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The present article examines the role of Dov Ber Borochov's Marxist thought in the reconstruction of Latin American Jewish identity between the 1950s and 1970s. Borochov (1881-1917) fashioned the most compelling synthesis between Jewish aspirations for national self-determination and the basic premises of historical materialism. The translation of his major works into Spanish and its diffusion among the most politicized sectors of Latin America's Jewish youth enabled Zionism to participate in the period's revolutionary discourse. By reading Borochov and his various interpreters, the present author claims that several generations of leftwing Latin American Jews were able to maintain a Jewish identity and express loyalty to the State of Israel in a manner that dovetailed smoothly with local revolutionary ideological movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the concepts of ethnic group and identity are described. Identity as a distinctive unit of certain group and their identifiers as features which delimit the frontiers between "Them" and "Us". Identity as a construction that contains essential features, where their contents evolves and adapts as time goes by. The Jewish collectivity is considered within the category of ethnic group, because is a group that has achieved permanency in spite of the internal and external changes. Five general Jewish features are pointed out: religion, traditions, Jewish peoplehood, Israel and Holocaust. These identity elements are being briefly described as well as how they are manifested and exhibited within the Latin American Jewish group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider different perspectives on Chilean and Argentinean Judaism, related to four main traits: a) the organization of Jewish and secular identities, with progressive and liberal components, although religion is not the central identity element; b) the consolidation of a religious orthodox space; c) the formation of new Jewish identities, that are not integrated into the structures of institutional Jewish communities; e) the emergence of some dissidence in Chilean and Argentinean Judaism, as part and parcel of a reaction to the official discourse about the Arab-Israeli Conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]