Jeffrey Lesser
Biographic Data
| ID | 91157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey Lesser |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Lesser |
| SIGNATURE | LESSER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Connecticut College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6386-7187 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Social determinants of health and migrant access to public healthcare in Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic
In recent decades, Brazil has emerged as a significant destination for migrants and refugees, contributing to a Global South-South migration trend. This trend is particularly notable for its influx from South and Central American countries, as well as African countries. Healthcare access in Brazil is universal through the Brazilian Health System (SUS). Although the existence of a social protection system is relevant, there are challenges to the l…
José Juan Pérez Meléndez. Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil: Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization
História da numeração das casas em São Paulo e seu uso na construção de um geolocalizador de endereços do passado
This article discusses the history of house numbering in São Paulo, aiming both to shed light on a little-known and underexplored aspect of the city's history and to explain the historical-documentary support of the historical address geolocator of the Pauliceia 2.0 Platform, a tool collaboratively developed and made available for use on the internet. Regarding the first objective, the text provides a more general historical introduction to the t…
Between harm and health: Jews, non-Jews, and the making of São Paulo, Brazil
What is the relationship between immigration, health, and the built environment? This article focuses on Bom Retiro, a textile industry-dominated, immigrant-populated zone of about forty thousand people in the center of São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in the Americas. It analyzes structural racism, memory and self-representation, and Jewish and Arab economic trajectories. Bom Retiro reflects the socioeconomic and racial diversity of São Paulo…
Sobre Camila Pastor, The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate
Entrevista com Jeffrey Lesser
Entrevista com o historiador Jeffrey Lesser
Committing to Continuity: Primary Care Practices During Covid-19 in an Urban Brazilian Neighborhood
Decreased engagement in preventive services, including vaccination, during the COVID-19 pandemic represents a grave threat to global health. We use the case of the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic in São Paulo, Brazil, to underscore how continuity of care is not only feasible, but a crucial part of health as a human right. The long-standing relationship between the clinic and neighborhood residents has facilitated ongoing management of physical an…
Pauliceia 2.0: Mapeamento colaborativo da história de São Paulo, 1870-1940
O artigo apresenta novas abordagens para investigar o passado usando tecnologias digitais. O projeto “Pauliceia 2.0: mapeamento colaborativo da história de São Paulo (1870-1920)” é de código aberto e visa engajar o público de maneira ampla, usando metodologias colaborativas. O texto discute a concepção do projeto, seu estágio atual e suas perspectivas. Além disso, também se oferece o Pauliceia 2.0 como um estudo de caso para discutir a relação en…
M ieko N ishida . Diaspora and Identity: Japanese Brazilians in Brazil and Japan
Over the last two decades, research on the experiences of Latin Americans of immigrant descent has expanded markedly. Studies of citizens of Asian, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and non-Christian backgrounds have shown the complexities of national and ethnic identities as many scholars move away from the bifurcation of the “or” approach to the more useful “and” approach. Rather than community studies and hagiographies, the most sophisticated …
Why Asia and Latin America
1 A&Q Why Asia and Latin America? Scholars working in the emerging field of intercultural connections between Asia and Latin America are often confronted by questions concerning the unusual combination of geographical sites their research proposestobringtogether.Whateverformthesequestionstake—whether a curious interjection or outright skepticism— the impetus animating such queries stems from a fundamental inability to imagine meaningful relatio…
The Social Geography of Zika in Brazil: Brazil’s Zika epidemic has placed new and added pressure on Brazil’s public health system, but much about the outbreak is very old
There is a saying in Brazil: “Mosquitos are democratic; they bite the rich and the poor alike.” While the insects do not have a highly developed sense of class consciousness, the current Zika virus
A geografia social do zika no Brasil
A crise do vírus do zika, como todas as doenças, é um indicador da desigualdade que persiste no Brasil mesmo após décadas de democracia. O zika ilustra disparidade não apenas em termos de classe e com a variedade de questões que se conectam com classe, como gênero e raça. Questões éticas relacionadas ao vírus do zika também têm impactos diferenciais em termos de escolhas reprodutivas, no uso de produtos químicos para a pulverização e no desenvolv…
Um Brasil melhor
Muitos países no continente americano se autodenominam "nações de imigrantes". Nos EUA, o mito da "terra prometida" sugere que estrangeiros prosperam ao chegar ali porque a nação é intrinsicamente extraordinária. No Brasil, contudo, a relação entre imigração e identidade nacional é outra. Intelectuais, políticos, além de líderes culturais e econômicos viam (e veem) os imigrantes como agentes de melhoria de uma nação imperfeita marcada por anos de…
Looking like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897-1945
On my commute each morning I read, I write, and sometimes I even rock and roll. Over many years I have developed a Spidey sense for when my train will arrive at the station where I switch to the bus. Yet one day I became so engrossed in Jerry García's new book that I missed my stop.Looking like the Enemy is an important addition to the “New Latin American Ethnic Studies” that has started to emerge in the last 15 years. It is yet another nail in t…
Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities
This collection of essays addresses various aspects of Arab and Jewish immigration and acculturation in Latin America. The volume examines how the Latin American elites who were keen to change their countries' ethnic mix felt threatened by the arrival of Arabs and Jews.
Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present
Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present examines the immigration to Brazil of millions of Europeans, Asians and Middle Easterners beginning in the nineteenth century. Jeffrey Lesser analyzes how these newcomers and their descendants adapted to their new country and how national identity was formed as they became Brazilians along with their children and grandchildren. Lesser argues that immigration cannot be di…
A Reflection on Foreignness and the Construction of Brazilian National Identities
A pesquisa sobre brasileiros de ascendência imigrantista ajuda-nos a entender questões amplas de raça e etnicidade. Ao dizer isso, eu tomo uma posição diferente da maioria das pesquisas onde os brasileiros nessa categoria são definidos como não normativos. A abordagem tradicional vem do uso linguístico no Brasil das categorias “imigrante” ou “estrangeiro” como ancestral ou herdado, como uma definição que pode ser aplicada mesmo para brasileiros n…
Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities
A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980
In A Discontented Diaspora, Jeffrey Lesser investigates broad questions of ethnicity, the nature of diasporic identity, and Brazilian culture. He does so by exploring particular experiences of young Japanese Brazilians who came of age in São Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s, an intensely authoritarian period of military rule. The most populous city in Brazil, São Paulo was also the world's largest "Japanese" city outside of Japan by 1960. Believi…
Challenging Particularity: Jews as a Lens on Latin American Ethnicity
Scholarly interest in Jews as a subject of Latin American Studies has grown markedly in the last two decades, especially when compared to research on other Latin Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East, Asia or Eastern Europe. In this context, we propose the use of the term 'Jewish-Latin American', rather than 'Latin American Jewry', in order to shift the dominant paradigm about ethnicity in Latin America by returning the 'nation' t…
Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking
Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism
During the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants entered Brazil by the tens of thousands. In more recent decades that flow has been reversed: more than 200,000 Japanese-Brazilians and their families have relocated to Japan. Examining these significant but rarely studied transnational movements and the experiences of Japanese-Brazilians, the essays in Searching for Home Abroad rethink complex issues of ethnicity and national ide…
The Japanese Community in Brazil, 1908-1940: Between Samurai and Carnival
This book analyzes the Japanese immigrant community in Brazil from the perspective of a historian of Japan. Examining the first period of mass Japanese immigration to Brazil (a second one began after World War II), the research is based primarily on Japanese-language newspapers published in Brazil and on personal accounts published in Japan.This book does not claim to be about Brazil per se, and Lone’s focus on expatriate Japanese has a number of…
Teaching Asian Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
road to the creation of The Minority in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1998 Focus-Asian Experiences was long and far from straight. Indeed, both the course topic and the pedagogical approach resulted from new directions in my research and new theoretical models with which I am working.The first version of The Minority Experience was taught seven years ago at Connecticut College (where I taught at the time) and was funded by a Mellon Foundation …
O Brasil dos Brasilianistas: Um guia dos estudos sobre o Brasil nos Estados Unidos, 1945-2000. Org. Rubens Antonio Barbosa, Marshall C. Eakin, and Paulo Roberto de Almeida. Sao Paulo: Paz e Terra. 200…
A geografia social do zika no Brasil
A crise do vírus do zika, como todas as doenças, é um indicador da desigualdade que persiste no Brasil mesmo após décadas de democracia. O zika ilustra disparidade não apenas em termos de classe e com a variedade de questões que se conectam com classe, como gênero e raça. Questões éticas relacionadas ao vírus do zika também têm impactos diferenciais em termos de escolhas reprodutivas, no uso de produtos químicos para a pulverização e no desenvolv…
Introduction: “Turco” Immigrants in Latin America
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil
(Re) Creating Ethnicity: Middle Eastern Immigration to Brazil
There once was a group of peddlers who sold their wares in the interior of Espírito Santos, going from place to place by mule. One of the peddlers was named Aziz and his wife, Marat, was considered the leader of the women who stayed behind as the men went out to sell their goods. These women went out every day to wash clothes in a place called the “Turkish bath” (bacia das turcas). Over time, the town that grew up around the place where the women…
Challenging Particularity: Jews as a Lens on Latin American Ethnicity
Scholarly interest in Jews as a subject of Latin American Studies has grown markedly in the last two decades, especially when compared to research on other Latin Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East, Asia or Eastern Europe. In this context, we propose the use of the term 'Jewish-Latin American', rather than 'Latin American Jewry', in order to shift the dominant paradigm about ethnicity in Latin America by returning the 'nation' t…
Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil
Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Michael Hanchard. ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.225 pp., tables, index
Jews are Turks who sell on credit’: Elite images of Arabs and Jews in Brazil
This contribution explores the Brazilian elite notion that Jews and Arabs are members of a single ‘race’. This linkage was one component of an attempt to create a western European‐like Brazilian national identity yet the contradiction between the economic benefits derived from immigrants and elite concerns about colour, religion, and national origin made Arabs and Jews a focus of comment among intellectuals. In spite of finding themselves the tar…
Between harm and health: Jews, non-Jews, and the making of São Paulo, Brazil
What is the relationship between immigration, health, and the built environment? This article focuses on Bom Retiro, a textile industry-dominated, immigrant-populated zone of about forty thousand people in the center of São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in the Americas. It analyzes structural racism, memory and self-representation, and Jewish and Arab economic trajectories. Bom Retiro reflects the socioeconomic and racial diversity of São Paulo…
Why Asia and Latin America
1 A&Q Why Asia and Latin America? Scholars working in the emerging field of intercultural connections between Asia and Latin America are often confronted by questions concerning the unusual combination of geographical sites their research proposestobringtogether.Whateverformthesequestionstake—whether a curious interjection or outright skepticism— the impetus animating such queries stems from a fundamental inability to imagine meaningful relatio…
Introduction: Images and realities of Arab and Jewish immigrants in Latin America
From antisemitism to philosemitism: The manipulation of stereotypes in Brazil, 1935–1945 1
Images of Jews and Refugee Admissions in Brazil, 1939-42
This article focuses on immigration policy enforcement, or the lack of it, in Estado Novo Brazil. It suggests that formal government policies that prohibited Jews from entering Brazil were only one component of a very sophisticated overall "Jewish policy" that sought to appease two contradictory and powerful forces among Brazilian elites: large landowners and "modernizers" interested in industrial and agricultural development based on immigrant s…
The Immigration and Integration of Polish Jews in Brazil, 1924-1934
The end of World War I marked the beginning of a new era in European migration to Brazil. The immigrants that had poured into the “país do futuro” (country of the future) now came at only a trickle and the number of entries fell by over fifty percent between 1913 and 1914 and by another sixty percent the year after. In 1918 fewer than 20,000 immigrants entered Brazil, a low that would not again be approached until 1936. Even so, between 1918 and …
The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940
Preface 1. Introduction (Richard Graham) 2. Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940 (Thomas E. Skidmore) 3. Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction (Aline Helg) 4. Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940 (Alan Knight) Bibliography Index
Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890-1930: In Search of an Identity
Neither Slave nor Free, Neither Black nor White: The Chinese in Early Nineteenth Century Brazil
There is no doubt that race is a critical factor in understanding Brazil. Yet, as Barbara J. Fields has so pointedly noted (in a discussion of the United States), many historians "tend to accord race a transhistorical, almost metaphysical, status that removes it from all possibility of analysis and understanding."
