White City Research Articles

Trashing “America the Beautiful”: from She to Shining She

Trashing “America the Beautiful”: from She to Shining She

Nightmare on Oxford Street

Veteran reporter Davis recalls how a minor case of shoplifting in London’s Oxford Street, when a woman left a store without paying for five gaily-coloured hats, turned into a major story that tested Fleet Street’s finest. The accused was identified as Nina Ponomareva, aged 27, a teacher and mother of a two-year-old boy named Sasha – a white beret listed in the charge was meant for him. “So far, so routine… But, unfortunately for all, Nina was also one of the Soviet Union’s most famous women, a world-class athlete who at the 1952 summer Olympics in Helsinki had taken gold for discus throwing. Fondly nicknamed Miss Muscles, she was in London with almost 100 other Russian athletes to compete against the British in a two-day meeting at the White City, due to begin the next evening.” Summoned to appear before magistrates and headlined ‘Nina of the Five Hats’, the discus genius’s non-appearance in court set off a chain of events that Involved the Russian chargé d’affaires, Lord Reading, minister of state at the Foreign Office, and the august British ambassador in Moscow, Sir William Hayter (Winchester and New College, Oxford), who “was infuriated to be summoned to the Kremlin to be harangued over this piddling business.” Davis reveals the whole hilarious story.

“White Cities,” “Diamond Zulus,” and the “African Contribution to Human Advancement”: African Modernities and the World's Fairs

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, representations of Africans at the world's fairs were often aligned with the colonial cultural logic of contrasting the “savage” Other with the “civilized” subject, illustrating the politics of modernity, racialization, and imperial conquest. Certain showcases, however, at the world's fairs in the U.S. and South Africa—as well as performances in the white urban environments of Chicago and Johannesburg—undid this binary by introducing new spectacular economies depicting African modernities.

‘Not Something We're New To. Its Something We Grew To’

On a global scale, new images are chasing out the old. Contemporary cultural experiences have new international inflections and connections: ‘households’ cross continents, teenagers in the Philippines don sequinned flares with nostalgia for the days of Elvis, white English city kids use Jamaican Creole and African American slang to articulate their experiences, and British-born second-generation West Indians identify with bhangra music and pan-Africanism. As ‘insights into other cultures… are brought into one's living room’ (McGrane 1989: 115), the ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1994) that comprise our social and cultural worlds show us that there are multiple ways of knowing, doing and being. As members of families, neighbourhoods, institutions, academies, cities, classes and so on, we are all living in, and engaged in making, an ‘all change world’ (Prescod 1997). In a context of the daily reworking and reconstruction of meaning-making processes, the question becomes ‘how are we to live in the world?’ (Rushdie 1981[1991]: 17). The following discussion looks at how ideas about culture and cultural diversity have changed since Boas’ time; how societies have themselves changed; and how contemporary social research, and the subjects of study, are continually developing ways to understand and represent ‘the diversity of ideologies and discourses that they both consume and engage with’ (Back 1996: 53).

Cohort Profile: Mandela's children: The 1990 birth to twenty study in South Africa

