Jewish in The Americas

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Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Santiago Slabodsky moderates a conversation between writers Dr. Marjorie Agosín and Dr. Ruth Behar on their diasporic experiences in the U.S., Chile, and Cuba

Founding of the Mount Sinai Hebrew School (presently the campus of Universidad de la Comunicación), 1943, México City, Mexico. Source: Archivo Histórico de la Universidad de la Comunicación

 
 

Open Plaza presents a conversation among three renowned scholars with unique diasporic experiences who have made important contributions to the field of Jewish Studies.

Dr. Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean-American writer and renowned professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. Born in the United States in the mid-1950s, she spent her early years with her Jewish family in a German community in Chile, where she attended the Hebrew School in Santiago. After Chile’s 1973 coup d'état, she and her family returned to the U.S. A prolific author in fiction and poetry, Dr. Agosín has also written a series of memoirs themed around the Jewish immigrant trying to find a place in Latin American society. In 2000, the Chilean government awarded her with the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor for Life Achievement.

Dr. Ruth Behar, a social anthropologist and the first Latina to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, is the James W. Fernández Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Behar’s Jewish-Cuban family is of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry; her grandparents “left Poland and Turkey for a better life in Cuba and had to uproot not once but twice.” Born in Havana, she grew up in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on her grandmother’s immigration journey, Dr. Behar’s most recent novel Letters from Cuba (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2020) tells the story of a young Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, while she works to rescue the rest of her family.

Dr. Santiago Slabodsky, whose roots are in Argentina, is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Slabodsky moderates a discussion between Dr. Agosín and Dr. Behar about their creative expressions outside the lines of academia—in the forms of poetry, novels, essays and memoir—and the process of writing more personally about what it means to be Jewish and Latina. 

 

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"Marjorie Agosin" by Ruth Behar
Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 23 June 2021. Jewish Women's Archive. Photo courtesy Margorie Agosin

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ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, 20.2 (Winter 2021) Photo: © LGM Studio – Luis Gallardo

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Marjorie Agosín

Dr. Marjorie Agosín is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. She holds a BA from the University of Georgia and MA and PhD degrees from Indiana University. Raised in Chile and the daughter of Jewish parents, Dr. Agosín is a poet, human rights activist, and literary critic interested in Jewish literature and literature of human rights in the Americas; women writers of Latin America; and migration, identity, and ethnicity. Both her scholarship and her creative work focus on social justice, feminism, and remembrance. Dr. Agosín is the author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. Her collections include The Angel of Memory (2001), The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (2000), Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of my Chilean Jewish Father (1998), An Absence of Shadows (1998), Melodious Women (1997), Starry Night: Poems (1996), and A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1995). Dr. Agosín has received numerous honors and awards for her writing and work as a human rights activist, including a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights and a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights. The Chilean government honored her with a Gabriela Mistral Medal for Lifetime Achievement.

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Ruth Behar

Dr. Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York. She holds a BA from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, and MA and PhD degrees in Anthropology from Princeton University. As a cultural anthropologist, poet, writer for young people, teacher, and public speaker, Dr. Behar is known for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She has lived in Spain and Mexico, and returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture, literature, and Jewish life. In her career as a cultural anthropologist, she has written books about her travels—Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy—and is also the author of a bilingual book of poetry, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé. More recently, Dr. Behar has begun writing books for young people, and she won the Pura Belpré Author Medal for her debut middle-grade novel, Lucky Broken Girl. Her new middle-grade novel, Letters from Cuba, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book, is based on her grandmother’s escape from Poland to start a new life in Cuba on the eve of WWII. Her debut picture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, is forthcoming in 2022. Dr. Behar was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and has been named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. She has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Featured
Santiago Slabodsky

Dr. Santiago Slabodsky holds the Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University-New York. He is co-director of the trilingual journal Horizontes Decoloniales/ Decolonial Horizons and convener of the Liberation Theology and Decolonial Thought program at the Center for Global Dialogue. He served as convener of the PhD program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and as associate director of the Center for Race, Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University. Dr. Slabodsky holds a BA from Universidad de Buenos Aires, an MA from Duke University, and a PhD from University of Toronto. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding book award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

 
 
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