Stop, Look, and Listen #43
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
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 warning: HIV/AIDS; Homophobia; The Holocaust; Antisemitism.
Five things to look at:
Writing for the History Workshop blog, Lucy Kelly explored the efforts of gay activists to challenge the homophobia and censoriousness of much official AIDS education in the US during the 1980s, and the potential lessons from that in resisting the Trump administration’s contemporary attacks on queer people.
In this article for Public Books, Melanie Shi outlined the often overlooked history of settlement by Chinese and other Asian communities in Paris over the past century, their differing ideological outlook and affiliations, and their shifting place in the city’s urban fabric, culinary cultures, and intellectual life.
Charlie Rumsby reflected in this post on a recent trip to London with her young daughter to London to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet, on guiding a child through cultural experiences that are relatively new to oneself, and on the capacity of young children to navigate complex and emotive subject matter.
Shaul Magid has written for his Shaul’s Substack on the connection between ideas about the exceptionalism of the Holocaust and of the Israeli state, rooted in a negative secular version of theological concepts of Jewish uniqueness and mission, resulting in the frequent framing of criticism of Israel as Antisemitic.1
In this post for her Review Roulette newsletter, Vaughn Joy revisited the 1952 film High Noon, exploring the film’s advocacy of collective resolve in the face of threats to members of a community through the contexts of its Jewish director, writer, and producer’s experiences of interwar fascism and post-war anticommunism.
Five things to listen to:
On the It Was What It Was podcast, Rob Draper and Jonathan Wilson covered firstly how Pep Guardiola’s and Barcelona’s brand of possession football revolutionised the global game from the late 2000s, and secondly how a new generation of Basque coaches might potentially supplant that approach.
On the Called to the Bar podcast, Tamsin Phillipa Paige, Ntina Tzouvala, Imogen Saunders, and Douglas Guilfoyle discussed how Donald Trump’s foreign policy jeopardises the future of international law, but is also a logical culmination of the growing gap between that legal system and the material inequalities it masks.
Roland Clark interviewed Stefan Cristian Ionescu on the New Books Network podcast about his book Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950, and Holocaust survivors’ efforts to reclaim their property through the legal system amid the rise of communism.
Peter Geoghegan joined Thomas Jones on the LRB podcast to talk about hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, his trajectory from Liberal Democrat donor to owner of GB News, the role of his evangelical Christian faith and friendship with Michael Gove, and the strategy behind his growing right-wing media portfolio.
On the Recall This Book podcast, John Plotz, Lori Allen, and Ajantha Subramanian discussed diasporic Zionism and Hindutva, the relationship between claims to wounded minority sentiments and affiliation with illiberal majoritarianism, and the potential limitations of ethnonationalist political projects within diaspora.2
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can also show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.
You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
This is the fourth instalment in a series of posts by Shaul Magid on why American Jews find discussing Antisemitism so difficult; you can read Parts I, II, and III here.
Thanks for the share, Dion! Great stuff as always