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Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina. By Raanan Rein. Translated by Martha Grenzeback. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. xii + 226 pp.
This monograph makes a vital contribution to the study of both sport and ethnicity in Latin America by examining the longstanding and critical association of Argentina's Jewish community with the Club Atlanta of the Villa Crespo neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Although the club was not solely run nor patronized by Jews, the prominence of Jewish players and administrators-most vitally the presidency of León Kolbowski-and Villa Crespo's role as a center of Jewish life in Argentina helped to transform the club and its fans into a metonym for the wider Jewish community from the middle of the twentieth century on.
As such, the club became a source of pride for immigrants and their children and grandchildren. Although the title of the book promises a wider history of Jewish footballers and fans in Argentina, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina is primarily an institutional history of the Club Atlanta and its relationship to the immediate neighborhood rather than a wide-ranging...