotin, Damián 174–175 Bonaparte, Laura 65 Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires (Aizenberg, Edna) xi, 59–60, 99, 104, 121, 188 Borges, Jorge Luis xi, 61, 69, 71, 76, 99, 104, 121–122, 188 Borneman, John 134, 150 Bortnik, Aída 107, 122 Bosnia 114 Brodsky, Marcelo (see Buena memoria; Nexo; Piedras por la justicia) iv, vii, ix, 5, 89–94, 98–100 Buena memoria (Brodsky, Marcelo) 89, 92, 99 Buenos Aires vii, ix, xi–xiii, 1, 6, 8–9, 12, 16–17, 20, 35, 40, 42, 44, 57, 59–60, 62–64, 68–71, 77–78, 91–94, 99, 101, 103–106, 110, 113, 115–119, 121–122, 124–125, 127–128, 130–131, 134, 136, 138, 141, 143, 146, 152–153, 159, 162, 167–171, 173–175, 180–181, 183–186, 188–190 Burstein, Sergio 81, 130

“Bai Mir Vistu Shein” 181 Bajder, Perla xii, 110, 123 Bal, Mieke 4, 132–133, 150 Banchero, El 136–137, 139, 160–162 Bandidos Rurales (Gieco, Léon) 176

Cabezas, José Luis (see Photojournalist) ix, 18, 28, 35, 54 “Cada 18” (Rago, Juan Martín) 177 “Cada Día 18” (Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky) 177

Index Café Literario salon x, 180–182, 187 Calamaro, Andrés 169 Cammack, Paul 170, 190 “Candombito del recuerdo” (Johansen, Kevin and Ricardo Liniers) 177–179 Cantilo, Fabiana 169 Caramelo descompuesto, el (Feierstein, Ricardo) 120 Cartoneros 138 Caruth, Cathy 100, 132–133, 142, 145, 150 Casa Rosada (Presidential Palace) 130 Castillo, Abelardo 64, 67 Cavallo, Domingo 56 cels (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales) 8, 12–13, 17, 26–27, 34, 39–40, 42 Cement barriers; cement barricades (see insecurity; pilotes; security) 24, 36, 44, 128, 130, 140 Centro de Documentación e Información sobre Judaismo Argentino Marc Turkow (Marc Turkow Center for Documentation and Information about Argentine Judaism at the AMIA) (see Centro Mark Turkow) viii, 102, 120, 169, 172, 177 Centro Marc Turkow (see Centro de Documentación e Información sobre Judaismo Argentino Marc Turkow; Marc Turkow Library) viii, 102, 120, 169, 172, 177 Chab, Victor 105 Chatterjee, Partha 166–167 Chirom, Daniel 107–110, 122 Citizen; citizenry; citizenship xi, xiii, 1–3, 6–7, 12, 14, 16, 19, 22, 25, 27–29, 36, 38–39, 41, 43, 48, 52, 57, 64, 106–107, 116, 124, 127, 129, 131, 135, 137, 140, 144–146, 150, 152–156, 158–168, 175, 185, 189–190 Citizens of the Plaza (see Ciudadanos de la Plaza) 6, 127, 129, 135, 137, 154–155, 159–163, 175, 185, 190 Ciudad Universitaria 70, 78, 91 Ciudadanos de la Plaza (see Citizens of the Plaza) 6, 127, 129, 135, 137, 154–155, 159–163, 175, 185, 190 Civil society xi, 9, 13, 16, 36, 43, 127, 130, 132, 144–145 Clarín 64, 67, 74, 76, 169 cofavi (Comisión de Familiares de Víctimas de la Violencia Institucional) 18 Cohen, Judah 187–188

193 Colson, Donald B. 98, 100 Comisión Pro Monumento a las Víctimas de Terrorismo de Estado (The Commission for Monuments to the Victims of State Terrorism) 70, 76, 91 Communist 161 Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (cha) 156 conadep (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas or National Commission of Disappeared) (see Nunca Más Report) 13, 25, 40, 128, 150 Convention on Human Rights (1978) 164 Cooperativa San Telmo (Ex-Padela) 154 Coordinadora de Trabajadores Desocupados Anibal Verón (Union of Unemployed Workers Anibal Verón) 57 Copani, Ignacio (see “Memoria Activa”) 169, 174, 176 Corach, Carlos 28 Coro Ale Brider (All Brothers Choir) x, 181–182, 184–185 Coro Judío Popular Mordje Guebirtig (or Coro Guebirtig; Gebirtig Choir) 78, 105, 130, 177, 185 Coro Kennedy 174, 186 Coro Volver a Empezar 185 correpi (Coordinadora contra la Represión Policial e Institucional) 18 Corrientes (Province in Argentina) 16 Corrientes Avenue 136 Cortes de ruta 16 Crisis 15, 23, 26, 40–42, 56–57, 128, 139, 171, 185 Cromañón 153 Crónica 169 Crónista, El 1 Cuando digo Magdalena (Steimberg, Alicia) 61, 67 Cutral-có 16 Czyzewski, Luis 81 daia (Delegación de Asociaciones lsraelitas Argentinas) (see Jewish community organizations) viii, 23, 26, 28–29, 52–53, 65, 128, 150, 174 Dance 109, 175–178, 181 Danziger, Danilo 104 Death flights (see “Flights of death”) 12

