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Papers by Evelyn María Dean-Olmsted

This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewis... more This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewish Mexican social life amidst shifting patterns of religiosity, education, and interethnic relations more generally. Mexico City’s Jewish communities have experienced important changes in recent decades. Within the broader Jewish population, long-standing ethnic divisions between Shami (Damascene), Halebi (Aleppan), Turco (Sephardi) and Idish (Ashkenazi) subgroups have become complicated by the growth of ultra-Orthodox sectors that began in the 1970s. Furthermore, Syrian Jewish young people - most of whom are third or fourth generation –are now attending university in large numbers, many defying old norms of teenage marriage for women and employment in family businesses for men. The result is an increasing diversity in how young Shamis and Halebis relate to their Judaism, their Arab heritage, and Mexico City society at large. I explore these processes through analysis of linguistic practice in everyday life. I gathered data over 15 months in Mexico City through participant observation, interviews, and making audio recordings of spontaneous verbal interaction in a variety of settings. After providing an ethnographic and linguistic overview of the Jewish Mexican communities, I focus on specific phenomena in which questions of Jewish ethnicity are made salient. These include ethnic labeling, using Arabic ‘heritage words’, and ethnic joking or relajo. I then focus on the interactions of Syrian Jewish students with Jewish and non-Jewish peers at a Catholic university. More than neutral ways of “expressing identity,” the language practices I analyze constitute strategies for grappling with religious and sociodemographic transitions. They serve to facilitate young peoples’ integration into new domains while maintaining a distinctive sense of ‘Arab Jewishness’ in the face of hegemonic discourses both Orientalist and anti-Semitic. They furthermore serve as a bid to legitimize Syrian Jewish participation in “modern” Jewish society, largely dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, as well as in Mexico City’s socioeconomic elite. In addition to complicating common (mis)understandings of what it means to be Arab, Jewish and Mexican in the 21st century, I aim to address broader questions of how members of diasporic and other minority groups use language to shape and navigate complex social landscapes.

Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, 2020

Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine, 2021

Journal of Jewish Languages, 2021

Jewish Social Studies, 2020

August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering a... more August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering apartment in the overgrown, semi-abandoned faculty housing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Playing in my head was the popular melodic version composed by David Zahavi, a staple of Holocaust commemorations. I was recovering from illness and a devastating semester of huelga, a student-led strike that paralyzed the university and shuttered my young children’s affiliated schools for over 70 days. The students’ protest actions were more than justified. Earlier that year, a federally imposed fiscal control board threatened to halve the university’s already shrunken budget in order to satisfy the Wall Street bondholders that held most of the island’s 74- billion- dollar debt. Such a move was also in line with the anti-university proclivities of local right-wing political sectors, including the now disgraced, then Governor Riccardo Rossello. But the strike took heavy tolls. The macho bungling of the non-faculty employee’s union, coupled with an administration that evaporated into silence, created an experience that even my therapist labeled traumatic. After scrambling to make up the semester—improvising distance learning while catching bronchitis on a research trip to Mexico—I was depleted: not just from the strike, my illness, and the new mode of teaching (sound familiar yet?), but from the stifling weight of perpetual calamity that is life in twenty-first-century Puerto Rico. “The crisis generation” is how political scientist Mayra Vélez Serrano dubbed our students, because it is all they’ve known. Having only arrived in Río Piedras four years earlier in 2013 to start my first full-time academic position, it felt like I’d arrived at the end of the party. It felt like a lot of beautiful things were ending.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2018

