Habitus

by Daniel Bloch · 12/28/11

From "The Block," by Romare Bearden

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Urban renewals

If you haven’t guessed by now, we love a good city story, and here are a few: Read Shelley Salamensky’s insightful look at “Diaspora Disneys,” re-creations–and, in some cases, renewals–of urban Jewish life and culture in Krakow, Birobidzhan and a town in western Spain. Follow cookbook author and food blogger Alex Schmidt as she enlists her bobe Dora on a hunt for Jewish soul food in Mexico City. Check out Madrid’s version of the High Line, part of an enormous project that includes new parks, plazas, transit options and a rebirth of the Manzanares river. Finally, be sure to take a look at the Best CityReads of 2011, courtesy of The Atlantic Cities.

Literary musings

Habitus contributor and friend Susan Bernofsky remembers Robert Walser, who died on Christmas Day, 1956. The New York Times considers the Bible’s overwhelming literary legacy through the ages. And the daughter of Ezra Pound fights to have her father’s name disassociated from an Italian right-wing group connected to the recent shooting deaths of Senegalese immigrants in Florence.

Cinematic intimacy

Tintin and Margaret Thatcher biopics not your thing? Have no fear: Dau, a grandiose doozy of a film about the life of physicist Lev Landau is already five years in the making; here is a preview/exposé from GQ. (Warning: lie down before you read this because you will need to afterward.) On a smaller scale, Papirosen, the latest film from Argentine director Gastón Solnicki will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image next month. For the film, Solnicki–who will appear in person at the screening–distilled hundreds of hours of footage of his extended family to a brief 74 minutes, charting their lives in Buenos Aires and beyond.

Portraits

Photographer Gisèle Freund captured Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in eerily timeless color images, but photographing the star writers of her day was only part of her fascinating journey. We salute abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, who passed away this week at the age of 83. And a special cosmic shout out to Romare Bearden, whose centennial is currently being honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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by Daniel Bloch · 11/09/11

Photo by Marcelo Brodsky

The work of Marcelo Brodsky merges the historical with the personal. In his career as a photographer, Brodsky has created an enormous archive of powerful images engaging with the nuances of his identity as an artist, a Jew, an Argentine and the brother of a desaparecido–a disappeared. Marcelo’s brother Fernando is one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 Dirty War, victims of an exceptionally cruel apparatus of state-sponsored terrorism which targeted  suspected “subversives.” Many, like Fernando, were barely out of their teens and allegedly linked, however tenuously, to anti-dictatorship political and social movements. Once detained, the majority were never heard from again, their bodies never recovered, thus literally disappearing by the thousands from their families–a horrific technique replicated during the same era by dictatorships across Latin America, especially in Chile and Uruguay.

In a conversation that appeared in the Buenos Aires issue of Habitus, Marcelo Brodsky recognized the importance of his family’s experience not only to his art but to a larger conversation about collective healing and memory in Argentina. Brodsky said:
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by Daniel Bloch · 10/11/11

Before Buenos Aires there was Basavilbaso. Most of the seeds of contemporary Jewish life in Argentina were literally sown in the grassland of the pampas, especially in the northeast provinces of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe, where thousands of Jews settled around the turn of the twentieth century. Allotted farmland by the Jewish Colonization Association, the newcomers brought little actual knowledge of farming–most came fleeing the urban pogroms and poverty of Eastern Europe–but saw Argentina as their Zion. In less than a generation, colonias like Basavilbaso, Villa Domínguez and Moisesville were dotted with Jewish schools, hospitals, cemeteries, social clubs and synagogues. In two generations, however, the colonias were emptied of their youth, most of whom left for Buenos Aires in search of their future selves.

What became of the colonias? A recent article on Fox News Latino offers a glance at contemporary Jewish life on the pampas; an accompanying slideshow digs a bit deeper. Several of the images profile the Museum of the Jewish Colonies, housed in an old pharmacy in Villa Domínguez and brimming with archival gems.

For a literary look at the Jewish colonias, check out Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, with a forward by Habitus contributing editor Ilan Stavans. For more on Argentina, take a look at our Buenos Aires issue.

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by Nicholas Myerberg · 08/04/11

Borges in 1951 (via Wikipedia)

Jorge Luis Borges, noted Argentine writer, poet, essayist, and translator, was invited by Harvard to give the Norton Lectures in 1967-68. Only recently rediscovered in the Harvard archives, UbuWeb wasted no time in digitizing the tapes and making them available for public use.

While the general theme of Borges’ lectures was that of poetics, he also explores notions of literary form, literary history, and translation theory, as well as the philosophy of literature. Drawing on literature as diverse as Joyce, Plato, Omar Khayyam, and Homer, Borges demonstrates that he was certainly one of the most engaging intellectual figures of his time.

Listen to Borges’ lectures here.

Habitus published a translated interview with Borges in our Buenos Aires issue; the interview is available here.

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by Nicholas Myerberg · 07/20/11

This past Monday marked the 17th anniversary of the devastating bombing of Buenos Aires’ Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), a Jewish community center. On July 18th, 1994, a car bomb was detonated outside of the AMIA building, killing 84 and injuring hundreds. It was Argentina’s deadliest bombing, and one of several bombings targeted at Buenos Aires’ Jewish community in the early nineties.

