Impure Migration investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jewish people displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitution was one of very few ways they could escape the limited options in their home countries, and Jewish men facilitate their transit and the organization of their work and social lives. Instead of marginalizing this story or reading it as a degrading chapter in Latin American Jewish history, Impure Migration interrogates a complicated social landscape to reveal that sex work is in fact a critical part of the histories of migration, labor, race, and sexuality.

MIR YARFITZ is an assistant professor in the department of history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“A fascinating account of Jewish participation in sexual commerce in Buenos Aires…Impure Migration deepens our knowledge of the relation between prostitution and migration.”

"This book provides us with exciting ways in which the perspectives of the subaltern can be narrated into a transnational history of elites who dominated the talk about them. Impure Migration is a brilliant piece of history writing which will speak loudly and inspirationally to global and transnational historians. Its findings will equally be of immense help to activists and academics engaged in debates on contemporary sex work and trafficking."

"Yarfitz has approached the delicate subject deftly and with sophistication."

"If you want to read just one of the very many books on Jewish white slavery, this is the one you should choose. Both specialists and the general public will find this volume engaging and insightful."

“A tour de force. It transcends conventional accounts of victimized prostitutes and malevolent pimps with an intellectually bold exploration of sexual and racialized public anxieties. An important contribution to the history of international mobility, immigrant sociability, gendered labor, and multi-ethnic cities.”

"Recommended."

“Impure Migration presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Jewish immigration to the Americas... it is important that this story be made available.”