(Winter/Spring 2020), 2020

This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewis... more This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewish Mexican social life amidst shifting patterns of religiosity, education, and interethnic relations more generally. Mexico City’s Jewish communities have experienced important changes in recent decades. Within the broader Jewish population, long-standing ethnic divisions between Shami (Damascene), Halebi (Aleppan), Turco (Sephardi) and Idish (Ashkenazi) subgroups have become complicated by the growth of ultra-Orthodox sectors that began in the 1970s. Furthermore, Syrian Jewish young people - most of whom are third or fourth generation –are now attending university in large numbers, many defying old norms of teenage marriage for women and employment in family businesses for men. The result is an increasing diversity in how young Shamis and Halebis relate to their Judaism, their Arab heritage, and Mexico City society at large. I explore these processes through analysis of linguistic practice in everyday life. I gathered data over 15 months in Mexico City through participant observation, interviews, and making audio recordings of spontaneous verbal interaction in a variety of settings. After providing an ethnographic and linguistic overview of the Jewish Mexican communities, I focus on specific phenomena in which questions of Jewish ethnicity are made salient. These include ethnic labeling, using Arabic ‘heritage words’, and ethnic joking or relajo. I then focus on the interactions of Syrian Jewish students with Jewish and non-Jewish peers at a Catholic university. More than neutral ways of “expressing identity,” the language practices I analyze constitute strategies for grappling with religious and sociodemographic transitions. They serve to facilitate young peoples’ integration into new domains while maintaining a distinctive sense of ‘Arab Jewishness’ in the face of hegemonic discourses both Orientalist and anti-Semitic. They furthermore serve as a bid to legitimize Syrian Jewish participation in “modern” Jewish society, largely dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, as well as in Mexico City’s socioeconomic elite. In addition to complicating common (mis)understandings of what it means to be Arab, Jewish and Mexican in the 21st century, I aim to address broader questions of how members of diasporic and other minority groups use language to shape and navigate complex social landscapes.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2006

Marcel Fournier, Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton, N.J.: Princ... more Marcel Fournier, Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005, 448 pp. The academic neophytes among us may take stock in the fact that the famous Marcel Mauss launched his career by writing book reviews; likewise, that the author of "The Gift" attained scholarly greatness despite his tendency to "set to work only when goaded by necessity, that is, at the last minute" (70). But these cocktail party trivia are hardly the most interesting insights that biographer Marcel Fournier offers into Mauss' life and work. As the book's introduction proudly announces, "The intellectual legacy bequeathed by this great scholar, long unappreciated by everyone but anthropologists, is now available to the academic community" (1). But after reading this engaging intellectual history, I would venture that even anthropology (at least in the United States) generally fails to recognize the scope of Mauss' contributions as both a scholar and a public intellectual. Although the book's allinclusive nature does not allow for much analysis of Mauss' writing (and inhibits, at times, overall readability), it provides a valuable perspective of the man, the disciplines he helped to establish, and their sociopolitical context. The first part of the book covers Mauss' childhood in Epinal through his university studies at Bordeaux and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where he developed his specialization in "primitive" religion, met influential men such as Sylvain Levi and Henrf Hubert, and played a pivotal role in the creation of Durkheim's famed Annee Sociologique. Aptly entitled "Durkheim's Nephew," we learn as much in this section about the uncle as we do the nephew. However, here Fournier also begins the task, pursued throughout the book, of showing that Mauss was more than "just a Durkheimian." Mauss' political activism, began as a university student, is major factor distinguishing him from the more "indirect" style of his uncle. The next section traces Mauss' early teaching career and publications both academic and political. Two chapters in the section are devoted entirely to his socialist activities. A devoted follower of the French Socialist leader jean Jaures, "Citizen Mauss" was active in various organizations and publications throughout his life, shifting allegiances whenever the goals of these groups no longer fit his always pragmatic and nuanced principles. The second section ends with the First World War. The Great War, as is well known, was a devastating blow both personally and professionally to the French sociologists. Yet we are surprised to learn that Mauss also thrived as a soldier: "I ride horses, I play soldier...! was made for this and not for sociology" (175). He emerged from the war "tired but crowned with glory and sporting many medals" (184) despite his 46 years. It was in the interwar period, as Fournier relates in his third and fourth sections, that Mauss did the work for which he is best known. He was truly prolific during this time: He continued his socialist activities, worked in peace movements, wrote on Bolshevism, violence, and the French economy. He secured Durkheim's legacy by editing his late uncle's previously unpublished work, helped to found the Institut d'Ethnologie, and took up the elephantine task of reviving the Annee, all while suffering many personal losses and health problems. In 1925, he published "The Gift," where he investigated the phenomena of reciprocity ["insufficiently developed by Durkheim" (245)] and developed the notion of "total social fact." For Mauss, who preferred to "simply work on my materials...and go on to something else" rather than "developing systematic theories" (287), "The Gift" is a rare example of just such a contribution to general social science theory. The tragic effects of World War II are unfortunately relegated to the epilogue, a label that evokes summary, extraneous material. …

