Stop, Look, and Listen #32
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past 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.
Content warnings: The Holocaust; Ethnic cleansing; Racism.
Five things to look at:
Maya Rosen has written for Jewish Currents on how mounting tensions between Israel and Hezbollah are fuelling far-right fantasies about establishing Israeli settlements in southern Lebanon, and the risk that such proposals gain more mainstream purchase absent lasting security in the Israel-Lebanon border region.
Also in Jewish Currents, Jonathan Shamir has written this article locating Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest within the broader pantheon of Holocaust cinema, and its success in relocating the Shoah within its historical context, without losing a sense of its specificity or drifting into vague generalisation.
In this post for Opinio Juris, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala and Matilde Masetti Placci explore how the relationship between private and public law has shaped the International Court of Justice’s recent advisory opinion on Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and its limitations in addressing collective Palestinian trauma.
Adam Tooze has written this post for his Chartbook newsletter about the deflationary effects of American financial hegemony in the interwar period and 1980s, and the way bondholders’ interests influenced governments’ focus on keeping inflation down amid economic downturns.
In this piece for his To Live Is To Maneuver newsletter, Joshua Tait examines how the American right have adopted conservatism as their principal ideological self-definition since the mid-twentieth century, and the tensions between its claim to moderation and their counterrevolutionary ambitions.
Five things to listen to:
On The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Alexandra Schwartz and Nick Paumgarten discussed Las Vegas’s divisive status as an American leisure destination, and its representation more broadly from Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the 2009 comedy film The Hangover.
Miranda Melcher interviewed Gary Mucciaroni about his book Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945 on the New Books Network podcast, and on why countries with ostensibly similar models of capitalism adopted different approaches to industrial disputes.
Elif Shafak joined Shahidha Bari on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book programme to talk about her new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, its depiction of water as connecting past and present and the Middle East to the wider world, and about literature’s capacity to give voice to the region’s marginalised peoples.
Emily Wither presented this episode of BBC World Service’s Assignment programme on Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, and how the disputed ownership of a local carpark has become central to the community’s struggle to retain its land and identity against the ambitions of the Israeli settler movement.
On the New Books Network, Stephen Hausmann interviewed Holly Miowak Guise about her book Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II, the ways different indigenous nations in different parts of Alaska experienced the conflict, and their resistance against racial oppression exacerbated by war.
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Regular World Service listener so I always love it when their broadcasting is picked up. Thank you as ever for providing such wide ranging pieces of interest (and sorry I've not been as active here this summer)