She's with her | The Spectator

The ‘Russians’ of Brighton Beach

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At the very southern tip of Brooklyn, far from the hip avocado cafés and right before you hit the sea, there sits the neighborhood of Brighton Beach. Nicknamed ‘Little Odessa’ after the waterfront city in Ukraine, the area is home to primarily Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It’s a jumble of identity. The immigrants are mostly Jews from Ukraine, hence the nickname, but also Russia, Belarus and the other Soviet republics. So what to call these people in America? In Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus, our identity cards never described us as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian. We were just Evrei, Jews.

Libby Emmons

Fashion victims: how feminists are betraying Muslim women

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When I was growing up, one of my closest female friends was Muslim. At first, her parents didn’t want us to be friends; they figured that as a child of divorced parents, I’d be a bad influence. Their restrictions pushed her to what they would surely have thought of as the dark side, had they ever known what we got up to. She and I were devout feminists, and we knew that women’s equality was more important than the dictates of religion. Neither she nor her mother covered her hair with a hijab or wore a baggy abaya. I’d been raised in a Christian household where short skirts were prohibited, but I’d recently moved in with my more permissive mother and stepfather.

Godfrey Elfwick

My morning with Black Lives Matter UK

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Portland, Oregon It was a bright April morning and the sun shone benevolent golden rays upon me as I strode purposefully up the steps to the door of a house in the London district of Islington. Pressing the Victorian brass doorbell, I heard the comforting chimes of Toto’s ‘Africa’ emanating from within and nodded my head in approval. After a few seconds the door was opened by a charming white-passing transracial man who called himself Babatunde (I later found out his birth parents had named him Rupert). He graciously invited me into a spacious studio apartment decorated with tribal carvings from Ikea’s African Solnedgång collection.

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