Anthropological Quarterly, Jul 1, 2006

Handbook of Jewish Languages, 2015

Jewish Social Studies, 26(1), 156–180, 2020

August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering a... more August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering apartment in the overgrown, semi-abandoned faculty housing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Playing in my head was the popular melodic version composed by David Zahavi, a staple of Holocaust commemorations. I was recovering from illness and a devastating semester of huelga, a student-led strike that paralyzed the university and shuttered my young children’s affiliated schools for over 70 days. The students’ protest actions were more than justified. Earlier that year, a federally imposed fiscal control board threatened to halve the university’s already shrunken budget in order to satisfy the Wall Street bondholders that held most of the island’s 74- billion- dollar debt. Such a move was also in line with the anti-university proclivities of local right-wing political sectors, including the now disgraced, then Governor Riccardo Rossello. But the strike took heavy tolls. The macho bungling of the non-faculty employee’s union, coupled with an administration that evaporated into silence, created an experience that even my therapist labeled traumatic. After scrambling to make up the semester—improvising distance learning while catching bronchitis on a research trip to Mexico—I was depleted: not just from the strike, my illness, and the new mode of teaching (sound familiar yet?), but from the stifling weight of perpetual calamity that is life in twenty-first-century Puerto Rico. “The crisis generation” is how political scientist Mayra Vélez Serrano dubbed our students, because it is all they’ve known. Having only arrived in Río Piedras four years earlier in 2013 to start my first full-time academic position, it felt like I’d arrived at the end of the party. It felt like a lot of beautiful things were ending.

Letra Urbana: Al Borde del Olvido Edición 43, 2019

Una académica, “blanca y soñadora”, da testimonio de un lento y tardío despertar sobre la conscie... more Una académica, “blanca y soñadora”, da testimonio de un lento y tardío despertar sobre la consciencia racial.

The AAA Blog, 2018

The heavy police presence along La Milla de Oro (The Golden Mile) was expected. Occupying two blo... more The heavy police presence along La Milla de Oro (The Golden Mile) was expected. Occupying two blocks of parallel avenues, Muñoz Rivera and Ponce de León, La Milla de Oro is the Wall Street of Puerto Rico and home to the headquarters of several banks which experienced damage at the hands of a few masked protesters during last year's May 1st protest. The 2017 march was one for the record books as one of the largest popular protests in the island's history, mobilized in large part by students of the University of Puerto Rico. At that time, the students were in the thick of a strike and campus shutdown that would last more than 70 days in protest of proposed budget cuts that would (and likely will) gut the UPR system and drastically spike tuition. While many argue that such strikes do more harm than good given the current climate, few could deny the students' impressive ability to mobilize a truly national movement.

