INQUIRY

INQUIRY • Volume 18, 2014
There is today a good deal of confusion about the status of knowledge in the humanities.
To some, the admission that we seek only an interpretation seems to allow all kinds
of subjective opinion to count as knowledge. Or worse, it seems to endorse the principle
that those with the power to impose “their” opinion define knowledge. Nothing could
be further from the truth. Interpretation is a form of knowledge, not mere opinion. What
distinguishes knowledge, even knowledge that makes no claim to absolute certainty, is
evidence and rigorous analysis. That is the meaning of disciplined inquiry in any field.
—Thomas Bender, University Professor and Professor of History
HUMANITIES
Dios y los Diez: Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi and the
Making of Icons in Contemporary Argentina
Catherine Addington, Latin American Studies
Sponsor: Professor Mariano López Seoane, NYU Buenos
Aires
Argentine soccer players Diego Maradona and Lionel
Messi have been subject to similar cultural phenomena,
from national identity politics to Catholic imagery, despite
wildly contrasting personal contexts. Their subjection to
the tropes in question is not an overwhelming natural outpouring
of the sport, the country or the players themselves,
but a function of rational cultural expression anchored in
Argentine social values. This thesis undertakes a comparative
study of the two players as secular icons in order to
discern those values. Foremost among these values is the
ever more tightly grasped moral economy that informs
Argentines’ relationships with soccer. The priority placed
on local, collective prosperity over individual success
has manifested itself as a communal resistance to soccer
as one of many cultural products seen as under siege by
neoliberalism and globalization. Yet another value is the
definition of citizenship as participation in institutions that
provide mechanisms for social change or resistance, which
has only included soccer when left with no other options
in civil society. Finally, ritual accessibility in Christian
and secular contexts alike is an increasingly prioritized
value that expresses itself in reaction to established forms
of religiosity across class lines.
A Historiography of the Relationship between the
Third Reich and Zionists
Mia Appelbaum, Economics
Sponsor: Professor David Engel, Hebrew and Judaic Studies
Although the Second World War is one of the bestdocumented
subjects in history, there is only a small
body of literature dedicated to the relationship between
the Third Reich and the Zionist movement. In the 1970s,
however, a proliferation of studies emerged on the Haavara
(transfer) Agreement, in which the Zionist Organization
negotiated the emigration of German Jews to Palestine
in exchange for Jewish assets. Within this area of study,
there are sharp disagreements among scholars about what
this relationship represented. There are those who argue
that Zionist collaboration with the Nazis was morally
reprehensible and politically perverse because it undercut
the global economic boycott movement against Germany
and promoted its own interests in establishing a national
home in Palestine. These writers maintain that the boycott
had a reasonable chance of defeating the Nazi regime in
its infancy, thereby obviating the eventual Holocaust.
Conversely, other historians gather evidence to prove that
economic boycott would not have been strong enough
to frustrate Nazi Jewish policy and that the number of
German Jews immigrating to Palestine through Haavara
was not enough to determine Palestine’s political future.
This research explicates why 70 years later, details of the
Haavara agreement continue to inflame passions and
strike a raw nerve among historians and the general public.
This historiographical study traces the academic actors in
the debate and illuminates their personal ideologies, the
selected archives available and their divergent conclusions.
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