Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States
Exploration of ethnic identity and community building through stories of contemporary Latino Jews.
Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States analyzes the changing construction of race and ethnicity in the United States through the lens of contemporary Jewish immigrants from Latin America. Since Latino Jews are not easily classified within the U.S. racial and ethnic schema, their ethnic identity and group affiliation challenge existing paradigms. Author Laura Limonic offers a view into the lives of this designation of Jewish immigrants, highlighting the ways in which they adopt different identities (e.g., national, religious, or panethnic) in response to different actors and situations.
Limonic begins by introducing the stories of Latino Jewish immigrants and laying out the important questions surrounding ethnic identity: How do Latino Jews identify? Can they choose their identity or is it assigned to them? How is ethnicity strategic or instrumental? These larger questions are placed within the existing scholarly literature on immigrant integration, religion, and ethnic group construction. Limonic explains how groups can be constructed when there is a lack of a perfect host group and details the ways different factors influence ethnic identity and shape membership into ethnic groups. The book concludes that group construction is never static in the United States, and, in particular, how race, religion, and class are increasingly important mediating factors in defining ethnicity and ethnic identity.
As the Latino population continues to grow in the United States, so does the influence of millions of Latinos on U.S. culture, politics, economy, and social structure. Kugel and Frijoles offers new insight with which to understand the diversity of Latinos, the incorporation of contemporary Jewish immigrants, and the effect of U.S. ethno-racial structures for immigrant assimilation.
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Laura Limonic is an assistant professor of sociology at the College of Old Westbury of the State University of New York. Her research is in the area of contemporary immigration to the United States and the integration trajectories of ethnic and ethno-religious groups.
This is a pioneering study that opens the door to a Latinx Jewish identity that is still evolving and defining itself. Future researchers will build upon the foundation that Limonic has laid to address many other nuances of intersecting Jewish and Latinx identities in the United States, including such important topics as Ashkenazi and Sephardic differences, the role of gender and women's position, the literary expression of identity, or even the meaning of food within this diversely Jewish and diversely Latinx community, which is hinted at by her book's alluring title, Kugel and Frijoles. To readers seeking to understand the peculiar Jewish hybridity that emerged from the diaspora to the "other America" and that has now rerouted to the United States, Limonic's book offers a superb guide.
-- "Studies in Contemporary Jewry"Limonic's research describes Latino Jews' interactions within the larger U.S. Jewish and Latino populations, their countries of origin, and Israel. In addition to richly documenting these communities, Kugel and Frijoles offers a suggestive model for interpreting the emergent social forms, identities, and relations that are developing in globally linked localities of the contemporary world.
--Steven J. Gold "Department of Sociology, Michigan State University"Limonic's framework and findings contribute to our knowledge of Latin/Latino Jews in the United States
--Yael Siman "AJS Review"Kugel and Frijoles is replete with charts and statistical tables illuminating multiple aspects of the Latino experiences in their process of immigration and assimilation into America. This book is clearly NOT a cookbook as this reader mistakenly expected from its title. But there was no disappointment.
--Marion Stein "Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews"I am grateful that Limonic wrote this book.
--Howard Freedman "J. The Jewish News of Northern California"Kugel and Frijoles does an admirable job linking this study to previous scholarship on Latinos in the United States, and marking, at the same time, an important milestone by opening a venue to discuss an often invisible group. The author of this intellectually sophisticated monograph of an important and timely subject cleverly intertwines theoretical points and ethnographic observations; the voices of the 86 Latin American Jewish immigrants she interviewed during her fieldwork (48 women and 38 men)--mostly from Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela--contribute immensely to strengthen the complex tapestry presented by Limonic.
--Milton Ricardo Antonio Machuca-Gálvez "Hispania"
