The Privatized City from Below: Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
Reviewed by Bench Ansfield
“Ford to City: Drop Dead” weighs in as one of the most legendary headlines in US history, and its notoriety likely owes to the apparent disjuncture between the New York City of the 1970s fiscal crisis and the supertall glass-scape of today.[1] These two urban archetypes, apparently worlds apart, are intimately linked, and few books have done more to shape how we conceptualize the dawning of a new metropolis than The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, by the late geographer Neil Smith.
Eva Tanguay's Racial and Gender Iconoclasticism and the Making of “Personality”
By Jonathan Goldman
When Dorothy Parker wanted to dunk on Billie Burke’s performance in the new Somerset Maugham play, she called Burke's acting “an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.”The reference may be obscure now, but it was not then. In January 1920, Tanguay had been a New York fixture and international celebrity for over fifteen years. Crowned “Queen of Vaudeville” by an infatuated press, from 1905 on she commanded her industry's highest salaries.
A Sound as International as the City Itself: A Review of Benjamin Lapidus' New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990
Reviewed by Matthew Pessar Joseph
New York and the International Sound of Latin Music boasts an ambitious title. Yet Benjamin Lapidus’s history of Spanish Caribbean music in Gotham does not disappoint. By exploring overlooked Cuban, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, and Jewish performers, dancers, music teachers, and instrument builders, the author shows how between 1940 and 1990 New York served as a transnational mecca for Latinx music.
Freedom Songs: Socialist Multiculturalism and the Protest Lyric from Percy Shelley to Chaim Zhitlovsky
By Benjamin Schacht
As protests exploded around the United States in the wake of the excruciating police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor last June, the venerable New York City-based Yiddish daily the Forward ran a story with the headline “‘We Shall Overcome’ sung in Yiddish.” Highlighting the ongoing dialogue between American Jews the civil rights movement, the article mostly focused on a recently adapted Yiddish version of the classic civil rights anthem. But it also touched on a somewhat more obscure Yiddish contribution to the movement, Un du akerst, un du zeyst (“And you plow, and you sow,” also known as “The Hammer Song”), a song that Theodore Bikel performed for a movement audience in the early 1960s.
The Unequal City: A Review of Racial Inequality in New York City since 1965
Reviewed by Kenneth S. Alyass
New York City is a nexus of racial and class inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout has made this all too clear. Nearly one in four New Yorkers of color have lost their job since March. City institutions like the MTA and CUNY, which the majority-minority population of the city rely on in their daily lives, are facing apocalyptic budget cuts. And while the media’s attention is often on the abandonment of corporate offices in downtown Manhattan, thousands of small businesses owned by people of color — the lifeblood of neighborhoods — have shut down, usually for good.
Everyday Politics are Everywhere in Arab New York: Emily Wills' Ethnography of a Community Under Pressure
Reviewed by Todd Fine
The defeat of Donald Trump promises the imminent end of the “Muslim ban” targeting people from several Arab countries, yet the challenges facing Muslim and Arab communities in the United States will surely continue. In the recent book Arab New York, University of Ottawa political scientist Emily Regan Wills seeks to depict how Arab communities in New York City, whose lives are greatly shaped by external politics, engage in politics themselves.
Dismantling Jim Crow from the Stage: A Review of The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966
Reviewed by Madeline Steiner
Back in the olden days, before the global spread of COVID-19, when we could freely attend live theatre, I was fortunate enough to see the 2011 revival of Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Written in 1955, the play, a metatheatrical commentary on Black civil rights, contains a complex message about racial representation, whites’ complicity in upholding racist institutions, and a critique of civil rights plays from earlier in the 20th century. Over half a century after it was written, the play is still quite stirring and its civil rights message feels unfortunately just as relevant now as at the time of its writing.
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family
Bruce Haynes Interviewed by Tyesha Maddox
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family tells the story of one Harlem family across three generations, connecting its journey to the historical and social forces that transformed Harlem over the past century. Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch capture the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century — the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the early civil rights victories, the Black Power and Black Arts movements--as well as the many forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes's own. As an authority on race and urban communities, Haynes brings unique sociological insights to the American mobility saga and the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.
“The Scourge of the ‘90s:” Squeegee Men and Broken Windows Policing
By Jess Bird
There is perhaps no other bogeyman of New York City’s “bad old days” that has incited greater ire than the squeegee man. Cars created a sense of safety, of separation from the unruly world of the street, but a window washer approaching a car stopped at a red light ruptured that sense of safety, incited panic, and demonstrated, to some, a breakdown in law and order. Squeegee men, “the scourge of the ‘90s,” symbolized the need to be tough on crime, regardless of the costs. Unsurprisingly then, the so-called squeegee pest featured heavily in the mayoral race of 1993, a rematch between incumbent Mayor David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.
New York: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get… Art?
Reviewed by Alexis Monroe
The class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.
