ABSTRACT
Alienation represents the estrangement that many Latin American Jews repeatedly experience when their ethnic and religious differences are compared to the culture of the larger Catholic population. Positioned dialectically as being in contradiction to the dominant society and culture, the Jews of Latin America consciously or unconsciously develop an enlightened perception of the dominant other, as well as themselves as others, that will be referred as “alterity.” A Polish Jew who immigrated to Brazil at the age of seven, Samuel Rawet resided in Rio de Janeiro until he was invited in 1957 to join the NOVA-CAP project that was to build Brazil’s futuristic capital, Brasilia. Dealing with Jewish alienation within the Jewish diaspora of Brazil, this story underlines the theme of difference in a them-versus-us frame between Gentiles and Jews. The concept of the Brazilian “cordial man” is developed in Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, Raizes do Brasil.
