So have yourself a tequila Chuckles (I’m going to get in trouble for that suggestion) and celebrate.

The Jewish Virtual History Tour: Mexico [Jewish Virtual Library]
Earlier: Like Water for Passover

The bombing was actually back in the news this week, with Argentina’s foreign minister denying reports that his country had given up investigations into that bombiing as well as a 1992 bomb at Israel’s embassy that killed 29. Apparently Argentina agreed to let the cases go in order to improve trade ties with Iran—which is expected to have been behind the slaughters.

Fresh Exposure
Argentina’s FM Denies His Government Offered to End Investigations Into 1990s Terror Bombings [AP/WP]
Related: The Rafsanjani Connection [Tablet Magazine]

Let’s first talk about the genre of the fotonovela. Does it always have the documentary character of Once@9:53am? Is it always grounded in real events?

Not at all. The fotonovela in the Spanish-speaking world is an escapist artifact. It delves into lurid themes and melodrama, much like your average telenovela. Its hallmarks are desire and sexual innuendo, class differences, violence physical and psychological. The attempt in Once@9:53am is to rescue the genre from the dogs, to make it historically conscious, and, also, to turn it into agitprop. The theme, as you know, is the terrorist attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The narrative revolves around a freelance journalist assigned by Playboy magazine to do a photo-essay on El Once, the neighborhood in the Argentine capital where Jews and other immigrants first settled—a kind of Lower East Side. As it turns out, something more than the usual rhythms of life play out that morning and the camera is there to serve as witness.

Your role in the fotonovela is not just as creator but as the character Rabbi Stavchansky. Your father is an actor. Was putting on a fake beard and using the unshortened form of your last name a way of getting in tune with the “family business”—or maybe a way of experiencing a rabbinical “road not taken”?

You put it better than I ever could. I’m not only a crypto-actor, I’m also a lapsed rabbi, or maybe an anti-rabbi. By the way, my father acted in several fotonovelas. The idea for this one took root after I stumbled over a copy in my family home in Mexico City.

The fotonovela pretty much ends with the explosion, but what can you say about its aftermath? Was it, for Buenos Aires’ Jews, what 9/11 was for New York? Come to think of it, did 9/11 alter or recast the way in which the citizens of El Once regarded their attack?

The aftermath of the AMIA attack is a long and twisted one. Iran seems to have been behind it. Argentina’s then president, Carlos Saúl Menem, who is of Lebanese descent, built an elaborate cover-up. The incident at the heart of Once@9:53am was indeed analogous to 9/11. It was perceived not only as an assault on El Once but on Argentina in general. It was a strike against the very concept of what it means to be a citizen of modern Latin America. On that morning, the region was touched by the Middle East as never before; the entire Spanish-speaking world was made aware of its vulnerabilities. Today the AMIA building has tight security. There are concrete barriers on the street. No photographs of it are allowed. That, in and of itself, is a metaphor for Jewish identity in Latin America today.

To download an excerpt from Once@9:53am, click on the picture below.

• “The current Israeli government has become a source of embarrassment to many liberal American Jews,” opines New York Jewish Week editor-in-chief Gary Rosenblatt. “More creative ways must be found to convince the world, starting with American Jews, that Jerusalem really wants a two-state solution before the option becomes moot.” [NY Jewish Week]

• If you can figure out exactly what Shimon Peres is saying about Muammar Gaddafi and John Galliano, you know him better than I do. [Ynet]

• Ilan Stavans expands on his thoughts on the late Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar. [Forward]

• Résistant Stéphane Hessel, 93, born half-Jewish in Berlin, writes leftist pamphlet that some have called anti-Semitic based on what it says about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The pamphlet, “Indignez-Vous!” is a best-seller. Gotta love the French. [NYT]

• Jack Gottlieb, onetime assistant to Leonard Bernstein and composer in his own right, died at 80. [Jewish Theatre]

For Stephen Colbert, Lent is not that far removed from Judaism.

