This edited volume features case studies that collectively invite new angles for interpreting the history and nature of Jewish Latin America. Chapters range temporally from nineteenth-century international migration booms to the imagined worlds of today's telenovelas. The book is based on a collaborative workshop organised by the Free University of Berlin and Tel Aviv University in 2015 – a gathering that surely generated fascinating discussion. The editors’ introduction affirms several refreshing trends that are steadily gaining momentum in the broader field of diaspora studies; that is, Rein, Rinke and Zysman challenge historiographical constructions of ethnicity built on presumptions of irreducible difference rather than on dynamism and mutability. They also advocate for discussing Jewish–Latin American history in comparative and inter-ethnic context – a proposition that led to the inclusion of four chapters that feature research on non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations in Argentina and Chile.

Finally, the editors place emphasis on the need to explore Jewish life in Latin America by starting with the groups and geographies most often marginalised by official, institutional histories. The stories of women, rural actors and unaffiliated Jews have hitherto often populated these peripheries of scholarly attention across disciplines. Chapter 2 by Jeffrey Lesser reinforces the introduction and serves as a theoretical undergirding for the collection. In it, he proposes a ‘New Architecture of Ethnic Studies’ that seeks to engage with the complex realities of shifting and multiple identities and allegiances that define the terrain of not only Jewish Latin America, but diasporic Latin America more generally. Several of the case studies that follow the editors’ and Lesser's introductions look to answer this clarion call for more inclusive ethnic studies models and methods.

In the realm of methodology, Nadia Zysman's chapter on Jewish garment workers in early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires is worthy of particular mention. She combines a gendered analysis with careful attention to the spatial dynamics of the Jewish labour networks that formed between the factory floor, workshops and domestic homework spaces. Valeria Navarro-Rosenblatt's chapter on non-affiliated Jews in Chile dedicates substantial focus to advocating for the utility of oral history in excavating insight into the lives of individuals typically excluded from official community histories. This echoes earlier calls by the editors and Lesser, who invite us to consider new methods that might foster inclusion of previously silenced persons and groups. Some doubts remain, however, as to whether or not the subjects of Navarro-Rosenblatt's chapter actually personify the definition of being ‘unaffiliated’ Jews. Nevertheless, the chapter raises important questions about wider tendencies to exclude Jewish progressive groups from Chile's collective memory and history.

Of note are the theoretical and historiographical contributions made by Mariusz Kałczewiak and Liliana Ruth Feierstein in their chapters on Polish Jews in Argentina, and German-speaking Jews in Latin America, respectively. In the former, the author makes the compelling point that by declaring allegiance to a foreign homeland, Polish Jews in the 1920s and 1930s were, in a sense, expressing their Argentine identity. He reasons that given Argentina's heavily international immigrant milieu of the early twentieth century, it was the norm to express allegiance to a foreign homeland. Thus, Polish landsmanshaftn organisations were spaces that fostered the appearance of Jewish argentinidad and channelled (rather than obstructed) socio-cultural integration in Argentina. Feierstein's chapter ambitiously takes on the question of the German–Jewish legacy in Latin America. In a tour de force that moves from Mexico City to the agricultural colony of Moisés Ville (Argentina), to a small casino theatre in Bolivia, the author explores the stories of individuals and cultural institutions. Attention to the role of prominent German–Jewish women clearly carries out one of the originally stated goals of the edited volume – to foreground the stories of the people and groups often at the margins of Jewish–Latin American studies.

As mentioned earlier, four of the volume's eight chapters focus either comparatively or solely on the histories, cultures, lived experiences and representations of non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations in Chile and Argentina. This is, as stated in the editors’ introduction, in keeping with their injunction against studying Jewish Latin Americans in isolation from other diasporic and ethnic communities. Especially informative is the chapter by Rein and Ariel Noyjovich on Peronist efforts to mobilise support among Arab-Argentines, and the ways in which Peronist discourse redefined the limits of Argentine nationality in a manner that specifically impacted diasporic populations. Their study contains a useful discussion of the interplay between citizenship, belonging, inclusion/exclusion and politics in Argentina (and Latin America more generally).

This reader wonders, however, about what interesting new dimensions the inclusion of other groups beyond Middle Eastern Latin Americans might have rendered, and whether this might have strengthened the inter-ethnic, comparative dimension of this collection. Of course there were probably some limitations in this regard, in that the chapters here reflect the subject material of conference participants, and not a broader sampling of current transregional diaspora and ethnic studies scholarship. Nevertheless, in the larger task of challenging commonly held assumptions about ethnicity and identity in Latin America, it could have been helpful to chip away at the prevailing vision of Latin American Arabs as the natural counterpoint example to Latin American Jews. Inclusion of scholarship on other diasporas and ethnicities from East Asia (beyond the reference to the Japanese–Argentine community made by Rein and Noyjovich, and Lesser's incorporation of Japanese– and Chinese–Brazilians in his theoretical introduction), for example, might have offered opportunities for expanding both the ethnic and geographical scope of the chapters.

Overall, this collection serves as a stimulating invitation to scholars of Latin American ethnic studies. It offers multiple models of scholarship that go beyond and against traditional narratives of Jewish Latin America. Together, these authors advocate for making ever more visible the variegated mass of voices (Jewish and otherwise) that shed light on the complicated – and sometimes contradictory – lived experiences of the subjects whose stories form the bedrock of interdisciplinary Latin American ethnic studies.