194 Del corazón al cielo (Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky) 100, 111, 123 Democracy; democratic; democratization 9, 13–14, 17, 20, 22, 29–30, 34, 36–43, 48, 50, 65, 71, 74–75, 120, 124, 164–165, 189–190 Desde la cima (Nasatsky, Miryam Gover de) 112, 122 Destakados del Pelle 174 Detenido/detenida (detained) 1, 160 Deterritorialize; deterritorialization (see Reterritorialization; Territory) 12, 24–25, 37 Di Tella, Guido 19 Diaspora xiii, 103, 123, 157, 168, 171, 173, 187, 189 Díaz, Leandro 176 Dickman, Enrique 66 “Dirty War” (see Military Dictatorship; Proceso de Reorganización Nacional) xii, 4, 10, 12, 39, 43, 145, 151, 157, 174, 190 Disappeared; disappear; disappearance 1–2, 4, 10–14, 17–18, 25, 34, 37, 39–40, 43, 49, 53–54, 60, 63–64, 68–70, 72, 77, 85, 90–91, 128, 133, 145, 150–151, 154, 156–157, 174, 190 Discourse v, 4–6, 9–10, 14–15, 19–20, 23, 27–29, 44–46, 48–50, 52–54, 56–58, 62, 80, 103, 123, 156–157, 168, 171, 179, 189 Discrimination; discriminate ix, 35, 59, 63, 71, 139, 156 “Dona Dona” 181 Dujov, Simja (Gabriel Dujovne) 187 Dúo Guefiltefish (Gefiltefish Duo) 181, 183, 185 Editorial Acervo Cultural 103–104, 124 Editorial Dunken 104 Editorial Milá 70, 76, 100, 102, 104, 106–107, 110–111, 114, 121–123, 173 Editorial Planeta 12, 43, 61, 67, 103, 115, 122 Eichelbaum, Samuel 66, 105 En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir (Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky) 85, 100 “Encuentro” 104–106 England 19 Enlightenment 166 “Escombros” exhibit 121 esma (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada; or National School of Mechanics) 2

index espejo de las palabras, El (Grimberg, Susana) 112, 123 Estadio Obras Sanitarias 169 Ethnicity; ethnic; ethnicized 10–11, 38, 54, 59–60, 71, 105, 134, 150, 158, 171–173, 183, 187–189 Ethnography; ethnographic xiii, 2–6, 125, 131, 136–137, 145, 153, 155, 159, 166–167, 180–181, 190 Ethnomusicologist; ethnmusicology xiii, 3, 172, 179, 183, 185, 187 Europe; Europeanness; Eastern European 60–62, 68–69, 72, 128, 138, 175, 183, 190 Exclusion; exclude (see “Others”) ix, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 18, 26–27, 34–38, 56, 62, 64, 80–81, 128, 143–144 Expediency of culture (see George Yúdice) 172, 189–190 Façade (see amia—amia building) 91–92, 94–95, 98, 103, 153 Faerstein, Ariadna 176 Falkland Islands (Malvinas) 69–70, 72, 127 Familiares y Amigos de las Víctimas del Atentado a la amia (Family Members and Friends of the Victims of the amia Bombing) ix, 2, 4, 19, 28, 73, 78–84, 95, 100, 128–130, 140–142 Faudree, Paja 180, 188 Faulk, Karen Ann 137, 150, 155, 165–166, 168, 174–175, 185, 189 Feierstein, Ricardo (see El caramelo descompuesto; La historia de los judíos argentinos; La logia del umbral; Mestizo; also El libro del centenario, co-ed. with Perla Sneh) viii, xii, 61–62, 67, 102–104, 106–107, 114–118, 120–123, 173 Fingueret, Manuela 61 “Flights of death” (see Death flights) 12 Folksong 175, 181–183, 185 Forgetting; forget; forgotten; unforgettable 26, 63–64, 66, 69–73, 84, 100, 134, 170, 174, 187–188 frepaso (Frente País Solidario or Front for a Country in Solidarity) 55 Freud, Sigmund 133, 150

