Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States
Description
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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About the Author
Reviews
Laura Limonic has written an eye-opening study of Latin American Jewish immigrants to the United States that in graceful prose comprehensively explores the complexities of ethnic and religious identity of this hybrid group that has made a virtue of its multiple attachments and cultural roots. Drawing from a rich ethnographic field study as well as her own Jewish Latina background, Limonic has given us a pathbreaking introduction to a fascinating population.-- (11/30/2018)
Full of rich and absorbing ethnographic material, Kugel and Frijoles provides important insights into the experiences of a fascinating immigrant group. Written in a highly readable style, the book enriches our understanding of how immigrants construct ethnic and racial identities in the U.S. today.-- (11/30/2018)
Kugel and Frijoles adds a fresh and vibrant perspective to the growing body of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and contemporary American Jewish life. Limonic's work raises important questions regarding the intersection of race, ethnicity, religion, and class during a time of rapid growth among a widely diverse Latino immigrant population to the U.S.-- (11/30/2018)
Quite simply, Laura Limonic owns the intersection of Jewish and Latino identities. Her book is utterly of the moment and yet also historically astute. It is an essential edition to the scholarship on an emergent part of American Jewry.-- (11/30/2018)
I am grateful that Limonic wrote this book.--Howard Freedman"J. The Jewish News of Northern California" (06/25/2019)
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.-- (09/01/2019)
