JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

28 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:27
of civil society have allowed the emergence of new actors and unprecedented
forms of participation. Opportunities for collective recognition and
new interactions between majorities and minorities are part of the prevailing
scenarios. Different social movements attract vast middle-class sectors,
including Jews and the Jewish community, as civic participants of the
national arena. Jewish individuals have increasingly entered the political
sphere by assuming high-ranking public roles. Simultaneously, Jewish communities
have acquired more visibility and legitimacy, derived from a twofold
complex process: the erosion of a national ethnic narrative, which
provided the criteria for national belonging, and the increased recognition
of minorities on religious grounds. Liberal policies have acknowledged the
relevance of middle- and high-class social sectors as players in the public
arena, thus creating favorable conditions for a stronger presence of Jewish
communities in the national landscape. 1
Paralleling these processes in countries like Mexico, in the Southern
Cone, changes have enhanced the search for civic commonalities through a
shift from the automatic valorization of cultural and ethnic differences to a
renewed concern with integration into civil society and the public sphere.
However, one cannot dismiss the centrality of the bombing of the communal
building AMIA in Buenos Aires, Argentina; it brought to the forefront
the convergence of old and new expressions of antisemitism. It also fostered
the visibility of transnational Jewish links and solidarity and the affirmation
of collective identity. New institutional channels of participation
point to new sources and expression of the dynamics of acceptance and
rejection and therefore to equally changing expressions of antisemitism.
Thus, one has to approach antisemitism as part of a broader parameter of
inclusion-exclusion.
The overall picture in Latin America of democratization as well as
economic crises, political instability, high levels of public violence, and
lack of security has increasingly exposed the region and its Jewish communities
to waves of migration. Although Latin American Jewry has historically
grown out of large-scale immigration, during the last decades,
migration patterns have tended to be outward. The number of Jews in Latin
America dropped from 514,000 in the 1970s to 390,000 in 2010. Mexico’s
community has maintained a stable demographic profile, due mainly to a
relative equilibrium of emigration and immigration coming from other
1. Judit Bokser Liwerant, “Los judíos de América Latina. Los signos de las
tendencias: juegos y contrajuegos,” en Haim Avni et al. (eds.), Pertenencia y Alteridad.
Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios (Madrid-Berlin:
Iberoamericana), 2011:115-164.