Index Galeano, Judge Juan José 24, 155–156, 164 Gaucho xi, 114–115, 117, 122–123 gauchos judíos, los (see Alberto Gerchunoff) xi, 122 Gautier, Ana María Ochoa 172, 189 Gender (see Identity—gender identity; women) 4, 10–12, 43, 60, 63, 94, 145, 151, 156, 159, 174, 176, 190 Generations of the Shoah (Generaciones de la Shoá) 105 Geography 70 Gerchunoff, Alberto xi, 61, 66, 99, 102, 104, 121–122, 188 German; Germany 68, 160, 179, 189 Germano, Gustavo 89, 99 Gieco, Léon (see “La Memoria”; Bandidos Rurales) 174–176 Ginsberg, Laura vii, 25, 28–29, 65–66, 81, 130 Glickman, Nora: Liturgías 105 Globalized; globalization 15, 69, 79, 100 González, Lucho 174 Gramscian 14 gran mentira, La (Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky) ix, 84–85, 100 Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (see Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) ix, 13, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, 49–50, 85 Greater Buenos Aires 16 Grieve (see Mourning) 66, 107 Grimberg, Susana (see El espejo de las palabras) 107, 112–113, 123 Grünberg, Carlos 66 Guterman, Andrea 73, 78, 81, 83, 85–89, 95, 98, 111 Guterman, Sofía Kaplinsky (see “Cada Día 18;” Del corazón al cielo: En cada primavera renace la alegría de vivir; La gran mentira) vii, 5, 73, 77–78, 81–85, 89, 95, 98–100, 107, 110–111, 123, 177 H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio) 26, 133 Haggadah 108, 110 Hebraica (also Sociedad Hebraica) 78, 119, 130 Hebrew (language) 45, 59, 104, 110, 174 Hebrews 19 Heffes, Gisela 66–67

195 Heredia, Victor 174 Hezbollah 8, 20, 24, 118 Hirsch, Baron Mauricio von (or Maurice; see Jewish Colonization Association) 183 Hirsch, Marianne (see Memory— Postmemory) 85, 100, 179, 189 Historia de los judíos argentinos (Feierstein, Ricardo) 115, 122 Holocaust (see Shoah) xi–xiii, 69–70, 73, 76, 100, 102, 104–105, 110, 119, 127–128, 130–132, 135, 151, 179, 189 Hombre de dos amores (Leviton, Sol) 105 Hospital de Clínicas iv, 91, 94, 140 Human rights (see Rights) xi, xiii, 2, 4–6, 9–10, 13–20, 23–29, 34, 36–43, 48–50, 52–55, 58, 60, 83, 129, 135, 137, 140, 143–145, 150, 153, 155–158, 161, 163–168, 175–176, 185 human rights organizations; human rights movements 4, 9–10, 13–15, 17, 20, 25–26, 28–29, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 48–50, 52, 144–145, 156–158, 161 human rights violations; human rights abuses; atrocity/atrocities 9, 14, 17, 20, 24, 26–27, 34, 41, 43, 48, 53–54, 78, 84, 156, 164, 176 Humanity 113, 165 Huyssen, Andreas 4, 79, 90–91, 98, 100, 180, 189 Hybridization 53, 187 Identity xii, 3, 5–6, 10–12, 16–17, 19, 26, 30, 39, 42, 44–45, 47, 53, 55–57, 61, 102, 105–106, 110, 114, 117, 123, 156–158, 161, 168, 171, 173–175, 177, 179–180, 183–184, 187–189 Argentine identity (see “Argentineanness”; identity— national identity) 6, 22, 30, 38, 157, 179, 183–184 collective identity 11 gender identity (also see gender; women) 12, 61, 156 Jewish Argentine identity 6, 53, 57, 105–106, 114, 173, 180, 187–188 Jewish identity (see Jewishness) 3, 30, 53, 56, 61, 105, 117, 161, 171, 179

196 Identity (cont.) national identity (see “Argentineanness”; Identity—Argentine identity) 6, 11, 16, 19, 105, 177, 183 religious identity 158, 175 “Imagined Communities” (see National Imaginary; Benedict Anderson) 10, 39 Immigration; immigrants; migration; migrants xiii, 3, 5, 27, 60–62, 66, 102–103, 113, 115–117, 182–183 Impunity; (also counterimpunity; see Injustice) vii, ix, 2–7, 18, 20, 22–23, 27–30, 32, 34–36, 38, 50, 52, 55, 63, 65, 71, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 85, 127, 129, 133, 135, 142–146, 148–149, 155–156, 164, 167–168, 175–176 “National Document Against Impunity” ix, 30, 176 “regime of impunity” 18, 27, 34 Inclusion; inclusive 7, 10–11, 13–14, 17, 19, 47, 49, 62, 165, 184 Inequality; unequal 16, 182 Injustice; “Injusticia” (see Impunity) 1, 4, 16, 20, 34, 52, 71, 78–79, 83–85, 139, 143, 148, 153–154, 161 Insecurity (see cement barriers; pilotes; security) 27, 55–56, 65, 117 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (iachr) 2, 129, 163–165, 168 Iran (see Memorandum of Understanding with Iran) 3, 8, 24, 58, 62, 81–83, 101, 118–119, 129 Islam; Islamic 58, 119–120 Islamist 20 Israel 8–9, 19, 103–105, 114, 120, 129, 185 Israeli; Israelite 1, 8–9, 19, 22–23, 28, 44, 52, 59, 62, 65, 69, 74, 77–78, 98, 104, 107, 109, 113, 118, 120, 125, 128, 156–157, 164, 169, 171, 174, 176–177, 184 Israeli Embassy Bombing 1, 8, 19, 22–23, 28, 44, 62, 69, 77–78, 98, 113, 118, 125, 128, 156–157, 164, 171, 176, 184 Italy 19, 23, 113 iwo (also Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut; yivo) viii, 78, 130 Jabotinsky, Vladimir 104 Jaievsky, Irene xii, 110, 123,

