Book Review: Keeping the mystery alive: Jewish mysticism in Latin American cultural production by Ariana Huberman, Brookline, MA, Academic Studies Press, 2022, 184 pp., $119, ISBN 9781644698983

Ariana Huberman’s book is a revealing investigation into the presence of Jewish mysticism in twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American literature. Huberman dedicates a chapter each to Alejandro Jodorowsy, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Mario Satz and Isaac Goldemberg and, in her evaluation of various forms of Kabbalistic influence, also carries out comparative readings with the work of visual artists, notably that of Xul Solar and Mirta Kupferminc. As a result of this wide-ranging corpus, the central study of literature has a multidisciplinary approach and, whilst the Kabbalah is a thread tying the chapters together firmly, the book is also notable for the diverse and multicultural backgrounds of the authors in question. One great strength of Huberman’s monograph is that it reveals much about the connections between Jewish and Latin American diasporic cultures within the four specific case studies.