Federico Finchelstein is Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and the Eugene Lang College of the New School University in New York City, and also the Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, and previously taught at Brown University. Finchelstein is the author of four books on fascism, the Holocaust, and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe, as well as more than fifty academic articles and reviews in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian. Transatlantic Fascism, featured in his Rorotoko interview, was recently published in a Spanish translation in Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010).
Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by the “sacred.”This intertwining of the secular with the sacred is central to an understanding of Argentine fascism and is thoroughly explored in the book. I stress the complex interaction between secularizing processes and religious tradition and practice. The book focuses on the quasi-religious dimensions of fascism that complexly overlapped with the Catholic “sacred.”This relation was not devoid of conflicts. But antisemitism, and with it anticommunism, provided both fascists and Catholics on the far right with a common intellectual battlefield on which to join forces as well as a symbolic shared space for enacting fascist ideology.As a political religion, Argentine fascism was embedded in Catholicism, as the fascists understood it. In this context they resorted to antisemitism as the best metaphor to represent the internal enemy.
Federico Finchelstein Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945Duke University Press344 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0822346128
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