index Jelin, Elizabeth (see Memory—“labors of memory”) 4, 13–14, 26, 38, 41, 78, 100, 130, 132–133, 144, 150, 170, 173, 189 Jewish Colonization Association (jca) (see Baron Mauricio von Hirsch) 183 Jewish community 1, 3, 8–9, 19–20, 23–26, 44–45, 53, 56–58, 69, 77, 103, 110, 116–117, 121, 128–130, 138, 150, 157–158, 169, 171, 186 Jewish community organizations (or institutions; see amia; daia) 44, 53 Jewish Museum (Museo Judío) 110 Jewish music (also see Music) 6, 169, 171, 173–174, 179, 186–188 Jewishness (see Identity—Jewish identity) 53, 171, 179 Johansen, Kevin (see “Candombito del recuerdo”; Sur o no sur) 177–179 Judaism (also Jewish holidays) viii, xi, 20, 46, 105, 112, 117, 121, 169 Jujuy (Province in Argentina) 16, 154 Justice; Justicia iv–v, vii–ix, xi–xii, 1–6, 8, 13–14, 16, 22, 24, 26–30, 33–39, 41, 44–45, 47–49, 51–52, 54–56, 59, 62, 64–67, 71–72, 77–85, 89, 91–95, 98, 100–101, 108, 111, 113, 123, 125–129, 135–137, 139–140, 142–145, 148–149, 151, 153–158, 161, 163–164, 167, 171, 173–176, 185, 189 “Justicia y Memoria” (Justice and Memory) 29, 80 “Justicia, Justicia Perseguirás” (Justice, Justice Thou Shall Pursue; also tzedek, tzedek, kirdof) ix, 33, 36, 48, 65, 157, 174 Kabalat Shabat 185 Kaddish 129 Kapszuk, Elio 170–171, 177 Kates, J. 107, 110 Katz, Jevl (see “Basavilbaso”) 182–183 King Lear 102 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de 2–3, 58, 81–82 Kirchner, Néstor 58, 171 Kirshbaum, Michal 110 Klezmer (also see Jewish music; music) 105, 174–175, 181, 187, 190 Klicksberg, Clara 104

Index Korea 114 Korin, Moshé viii, 103, 186 Kosice, Gyula 71, 74 Kosovo 59, 71 Kosteki, Maximiliano 57 Kovadloff, Santiago 60, 62, 67 Kuperman, Basia 105 Kupferminc, Mirta (see Monument to the Victims of the amia Bombing) x, 146–148 Ladino 102, 114 Landscape 3–5, 7, 9, 12–13, 24, 26, 44, 68–70, 77, 95, 128, 130, 134, 149, 151, 187, 190 Laub, Dori 100, 131–134, 151 Lazar, Sian 159, 168 Lerner, Alejandro 174 Lerner, César 105, 174–175, 187 Levi, Primo 132, 151 Levine, Annette 110–111 Leviton, Sol (see Hombre de dos amores) 105 Levy, Carlos 113–114, 123 Liberman, Horacio 181, 184, 186 Libro cd Testimonio 175 libro de los recuerdos, El (Steimberg, Alicia) 103, 123 libro del centenario, El (ed. Ricardo Feierstein and Perla Sneh) 103, 122 Liniers, Ricardo (see “Candombito del recuerdo”; 85 puntos de color) 177 Listening; listener 5, 7, 22, 100, 125–127, 130–137, 139–146, 148–151, 184 Lithuanian 182 “Local Connection” 31, 64–65 logia del umbral, La (Feierstein, Ricardo) 38, 114, 116–117, 122 Macabi 78 Madres de Plaza de Mayo (see Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) vii, ix, 4, 13, 26, 28–29, 35, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 64–65, 67, 69, 73, 76, 85, 101, 127, 131, 135, 145, 157, 161 Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora (see Mothers of Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line) 26, 161 Malamud, Diana 31, 107 Malvinas (see Falkland Islands) 69–70, 72, 127

