Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo by Misha Klein (review)

Leaving out preambles about Jewish identity (which would possibly carr y another book-length essay), Misha Klein conceptualizes a Jew as "a person who identifies or is identified as Jewish (including by other Jews)" (11). Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo comprises seven chapters: "Departures"; "Braided Lives"; "Kosher Feijoada"; "The High Cost of Jewish Living"; "Inscribing Jew into the Nation"; "Doubly Insecure"; and "Cosmopolitans at Home," followed by notes, a bibliography, and an index. The intersection between nation, race, ethnicity, and class among Jews and non-Jews in Brazil is the core of this study, as stated by the author (1).

The book's title reflects the contrast between a national dish (feijoada, a black bean and meat stew) and the Jewish prohibition of consuming it, for most of the meat in the dish is pork, which may intimidate even the nonreligious members of the Jewish community. It is an amusing reference ("kosher feijoada") to the possibility of this plate being consumed by Jews once adaptations are made without impairing its original taste. That is the core of this analytical book: how Jews adapt themselves to Brazil and how the country receives their adaptations. The text, worded in an accessible narrative style (which might have fulfilled the author's "mother's wish that this book be readable and not too academic" [xi]), focuses mostly on selected aspects of the Jewish community of the city of São Paulo, Brazil's economic hub, in the final decades of the twentieth centur y and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Explaining the selection of this particular city in centering her examination and analysis of Brazilian Jewry, K lein mentions the facts that it holds the largest and most diversified Jewish population in the country and is home to the significant Confederação Israelita Brasileira, an organization representing Jews of Brazil inside and outside of the countr y; it is also the place where Hassidic, Reform Judaism, and any other Judaisms between the two coexist; it hosts "Jewish" clubs (Macabi and Hebraica) and a hospital (Israelita Albert Einstein, a state-of-the-art health facility with branches even in a slum area, where doctors and nurses attend people free of charge); and it contains two districts inhabited almost predominantly by Jews (formerly the historical Bom Retiro, and currently Higienópolis). The community is privileged by two weekly Jewish television programs and by entrepreneurs, show producers, and hosts working in non-Jewish performance centers. Magazines and newspapers for general readership and a university journal devoted to Jewish themes are sold either weekly, monthly, or as biannual publications. Two of the largest and most diversified bookstores in the city are owned by Jews, while a third one, smaller in size and scope, offers mainly religious books. In the same city one can see Jewish bankers and Jews on line in a soup kitchen or in a meal center; Jews born, raised, and educated in Brazil are found as klezmer players, classic pianists, violinists, maestros, popular singers, composers, politicians, university professors, sport figures, scientists, sculptors, painters, movie and TV actors and actresses, and directors, among many other Jews who became recognized and renowned for their talents and their contribution to the Brazilian entertainment, scientific, intellectual, and sports sectors. Furthermore, São Paulo nests both Ashkenasic and Sephardic Jews, giving the researcher an ample field of study on the attitudes and behaviors of these two Judaic subcultures. Therefore, it is understandable that anthropologist K lein found, in the city of São Paulo, the capital of the State holding the same name, the perfect "lab" for her analyses of the Jewish community in Brazil.

In São Paulo, Klein obser ved people, talked with and inter viewed them mostly in a casual atmosphere, through conversations focusing on their interaction with non-Jews at schools, work places, or other locations such as the Hebraica club...