Stop, Look, and Listen #1
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Vittles British Jewish Food Week
The only appropriate place to start is I think Vittles magazine’s fantastic British Jewish Food Week Project. This includes a number of articles, most of which are free to read, on what British Jewish food has been and is now, and its interactions with other diaspora and cuisines too.
In particular, I recommend reading:
This topic is of a deep personal resonance to me: my own Greek Cypriot grandfather, Leondis, worked for the family-run Jewish restaurant Bloom’s in Whitechapel, Golders Green, and finally Edgware for forty years (his son Apostolos, my uncle, also worked for Bloom’s for twenty years). Bloom’s, which opened in 1920 and closed in 2010, gets a mention in a few of the articles; it is much missed, as is my grandfather.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
September marked the 75th anniversary of the general release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope: an extremely innovative film, in which all the action takes place within a single apartment, occurring in real time and filmed through continuous long takes.
If you are a fan of the film, I’d recommend:
Firstly listening to this exploration of Rope’s themes on the Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics podcast...
Other articles worth reading
Morgan Jerkins for Vanity Fair on African-American affinity for Italian-American cinema and the connections between the Black and Italian experiences in the US that underpin it.
Dave Karpf for his The Future, Now and Then newsletter on WIRED magazine, the dawn of the internet era in the mid-1990s, start-up culture, and the intersection of techtopianism and libertarianism.
Daniel Trilling’s Guardian ‘Long Read’ on the combination of cynicism, cruelty, and incompetence that has underpinned the development of the British government’s Rwanda asylum policy.
Evan Smith’s article for Jacobin on the longstanding intertwined history of anticommunism and opposition to Aboriginal rights in Australia, linking the political mainstream and security state with international White supremacism.
Other podcasts worth listening to
This episode of the Surviving Society podcast, featuring Aaron Winter: a wide-ranging discussion that touches on ‘probational Whiteness’ and the broader issue of minorities adopting right-wing positions, as well as on questions of organising and negotiating factional divides on the left while building a politics of care.
This episode of New Books in History with Sara Marcus, discussing her book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis and exploring the relationship between emotion, political movements, and different cultural forms in the US between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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So much to follow up! Always grateful for insights like this...