197 Marc Turkow Library (see Centro Marc Turkow) vii, 102, 120, 169, 172, 177 Marcela y Judith (Amster, Enrique) 104 Marginalization 1, 18, 60 Market; market economy 15–17, 28, 40, 170 Martín Fierro (Hernández, José) 114, 123 Martínez, Tomas Elroy 63–64, 67 Martyr (shahid; see amia— victims) x, 73, 119, 148 Mazur, Gerardo 25, 27–28, 34 Media ix, 8, 13, 28, 35, 45, 51, 55, 65, 129, 135, 144, 146, 155, 167 Memorandum of Understanding with Iran (see Iran) 3, 58, 129 “Memoria, La” (Gieco, Léon) 176 Memoria Activa (see Active Memory) v, ix, 2, 4–6, 9, 19–32, 34–38, 44–53, 56–58, 64–67, 73, 78–82, 101, 106, 111, 125–130, 135–137, 139–140, 142–146, 148, 155–161, 163–165, 174–176 “Memoria Activa” (song) (Copani) 176 Memory vii–xi, xiii, 2–7, 9–10, 14, 20, 22, 29–30, 39, 42–43, 45, 58–60, 64, 68–73, 75–81, 83–85, 87, 89–92, 95, 98–101, 105, 123–137, 140, 142–147, 149–152, 155, 157–160, 168–171, 173–182, 184–185, 187–190 commemoration; commemorate; commemorative vii, ix, 3–5, 14, 28, 31, 35, 45, 69–70, 73–74, 77–81, 90, 95–98, 125, 127, 129–131, 133, 140–141, 143, 145, 149–150, 170, 173–175, 177–179, 181, 187, 189 mnemonic map 75 “labors of memory” (also “vehicles of memory”; see Elizabeth Jelin) 4, 78, 144, 150, 170, 176, 179–180, 188–189 collective memory 42, 123, 180 cultural memory 39, 43, 190 memorial; memorialization ( see monuments) 2–5, 63, 68–70, 72, 74–76, 78, 84, 90, 98–100, 125, 130–131, 140, 142–143, 149, 155, 161, 179, 185, 187–188 monument (see memorial) x, xii, 3–5, 68–72, 74–79, 84, 90–92, 98–99, 104, 143, 146–148, 154, 157, 162, 177, 179, 189 musical memory 176, 180, 187 postmemory (see Marianne Hirsch) 85, 100, 179, 189

198 Memory (cont.) transmission 5, 90, 94, 179 memoryscape 77 Memory Park (Parque de la memoria) 70, 91–92 Menem, Carlos Saúl 2, 8, 15–20, 22–25, 27–29, 34, 37–38, 42, 55, 61, 65, 107 Menemism; Menemist; menemista 15–16, 123 Mestizo (Feierstein, Ricardo) xii, 60, 62, 67, 103 Meyer, Rabbi Marshall T. 53 Mihanovich, Sarah 169 Military (see Military dictatorship) ix, 1–2, 9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 25–26, 34–35, 37, 43, 48–49, 54, 62–63, 70, 115, 120, 128, 145, 154, 157, 160, 170, 174, 176 Military Dictatorship (1976–1983) (dictatorship; military government; military junta; military regime; state terrorism; also see “Dirty War”; military; Proceso de Reorganización Nacional) ix, xii, 1–2, 9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 25–26, 29, 34–35, 37, 43, 48–50, 53–54, 58, 62–66, 69–71, 90–92, 115, 120, 128, 133, 145–146, 154, 156–157, 160, 164, 170, 174, 176, 188, 190 Minority 12, 19, 28, 62 mjdh (Movimiento Judío por Derechos Humanos) 53 Moguilevsky, Marcelo 105, 174–175, 187 Moises Ville (see also Jewish Colonization Association) 115–117 Monalisa de Jerusalén, La (Sherbacovsky, Elías) 104 Monday morning gatherings [in Plaza Lavalle] (also weekly actos; also see actos; protests) 20, 22–23, 26–27, 30, 36, 79, 126–129, 135–137, 139, 142–143, 145–146, 149, 157–161, 175 Monument to the Memory of the Victims of the Terrorist Attack on amia (see Yaacov Agam) 177 Monument to the Victims of the amia Bombing (or Monument to the Martyrs of the amia; see Mirta Kupferminc) x, 146–148, 162 Monumentality (of photographs) 84, 92, 98–99, 179, 189 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (see Madres de Plaza de Mayo) vii, ix, 4, 13, 26, 28–29,

