Shtetl by the Sea

The first time David Godlis went to Miami Beach was to visit his grandparents. That was in the 1950s, he was a child and his grandparents had retired in South Beach, a sort of heaven for older generations and Jewish immigrants mostly originally coming from Eastern European countries. Later, he said these trips  were "like visiting Jewish Disneyland". When Godlis went to visit with his grandmother in 1974,  part of "that magic kingdom" had already disappeared. He was 22, took his his camera out on to Ocean Drive, shot sixty rolls of film in ten days capturing what was left of the magic (via) witnessing the end of an era. 

The environment had once been a thriving one attracting many people, offering - among other things - Yiddish-language vaudeville shows in art deco theatres (Yiddish would be abandoned by the second-generation immigrants in favour of English). 

His grandparents, like other immigrants in the community, were snowbirds who retired to South Florida after back-breaking work in the hustle-and-bustle atmosphere of New York City. A far cry from New York's harsh winters, these retirees were savoring the respite from the frost of the Northeast. 'Goodbye snow, hello coconuts,' Godlis writes in his book. (via)

When Florida repealed the discriminatory law barring Jewish Americans from owning real estate in 1949, Miami Beach became a magnet for the community. It was called "Little Jerusalem" or "Shtetl by the Sea" (via). In the 1970s, around 80% of the population of Miami Beach was Jewish,, with a peak in the 1980s (via). While in 1982, there were an estimated 60.000 Jewish households, more recent surveys put the number at a maximum of 16.000. Today, the legendary nightclub and theatre are no more, the demographics have changed. (via). But, as Godlis says, not all is lost.

In 2017, when I last returned to Miami Beach, I stayed in the little Century Hotel, looking pretty close to how it looked in 1974 when I first came upon it. I walked around to see where most of these pictures had been taken. To dream the dream I had photographed 40 years earlier. And I could still see it all. Even my cover girl in her cool Oliver Goldsmith sunglasses. The ocean and palm trees have a way of making those dreams come true. If only for a 1/125th of a second. David Godlis

In 1985, 10 years after I shot these photographs, I returned to Miami Beach with my wife, Eileen. I took her down to Ocean Drive to show her where they were taken and was astonished to find that most everyone was gone. I don’t think even in my early 30s I understood how fast time flies. Of course, many of the retired people I shot pictures of were dead 10 years later. But also many of them had been driven out by the Mariel boatlift of 1980. You can see what became of Ocean Drive in the bathroom shootout scene with Al Pacino in Brian DePalma’s Scarface. So Eileen and I stayed a little further up Collins Avenue the year. And I had to be very careful taking photographs on Ocean Drive that my camera wasn’t stolen.
David Godlis

photographs by David Godlis via   

Rudi Gernreich, "a great example of how far we haven't come"

Rudi Gernreich was born into a non-religious Jewish middle-class family in Vienna in 1922. When he was eight, his father committed suicide, Genreich was mainly raised by his mother and aunt who ran a fashion salon where he learned "the grammar of feminine adornment". In 1938, anti-semitism forced him and his mother  to flee the country. They left for the United States where they settled in Los Angeles. His mother baked pastries, Gernreich sold them door to door. Then he washed cadavers for autopsy. Years later, he recalled: "I grew up overnight. I do smile sometimes when people tell me my clothes are so body-conscious I must have studied anatomy. You bet I studied anatomy."

Gernreich studied art for a while, joined a dance company as a performer while designing the company's costumes. There he also met Harry Hay and became one of the cofounders the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organisation. Genreich did not come out publicly. 

With his topless monokini, designed in 1964, Gernreich "dared to question the taboo of nudity, or more specifically, female nudity" causing outrage which ranged from the Pope forbidding Catholics to wear it to the French Riviera prohibiting it but also Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands banning it. 

The story of the topless bathing suit begins with Adolf Hitler. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler banned public nudity with an executive order. The Post-Freudian Viennese had taken to exercising in the nude, regarding it as healthy. Among those who fled the Nazi regime was widowed Jewish mother Elizabeth Gernreich and her 16-year-old son Rudi. They came to America, where Rudi launched an L.A. career as dancer, fashion designer, and gay activist. He was a founder of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization. 

Throughout his life, Gernreich retained the free, Viennese attitude to nudity. This was reflected above all in his swimsuits. In a 1962 issue of Women's Wear Daily, Gernreich declared: "Bosoms will be uncovered within five years." Thereafter journalists kept pressing him for specifics. "It was my prediction," Gernreich recalled. "For the sake of history, I didn't want [Emilio] Pucci to do it first." (via)

His fashion was more about statement than marketability, It was about questioning the way women's bodies were regulated by the fashion industry, about unisex clothing and the boundaries of gender entrenched within fashion. His no-bra bra was "a protest against the aesthetic ideal of breasts padded into uniformity". 

Fashion, as we know it, is dead. In the new environment of the future, people will accept their bodies. Clothes will be utilitarian, organic, and minimal. It will free us to think of more important things.

Rudi Gernreich, 1971

Fashion does come up from the streets now. Young people are saying ‘We are people, not men and women.’ There’s no sexual confusion. It’s a social change. Rudi Gernreich, 1967

Ahead of his time, Genreich is, in fact, "a great example of  how far we haven't come." (all sources via and via and via and via)

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photograph (by William Claxton, 1964, Vanity Fair) via 

Can Dogs be Racist?

Abstract: Can dogs be racist? Posing this question may seem odd and at worst, unhelpfully provocative at a time when the discourse of ‘colour-blindness’ is so pervasive. Yet the idea of ‘racist dogs’ remains salient within the post-settler societies of eastern and southern Africa, where dogs have been an integral if overlooked tool of colonial practices of racialization. This article traces the colonial demarcation of ‘native dogs’ – juxtaposed to white settlers’ ‘pet’ dogs – to understand how racial categories were imposed on domesticated animals, and how these racialized animals were then colonized through rabies legislation. 

Although the formal racialization of dogs ended with the dawn of political decolonization in the early 1960s, dogs continued to be co-opted for postcolonial racial discourse. Dogs were in a prominent position in postcolonial society due to their prevalence in the security arrangements of white homes as well as in the security forces of white supremacist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The intensity of the relationship between white minorities, their canine pets and the surrounding African population points toward the uncomfortable conclusion that in the heightened racial environments of decolonizing settler Africa, dogs could be made to be racist. (Doble, 2020)

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- Doble, J. (2020). Can Dogs be Racist? The Colonial Legacies of Racialized Dogs in Keny and Zambia. History Workshop Journal, 89, 68-89.
- photograph by Elliott Erwitt (Magnum) via

Fleeing Humanity. By Akwugo Emejulu.

"When did you first learn that you were a non-human? For me, it was a slow realisation. To begin with, I formly rejected the idea. When a white boy in third grade called me a n*gger and I ran to my white teacher in tears, she, unmoved, simply shrugged her shoulders and told me to ignore it. And that was that. (...)" Emejulu (2022:11)

"Granny, as we called her, had incredible stories. Her stories were my first introduction to Blackness, and, by extension, aspirational humanness." (ibid.:15) "My grandmother did not want to be white, even though (...) she had the ability to disappear into whiteness. It never occurred to her to be white - she wanted to be human. But, of course, I now understand that it is impossible to separate the two." (ibid.:17)

"The understanding of my non-humanity crept up on me and now I cannot let it go. I want to pick it up, turn it over in the light. Study it. Understand it. And embrace it. I can't say exactly how I came to this realisation. I felt my exclusion from the supposedly universal category of the 'human' most keenly in my alienated relationship to the social sciences: much of it didn't apply to me or Black women more generally because it was the work of white scholars describing their implicitly white world. Also, in my exhausting encounters in feminist activist and academic circles, I had to constantly remind my white 'sisters' that Black women were, in fact, women (...). (ibid.:19f)

"To believe I am non-human does not mean I believe in my own inferiority. Rather, it means I believe that the human is a construction of whiteness and any discussion about Black inferiority is a product of the futile struggle to be recognised as human." (ibid.:23)

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- Emejulu, A.  (2022). Fugitive Feminism. Silver Press.
- photographs of Diana Ross by Harry Langdon via and via 

2.2%

In the United States, the average woman weighs 140 pounds (63.50 kg), the average fashion model 117 pounds (53.07 kg) while being 5'11'' (more than 180 cm) tall. In the United Kingdom, 45% of women are size 16+, people these size make up 2.2% of women shown in advertisements (via).

‘Our campaign found that 57% of adults have never seen themselves represented in the media. This is why we’re committed to representing all body types, so the everyday consumer can feel empowered. It’s important to shed light on the fact that every body is beautiful and that no one needs to conform to typical beauty standards.’ (Yours Clothing)

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photograph via

Narrative images: Window Shopping, Granada, 1930s

"An African American woman, dressed in her Saturday go-to-town-best, stands outside a store window, chin in hand, contemplating the contents in the window. The image is reflective and thoughtful. What is she thinking? And what lies beyond the frame of this photograph? In Mississippi in the 1930s, could she walk into this store, perhaps try on clothes or hats, and make a purchase? If she were welcomed in this store, would she have the means to buy the merchandise? The woman is separated from the contents of the store window by the large plate glass of segregation.

As in most of her photographs, Welty captures an artistic moment in this image, but the reality of the world outside the frame of the photograph is always present. In this instance, Welty raises questions about this woman as a consumer. How is her ability to buy a mark of freedom conveying access to the American dream? Grace Elizabeth Hale states in her book Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 that shopping and segregation were uneasily intertwined. Department stores, like railroad cars and movie theaters, were “muddled middle” spaces where segregation remained vulnerable, “neither public nor private, neither black nor white” (9). It was in these “muddled middle” spaces that middle class African Americans chose to shop. While whites and blacks might be separated in schools, churches, restaurants, and other spaces, the ritual of Saturday shopping “belonged to all southerners” (Hale 182). Welty captures this “muddled middle” of a Mississippi small town on Saturday in the group of white men just down the street from the African American woman gazing in the shop window."

Mae Claxton

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photograph by Eudora Alice Welty, 1909-2001, (c) by Eudora Welty Foundation) via

Ten Thousand Thanks

Ten thousand thanks for following the tenth year of "Diversity is Beautiful", a wonderful year with some progress for some marginalised communities in some places (and none at all in others), a year of reflection, joy and sunshine (which is good unless too much due to the climate change), a year of excitement and Blur's appearance (scream!) at Wembley Stadium this week. Thank you!

"Since the event I've become half a person." The person in the disabled body.

In their paper, Agmon, Sa'ar and Araten-Bergman (2016) explore the experiences of newly diagnosed persons with disability. Since these individuals lived to adulthood as able bodied people before becoming disabled, their experiences may "offer a unique perspective on both normative and aberrant personhood".

Research on the disabled body is characterised by three assumptions: 1) Disability is a distressing and stigmatised experience that often leads to exclusion, 2) the disabled body is "a stopping point on a continuum of health", and 3) disability is a social construct which becomes more obvious when considering cross-cultural variations in approaches.

The authors come to the conclusion that visibly damaged bodies are assumed to entail cognitive disability. Doctors, for instance, tend to direct explanations to relatives and not to the individuals with disability despite them being present. their abilities are often underestimated, their independence is far from being nurtured reinforcing their exclusion. Persons with disability lose sexuality and gender, usual "codes of interaction between men and women" are disregarded by caregivers in the institution where the study was carried out. Individuals with disability are infatilised, at birthdays they are "allowed" to have some candies.

Since the event I’ve been half a person—half is saying too much: a living dead person. On one side you see how he’s dead. The tonus goes higher and higher, the hand is completely paralyzed, the leg is splinted. Dr. Zaiger told me on my last visit to Leowinstein, that if it doesn’t improve we’ll have to give injections to release the tonus.

Aryeh

Results: 

The analysis reveals the agonizing experience of individuals who have become disabled in adulthood, who undergo symbolic diminution and social exclusion after their former acceptance as whole and normative persons. This ongoing multifaceted process includes infantilization, denial of their sexuality/sensuality, transgression of gender boundaries, and their construction as categorically different from the "healthy" people around them. At the same time, the analysis also demonstrates the ways in which daily routine at the daycare center also complicates the normative healthy-disabled binary, indicating a continuum on which attendees may attempt to reposition themselves.

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- Agmon, M., Sa'ar, A., Araten-Bergman, T. (2016). The person in the disabled body: a perspective on culture and personhood from the margins. International Journal for Equity in health, 147, link
- photograph (protesting against the 1992 ITV Telethon, by People's History Museum) via

Individualism/collectivism and personality in Italian and American Groups

Abstract: Italian (n = 129) and American (n = 86) samples were evaluated with the Five Factor Inventory of personality and a measure of individualism/collectivism. Greater individualism was seen in the American group than the Italian group, as in the Hofstede (2019) data. For the Italian sample only, greater individualism was associated with greater neuroticism and greater collectivism was associated with lower neuroticism. This may reflect poor culture fit for Italians with a very individualistic orientation given that Italy falls between the United States and Asian countries in terms of the individualism/collectivism dimension. 

Other studies have shown better personal adjustment being associated with having a personality that fits with the culture in which one is embedded. For both Italian and American groups, higher collectivism was associated with higher extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness consistent with other reports. Additional findings included higher openness in the Italian group and higher conscientiousness in the American group. (Burton et al., 2021)

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- Burton, L., Delvecchio, E., Germani, A. & Mazzeschi, C. (2021) Individualism/collectivism and personality in Italian and American Groups. Curr Psychol 40, 29–34 

- photograph by Charles H. Traub (Naples, 1985) via

Quoting Lena Horne

"(M)y and (Walter) White's concern was that in the period while I was waiting for Cabin in the Sky they would force me to play roles, as I have said, that most N*groes were forced to play in the movies at that time. It was not that I felt I was too good or too proud to play them. But Walter felt and I agreed with him, that since I had no history in the movies and therefore hand not been typcast ... it would be essential for me to try to establish a different kind of image for N*gro women."
Lena Horne (cited in Sim, 2006)

- Sim, Y. D. (2006). Women of Blaxploitation. How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture. Jefferson & London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers.
- photograph of Lena Horne via