Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Brazil, 1930–1985.

9798607315924

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019

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This dissertation examines Brazilian Jewish politics of belonging during the Global Cold War. It argues that Brazilian Jews used political activism to assert and define belonging in their nation-state, ethnic community, and generation. Drawing on Brazilian newspapers written in Portuguese and Yiddish, diplomatic and governmental correspondence, police and intelligence records, memoirs, and oral history interviews, this dissertation considers Brazilian Jewish politics of belonging during the twenty years of postwar democracy (1945-1964), and the two decades of military dictatorship that followed (1964-1985). During the postwar democratic period, Brazilian Jewish politics centered around the question of antisemitism. Brazilian Zionists and Jewish communists used the new national myth of racial democracy to fight together against antisemitic immigration restrictions and the presence of Nazi war criminals in Brazil as a way of affirming their national belonging, and jointly established representative communal institutions such as the Jewish state federations. Following the onset of the Global Cold War, and Soviet repression of Zionism and Yiddish culture, however, relations between Brazilian Zionists and Jewish communists in Brazil rapidly deteriorated, turning the Jewish state federations and Brazilian Yiddish press into arenas of conflict over communal belonging. Led by recently arrived Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, Zionist and communist newspapers employed allegations of antisemitic state violence in the US and USSR to discredit their ideological adversaries, and define the limits of communal belonging. The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 condemnation of Stalinist antisemitism vindicated Brazilian Zionists, provoking schisms in communist institutions that effectively eliminated the communists as a political force in the Brazilian Jewish community, and confirming Zionist hegemony over Brazilian Jewish communal institutions.During the military dictatorship, however, as political possibilities narrowed, Brazilian Jewish politics came to primarily revolve around the issue of armed struggle, even as the particular paths of Zionists and communists diverged. Politicized through social ties created at leftist Jewish elementary schools and summer camps, elite public high schools, and university departments, Jewish Marxist high school and university students participated in the student movement and armed struggle against the Brazilian military regime, as a way of affirming their belonging in the revolutionary politics of the 1960s generation, while Brazilian state violence forced them to confront difficult questions about generational belonging. Meanwhile, their Zionist contemporaries focused on opposing the efforts of the Palestine Liberation Organization to open a diplomatic office in Brazil, which they claimed would bring the Palestinian armed struggle to Brazil. Viewing this office as a threat to their national belonging, Zionist activists employed the dictatorship’s language of national security and racial democracy to argue that the PLO office would undermine Arab-Jewish coexistence. At the same time, non-Zionist Jewish leftists used protests against Israeli state violence in Lebanon to challenge Zionist hegemony over Brazilian Jewish communal institutions, reigniting debates about authority and communal belonging that had been dormant for thirty years.The first work to compare Brazilian Jewish politics under democratic and dictatorial regimes, this dissertation contributes to the study of ethnic politics during the Global Cold War, demonstrates the formative impact of state violence on national, communal, and generational forms of belonging, and illustrates the entangled histories of twentieth-century Zionism and Jewish communism.

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July 15, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. History.