index 35, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 64–65, 67, 69, 73, 76, 85, 101, 127, 131, 135, 145, 157, 161 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line (also Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora) 26, 161 Mourning; mourn (also see grieve) 77, 98, 129, 178, 185, 190 Murga; murgueros 153, 181, 189 Museo Judío (see Jewish Museum) 110 Music (see Jewish music) xii–xiii, 1–6, 44, 103, 105–106, 111, 153, 169–190 music in the everyday 173, 179, 190 Muslim 61, 118 Nación, La 12, 81–82, 100, 169, 171 Narrative xii, 3, 5–7, 9, 13–14, 16–19, 23, 25, 36–38, 85, 90, 100, 127, 130, 132–135, 142, 144–145, 149–151, 170–171, 176, 183, 187 Nasatsky, Miryam Gover de (See Desde la cima; La pasión de un visionario; Persistentes vibraciones; Resonancias de Auschwitz) 111–112, 122 Nation; national (see Argentina; nationstate) ix, 1–3, 6, 8–20, 22–27, 30–31, 36–38, 40–43, 45–48, 51–53, 60, 62–64, 66, 69, 71–72, 74, 77, 79, 83, 90, 98, 101, 105, 113, 115, 117, 120, 128–130, 135, 139, 143–145, 149, 156, 158, 165–166, 169–171, 174–177, 180, 183, 188–189 Nation building 10–11, 37 Nation-state (see Nation; State) 120, 166 National imaginary (see also “Imagined Communities”) 2, 158 Nationalism; nationalist (also see Identity— National identity) 3–4, 10–11, 15, 38–39, 42–43, 145, 151, 174, 183, 190 Nationhood 11, 38 Nazi; Nazism 23, 25, 62, 131, 145, 150–151, 160, 190 Neoliberalism; neoliberal xi, 2, 9, 15–17, 19–20, 27, 34, 37–38, 40, 43, 51, 55–56, 137, 150, 155, 165, 168, 175, 185, 188–189 Neruda, Pablo 68, 73, 75–76 Neuquén (Province in Argentina) 16, 18 Nexo (Brodsky, Marcelo) 90–91, 100 Nisman, Alberto 2, 129 Non-Jew; non-Jewish 8, 23, 29, 44, 47, 59, 113, 118, 121, 135, 170, 176 Norma Editorial 15, 42, 76, 104 Nunca Más Report (see conadep) 13, 25, 40, 64, 66, 128, 150

Index Obelisk 136 “Oif’n Pripetchik Brennt a Feier” (Warshawsky, Marc) 175 Ombú Yiddish Theater 102 Once (Neighborhood) 111, 140, 161, 180 Opus Cuatro 174 Organization of American States (oas) 163–164 Orquesta Kef 187 “Otherness;” “Others” (see Exclusion) 11, 13, 16, 19, 37 Pact of San José (See American Convention on Human Rights) 164 Páez, Fito x, 169–172 Página/12 27, 31, 43, 47, 63–64, 67, 129, 169–171 “Palace of Injustice” (also see Tribunales) 143, 153 Pampas, Las 116–117 Papiernik, Charles (see Una vida) xii, 110, 123 pasión de un visionario, La (Nasatsky, Miryam Gover de) 112, 122 Pasteur Street vii, ix, 4, 28–29, 59–60, 64, 71, 73–74, 77–81, 91, 95, 98, 113–114, 120–121, 126, 129, 140–145, 149, 180 Performance; perform; performative; performativity v, x–xi, xiii, 3–6, 11–12, 43, 45–47, 53, 58, 85, 90, 99, 105, 125, 133, 139, 143, 151, 159, 169–181, 183, 185–188, 190 Perón, Juan Domingo (also Peronist; Peronism) 15–16, 41, 48, 116, 161 Persistentes vibraciones (Nasatsky, Miryam Gover de) 111–112, 122 Photograph; photography v, vii, 5, 54, 77–78, 84–85, 89–92, 95, 98–101, 110, 140, 162, 179 Photojournalist (also see José Luis Cabezas) ix, 18, 28, 35 Piedras por la justicia (Stones for Justice) (Brodsky, Marcelo) vii, ix, 91–94 Pilotes (see Cement barriers; also see Insecurity; Security) 44, 140 Piqueteros; piquete 16–17, 39, 55 Plager, Silvia 61, 102, 105 Plaza Bernardo Houssay 91, 94 Plaza de los dos Congresos (or Plaza del Congreso) (also see Tarde de los Paraguas) 1, 9, 17, 153 Plaza de Mayo ix, 12–13, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, 42, 49–50, 64–65, 67, 69, 73, 76, 85, 101, 116, 127, 130–131, 135, 145, 153, 157, 161

199 Plaza Huincul 16 Plaza Lavalle (“Plaza of Memory”) vii, ix–x, 4–6, 20, 22–23, 27, 35, 45–46, 65, 71, 73, 78–81, 101, 125–127, 129, 135–137, 139, 142–143, 145–147, 157, 159, 161, 175 Plaza Libertad 20 “Plaza of Memory” (also see Plaza Lavalle) ix, x, 5, 20, 125–126, 127, 135–137, 140, 142–145, 147, 149 Plaza San Martín 71 Pluralism (also plural) 3, 6–7, 59–60, 66, 71, 76, 99, 135, 158 Poetry xii, 73, 103, 107, 110–112, 137 Poland 112, 136, 139, 160 Police; police brutality (also police violence) 17–18, 24, 29, 34, 62, 119, 140, 164 Populism (or populist) 12, 15, 41 popurrí 181–182, 189 post-amia; post-atentado v, 5, 66, 77–78, 127, 145 Poverty 56, 106, 138 Privatize; privatization 16, 20, 24, 27, 39, 41–42, 55 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization; see “Dirty War;” Military Dictatorship) 1, 69–70, 72–73, 115, 184 Prose 103, 111 Protest literature 102 Protest music (also musical protest) 178 Protests (also Marches; Rallies; See also Actos; Monday morning gatherings) 3–4, 6–7, 12–13, 16–18, 20–21, 30, 35, 39, 42–43, 45–50, 52–55, 57, 74, 77–79, 102, 106–107, 111, 121, 125, 127–130, 139–140, 145, 153, 155–156, 158, 163, 167, 175, 178, 184–185 Public sphere; public arena 2, 16, 18, 25, 28, 37, 40, 54, 77, 130, 165, 170, 188 Publicness 10, 22, 27 Rabbi 53, 113, 135, 171 Rabin, Yitzhak 107 Radio jai 106 Rago, Juan Martín 177 Rago, Juan Martín (see “Cada 18”) 177 Recognition 15, 17, 39, 49–50, 52, 85, 117, 134, 158, 166 Reconciliation 16, 18, 40, 85, 134, 150–151 Rein, Raanan vii, 78, 101, 105–106, 124, 127, 130, 152, 159, 168, 173, 185, 189–190

