The Participation of Brazilian Jews in the Struggle Against the Brazilian Military Regime, 1964-1985.

This paper explores the participation of Brazilian Jewish student activists in the student movement and armed struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship that came to power in 1964. While several recent works have addressed Latin American Jewish communities living under military rule in Argentina and Brazil, these studies have generally limited themselves to institutional Jewish communal responses to the disappearances and deaths of Jewish anti-dictatorship activists, rather than the political involvement of the activists themselves. In this presentation, I will examine the role played by Brazilian Jewish activists in the student movement (1964-1968) and armed struggle against the dictatorship (1968-1974) in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Drawing upon memoirs, oral history interviews and secret police records, I explore the reasons that Jewish students joined anti-dictatorship movements, the activities of Jewish students within clandestine revolutionary organizations, and the impact of government repression upon Jewish activists and their families. I argue that Brazilian Jewish students’ involvement in the struggle against the military dictatorship reflects Jewish integration into specific generational, political and socio-economic sectors of Brazilian society, and illustrates Jewish students’ commitment to ameliorating Brazilian political and socio-economic realities. This presentation will contribute to the study of Twentieth-Century Latin American Jewish political activism under authoritarian regimes.