This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewis... more This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewish Mexican social life amidst shifting patterns of religiosity, education, and interethnic relations more generally. Mexico City’s Jewish communities have experienced important changes in recent decades. Within the broader Jewish population, long-standing ethnic divisions between Shami (Damascene), Halebi (Aleppan), Turco (Sephardi) and Idish (Ashkenazi) subgroups have become complicated by the growth of ultra-Orthodox sectors that began in the 1970s. Furthermore, Syrian Jewish young people - most of whom are third or fourth generation –are now attending university in large numbers, many defying old norms of teenage marriage for women and employment in family businesses for men. The result is an increasing diversity in how young Shamis and Halebis relate to their Judaism, their Arab heritage, and Mexico City society at large. I explore these processes through analysis of linguistic practice in everyday life. I gathered data over 15 months in Mexico City through participant observation, interviews, and making audio recordings of spontaneous verbal interaction in a variety of settings. After providing an ethnographic and linguistic overview of the Jewish Mexican communities, I focus on specific phenomena in which questions of Jewish ethnicity are made salient. These include ethnic labeling, using Arabic ‘heritage words’, and ethnic joking or relajo. I then focus on the interactions of Syrian Jewish students with Jewish and non-Jewish peers at a Catholic university. More than neutral ways of “expressing identity,” the language practices I analyze constitute strategies for grappling with religious and sociodemographic transitions. They serve to facilitate young peoples’ integration into new domains while maintaining a distinctive sense of ‘Arab Jewishness’ in the face of hegemonic discourses both Orientalist and anti-Semitic. They furthermore serve as a bid to legitimize Syrian Jewish participation in “modern” Jewish society, largely dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, as well as in Mexico City’s socioeconomic elite. In addition to complicating common (mis)understandings of what it means to be Arab, Jewish and Mexican in the 21st century, I aim to address broader questions of how members of diasporic and other minority groups use language to shape and navigate complex social landscapes.

Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, 2020

Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine, 2021

Journal of Jewish Languages, 2021

Jewish Social Studies, 2020

August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering a... more August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering apartment in the overgrown, semi-abandoned faculty housing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Playing in my head was the popular melodic version composed by David Zahavi, a staple of Holocaust commemorations. I was recovering from illness and a devastating semester of huelga, a student-led strike that paralyzed the university and shuttered my young children’s affiliated schools for over 70 days. The students’ protest actions were more than justified. Earlier that year, a federally imposed fiscal control board threatened to halve the university’s already shrunken budget in order to satisfy the Wall Street bondholders that held most of the island’s 74- billion- dollar debt. Such a move was also in line with the anti-university proclivities of local right-wing political sectors, including the now disgraced, then Governor Riccardo Rossello. But the strike took heavy tolls. The macho bungling of the non-faculty employee’s union, coupled with an administration that evaporated into silence, created an experience that even my therapist labeled traumatic. After scrambling to make up the semester—improvising distance learning while catching bronchitis on a research trip to Mexico—I was depleted: not just from the strike, my illness, and the new mode of teaching (sound familiar yet?), but from the stifling weight of perpetual calamity that is life in twenty-first-century Puerto Rico. “The crisis generation” is how political scientist Mayra Vélez Serrano dubbed our students, because it is all they’ve known. Having only arrived in Río Piedras four years earlier in 2013 to start my first full-time academic position, it felt like I’d arrived at the end of the party. It felt like a lot of beautiful things were ending.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2018