The late 1980s were a period of profound sociopolitical change in South Africa. It was clear that the Apartheid state was crumbling and amongst acts of civil disobedience which characterized the struggle Black Africansy began to disregard restrictive legislation that constrained where they lived and worked. Very rapid unplanned urbanization began and shanty towns mushroomed around formerly White cities and towns. It was anticipated that this rapid urbanization with urban growth estimated at the time to be 3.5% per year. would have profound effects on childrens health and development. While improved access to health care education and employment in urban areas could decrease preventable childhood morbidity and mortality the inability of government to establish and maintain services to meet the needs of the growing urban population could exacerbate existing infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Non-infectious conditions related to the interaction of lifestyle urban stressors and socio-cultural changes-for example childhood injuries substance use and obesity-were predicted to increase. In 1988 as a result of discussions on these issues Noel Cameron at the University of the Witwatersrand and Derek Yach at the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) approached the then MRC President Andries Brink for funds to begin a birth cohort study in Soweto-Johannesburg with Lucy Wagstaff also from the University of the Witwatersrand. The aim was to track a group of urban children for 10 years not knowing at the time that these children would also be the first cohort born into a democratic South Africa. At the start the study was called Birth to Ten (BT10) but changed to Birth to Twenty (BT20) in 2000 when we reached the 10-year follow-up goal and resolved to continue the study to age 20. The children came to be known colloquially as Mandelas Children because they were born in the 7 weeks following Nelson Mandelas release from prison on the February 11 1990 an event that heralded in radical social and political changes. Linda Richter was part of the original investigator group. Shane Norris has been the Project Manager since 2001. With seed funding we undertook several pilot studies to determine amongst other things the seasonality of births in the area and the optimum months for recruitment into a birth cohort study; the nature and accuracy of routinely collected health service data; and follow-up rates of children from birth to six months. The date for enrolling the birth cohort was set for February but a national hospital strike delayed enrolment which occurred from April 23 to June 8 1990. (excerpt)

Green Belt, White City: Race and the Natural Landscape in Boulder, Colorado

Green Belt, White City: Race and the Natural Landscape in Boulder, Colorado

Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (review)

Reviewed by: Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States Philip Nel (bio) Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. By Julia L. Mickenberg. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. What Michael Denning's The Cultural Front has done for the study of popular culture, Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left will do for the study of children's literature. Each book's richly detailed cultural history restores a previously neglected radical past to its proper place in any serious study of the subject. In clear, lively prose augmented by over two dozen illustrations, Learning from the Left chronicles children's literature from the Lyrical Leftists of the 1910s and 1920s through the New Left activists of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a groundbreaking book. These are its main claims. First, during the Cold War, "[t]here was no blacklist per se in children's publishing" (142); children's literature's "feminized position . . . within a literary hierarchy" allowed it to operate with little scrutiny (15). That is, perceiving children's books as a field dominated by women, Red hunters deemed it less important and so did not monitor it very closely. Second, although the field provided a safe haven for leftists shut out of other fields of cultural production, there "was not a Communist plot to reach the kiddies" (6). Most of these books were not revolutionary in a Marxist sense but instead hoped "to make children autonomous, critical thinkers who questioned authority and believed in social justice" (11). Third, examining the history of radicals' and ex-radicals' work in the field of children's publishing allows us to uncover unexplored connections between the Old Left and New Left. Though Mickenberg notes that drawing a "cause-and-effect link" between the two "would be impossible (and far too reductive)" (276) she persuasively demonstrates how books authored by the activists of the 1930s and 1940s may have influenced the activists of the 1960s and 1970s. Such provocative claims require a substantial body of evidence. As the eighty pages of endnotes demonstrate, Mickenberg has done her homework—and then some. She consulted dozens of archives, obtained access to FBI files of ten of the authors under [End Page 80] discussion, and conducted personal interviews with over thirty people involved with left-leaning children's literature and culture, including Pete Seeger and the late Meridel Le Sueur. This extensive use of primary sources allows Learning from the Left to offer an insider's history of the politics of twentieth-century American children's books. We learn, for example, that in the 1930s Syd Hoff (as A. Redfield) was art editor for the New Pioneer, the Communist Party's children's magazine (67). Though all reference works omit Hoff's "Redfield" publications, he had many ties to the Old Left, as did Crockett Johnson and P. D. Eastman. We also witness pressures within the publishing industry that, in the late 1950s, forced Helen Kay to rewrite her adolescent novel of an interracial friendship, making it "a more conventional story of a white city kid visiting a country cousin" (280). In the 1960s, when the political climate had shifted, the publisher invited her to republish the novel and restore the black protagonist: frustrated by the original response, Kay refused. What makes Learning from the Left's evidence persuasive is the book's tendency to qualify its claims and its willingness to include examples that complicate its thesis. For example, Mickenberg suggests that, despite Johnson's and Hoff's association with Communist publications, the imaginative emphasis in Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) and Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) derives more from the Lyrical Left of the 1920s than from the Marxist proletarian children's literature of the 1930s (82). Or, from the 1940s through the 1960s, a good number of Marxists and ex-Marxists wrote science books for children, but their works were not necessarily politically radical. One the one hand, Mickenberg notes that leftist Millicent Selsam's Hidden Animals (1947) encourages children to "look beyond the obvious, to probe beneath the...

