SOURCE: Vieira, Nelson H. “Outsiders and Insiders: Brazilian Jews and the Discourse of Alterity.” In The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America: New Studies on History and Literature, edited by David Sheinin and Lois Baer Barr, pp. 101-16. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1996.

In the following essay, Vieira uses the works of Samel Rawet to demonstrate the commonality of the theme of alienation in many Brazilian-Jewish writings.

“[T]hey were talking about Jews during that Christmas supper. … [T]here was the whole universe, the others and he, experiencing the same clichés, and the same insoluble contradiction.”

[Samuel Rawet, “Christmas Without Christ,” Diálogo, 1963]

Alienation represents the estrangement that many Latin American Jews repeatedly experience when their ethnic and religious differences are compared to the culture of the larger Catholic population. Positioned dialectically as being in contradiction to the dominant society and culture, the Jews of Latin America consciously...