New Article Published: Reconnecting Queer, Trans, and Jewish History in Twentieth-Century Argentina.

I am excited to share that my latest article, “Shared Roots, Shared Branches: Reconnecting Queer, Trans, and Jewish History in the Argentine Twentieth Century,” has been published in Latin American Jewish Studies (Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall 2025).

Overview

While the histories of state violence, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ+ repression in Argentina are often studied in isolation, they are deeply interconnected. This research traces those links back through the twentieth century, using as a starting point the historic figure of 400 disappeared trans and queer individuals during Argentina’s last dictatorship—a number first brought to light through the efforts of Rabbi Marshall Meyer and activist Carlos Jáuregui.

By examining documents from the Police Archive of Rosario, Argentina, the paper explores how marginalized subjects navigate systems of intense surveillance:

• Shared Strategies of Survival: Analysis of historical police files (legajos) revealing how individuals targeted for “immorality” or social stigma—including Jewish pimps (caftens), Polish prostitutes (polacas), and effeminate gay/trans individuals—used clever strategies of self-concealment and “moral cleansing” to evade state repression.
• The “Subversion Tree”: An exploration of how conservative, nationalist, and Catholic factions built an ideology that framed both Jewish populations and sexual dissidents as intertwined threats to national identity.
• Archival Intersections: A call to bridge the gap between sexuality studies and Jewish studies to better understand the long timeline of state violence and build political solidarity today.

“Keeping Jewish people, trans people, queer people, and other marginalized groups in different folders is a way to obscure the complex and systematic violence carried out by the armed forces, the police, and nationalist Catholic sectors. But what today appears separate in the archives was once united in the past.”

You can read and download the full article here:

🔗 Read “Shared Roots, Shared Branches” on Latin American Jewish Studies