(Winter/Spring 2020), 2020

This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewis... more This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the connections between linguistic practice and Jewish Mexican social life amidst shifting patterns of religiosity, education, and interethnic relations more generally. Mexico City’s Jewish communities have experienced important changes in recent decades. Within the broader Jewish population, long-standing ethnic divisions between Shami (Damascene), Halebi (Aleppan), Turco (Sephardi) and Idish (Ashkenazi) subgroups have become complicated by the growth of ultra-Orthodox sectors that began in the 1970s. Furthermore, Syrian Jewish young people - most of whom are third or fourth generation –are now attending university in large numbers, many defying old norms of teenage marriage for women and employment in family businesses for men. The result is an increasing diversity in how young Shamis and Halebis relate to their Judaism, their Arab heritage, and Mexico City society at large. I explore these processes through analysis of linguistic practice in everyday life. I gathered data over 15 months in Mexico City through participant observation, interviews, and making audio recordings of spontaneous verbal interaction in a variety of settings. After providing an ethnographic and linguistic overview of the Jewish Mexican communities, I focus on specific phenomena in which questions of Jewish ethnicity are made salient. These include ethnic labeling, using Arabic ‘heritage words’, and ethnic joking or relajo. I then focus on the interactions of Syrian Jewish students with Jewish and non-Jewish peers at a Catholic university. More than neutral ways of “expressing identity,” the language practices I analyze constitute strategies for grappling with religious and sociodemographic transitions. They serve to facilitate young peoples’ integration into new domains while maintaining a distinctive sense of ‘Arab Jewishness’ in the face of hegemonic discourses both Orientalist and anti-Semitic. They furthermore serve as a bid to legitimize Syrian Jewish participation in “modern” Jewish society, largely dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, as well as in Mexico City’s socioeconomic elite. In addition to complicating common (mis)understandings of what it means to be Arab, Jewish and Mexican in the 21st century, I aim to address broader questions of how members of diasporic and other minority groups use language to shape and navigate complex social landscapes.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2006

Marcel Fournier, Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton, N.J.: Princ... more Marcel Fournier, Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005, 448 pp. The academic neophytes among us may take stock in the fact that the famous Marcel Mauss launched his career by writing book reviews; likewise, that the author of "The Gift" attained scholarly greatness despite his tendency to "set to work only when goaded by necessity, that is, at the last minute" (70). But these cocktail party trivia are hardly the most interesting insights that biographer Marcel Fournier offers into Mauss' life and work. As the book's introduction proudly announces, "The intellectual legacy bequeathed by this great scholar, long unappreciated by everyone but anthropologists, is now available to the academic community" (1). But after reading this engaging intellectual history, I would venture that even anthropology (at least in the United States) generally fails to recognize the scope of Mauss' contributions as both a scholar and a public intellectual. Although the book's allinclusive nature does not allow for much analysis of Mauss' writing (and inhibits, at times, overall readability), it provides a valuable perspective of the man, the disciplines he helped to establish, and their sociopolitical context. The first part of the book covers Mauss' childhood in Epinal through his university studies at Bordeaux and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where he developed his specialization in "primitive" religion, met influential men such as Sylvain Levi and Henrf Hubert, and played a pivotal role in the creation of Durkheim's famed Annee Sociologique. Aptly entitled "Durkheim's Nephew," we learn as much in this section about the uncle as we do the nephew. However, here Fournier also begins the task, pursued throughout the book, of showing that Mauss was more than "just a Durkheimian." Mauss' political activism, began as a university student, is major factor distinguishing him from the more "indirect" style of his uncle. The next section traces Mauss' early teaching career and publications both academic and political. Two chapters in the section are devoted entirely to his socialist activities. A devoted follower of the French Socialist leader jean Jaures, "Citizen Mauss" was active in various organizations and publications throughout his life, shifting allegiances whenever the goals of these groups no longer fit his always pragmatic and nuanced principles. The second section ends with the First World War. The Great War, as is well known, was a devastating blow both personally and professionally to the French sociologists. Yet we are surprised to learn that Mauss also thrived as a soldier: "I ride horses, I play soldier...! was made for this and not for sociology" (175). He emerged from the war "tired but crowned with glory and sporting many medals" (184) despite his 46 years. It was in the interwar period, as Fournier relates in his third and fourth sections, that Mauss did the work for which he is best known. He was truly prolific during this time: He continued his socialist activities, worked in peace movements, wrote on Bolshevism, violence, and the French economy. He secured Durkheim's legacy by editing his late uncle's previously unpublished work, helped to found the Institut d'Ethnologie, and took up the elephantine task of reviving the Annee, all while suffering many personal losses and health problems. In 1925, he published "The Gift," where he investigated the phenomena of reciprocity ["insufficiently developed by Durkheim" (245)] and developed the notion of "total social fact." For Mauss, who preferred to "simply work on my materials...and go on to something else" rather than "developing systematic theories" (287), "The Gift" is a rare example of just such a contribution to general social science theory. The tragic effects of World War II are unfortunately relegated to the epilogue, a label that evokes summary, extraneous material. …