Amherst College Professor Ilan Stavans, a Tablet contributor and Nextbook Press author, spoke fondly of his friend and frequent travelling companion. “He was provocative and educational,” he said wryly of their discussions on Jewish and Latin American issues.

His most popular book, The Centaur in the Garden was included among the 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature by the National Yiddish Book Center. The novel tells the story of a Jewish Centaur of Eastern European ancestry living in the Brazilian Pampas. Scliar, through his creation’s multiplying otherness, meditated on Brazilian identity, the Jewish body and the pressures of immigration, “in a way,” said Stavans, “that was never stern, but always serious.”

His humor, explains Stavans, came “from both his Brazilian and Jewish tradition. He was [immersed] in the Yiddish literary tradition. He identified with Sholem Aleichem, and loved I.L Peretz. We shared a passion for Isaac Bashevis Singer.”

Controversy came to Scliar in 2002 when Canadian author Yann Martel won the Man Booker prize for his novel Life of Pi. The novel about a boy trapped on a boat with a tiger, closely mirrored Scliar’s Max and the Cats, the novel of Max Schmidt, a refugee from Nazi Germany who finds himself trapped in a dinghy with a Jaguar.

The international uproar (for his part, Martel thanked Scliar for “the spark of life” but insisted he’d only read reviews of Max and the Cats), largely washed over Scliar, aside from increased attention to his work and allowing a few of his books to be reprinted.

“His answer was remarkable,” says Stavans. “He was just flattered that the book has inspired another writer.”

Moacyr Scliar, 73. [Habitus]
100 Great Works of Modern Jewish Literature [National Yiddish Book Center]

• Nextbook Press author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein raves over Nicole Krauss’s new novel Great House. [NYT Book Review]

• Another Nextbook Press author (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Ilan Stavans thinks you should go see Nora’s Will, a new film centering around a Mexican Jewish Seder. [Forward]

• Another Tablet Magazine contributor, Michelle Goldberg, upbraids the Anti-Defamation League for unfairly painting legitimate critics of Israel with the anti-Israel brush. [The Daily Beast]

• Famed and pioneering Columbia Law School Professor Louis Henkin died at 92. [CLS]

• Great pitcher Rube Marquard was not a Jew. But he was buried in a Jewish cemetery with his Jewish wife. [Kaplan’s Korner] Which is my way of reminding you to watch the Philadelphia Phillies’ Roy Halladay take on the San Francisco Giants’ Tim Lincecum tomorrow night in the National League Championship Series.

Sheila Broflovski, the most ostentatiously Jewish character on South Park, has a confession to make: She’s from New Jersey.

In recent years, he has also ventured beyond his immediate habitat, writing about Jews in other parts of the world, including Israel. Indeed, judging by Vargas Llosa’s admirable oeuvre, one reaches the conclusion that, while he may be a measured critic of Israel—especially since the failure of the Oslo Accords—he is essentially a Judeophile.

One of Vargas Llosa’s heroes is Isaiah Berlin, the liberal thinker and Oxford philosopher, about whom Vargas Llosa has published a number of eloquent essays focusing especially on the duality of the hedgehog and the fox, which, according to Berlin, represent the two ways of approaching the world: one boiling down everything to a single idea, the other looking at things eclectically. Equally attractive to Vargas Llosa is Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, in which humans are free insofar as their freedom doesn’t curtail that of others. He has been a champion of individual and collective liberty in the Spanish-speaking world, but that liberty, in his eyes, must not go unchecked: We should advance our personal and national interests only as part of a project that safeguards pluralism.

The issue of minorities and the role they play in a democracy is central for Vargas Llosa. In his weekly columns for the Spanish daily El País he has frequently written about Arabs in France, Turks in Germany, Mexicans in the United States, and Haitians in the Dominican Republic. These explorations, to my mind, are extensions of his 1987 novel El Hablador (The Storyteller). Saúl Zuratas, the book’s Jewish protagonist, is an anthropology student of Sephardic descent who, in an attempt to harmonize his Jewish and Peruvian selves, decides to abandon scientific research and become a storyteller for the Machiguenga tribe. To tell stories, and to use them as repositories of ancestral memory, is Zuratas’ way to help the Machiguengas survive—and to help him make his own fractured identity whole.

