Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Latin America

Brazilian Belonging examines a century of Brazilian Jewish political activism, from the onset of Jewish mass migration to Brazil in the early 1920s to the present. The home of the largest Jewish community living in a nonwhite-majority country in the world, and a country that has witnessed extended periods of democratic and dictatorial rule, Brazil offers an important window for rethinking Jewish ideas about race and nation, democracy and dictatorship, and local and global forms of state violence. In this book, Michael Rom highlights the important roles Brazilian Jews played in prominent social movements—movements that contested the meaning of the discourse of racial democracy, fought against the military dictatorship, and sought out new political possibilities following the return of democratic rule. He draws on extensive research—including previously unexamined secret police and intelligence records, the Brazilian Yiddish press, and oral history interviews—to illuminate decades of Brazilian Jewish activism under both democratic and dictatorial regimes. Offering the first study of modern Jewish politics and Latin American ethnic belonging throughout the Cold War, this book situates Brazilian Jewish activism within the transnational contexts of the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Cold War superpower rivalries, Latin American revolutionary insurgencies, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.