Anthropological Quarterly, Jul 1, 2006

Handbook of Jewish Languages, 2015

Jewish Social Studies, 26(1), 156–180, 2020

August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering a... more August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes’s famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering apartment in the overgrown, semi-abandoned faculty housing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Playing in my head was the popular melodic version composed by David Zahavi, a staple of Holocaust commemorations. I was recovering from illness and a devastating semester of huelga, a student-led strike that paralyzed the university and shuttered my young children’s affiliated schools for over 70 days. The students’ protest actions were more than justified. Earlier that year, a federally imposed fiscal control board threatened to halve the university’s already shrunken budget in order to satisfy the Wall Street bondholders that held most of the island’s 74- billion- dollar debt. Such a move was also in line with the anti-university proclivities of local right-wing political sectors, including the now disgraced, then Governor Riccardo Rossello. But the strike took heavy tolls. The macho bungling of the non-faculty employee’s union, coupled with an administration that evaporated into silence, created an experience that even my therapist labeled traumatic. After scrambling to make up the semester—improvising distance learning while catching bronchitis on a research trip to Mexico—I was depleted: not just from the strike, my illness, and the new mode of teaching (sound familiar yet?), but from the stifling weight of perpetual calamity that is life in twenty-first-century Puerto Rico. “The crisis generation” is how political scientist Mayra Vélez Serrano dubbed our students, because it is all they’ve known. Having only arrived in Río Piedras four years earlier in 2013 to start my first full-time academic position, it felt like I’d arrived at the end of the party. It felt like a lot of beautiful things were ending.

Letra Urbana: Al Borde del Olvido Edición 43, 2019

Una académica, “blanca y soñadora”, da testimonio de un lento y tardío despertar sobre la conscie... more Una académica, “blanca y soñadora”, da testimonio de un lento y tardío despertar sobre la consciencia racial.

The AAA Blog, 2018

The heavy police presence along La Milla de Oro (The Golden Mile) was expected. Occupying two blo... more The heavy police presence along La Milla de Oro (The Golden Mile) was expected. Occupying two blocks of parallel avenues, Muñoz Rivera and Ponce de León, La Milla de Oro is the Wall Street of Puerto Rico and home to the headquarters of several banks which experienced damage at the hands of a few masked protesters during last year's May 1st protest. The 2017 march was one for the record books as one of the largest popular protests in the island's history, mobilized in large part by students of the University of Puerto Rico. At that time, the students were in the thick of a strike and campus shutdown that would last more than 70 days in protest of proposed budget cuts that would (and likely will) gut the UPR system and drastically spike tuition. While many argue that such strikes do more harm than good given the current climate, few could deny the students' impressive ability to mobilize a truly national movement.