After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation

After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. By Charles T. Clotfelter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 216p. 17.95 paper.Those who live or have lived in metropolitan areas that faced court-ordered desegregation of the schools in the latter part of the twentieth century have likely heard a common theory about the connection of those efforts to the state of the relevant city. It goes something like this: Once federal courts ordered city schools to desegregate, many white city dwellers either fled to the suburbs for protection or plucked their kids from city schools and enrolled them in private ones. Under the first scenario, the end of neighborhood schools negatively affected the city, as families in once-vital neighborhoods abandoned desegregating city schools they perceived as problematic for their children's education for virtually lily-white suburban schools thought to be of a higher quality. Under the second scenario, white parents remained in the city of their birth but undermined desegregation efforts by transferring their children to private schools (which were mostly Catholic in the Northeast and Midwest and mostly newly opened in the South). In the end, long-frustrated federal judges and civil rights leaders ultimately succeeded in increasing the levels of interaction between white and black children, but their efforts had significant side effects for those cities as well.

Reading and Writing the White City Legend

Reading and Writing the White City Legend

Writing the Urban Discourse into the Black Ghetto Imaginary: Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was A Number Runner

Writing the Urban Discourse into the Black Ghetto Imaginary:Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was A Number Runner E. Lâle Demirtürk Starting with the Great Migration in the early twentieth century, the city has emerged as a site of racial geography that constructs blackness and whiteness in terms of spatial definitions.1 The racialized urban space introduced a cognitive map of the predominantly white city where the ghetto became "an ideological construct" (Sugrue 229) even more than a physical one. Since the 1960s black ghettos have become the subject of serious sociological research that analyzes inner-city communities in close scrutiny.2 The sociopolitical and ideological constructs that caused the spatial isolation of black Americans were achieved by "a conjunction of racist attitudes, private behaviors, and institutional practices that disenfranchised blacks from urban housing markets and led to the creation of the ghetto" (Massey & Denton 83). Since the historical frame of reference of the term "ghetto"3 signifies a spatialized term, it also signifies, as the Kerner Report of 1968 suggests, that "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto" (qtd. in Bernasconi 345).4 The fact that blacks are confined to the black ghetto is a forceful statement on the ideology of whiteness: the historical and political agency involved in the creation of the ghetto signifies "the collapse of public institutions"5 in the city since the mid-1970s (Wacquant, 438). Hence, the black ghetto, [End Page 71] in Joe W. Trotter's terms, draws attention to "the presence of white racism in the socioeconomic and political life of the city" (4). Segregation in ghettos has caused unemployment and the social isolation of black people, "reducing their chances of acquiring the human capital skills, including adequate educational training," that facilitate upward mobility (Wilson, "From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos" 121). The neo-racist strategy of racializing urban space in an attempt to pathologize black bodies results in seeing drug use, unemployment, prostitution, welfare dependency, and teenage childbearing as a natural outcome of the decline of inner cities. The 1965 Moynihan Report conceptualizes the black ghetto as a site of pathology, because of the socioeconomic system responsible for the black urban poor which causes other forms of pathology.6 The pathology of the ghetto is also at the basis of the culture-of-poverty argument that proposes the thesis that people are poor because their culture is defective, blaming the victim in its assertion that "basic values and attitudes of the ghetto subculture have been internalized and thereby influence behavior" (Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged 61). Starting in the 1960s, urban studies of ghetto life have utilized research data to show "how the experiences and the patterns of conduct of ghetto residents are shaped by powerful structural constraints in urban American society" (Wilson, "Introduction" xii). Sociologists investigate measurable conditions and observable social behaviors in terms of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic status. But "urban culture has other dimensions that do not lend themselves so easily to quantitative analysis or narrative description" (LeGates & Stout, "Introduction" 91). Here, ghetto fiction plays a crucial role, as literary representations of the ghetto show different dimensions of ghetto life which cannot be measured by quantitative analysis. By its definition, ghetto fiction as an urban cultural genre forms a city discourse in which the black ghetto is the site of devalorization against the "white" city. Textualizing the ghetto becomes a way of seeing the city.7 We see ghetto residents are not passive victims; on the contrary, they struggle to find effective strategies of survival. Racialized urban space creates an ambivalence that obscures the interactions between the black ghetto and the white city. The ghetto signifies the social construction of a marginal space, reconstructing the city "as a mechanism of spatial exclusion, surveillance, and social control" (Smith ix). In this context, Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) belies the culture-of-poverty argument in both depicting black individuals' struggle for a better life and in privileging the point of view of the black ghetto resident. As ghetto fiction, Meriwether's novel restructures [End Page 72] the "urban imaginary"8 in situating our city-centric consciousness within the black ghetto. Here the primary...

The King and the Daughter of the Sea

There was a city built on a high hill overlooking the sea. It was big, beautiful and wealthy. It was a garden of palms, flowers and trees. It was called the White City. And under the sun, the wind,...

Natural born celebrities: serial killers in American culture

Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Over the past thirty years, serial killers have become iconic figures in America, the subject of made-for-TV movies and mass-market paperbacks alike. But why do we find such luridly transgressive and horrific individuals so fascinating? What compels us to look more closely at these figures when we really want to look away? Natural Born Celebrities considers how serial killers have become lionized in American culture and explores the consequences of their fame. David Schmid provides a historical account of how serial killers became famous and how that fame has been used in popular media and the corridors of the FBI alike. Ranging from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster, Schmid unveils a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, from their depiction in The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files to their becoming the stuff of trading cards and even Web sites where you can buy their hair and nail clippings. Bringing his fascinating history right up to the present, Schmid ultimately argues that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever to manage the fear posed by Osama bin Laden since September 11. This is a persuasively argued, meticulously researched, and compelling examination of the media phenomenon of the 'celebrity criminal' in American culture. It is highly readable as well. Joyce Carol Oates

English in the Middle Ages by Tim William Machan (review)

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1079 phenomenology of the nineteenth-century crowd as on the ways in which the crowd impinges on the principles of the liberal-democratic public sphere in American liter? ary representations from the 1830s to the 1930s. As such, the book's title accurately conveys the author's interest in exploring the relationship between the affective aes? thetics of crowd experience and the political significance of the crowd for American liberal democracy?a distinction which must be preserved, in Kantian fashion, as a categorial separation of spheres. The danger of conflating aesthetics and politics, and, in consequence, blurring the boundaries between the 'crowd' and the 'public', is indeed a recurring theme of Esteve 's analysis of crowd representations in the fiction of Poe, Henry James, Crane, du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Henry Roth (to list the main authors under discussion), and at the heart of the book's underlying theoretical and political concerns. Esteve mounts a vigorous defence of the principles of the liberal-democratic public sphere (as defined, most influentially, by Jiirgen Habermas in The Structural Transforma? tion of the Public Sphere (German original 1962; trans. by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity, 1989)), which, she maintains, establish the conceptual boundaries for 'rational-critical debate' and the necessarily abstract, non-empirical framework of consensual public discourse. The accompanying polemic against the fetishization of empirical 'particularity' and 'difference' in radical postmodern democratic theory will, no doubt, prove the most contentious aspect of this book, but, apart from some occasionally glib analogies between the reactionary nineteenth-century discourse of 'crowd psychology' and the putatively radical postmodern theorization ofpolitics as power (Foucault et al.), the author deve? lops an important and often compelling case. Where the argument is less convincing is not so much in its defence of the disinterested reason of a critical public sphere as in its departure from (or at least inconsistent application of) Habermas's account ofthe transformation ofthe public sphere under the conditions ofadvanced capitalist society. In the chapter on Henry James, forexample, Esteve begins by aiming to demonstrate how James's fictional representation ofthe crowd 'exemplifies [. . .] the fall ofthe pub? lic sphere' in Habermasian terms (p. 61), but then, in a strangely optimistic reading of 'The Papers' (1903)?one of James's darkest cultural satires?goes on to suggest that a Kantian model of the public sphere emerges virtually unscathed from its exposi? tion of the logic of mass-media publicity. Esteve's intention of tracing the 'particular literary history' of the 'abiding virtues of political-liberal ideas and practices' thus produces an insufficientlyhistorical account of the changing conditions of the public sphere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture (p. 171). Despite this objection, the conceptual sophistication and breadth of Esteve's read? ings of individual texts, as well as the richness of the contextual material that she uncovers, are impressive. In particular, her detailed study of discursive and ideologi? cal connections between the representation of crowds gathering forthe 1893 Chicago World's Fair?the 'White City'?and contemporaneous representations ofthe lynchmob in Chapter 4 addresses the relationship between political and aesthetic experi? ences of the crowd in complex and nuanced form. The disturbing nature of these connections highlights, most graphically, the importance forpolitical democracies of distinguishing between crowds and publics, which is the urgent message of this book. University of Leeds Richard Salmon English in the Middle Ages. By Tim William Machan. Oxford and New York: Ox? ford University Press. 2003. x + 205pp. ?45. ISBN 0-19-926268-3. Using the present to explain the past (William Labov's formulation) has become stan? dard practice formany historical linguists. As Suzanne Romaine states, 'the linguistic 1080 Reviews forces which operate today and are observable around us are not unlike those which have operated in the past. Sociolinguistically speaking, this means that there is no reason forclaiming that language did not vary in the same patterned ways in the past as it has been observed to do today' (cited p. 12). This view needs unpacking and careful qualification before serving as the basis of 'sociohistorical linguistics'. All texts?a poem, a document, a private letter,a conver? sation...

“To Show Who was in Charge”

This article argues that beginning in the late nineteenth century, New York City’s black population experienced targeted harassment and abuse from the city’s police officers. Antiblack prejudice proved to be fundamentally different from the Progressive Era attitudes about other ethnic groups who often faced scorn but who were still considered to be capable of reform. Blacks were perceived to be innately immoral and therefore irredeemable. Consequently, white reformers and policemen alike sought to limit the impact of black people on the (white) city, while permitting vice and crime to flourish in black neighborhoods.

South Side Story

This bleak assessment of the far South Side uttered by Dr. Sommers, the protagonist of Robert Herrick's novel, would have been echoed by many of Chicago's civic leaders of the period. The passage of an amended annexation bill in 1889-over the objections of some elite, anti-urban Hyde Parkers-had brought an extensive swath of land into the city limits, multiplying Chicago's size more than fourfold. If the redrawing of city boundaries on a map was controversial, even more challenging tasks lay ahead: improving the physical landscape and constructing a larger civic identity on the ground. Some of the furthest outposts remained wastelands-in Herrick's words, bare, vacant, deserted. Real estate lots on the far South Side were little more than squares of land and marsh, cut up in regular patches for future house-builders and cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on either side of an embankment.2 An economic depression had intervened, deferring the settlement of these subdivisions and allowing the cement sidewalks to crumble and weeds to grow. And at the center of this desolate landscape-indeed, its principal cause, in Herrick's view-were the ruins of the World's Columbian Exposition. After closing its gates in early 1894, the White City remained standing, its future uncertain. The debris of its neoclassical buildings provided Herrick with an ideal setting for the illicit courtship between Dr. Sommers and a married woman, Alves Preston, who eventually shack up in an abandoned fairground booth that resembled a time-stained Greek temple.4 It has become a familiar historiographical move to dramatize the aspirations and contradictions of fin-de-siecle American culture by revisiting the scene of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Some of the most important

