Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production

“Ariana Huberman’s Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Jewish Cultural Production is a long-needed and profound study of how Kabbalistic and exoteric concepts inform the work of certain Latin American Jewish writers, filmmakers, and artists. Huberman employs her vast erudition to explain Jewish mysticism as a driving, organizing force in an under-studied area: Latin American Jewish production. She analyzes Alejandro Jodorowsky’s making of the exotic normal; Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s fascination with the ‘Tree of Life,’ the life cycle, and nature; Mario Satz’s investigations into the interconnectedness of everything, the centrality of language, and the imperative for taking care of the Earth; and Isaac Goldemberg and Mirta Kupferminc’s pondering on the Jew’s wandering in a hostile world. Along with her insightful readings of the primary sources, Ariana Huberman draws on Hassidic rabbis, Orthodox commentators, and secular, contemporary scholars of all stripes to support her own original and convincing arguments.”

– Stephen A. Sadow, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature and Jewish Studies, Northeastern University, Boston; Winner of the National Jewish Book Awards in autobiography and memoir

“In Keeping the Mystery Alive Huberman skillfully guides her readers on an exploration of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature ‘after Borges.’ The book demonstrates the extent to which Kabbalah is a broadly shared yet differentially expressed trope in Jewish Latin American literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Huberman’s reading offers a refreshing break with the prevalent ‘Borgesian model’ for understanding the engagement with Kabbalah in Latin American culture. The book discusses Kabbalah as a lived experience, as a psychological language of emotional development, as a mode of connection to one’s ancestors, and as a markedly visual expressive field. Huberman’s deeply multidisciplinary scholarship will certainly interest readers in the fields of Latin American literature, visual art, and culture, as well as readers in the fields of Jewish literature and culture.”

– Yitzhak Lewis, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Duke Kunshan University

“Jewish Mysticism is a fertile source of creative inspiration in secular culture among Latin American writers and artists who migrated to and from Europe and the United States. With rigor and vision, assuming the Borgesian and post-Borgesian legacy, Huberman takes the reader through a rapturous journey of sources across disciplines, doctrinal and experiential, apocryphal and canonic, deeply rooted and universal, articulating a poetics of ecstatic syncretism through the appropriation of Kabbalistic motifs. Beyond the constraints of periodization, informed critical perspectives afford new light on the dialogue between texts and art forms from many cultures. Jodorowsky, Muñiz-Huberman, Satz, and Goldemberg encounter Underhill, Scholem, Idel, Wolfson, Liebes, Huss, King. Dybbuks meet Mexican lore; Merkabah mysticism, hypostatic Christian traditions; Inca cosmology, Jewish wandering souls.”

– Daniel Nahson, Associate Professor of Spanish, SUNY Oneonta