200 Representation 3–7, 16, 52, 77–78, 98, 131–132, 144, 150, 179 Repression 4, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 26, 29, 42, 78, 100, 128, 144, 150, 170, 189 Resonancias de Auschwitz (Nasatsky, Miryam Gover de) 112, 123 Reterritorialization (see Deterritorialization; Territory) 14, 31 Rights (see Human rights) v, xi, xiii, 2, 4–6, 9–12, 12–20, 23–29, 34, 36–43, 48–55, 58, 60, 63, 83, 129, 135, 137, 140, 143–145, 150, 153, 155–158, 161, 163–168, 175–176, 185, 189 Río de la Plata (River Plate) 12, 34, 92, 115, 138, 183 Ritter, Jonathan 179, 189 Rodríguez, Jorge 28 “Rock nacional” 169–170, 179, 190 Roffé, Reina 61 Rosario 14, 39, 106, 189 Ross, Fiona 134, 144, 151 Rubble 34, 59, 66, 72–73, 78, 91–92, 103–104, 121 Ruins 68–69, 72, 74 Russia; Russian 102, 115 Rwanda 114 Sábato, Ernesto 64 Sacralization 187 Salta (Province in Argentina) 16 Santiago del Estero (Province in Argentina) 16 Santillan, Danilo 57 Schapiro, Mariana 104 Scherman, Gabriel 177 Schramm, Katharine 187, 190 Security (see Cement barriers; Insecurity; Pilotes) xiii, 1, 8, 24–27, 29, 48, 54, 58, 66, 74, 77, 101, 103, 116, 119, 121, 128, 140, 165, 181 Seder 110 Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) 128 Sephardic 60, 78, 114 serpaj (Servicio Paz y Justicia) 26 Shahid (see martyr) 119 Shapiro, Marian (see amia—amia Memorial) 75 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman 183, 190 Sherbacovsky, Elías (see La Monalisa de Jerusalén) 104

index Shoah (see Holocaust) xiii, 70, 73, 105–106, 110, 124, 127, 132, 152 Shofar (also shofarot) ix, 20–21, 23, 45, 126–129, 136, 143, 148, 161, 175 Shua, Ana María 61, 102–103, 105, 123 Silence 1, 12, 20, 26, 29, 65, 69, 73, 75, 104–105, 109, 125–126, 134–135, 144, 151, 162 silencio de los aparecidos, El (Wang, Diana) 104–105, 124 Site (also site of memory) vii, 4–5, 7, 24, 28, 59, 68, 72–73, 75, 91, 102, 116, 129–130, 132, 140, 143, 173, 179, 183, 187–188, 190 Sneh, Perla (see El libro del centenario, co-ed. with Ricardo Feierstein) 103, 105, 122, 184 Social change 53, 78, 101, 105, 124, 127, 130, 135, 152, 159, 166, 168, 185, 190 Social movements 2–3, 9, 13, 17, 36, 39, 42, 47, 49–50, 128, 131, 145, 184 Sosa, Mercedes 174 Sosa, Patricia 169 Space for Memory and Human Rights (Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos) 2 Spaces (also public spaces) v, 4–6, 9, 12–14, 20, 26, 37–38, 69-70, 72, 77–80, 101, 111, 123, 128, 130, 139–140, 142–143, 145–146, 149, 151, 167, 180, 186, 188 Spain 19, 105, 113 Spectacle 4, 10, 43, 145, 151, 169, 174–175, 190 Spectator 11, 85, 89, 99, 145, 177 Spinetta, Luis Alberto x, 169–172 State (see Nation-state) 2, 4, 9–11, 13–19, 22, 24–27, 29, 31, 37, 38, 40–43, 47–50, 53–54, 58, 65, 74, 77, 84, 90–91, 101, 103, 105, 112, 120, 128, 132–133, 140, 143–144, 146, 150, 156–157, 163–168, 170–171, 189 Steimberg, Alicia (see Cuando digo Magdalena; El libro de los recuerdos) 61, 67, 102 Steuerman, Miguel 106–107, 123 Strier, Mirta 120 Sur o no sur (Johansen, Kevin) 177 Survivor; Survival xii–xiii, 7–9, 24–25, 72, 74, 100, 104–106, 110, 124, 127, 131–135, 142, 144–146, 151–152 Synagogue (or temple) 23–24, 63, 73, 78, 128, 138, 162, 169 Syria 24, 61, 183, 190 Szichman, Mario 61 Tablada Cemetery, La (see amia—amia Memorial) 71, 73, 75, 78