The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire

The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire

Imagining London: postcolonial fiction and the transnational metropolis

London was once the hub of an empire on which 'the sun never set.' After the second world war, as Britain withdrew from most of its colonies, the city that once possessed the world began to contain a diasporic world that was increasingly taking possession of it. Drawing on postcolonial theories - as well as interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural geography, urban theory, history, and sociology - Imagining London examines representations of the English metropolis in Canadian, West Indian, South Asian, and second-generation 'black British' novels written in the last half of the twentieth century. It analyzes the diverse ways in which London is experienced and portrayed as a transnational space by Commonwealth expatriates and migrants. As the former 'heart of empire' and a contemporary 'world city,' London metonymically represents the British Empire in two distinct ways. In the early years of decolonization, it is a primarily white city that symbolizes imperial power and history. Over time, as migrants from former colonies have 'reinvaded the centre' and changed its demographic and cultural constitution, it has come to represent empire geographically and spatially as a global microcosm. John Clement Ball examines the work of more than twenty writers, including established authors such as Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, and Salman Rushdie, and newer voices such as Catherine Bush, David Dabydeen, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith.

Review: Urban Renaissance? New Labour, Community and Urban Policy, Developments in British Politics 7, All the World is Here!: The Black Presence at White City, Making Global Trade Work for People, Gender, Place and the Labour Market, European Union Enlargement, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. Real Utopias Project

Review: Urban Renaissance? New Labour, Community and Urban Policy, Developments in British Politics 7, All the World is Here!: The Black Presence at White City, Making Global Trade Work for People, Gender, Place and the Labour Market, European Union Enlargement, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. Real Utopias Project

Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb

This article traces the historic evolution of the California city of Compton, both as a physical place, and as a popular cultural idea. A recipient of the coveted All-American Cities Award in 1952, the almost exclusively white city of Compton quickly integrated after the landmark Supreme Court housing desegregation cases of the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, Compton was a symbol of black middle class achievement, and by the 1970s it would become a vanguard for black political power, with a black mayor and city council. However, by the 1980s, the intense concentration of gang activity in Compton, coupled with the city's proximity to the movie and music-making industries of Hollywood, contributed to the recasting of Compton as a symbol of black crime and poverty throughout urban America. The article explores this transformation of Compton from a place name to a metonym in local and national media reporting, hip-hop music, and the so-called "gangsta" films of the 1980s and 1990s. A quick glance at local business and county land annexation patterns suggests, as well as the battle to rename Compton Boulevard, suggests that by the late 1980s, the idea of Compton became almost as important—and in some cases, far more so—than the actual history of the place. The lesson of the Compton story, the author concludes, is that an engaged citizenry should approach "truths" about physical places with as much skepticism as we do "truths" about races of people.

Re‐imagining the “White City”

The political use of urban planning in the Middle East is the focus of Samer Bagaeen's paper (in this issue) and of earlier work by Safier and Bollens (both in Vol. 5, No. 2, 2001). This paper looks at the politics of UNESCO's recognition of the “White City” in Tel Aviv as a World Heritage Site. LeVine offers a critique of the heritage designation which excludes “Jaffa from the narrative of the region's modern architecture and planning” and argues that UNESCO's award—in its motivation and geographical designation—reinforces the myth that Tel Aviv emerged as a city independently from its Palestinian Arab environment. “The fact is that Palestinian Arabs helped build the town from the start, and continued to work, shop, play and in some cases live there right up to 1948.” LeVine concludes with a plea “to acknowledge the crucial roles played by both Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and their conflicted yet vital relationship, on the development of the two national movements still struggling to find a home in their ancestral land”.