STUDYING BRAZIL IN ISRAEL
By Jeffrey Lesser

“You’re going to Tel Aviv … to study Brazil?” This question, accompanied by raised eyebrows and a tone of disbelief, was the most common response to the news that I had been awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

As it turned out, Israel was a wonderful place to study not only Brazilian ethnic identity but also many other aspects of Latin American history. My Fulbright seminar on “The Pacific Rim in the Atlantic World” examined Diasporas in Latin America and was as much a learning experience for me as it was for the students. Our course was a code-switcher’s delight, with English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew moving through our conversations, sometimes comfortably but often awkwardly. The discussions went from historical moments in Latin America to contemporary moments in the Middle East.

My favorite teaching moment of the year came early in the semester during a discussion in which one student said to another, “Let me interrupt you to say that I will let you finish before I attack you [verbally].” My initial reaction was one of surprise (should I lecture the students on appropriate behavior?) but I soon realized that intense debate and counter-argumentation was one of the real pleasures of teaching in Israel. I will miss the ferocity of this kind of give-and-take. Emory students, by contrast, politely raise their hands and wait quietly for their colleagues to finish their statements. The intensity of the discussion in the Tel Aviv University classroom, often punctuated by roars of laughter, demonstrated that different cultures go about teaching and learning in different ways. For example, I learned as a graduate student in the United States that it is important to compliment students following their comments, as though the act of speaking in the classroom setting was worthy of praise. In Israel, my use of that technique led to a funny moment. After I had told a number of students how good, interesting, or fascinating their comments were, one of them stopped the class and shouted, “Jeff, stop telling us that our points are good, even when they are bad.” From that point on, every student’s comments began with “I want to comment on so and so’s excellent point” while the rest of the class burst out laughing (at me).

The joy of classroom teaching was matched by an endlessly fascinating world around me. Simply going to an archive was an experience. Once, after learning that my documents had been given security clearance at a particular archive, I arrived two hours later to find that the archivists were on strike. It hardly seemed worth complaining. Instead a friend and I went to the Arab quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City to eat “the best hummus in Israel” at one of the perhaps 200 locations in the country that compete over this gastronomic claim.

With the Fulbright award I continued my research program as well as my teaching. I focused on Brazilian-Israeli relations, especially the 1975
United Nations (UN) vote (since overturned) that equated Zionism with racism. Studying Brazil in Israel reinforced my belief that Area Studies provides the deep cultural knowledge necessary to analyze diplomatic events. My project sought to interpret the cultural and political meanings behind the Brazilian decision, at a time when the country was directed by a brutal military dictatorship, to vote in favor of the UN resolution. Many leaders of democratic countries interpreted Brazil’s vote as a sign of high levels of anti-Semitism within the regime. Yet examining documentation from the Israeli Foreign Ministry disclosed a different picture. For Israeli diplomats, Brazil was engaging in an expected realpolitik that guaranteed it would not be boycotted by those nations that provided the oil it needed to run its industries. Who would have expected that a relatively accepting interpretation of Brazil’s vote equating Zionism with racism would be found in Israel?

I also had the opportunity to work with Emory’s study abroad program in Israel, which was reestablished just as I arrived. Together with Martin Wein, the program’s coordinator and a graduate of Emory’s Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies master’s program, we ran a monthly series of out-of-classroom experiences for our students that augmented what they were learning at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University overseas programs. We examined urban architecture and its relation to the Kibbutz movement, the implications of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus
movement, and Arab-Jewish relations. One meeting, which included Institute for Jewish Studies Associate Professor Benjamin Hary, was on “Linguistic Landscaping,” about the ways in which written language in public spaces becomes a forum for identity discussion.

This held particular fascination for me because one of the first things I had noticed after arriving in Israel were bumper stickers and graffiti with the unintelligible (at the time) words, “Na, Nach, Nachma, Nachman M’Uman.”My interest was further piqued after my 14-year-old sons returned from a baseball practice chanting a hip-hop version of the phrase that is believed to help bring spiritual fulfillment by some of the followers of the 18th-century Chassidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (also known as Nachman from Uman – the Ukranian town where he is buried). Rabbi Nachman’s followers are known for their annual Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) pilgrimages to the gravesite in Uman and for driving vans with large loudspeakers from which they emerge to dance in public places.

Walking with our Emory group through Tel Aviv, discussing everything from street signs to posters for dance parties, I began to understand better why “Nachmanim” melded traditional religiosity with modern forms such as loud music and bumper stickers.

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Formerly the director of Emory’s Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Jeffrey Lesser is currently the director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and the president of the Conference on Latin American History.