The years following the bombing have been marked with gross investigative and judicial misconduct, culminating with the impeachment of Judge Juan José Galeano in September, 2005; former Argentine president Nestor Kirchner called the investigative process a “national disgrace.” Numerous arrests were made, but no convictions resulted from the investigation into the bombing.

In recent years, several developments have occurred in the AMIA case. In 2007, following Galeano’s removal, Argentine prosecutors formally charged Iran of orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah of carrying it out. Six Iranian nationals are still sought to stand trial in Argentina, though Iranian officials maintain that Iran was not involved.

The remains of the AMIA building, July 18, 1994.

This past Monday, coinciding with the commemoration of the AMIA attack, Iranian officials reportedly offered Argentina its full support in determining the truth behind the bombing, despite the fact that the Iranian Defense Minister, General Ahmad Vahidi, remains on the Interpol Red Notice List. Nonetheless, Argentine officials have welcomed Iran’s offer.

The AMIA bombing was a profoundly traumatic event for Buenos Aires’ Jews, who make up the largest Jewish population in Latin America. Yet, almost twenty years later, the perpetrators of the attack have not stood trial. Many fear that the bombing will be forgotten long before justice is served.

Some very interesting works of art have emerged from this fear of forgetting. Recently, a work that consisted of 30 human-sized figures with the faces of those who were killed in the attack, installed throughout Buenos Aires,  won two awards at the international Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Mexican-American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans and Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky revisited the AMIA bombing in their recent fotonovella, Once 9:53. Both spoke about the fotonovella, why they chose to revisit the AMIA bombing, and more in this short video segment, produced by Habitus.

For more, read our Buenos Aires issue.

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by Nicholas Myerberg · 07/13/11

Sergio Bergman

Ben Sales, of The Jewish Daily Forward, reports that Rabbi Sergio Bergman was recently elected to Buenos Aires’ municipal parliament as a representative of the center-right PRO party.

With 45% of the vote, Bergman’s considerable victory may be indicative of the beginnings of a sort of acceptance of Jews into Argentine life and politics, in contrast with Argentina’s history of being a haven for Nazis and anti-Semites.

Bergman’s reputation was built, in part, as the founder of Active Memory, a group dedicated to the commemoration of the 1994 bombing of AIMA, a large Buenos Aires Jewish community center.

Read the rest of Sales’ article here.

For more, read our Buenos Aires issue.

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by Habitus · 03/28/11

The next event in our series with the JCC in Manhattan will be on April 14th.

Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky: Reinventing the fotonovela
The Mexican-American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans and Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky have collaborated to re-imagine the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary. Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building.

Register for the event here.

Read some of the great press this project has received, in Tablet and the Forward.

We produced a short video about the project last year:

Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky on Once 9:53 – a fotonovela from Habitus A Diaspora Journal on Vimeo.

JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Avenue
7pm
$7.00 Members
$10.00 Nonmembers

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by David Gutherz · 08/24/10

One of our founding principles here at Habitus is that the Diaspora is not only–as Ahad Ha-Am conceived of it–a web of roots strengthening the tree of some (material or spiritual) Jerusalem. It is also rhizome: a constantly shifting multiplicity of connections across and between several centers, several worlds. And so it is always with great pleasure that we hear of things like the current Bi-Centennial Celebration of Jewish Life in Argentina at the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Tracing the evolution of the Argentine Jewish community from the first recorded Jewish wedding in 1860 through to the present day, the exhibition employs a number of multimedia elements including a mesmerizing presentation of contemporary Argentine Jewish film. The guiding theme, however, is that most paradigmatic Jewish medium: The Book. At the “heart” of the exhibit lies “Book Store of Memories,” a collection of several hundred biographies that showcases the singular diversity and richness of Argentine-Jewish culture. Mirroring this celebratory monument, however, there is also the “Underground Library II,” a re-imagining of Israeli artist Micha Ullman’s memorial to Nazi book burnings.  All in all, the exhibit goes far beyond its stated aim of “illustrating the integration of the Jewish community into Argentine society.” It is powerful homage to the continued vibrancy of Diaspora existence in general, and in Argentina and Germany specifically.

The exhibition runs through October 10th.

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by Habitus · 04/28/10

Last year, Habitus editor Joshua Ellison introduced Mexican American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans to Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky. Soon afterward, the two began a collaboration, re-imagining the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book that was once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary.

Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building. As the story unfolds, photojournalist Roli Gerchunoff stumbles across the bomb plot—and realizes that he may have a chance to change its outcome.

Stavans and Brodsky have shared an early draft of the book with Habitus, and in the video below speak about their work on on the project, their reasons for reexamining the AMIA bombing, and their enduring affection for the fotonovela.

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by Habitus · 02/25/10

Our friend Osvaldo Golijov will bring his music to Toronto next week at the TSO’s sixth-annual New Creations Festival. Golijov was also the subject of a nice profile in The Star.

Each of Golijov’s compositions is different. The influences include South America, the synagogue and the shtetl, wrapped in a life-filled tonal shimmer.

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