A Visual Culture Examination of the Unsolved Terrorist Attack Against Argentinian Jewry and its Implications for Israel–Argentinian Jewry Relations

On July 18, 1994, eighty-five people perished in a car-bombing that destroyed the headquarters of AMIA, the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association in Buenos Aires, two years after the bombing of the Israeli embassy there. The successive attacks raised issues of Middle East-based transnational terrorism and singled out Argentinian Jewry among other minorities. This was reflected in a consolation message after the AMIA attack from Argentine President Menem to the Israeli Prime Minister, not to his own citizens, and the media`s repeated distinction between Jewish victims and those who were "innocent." All judicial questions following the bombing remain open. The absence of justice prompted civil groups parallel to AMIA to fuse memory with protest against impunity, instigating a complex process of grassroots, semi-official, and official collective memory construction in the public space. This proposal, based on Visual Culture, Visual Sociology, and Memory Studies perspectives, asks how AMIA uses art interventions in the public space in regard to the attack and how they help AMIA play its role as an agent of memory and protest vis-à-vis Argentinian Jewry, Argentinian authorities, and Israeli institutions. Focusing on the subway-station memorial site, renamed “AMIA-Pasteur” in 2015, featuring caricatures and graffiti on platform, aisle, and staircase walls, and an adjacent interpretative center, I argue that the use—conflicting or complementary—of Jewish (and Israeli) commemoration and protest patterns and those from Argentine visual culture not only reflect Argentine Jewry’s status but also offer a case study of the current complexity of Israel–Diaspora relations.









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