{"id":63992,"date":"2022-09-06T02:04:09","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T02:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63992"},"modified":"2022-09-06T02:04:09","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T02:04:09","slug":"afro-brazilian-jewish-women-female-centaurs-transgressing-the-borderlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63992","title":{"rendered":"Afro-Brazilian Jewish Women: Female centaurs transgressing the borderlands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Afro-Brazilian Jewish Women: Female centaurs transgressing the borderlands<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

San Diego State University
\nSpring 2008
\n148 pages<\/p>\n

Abby Suzanne Gondek<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Women\u2019s Studies<\/em><\/p>\n

Once I began my research in the synagogue in Salvador, Brazil<\/a>, I met men and women of color who considered themselves Jewish, even when the rabbi and other congregants did not. I was especially interested in the stories of the Jewish women of color I met. Their passion for Judaism, desire to raise their children Jewish, and their insistence on claiming both identities – Black and Jewish – in the face of rejection from \u201cwhite\u201d Jewish communities and non-Jewish Afro-Brazilian communities, as well as their families, spoke to me deeply and I felt compelled to shift the focus of my thesis. I began to ask the question Aurora Levins Morales<\/a> poses in \u201cThe Historian as Curandera<\/em>,\u201d \u201c\u2018If women are assumed to be the most important people in the story, how will that change the questions we ask?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Brazil<\/a> has consistently made efforts to make Jews into symbols of otherness and at the same time rhetorically valued the \u201cmulatto<\/em><\/a>\u201d identity as a symbol of brasilidade<\/em> (\u201cBrazilianness\u201d), Jews are seen as foreign parasites, light-skinned Blacks are portrayed as symbols of \u201cauthentic\u201d Brazilian identity, dark-skinned Blacks are invisible, and Jews and Blacks are irreparably separated from each other. In addition, the rhetorical valuation of the \u201cmulata<\/em><\/a>\u201d and the devaluation of the Jew, places the Black Jewish women I interviewed, who fit into the \u201c mulata<\/em>\u201d category because they are lighter-skinned black women, in between what is symbolically valued and devalued in Brazil, literally in the border between \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moacyr Scliar\u2019s<\/a> use of the centaur<\/a> to describe Brazilian Jews\u2019 position in the borderlands and Gloria Anzaldua\u2019s use of the image of women \u201ccaught in the crossfire\u201d are both transformed by the inclusion of Misty Anderson\u2019s<\/a> exploration of the transgressive meanings of the woman centaur. The Afro-Brazilian Jewish women I interviewed are spiritual, religious, sexual, and racial transgressors. They are \u201ccaught in the crossfire\u201d between multiple communities and identities, but they assert their agency to break the barriers that surround them, to live how they want to live.<\/p>\n

Read the entire dissertation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once I began my research in the synagogue in Salvador, Brazil, I met men and women of color who considered themselves Jewish, even when the rabbi and other congregants did not. I was especially interested in the stories of the Jewish women of color I met. Their passion for Judaism, desire to raise their children Jewish, and their insistence on claiming both identities – Black and Jewish – in the face of rejection from \u201cwhite\u201d Jewish communities and non-Jewish Afro-Brazilian communities, as well as their families, spoke to me deeply and I felt compelled to shift the focus of my thesis. I began to ask the question Aurora Levins Morales poses in \u201cThe Historian as Curandera,\u201d \u201c\u2018If women are assumed to be the most important people in the story, how will that change the questions we ask?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,83,21,838,3601,8,820,25],"tags":[33634,33633,33632,15145,9834],"class_list":["post-63992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-dissertations","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-women","tag-abby-gondek","tag-abby-s-gondek","tag-abby-suzanne-gondek","tag-salvador","tag-san-diego-state-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63993,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63992\/revisions\/63993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}