Between Two Homelands: Jewish-Argentine Return Migration from Israel, 1948-2006

Research project of Adrián Krupnik, 2019-2020

Adrián Krupnik’s research stands at the intersection of Latin American and Israel studies by uniting two strands of modern Jewish history: development and change in a Diaspora community whose members integrated successfully into the host society, and the evolving relationship of that community with Israel. He contends that return migration played a key role in Israel-Diaspora relations even though this notion had been excluded from the Zionist narrative. Argentine returnees from Israel represented a significant proportion of the total number of Jews in Argentina. Their Jewish identity, professional paths, and contributions to both the Jewish community and Argentine society at large were influenced by their experience in Israel. Krupnik draws from Israel studies, Argentine history, migration studies, sociology, oral history, and Israel state documents to expose the tensions that contributed to unreliable records of returnees and various conflicting narratives about them.

Adrián Krupnik obtained his Ph.D. in history at Tel Aviv University. He previously studied sociology at the University of Buenos Aires. Currently, he is a fellow of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. During his stay at the University of Potsdam he published his book chapter Unsafe Havens for Jewish-Argentine Migrants: The Rise and Fall of the Third Peronist Government and the Traumatic Effects of the 1973 Yom Kippur War,

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and completed his first book manuscript, “Between Two Homelands: Jewish-Argentine Return Migration from Israel, 1948-2006.” Krupnik has begun planning his next major project, “German-Argentine and Jewish-Argentine Youth in Radical Times: Ethno-Political Identities and Transnational Bonds in Comparative Perspective, 1966-1976."