201

Index “Taiere Malke” 181 Talcahuano Street 153 Tarde de los paraguas (The Afternoon of the Umbrellas) (see Plaza de los dos Congresos) 1 Taylor, Diana 4, 10–11, 13, 43, 133, 145, 151, 173, 174, 190 Teatro Gran Rex 174 Temporality 167 Territory (see Deterritorialization; Reterritorialization) 10, 37 Terrorism; terrorist 1, 12, 18–19, 48–50, 53, 58, 62–63, 65, 70, 74–77, 91, 103, 107, 118–121, 128, 133, 139, 146, 157, 169, 177 Testimony; testimonial ix, xiii, 5, 8, 19, 25, 43, 50, 60, 65–67, 70, 79, 84, 94, 100, 102, 104, 106–107, 110, 117, 120, 122–124, 127, 129, 131–132, 134–137, 140–144, 148, 151–152, 175, 179, 187, 190 Theater 102–103, 105, 153, 173–174, 176, 180–181 Tiempo, César 102 Timerman, Héctor 81 Timerman, Jacobo 25, 43, 128, 151 “Todos somos judíos” (We are all Jews) 1 “Todos somos Memoria Activa” (We are all Memoria Activa) 136 Torres, Gabriela 174 Torture 2, 4, 13, 17, 25, 40, 60, 156 Transnational; transnationalism 156, 165, 173, 182 Trauma; traumatic 3–5, 7, 9, 84, 92, 98–100, 107, 123, 131–135, 142, 144–145, 149–151, 173, 179, 187 Triangle 71 Tribunales (or Judicial Palace; Palace of Justice; Palacio de Justicia; Supreme Court; high courts; See also “Palace of Injustice”) 20, 23, 45, 65, 71, 79, 125, 127, 129, 135, 139, 143, 153, 158, 164, 175 Tucumán Street 160 “Tumbala Laika” 181 “Tzedek, tzedek, kirdof,” (see “Justicia, Justicia perseguirás”) ix, 33, 36, 48, 65, 157, 174 ucr (Radical Party) 55 último día, El (Weil, Mina) 104 United States xiii, 12, 19, 103, 105, 110

Verón, Anibal (Coordinadora de Trabajadores Desocupados) 57 “Vi Nemtmen a Bisele Mazl” 181 vida, Una (Papiernik, Charles) 110 Videla, General Jorge Rafael 12 Vila, Pablo 170, 179, 190 Villa Crespo (Neighborhood) 136 Viñas, David 66–67, 102 Violence xiii, 4–7, 9, 18–19, 25–27, 29, 34, 36, 49–50, 59, 63–64, 71, 90, 99, 127–128, 130–134, 142–145, 150–151, 170–172, 174–175, 178–179, 181, 185, 187–190 Wailing Wall 73 Wall 27, 39, 68–69, 72–76, 110, 127, 140, 153, 155, 168, 180–181 Wang, Diana (see El silencio de los aparecidos)  viii, 104–106, 121, 123, 132, 145, 151, 190 Warshawsky, Mark (see “Oif’n Pripetchik Brennt a Feier”) 175 Wasser 115 Wassner, Dalia 119–120, 124 Weil, Mina 104 Weinstein, Ana (Anita) viii, 74, 120 “White Tent” (Carpa Blanca Docente) 17, 55 Wilensky, Gabriela 186–187 Witnessing; witness 1, 3–5, 7, 69, 80, 85, 89, 99–100, 103, 107–108, 127, 130–135, 142–144, 151, 179 Wlodarski, Amy 179, 190 Women (also see gender; identity—gender identity) 17, 39, 43, 47, 49, 59, 64, 66, 85, 101, 110, 134, 138, 144, 151, 153, 157, 159, 163, 168, 176 Yad Vashem 69, 73 Yiddish (also Ídish) xiii, 6, 59, 61, 70, 78, 102–106, 115, 124, 130, 152, 159–160, 168, 175, 181–185, 190 yivo (Argentine Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut; also see iwo) viii, 78, 130 Yúdice, George (see “expediency of culture”) 172, 190 Zaretsky, Natasha 105–106, 110, 173, 175, 184–185, 190 Zenko, Julia 174 Zionist; Zionism 114 Zucker, Mirtha 181, 186 Zuppi, Dr. Alberto 23, 31