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6 Doubly Insecure What is unique about Jewish Brazilians is their Brazilianness. The ideologies that are central to Brazilian national identity have created a space for Jews to be able to become fully incorporated, participating citizens. More significantly, these same ideologies are reproduced within the paulistano Jewish community, buttressing a set of hybrid beliefs and practices such that they enact their Jewishness in Brazilian ways. What set paulistano Jews apart from other Brazilians, including other Brazilian transnational groups, are the external and very contemporary qualities of the hostility directed against them. Without a strong history of organized anti-Semitism in the country, there is little room within the Brazilian framework for apprehending these active forms of intolerance, but its existence and the clear threat of transnational enactments of this sort of violence force the Jewish community to engage directly with their transborder identities . It is a particular irony that in this tolerant nation, where Jews have attained such social acceptance and economic success, it is their transnational condition that places limits on their belonging, not necessarily 164 ◆ Kosher Feijoada because of their own external ties but because of the external sources of violence directed against them. Within the context of generalized crime and violence, paulistano Jews respond in ways that are consistent with that of other middle- and upper-class paulistanos, blending the local and transnational in their practices. Living in the City The city of São Paulo is more than a backdrop, more than merely a setting in which Jews live their lives. It is practically a character in their daily dramas . Much of what it means to be Jewish and Brazilian in São Paulo has to do with the city itself, its sheer size and complexity, its ethnic and class tensions, and the incessant noise, filth, congestion, and crime, all of which conspire to make life in the city both exciting and precarious. Living in São Paulo means living with insecurity, and this urban danger is also part of the identity of paulistano Jews. It couples with the insecurity that Jews feel almost everywhere as part of their condition as Jews. The insecurity of paulistano Jews is a dialectic in which they simultaneously share in the risks of the population around them while managing the risks that are peculiar to them as Jews. It is this difference in risk, and their collective response to it, that distinguishes Jewish Brazilians from their compatriots and limits their belonging in this otherwise accepting nation. The street, a rua, is a powerful concept in Brazil (DaMatta 1987 and 1991a:63–69), synonymous with public, often informal, space. Na rua, on the street, is where errands are run, random encounters occur, and unstructured learning takes place. It is where meninos de rua, street children , make their existence uncomfortably known.1 It is also where class boundaries are negotiated. Street vendors dodge police as they attempt to make a living selling cheap goods imported from China via Paraguay and dangerously unregulated foodstuffs. At the other extreme, the privatization of public thoroughfares is hotly contested as the residents of wealthy areas attempt to close themselves off to incursions from outsiders by the creation of walled and guarded “fortified enclaves” (Caldeira 1999, 2000). In popular parlance, a rua is a place of problems. Certainly, the streets in São Paulo are a source of difficulties, with daily traffic jams measured in kilometers.2 When not immobilized by gridlock, vehicles of all sorts and sizes move much too quickly along well-rehearsed Doubly Insecure ◆ 165 paths. Confronting street traffic impinges on quality of life, but it is also central to the experience of the city for its residents, “traveler-inhabitants” who move through the city and do not merely reside in it (García Canclini 2009:57). Those who depend on public transportation are subject to robbery on the buses, deepening the miserable conditions of mass transit. Waiting for a bus can be an anxiety-provoking experience, as one maintains one’s senses alert to the presence of possible sources of danger while hoping that the bus is not overly delayed by too many vehicles, accidents, floods, and street repairs. One day, as we made our way through the traffic , my friend Raquel suggested that I call my book São Paulo: The Chaos. Though she knew my work was about the Jewish community, her comment underscored the extent to which the city streets figure prominently in their day-to-day lives. The streets...

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