Beyond Exile: German-Jewish Encounters in Latin America

Approximately 100,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Latin America between 1933-1945, as they fled Nazi persecution in Central Europe. In different countries in the region, these refugees found more than a safe haven. The three presentations in this panel explore various facets in the lives of displaced Central-European Jews in Latin America, highlighting interactions with their new surroundings, cultural transfers and everyday experiences.

Presentation Titles:

Sheer Ganor:

“A Warning Sign? The Latin-American Challenge to the German-Jewish Diaspora”
 

Liliana Ruth Feierstein:

"The Heritage of Breslau, or: Some Stories that Had Not (yet) Been Told about (German-) Jewish History in Latin America"
 

Daniela Gleizer:
“The Famous and the Others: Political Exiles and German-Jewish Families in Mexico.”
 

Participant Bios:

Sheer Ganor

Sheer Ganor is an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota, and an affiliated faculty of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript, in which she studies the emergence of a global diaspora of German-speaking Jews who fled Nazi violence. Sheer’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the German Historical Institute, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Association for Jewish Studies and the Central European History Society. At the University of Minnesota, she teaches classes on the history of the Holocaust, comparative Genocide history, human rights and modern Germany.   

Daniela Gleizer

Daniela Gleizer is an associate researcher at the Institute of Historical Research, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her work has focused on the relationship between the Mexican state and foreigners, particularly on immigration and naturalization policies. Gleizer earned her Ph.D. in History from El Colegio de México, in Mexico City, and has received various awards for her work. Her book Unwelcome Exiles, Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism 1933-1945 (Brill, 2014) analyzes the Mexican stance towards Jewish refugees during Nazism, questioning the country’s “open door” myth, by pointing to the limitations placed by the Mexican immigration policy on a number of nationalities, religious and political groups, including the Jews. She has also worked on the relationship between Mexico and the Third Reich, and the role of Mexico´s consuls in granting visas during the Second World War. Gleizer is currently working on two projects: one on the limits of citizenship policy in Mexico and the other on witness´s accounts of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Mexico. 

She teaches several graduate and postgraduate history courses at the UNAM. She belongs to the National System of Researches, to the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, and she is Affiliate Researcher at the Center for Advance Genocide Research of the University of Southern California.

Liliana Ruth Feierstein

Liliana Ruth Feierstein is Professor for Transcultural Jewish History and Head of the Department of Cultural Theories at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is also a Member of the Board from the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin- Brandenburg. Her current research topics include ethics, religion, psychoanalysis as related to violence, the phenomenon of the “disappeared” and of mourning. She is also interested in the intertextuality and the exportation of narratives of the Shoah towards the narratives about Latin American dictatorships.

Feierstein has published widely on Jewish literature and philosophy theories of translation and literature produced during dictatorship, memory, and trauma from an intergenerational perspective.

Presented by the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies and Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies