Jews in Brazil: The Man Who Couldn’t be Buried and Other Stories |
The man who couldn’t be buried. That may sound like the title of a Hollywood horror film, but this tale is true... Anecdotes like that one pepper “Os Judeus no Brasil: Inquisição, Imigração e Identidade,” (Jews in Brazil: Inquisition, Immigration and Identity), a book recently released in Portuguese by the Brazilian publisher Civilização Brasileira. With contributions by over a dozen leading scholars, the volume represents one of the first efforts to provide a comprehensive overview of Jewish history in South America’s largest country.
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Brazilian Language: a Sea of Metaphors |
Portugal, like England, was a great seafaring nation - a small strip of land on the Atlantic taking for its own the seven seas. It bequeathed a language full of maritime expressions to its most important colony, Brazil, and the Brazilian popular vernacular still smacks of the sea.
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Brazilian Air Safety: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane (and that’s the problem) |
In peace-loving Brazil, the environment outranks terrorism as a security threat at the country’s airports. Open air dumps nourish expanding populations of vultures, and many of these birds venture into flight patterns. The number of reported collisions between airplanes and birds in Brazil has more than doubled in a decade.
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Rio São Francisco: Brazilian River Threatened |
The São Francisco River runs through a culturally rich but economically impoverished and drought-stricken region called the “sertão.” The struggle of subsistence farmers to eek out a living under such conditions has been captured in Graciliano Ramos’ novel Barren Lives, with a film version by director Nelson Pereira dos Santos. For decades politicians have used the suffering of smallholders like those that populate Ramos’ novel to convince taxpayers to throw money at the northeast. President Lula appears bent on pursuing a questionable irrigation project that activists say could further exacerbate the river’s environmental troubles.
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Brazil Museum: the Virtual Museum of the Person |
The Museum of the Person is transforming the way history is recorded in Brazil by providing a vehicle for unrecognized individuals - from street scavengers to nursing home residents - to tell and store their life stories.
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Brazilian Sex Workers Don’t Mourn, They Organize |
Sex workers around Brazil are organizing to defend their civil and human rights and advocate the full recognition of prostitution, which is not illegal in Brazil, as a profession under labor and social security laws. Public health officials praise their contributions to Brazil’s internationally acclaimed campaign for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
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| Copacabana by Genevieve Naylor |
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