How did twentieth century Argentine Jewish organizations view sexual morality? And how did these views impact the broader Jewish community? Hear guest lecturer Mir Yarfitz discuss this and more.

About the event

Fearful not only of shame in front of non-Jews, but violent reprisals, Jewish leaders and institutions have often tried to keep dirty laundry indoors. In early twentieth century Argentina, as the Jewish population became one of the largest in the world, the Zwi Migdal, a mutual aid and burial society of several hundred Ashkenazi Jews, became infamous for moving thousands of Jewish sex workers across the Atlantic to brothels in South America. “Respectable” Jews battled this organization for decades, and in later years continued public conflicts over other aspects of sexual morality, raising debates about protecting Jews from antisemitism and from one another.

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About the speaker

Mir Yarfitz has lived in each of the four corners of the US as well as South and Central America. His enthusiasm for Latin America grew from his college study abroad experience in Nicaragua, a Fulbright in Argentina, and work with migrant farmworker labor unions in Washington, Oregon, and Georgia. His teaching and research interests include Latin American cultural production, social movements, dictatorships and resistance, racial hierarchies, migration, gender, sexuality,  masculinity, and transgender studies. His current research explores what might fruitfully be framed as trans lives in Argentina from 1900 to 1945, as part of the larger development of archivally-based trans studies. His 2019 Rutgers University Press book  “Impure Migrations: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina”, historicizes immigrant Ashkenazi Jews in organized prostitution in Buenos Aires between the 1890s and 1930s and in broader transnational flows of sex workers and moral opposition. In addition to publishing in the fields of Latin American trans studies, sex work history, and Jewish studies, he has written collaboratively with a team of Wake Forest Librarians about their experiences in cooperative pedagogy and ungrading, including creating a zine together about the books (and zines) their students have written. He is a 2023 Kulynych Family Omicron Delta Kappa Award winner, selected by students for bridging “the gap between the classroom and student life.”