The Immigration and Integration of Polish Jews in Brazil, 1924-1934
The end of World War I marked the beginning of a new era in European migration to Brazil. The immigrants that had poured into the “país do futuro” (country of the future) now came at only a trickle and the number of entries fell by over fifty percent between 1913 and 1914 and by another sixty percent the year after. In 1918 fewer than 20,000 immigrants entered Brazil, a low that would not again be approached until 1936. Even so, between 1918 and …
Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question
Images of Jews and Refugee Admissions in Brazil, 1939-42
This article focuses on immigration policy enforcement, or the lack of it, in Estado Novo Brazil. It suggests that formal government policies that prohibited Jews from entering Brazil were only one component of a very sophisticated overall "Jewish policy" that sought to appease two contradictory and powerful forces among Brazilian elites: large landowners and "modernizers" interested in industrial and agricultural development based on immigrant s…
Cárdenas, Vargas, Perón and The Jews: A Curtain Raiser
Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City
Bad land, popular rebellion and ethnic survival: Jewish farmers in southern Brazil, 1904–25
The roots of how Brazil's twentieth century ‘Jewish Question’ unfolded can be found in a group of planned farming colonies that the Jewish Colonization Association established in southern Brazil beginning in 1904. While the number of East European Jews who populated the colonies was relatively small, the mere existence of the colonies challenged traditional images of Jews as exclusively and insidiously oriented toward finance and capital in urban…
From antisemitism to philosemitism: The manipulation of stereotypes in Brazil, 1935–1945 1
Introduction: “Turco” Immigrants in Latin America
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
(Re) Creating Ethnicity: Middle Eastern Immigration to Brazil
There once was a group of peddlers who sold their wares in the interior of Espírito Santos, going from place to place by mule. One of the peddlers was named Aziz and his wife, Marat, was considered the leader of the women who stayed behind as the men went out to sell their goods. These women went out every day to wash clothes in a place called the “Turkish bath” (bacia das turcas). Over time, the town that grew up around the place where the women…
Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question
Jews are Turks who sell on credit’: Elite images of Arabs and Jews in Brazil
This contribution explores the Brazilian elite notion that Jews and Arabs are members of a single ‘race’. This linkage was one component of an attempt to create a western European‐like Brazilian national identity yet the contradiction between the economic benefits derived from immigrants and elite concerns about colour, religion, and national origin made Arabs and Jews a focus of comment among intellectuals. In spite of finding themselves the tar…
Introduction: Images and realities of Arab and Jewish immigrants in Latin America
Between the Lines: Letters Between Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends
In the continuing U.S. debate over illegal immigration, a human face has rarely been shown. The topic has been presented as a monolithic abstraction, a creation of statistics, political rhetoric, and fear. This collection of letters between undocumented immigrants in California and their families back home reveals the other side of the story. Published for the first time in paperback, Between the Lines reveals the often poignant human drama curre…
Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil
Tornando-se japonês: Literatura De Viagem Em Busca De Identidade Nacional
A partir da literatura de viagem sobre o Japão, o autor procura mostrar como do final do século XIX até depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial esse país foi encarado como modelo a ser seguido na construção da nacionalidade brasileira
Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture
Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil
Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Michael Hanchard. ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.225 pp., tables, index
Re-Thinking the New Approaches: An Introduction
It has long been a scholarly contention that the analysis of any particular country demands approaches not always applicable to other nations. The accuracy (or lack thereof) of the statement notwithstanding, it can be said with some certainty that discussing approaches to national analysis has not been an academic priority. The essays that appear in this special issue of EIAL seek to remedy this lacuna by focusing on Brazil
Teaching Asian Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
road to the creation of The Minority in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1998 Focus-Asian Experiences was long and far from straight. Indeed, both the course topic and the pedagogical approach resulted from new directions in my research and new theoretical models with which I am working.The first version of The Minority Experience was taught seven years ago at Connecticut College (where I taught at the time) and was funded by a Mellon Foundation …
O Brasil dos Brasilianistas: Um guia dos estudos sobre o Brasil nos Estados Unidos, 1945-2000. Org. Rubens Antonio Barbosa, Marshall C. Eakin, and Paulo Roberto de Almeida. Sao Paulo: Paz e Terra. 200…
Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking
Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism
During the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants entered Brazil by the tens of thousands. In more recent decades that flow has been reversed: more than 200,000 Japanese-Brazilians and their families have relocated to Japan. Examining these significant but rarely studied transnational movements and the experiences of Japanese-Brazilians, the essays in Searching for Home Abroad rethink complex issues of ethnicity and national ide…
Political science (28 works) · History (24 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Immigration (17 works) · History (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Ethnic group (11 works)