While The Storyteller isn’t usually ranked among Vargas Llosa’s most accomplished works—it is modest in contrast with epic tapestries like Conversation in the Cathedral and The War of the End of the World—it is, I’m convinced, one of his most courageous performances. Its message is that minorities in Peru, to retain their mission, need to be bridges. It also presents a Jewish character who stands in stark contrast with the sorts of Jewish stereotypes that persist in a land where The Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be found on newsstands and Osama Bin Laden is a popular hero.

Vargas Llosa’s writings on Jewish themes include a slim, seldom-mentioned, book-length essay on the Middle Eastern conflict, Israel/Palestina: Paz o Guerra Santa (Israel/Palestine: Peace or Holy War), illustrated with photographs by the author’s daughter Morgana. It resulted from a trip to Israel in 2005 to chronicle Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. He had won the Jerusalem Prize a decade earlier, and his novels, translated into Hebrew, are popular in Israel. However, the columns Vargas Llosa wrote on the topic, and the essay into which he turned them, generated tangible discomfort among Israelis, mostly on the right of the political spectrum, who suggested that Vargas Llosa’s prescriptions came without a full knowledge of the conflict and its complexities.

For Vargas Llosa, the Oslo Accords became the moment when the writer’s love for things Jewish began truly to conflict with the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians—although he was quick to stress that it was the government and not the country’s people with whom he took issue. Indeed, he has become something of a thorn in Israel’s side, talking publicly against the living conditions in Gaza, portraying Netanyahu as intransigent—even as he also accuses Hamas of resorting to treacherous, irrational behavior. His dovish position might be embraced by Washington—and, one assumes, by Stockholm—but among European intellectuals it is increasingly understood as naïve.

In Israel, whose Amos Oz and David Grossman have long been discussed as leading Nobel contenders, the choice was widely seen as a snub. But such a reaction is childish. On today’s intellectual stage, no figure with a large following can afford to take an uncritical stand toward Israel. Vargas Llosa’s philo-Semitism, on the other hand, which might be seen as charming in its innocence, as such, is reminiscent of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, never a Nobel laureate himself but another Jerusalem Prize recipient.

In the Latin American landscape, where order and chaos, reason and barbarism, dance forever to a syncopated rhythm, Vargas Llosa is an enlightened voice. He is interested in the depths and complexities of contemporary Jewish life, which is more than one can say of the majority of the hemisphere’s intelligentsia.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin America and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of the Nextbook Press title Resurrecting Hebrew and most recently, with Mordecai Drasche, of With All Thine Heart: Love and the Bible.

Benjamin Cardozo isn’t considered Hispanic because he didn’t come from Mexico, Central America, or the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the three main immigrant sources feeding this country’s largest minority. Portugal doesn’t count, nor does Spain, since the Iberian Peninsula as a whole is seen popularly as the Evil Empire. Brazilians, too, are often excluded from being part of the Hispanic/Latino category because they speak Portuguese, not Spanish, although in Miami, among other places, exceptions are made in increasing fashion to make them feel part of the whole.

Needless to say, neither Hispanic nor Latino were terms in use in Justice Cardozo’s age, so he’s neither one nor the other. But the main problem, no doubt, is his religion: he was Jewish, e.g., not a Catholic, a distinction with a major difference in the Spanish-speaking community, which tends to conflate ethnic affiliation with the majoritarian faith. I say this as a Mexican Jew, the ultimate oxymoron.

Of course, in the age of Obama, categories like these are no longer what they seem—or shouldn’t be. Obama himself is a mulatto: his father was from Kenya, his mother was white. Among recalcitrant Blacks for whom slavery is the sine qua non of the African American experience, Obama is an outsider. All of which makes me wonder if Judge Sotomayor isn’t Jewish herself. After all, she grew up in the Puerto Rican diaspora, was educated among non-Hispanics, and likes the shifting game of identities.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of Resurrecting Hebrew (Nextbook) and, forthcoming in September, the anthology Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America).