JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

The New Judeophobia on the Left 1
Patricio Brodsky*
Brodsky investigates the left’s merging of anti-Zionism with Latin American
antisemitism.
Key Words: Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Israel, Judeophobia
Argentine intellectuals Sergio Bagu, Gregorio Klimovsky, Ernesto
Sabato, Leon Rozitchner, David Viñas, Noe Jitrik, Bernardo Verbitsky,
Inda Ledesma, Gregory Selser, Abelardo Castillo, and Cesar Tiempo
endorsed the 1967 manifesto. The manifesto stated:
. . . [It] is the unquestionable right of the State of Israel to its existence.
The independence of the Jewish people in Israel was the result of their
effort of their sectors’ pioneers and Vanguard was a response to the
inability of the world to solve the Jewish problem; it responds to the
legitimate aspirations of national liberation, and was supported in this
opportunity for worldwide progressive . . .
I am from Argentina. I am Jewish. And I want to reflect on some
events in this country and region. There is a long tradition of Judeophobia/
antisemitism dating back almost to the origins of the Jewish immigration to
Argentina.
Antisemitism was deeply rooted in the upper classes at that time. Some
examples: In 1890, a furious antisemitic novel by Julián Martel called The
Bag appeared; in January 1888 (only eight months before dying), Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento published several anti-Jewish articles in The National;
the newspaper La Prensa, on various occasions, expressed its opposition to
the Jews’ forming agricultural communes in Entre Ríos and Santa Fe; and,
above all, the “action” of May 15, 1910, ten days before the Centennial,
when upper-class young people, coming out of the very exclusive “society
Sportive Argentina” under the leadership of Baron Demarchi, stormed the
headquarters of the Avangard, the body of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist
Workers Group, and the so-called “Russian library,” then burning its books
1. I’ve decided to explicitly avoid working on the speeches of President Húgo
Chávez and Fidel Castro because they are the most well known. Instead, I have
focused, above all, though not exclusively, on intellectual referents and political
speeches of the Argentinian radical left.
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