Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jewish in the United States
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Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jewish in the United States Wayne State University Press, 2019, pp. 256, Price: $34.99 Ilan Stavans1 Accepted: 5 November 2020 / Published online: 3 December 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Latin America has roughly 450 million people. Its combined Jewish population, concentrated in descending order in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and other countries, oscillates, depending on various sources, between 350,000 and half a million; in other words, a minuscule number. Worldwide, this population constitutes the fourth largest. A slew of books with it as their topic have appeared in recent times, although not enough, given its relevance in realms like culture, politics, science, education, and the economy. Laura Limonic, who teaches at the College of Old Westbury in Upstate New York, has turned her doctoral dissertation at CUNY-Graduate Center into a workmanlike sociological volume that focuses on Jews and Latinos in the United States, how they are the by-product of Yiddish-speaking and French-, Arabic-, and Ladino-language immigrants from the ‘Pale of Settlement’ and the Ottoman Empire who have made a home north of the Rio Grande. Based on an assortment of interviews she conducted in Boston, New York, Miami, and Southern California, Limonic weaves quotations that, in essence, look at the two sides of the same coin: the exoticism of being both Latino and Jewish (the book’s title is proof of that exoticism), and the perplexity that such combination results in (chapters 3 and 4 are called “Coming to America, Part I: On Being Jewish” and “Coming to America, Part 2: On Being Jewish”). In the spectrum of ethnic and religious varieties of American society, her placement of Latino Jews is in an in-between, hyphenated location: neither one nor the other, yet both. She also offers efficient charts in which she studies quantitative analysis of her samples; and, as validation, she includes an appendix in the back matter describing her methodology. I’m afraid none of it is either innovative or exciting. Looking at immigrants as owners of hyphenated identities is an approach that has been around for about 30 years. In the 1990s, I myself proposed looking at Latinos under such a lens. And the * Ilan Stavans [email protected] 1
Amherst College, Amherst, USA
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exoticism Limonic emphasizes (“I had no idea there were Jews in Mexico”), when taken without irony, falls flat. The same, I must add, is to be said of her writing style: she writes like any dutiful doctoral student; she doesn’t have a unique, distinctive voice. Too bad, because the topic is of immense interest. Limonic writes without the slightest hint of nuance. As a well-trained graduate student, she seems to have made up her mind, even before she started, of what her fieldwork findings were likely to be; and then, predictably, she simply filled in the blanks. In the twenty-first century, the Jewish and Latino minorities in the United States are undergoing rapid seismic changes. The former, beco
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