In articulating Jewish and other identities, Jewish Latin Americans draw on a broad range of semi... more In articulating Jewish and other identities, Jewish Latin Americans draw on a broad range of semiotic resources associated with social categories that span geographic and temporal scales. However, these practices have been largely overlooked in both Spanish/Portuguese sociolinguistics and Jewish language research, due to the dominance of ‘distinctiveness-centered’ or ‘ethnolect’ paradigms in both fields. In this paper, I employ the notion of Jewish semiotic repertoire (a modification of Benor’s (2009) ‘Jewish linguistic repertoire ,’ or a fluid collection of resources that speakers use variably to construct and express Jewish identities) to examine Jewish language practices in Mexico City. Jewish communal life here has long been organized into ethno-religious subsectors that represent Aleppan, Damascene, Sephardic and Ashkenazi groups, respectively. These social categories have recently become destabilized through demographic and socioeconomic shifts, migration, and a growth of religious diversity, including a prominent haredi or ultra-Orthodox movement. This complexity is reflected in the local Jewish semiotic repertoire, which includes ‘heritage words’ (Dean-Olmsted 2012) from Yiddish, Arabic and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino); influence of modern Israeli Hebrew and textual Hebrew/Aramaic; stylistic practices associated with Ashkenazi haredi Judaism (selectively adopted by Sephardic and Syrian haredi Jews); phonological and other elements associated with different national varieties of Spanish; and local linguistic stereotypes associated with wealthy (‘fresa’) and poorer (‘naco’) Mexico City residents. In this paper, I examine how Jewish Mexican filmmaker Salomon Askenazi draws on this rich indexical field (Eckert 2008) for comic effect and social critique in his short film, “Jewish Wars” (2008). The film features scenes from the popular Hollywood movie “Star Wars” (1977) dubbed over with voices of prominent types in the Jewish Mexican social world, including Darth Vader as an ultra-Orthodox, Argentine rabbi. Through this analysis, I consider what contemporary Jewish linguistic practice might contribute to the notion of superdiversity, and vice versa.

Young Syrian Jewish Mexicans- mostly third- and fourth-generation – are coming of age amidst two ... more Young Syrian Jewish Mexicans- mostly third- and fourth-generation – are coming of age amidst two phenomena largely unknown to their forebears. The first is the pervasive presence of ultra-Orthodoxy, which has transformed relations within and between Mexico City’s ethnic Jewish sub-groups. In addition, Syrian Jews are now attending university in large numbers, defying old norms of teenage marriage for women and employment in family businesses for men. These processes are often characterized as oppositional: ultra-Orthodox beliefs and practice encourage cultural isolation while higher education promotes integration into wider Mexican society. Ethnography, however, reveals surprising intersections between the two. In this paper, I highlight the case of “Silvia,” a gregarious young woman who is highly involved with ultra-Orthodox groups in her Syrian Jewish community and student life at her Catholic university. I analyze her interaction with university classmates, her discourse on a university radio show and in the religious classes she imparts to other young Jewish women. Rather than estrange her from her non-Jewish peers, her public persona of piety earns their respect and facilitates her relationships with them. She draws on the ideas and discourses of ultra-Orthodoxy to engage with broader Mexico City society, thereby becoming “more Mexican” by becoming “more Jewish.” This complicates a common binary posited both by scholars and leaders of immigrant and minority groups: that of cultural and religious survival via isolation on the one hand, and demise via assimilation on the other.

Although folklorist Dan Ben-Amos called for more situated and nuanced analyses of joking among Je... more Although folklorist Dan Ben-Amos called for more situated and nuanced analyses of joking among Jews in 1973, the myth of quasi-pathological Jewish humor largely persists. Indeed, most of what is labeled as Jewish humor is in fact specific to Ashkenazi Jews in North America. Joking among Jewish Mexicans offers a fresh perspective on both ‘Jewish humor’ and the Mexican conversational genre of relajo or “fooling around.” Like the relajo among Central American rancheros in Chicago that Farr (2006) has analyzed, Jewish Mexican ethnic joking flouts norms of cordiality, builds solidarity and is fundamentally collaborative. In this presentation, I analyze how a group of young men in a religious class draw on the Biblical text and shared stereotypes to create jokes about the ethnic subgroups within the Mexico City Jewish community. For example, Moses must have been Halebi (Aleppan Jewish) because he divided the Ten Commandments into groups of five, a joke that indexes the common Middle Eastern "superstitious" practice of thwarting the Evil Eye with expressions of five (hamse in Arabic). Analyzing recordings made over several months of participant observation in the class, I explore the conversational structure of these interactions and how they function within this particular group. I use this analysis to address the question of why ethnic joking is so prevalent among Syrian Jewish Mexicans, in particular, both in the Torah class and beyond. In light of official national discourses on anti-racism and pluralism, as well as global Jewish ones encouraging unity, I see such behavior as a socially sanctioned way of both bridging and maintaining ethnic distinctions. Furthermore, I argue that their ethnic joking is related to the moment of religious and social transition in which many Syrian Jewish young people find themselves, as they engage with ultra-Orthodoxy and expand their participation in broader social spheres like university.

