This chapter assesses Laura Limonic's Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States (2019). This sociological study focuses on Latinx Jews who have migrated to the United States since 1965, largely from Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. Limonic establishes that the earlier migration of Cuban Jews to Miami in the early 1960s created a precedent for other Latin American Jews to search for a new home and a new sense of identity as “Latino Jews” in the United States. Fleeing the turn to Communism after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, thousands of Cuban Jews arrived in Miami hoping to be welcomed into the American Jewish communal and religious institutions of the day. Instead, they discovered that their Cubanness made their Jewishness suspect at a time when multiculturalism was not yet in vogue. As a result, they had to build their own religious and social spaces, constructing an Ashkenazi synagogue, the Cuban Hebrew Congregation of Miami, and a Sephardic synagogue, Temple Moses.
Book Review: Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia