Political Violence, Military Dictatorship, and Memory. The Argentina of the Seventies and Eighties from the Marshall T. Meyer Archive

Abstract

The North American Rabbi Marshall Meyer was a leading figure of the Jewish- rgentine community and a pioneering advocate for human rights during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983). In recent years, his personal archive has been incorporated into the Human Rights Archive of the David M. Rubenstein Library, the Manuscripts and Rare Books Library of Duke University. From his sermons, speeches, personal and professional correspondence, essays, interviews, and audiovisual material, this work reconstructs his trajectory in Argentina, focusing specifically on the years of political radicalization, repression, and the years just after the dictatorship. The article begins with the arrival of Meyer to Argentina in 1959, describing his impression of the society that welcomed him and the relation between this society and the Judaism that he sought to instill in his institutions. Later, he focuses on his perception of Peronism, the political violence that characterized the first half of the seventies, the commitment he made with the struggle for human rights in the second half and, finally, the construction of a first memory, in the eighties, of the dictatorship that was being left behind. An inquiry into Meyer’s life opens up an intimate registry, individual and oftentimes communal, of the years of political violence, military dictatorship, and the transition to democracy.