Social Sciences and Contemporary Jewry: Classifications and Boundary Building, Naming the Other

Concepts and categories both reflect and shape reality. Their relevance and who dictates them determine how reality is perceived, represented, and understood. Conceptual distinctions, classifications, and interpretative strategies are constitutive dimensions in boundary building. Symbolic boundaries imply conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize people, practices, and identities. Classifications in the social sciences are known and understood by their human social “objects of classification”- they can then come to change or modify their behavior based on their perception of their label.
The interplay between Otherness, distinctiveness, and integration reflects historical experiences and changing constellations. Today`s diversification of semantic, ideological, and institutional connections demands avoiding totalizing categories and considering diversity within and across societies, as social constructs. The categories of ethnicity, race, and racialized ethnicity as well as sub-ethnicities, religious belonging, and national context should be analyzed within contextual historical-political and hermeneutical levels.
Focusing on the complex triad Hispanic, Latino, Latin American Jews (not minimizing the label Jews of color), this paper explores the impact of intersectionality studies and post and de-coloniality currents to account for the place of Jews and the internalization of their representations by recovering binary categories in race, class, and gender. Focusing on the US context, we will bring a comparative inverted mirror as well for the new Jews or emergent communities in Latin America. The indistinct otherization of minorities unveils the problematic nature of a center that tends to represent itself and to be erroneously represented as lacking inner diversity. With a transnational perspective, and considering the fluidity of cultural boundaries, it explores whether Jewish identities -and identification of the Jews- are defined in opposition to a privileged “Other,” or in juxtaposition to a number of possible “others”.