In this paper, I draw on Shandler’s (2008) concept of postvernacularity to examine how third-gene... more In this paper, I draw on Shandler’s (2008) concept of postvernacularity to examine how third-generation Syrian Jewish Mexican women position themselves with regards to traditional language and culture through their talk in a card game. In his exploration of Yiddish in postwar North America, Shandler characterizes postvernacularity as a mode of using a language that is no longer a medium of everyday communication. It is defined by its primarily symbolic (over referential) value and the tendency to preserve only the language’s most colorful or evocative elements. Postvernacularity “always entails some awareness of its distance from vernacularity” (2008:xlii) and can simultaneously communicate mockery and affection for the language and the social worlds it indexes.

While Shandler privileges postvernacular language represented on physical objects and in formal, “cultural performances” (Bauman 1984) like klezmer music, I bring this theoretical tool to the analysis of everyday talk. I modify Shandler’s concept slightly by defining postvernacularity as a stance (Englebretson 2007; Kiesling 2001) in which Syrian Jewish Mexican speakers move in and out through using Judeo-Arabic loanwords and participating in/critiquing traditional activities like reading coffee grounds.

I analyze a recording made when one of the participants in my dissertation research wore a small voice recorder with an omnidirectional microphone to a gathering of fellow shami (Damascene Jewish) girlfriends. I discuss how the materials of the evening – including the playing cards and poker chips, Turkish coffee grounds and even the voice recorder - induce talk and behavior that both embodies and metadiscursively remarks upon traditional Syrian Jewish linguistic and other practice. I argue that some such actions are more clearly postvernacular than others: for example, when “Dina” (the woman wearing the recorder) indiscreetly burps, the others erupt in laughter and one of them instructs her to “tell them how you say it in Arabic,” presumably for the benefit of the recorder. Dina’s performative, distorted pronunciation of the word saha (from the original Arabic word meaning ‘health’) draws attention to its “Arabness” and communicates a sense of ironic distance between herself and the Arabic word she utters. My analysis demonstrates not only the importance of Judeo-Arabic loanwords in fomenting solidarity among young Syrian Jewish Mexicans today, but also how such words can be used to communicate and construct a range of relationships with traditional Syrian Jewish culture. Furthermore, I argue that the concept of postvernacularity can be useful toward a general theory of heritage language loanwords among descendants of immigrants.

Bauman, Richard 1984. Verbal art as performance. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.
Englebretson, R. (Ed.), 2007. Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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Bienvenidos al Léxico Judío Latinoamericano, una base de datos colaborativa de palabras que usan ... more Bienvenidos al Léxico Judío Latinoamericano, una base de datos colaborativa de palabras que usan los judíos hispanohablantes de Latinoamérica y el Caribe, en la escritura y en el habla.

Las palabras incluidas en esta base de datos se derivan de muchos idiomas hablados por los judíos desde el pasado hasta la época actual. Entre ellos se encuentran el hebreo y el arameo de los textos bíblicos y rabínicos; el judeo-árabe, ladino e idish de las antiguas tierras ancestrales y el hebreo moderno del Estado de Israel. Asimismo, la base de datos incluye palabras y frases en español que tienen significados únicos entre judíos y cuyo sentido varía cuando se usan entre hablantes judíos o entre hablantes no judíos.

Puedo enviar los archivos de audio si se los pide. I can send the audio files if requested.

Enlace Judío: El sitio de expresión judía en México, May 25, 2014

NPR and WBUR's Only a Game, Apr 5, 2014

Latin American Jewish Studies Vol. 34, 2016