jenna-norman

4334 Articles by:

Jenna Norman

Jenna Norman is a London-based writer and campaigner.

To Still Speak of Freedom

Seventy years ago, the Congress of the People was broken up by apartheid police while discussing the Freedom Charter, a vision for a just society. The document remains a guide for building a free South Africa today, writes Mervyn Bennun, one of the meeting’s participants.

Airbrushing the Ghettoes

From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the legacy of the Holocaust has been used to denigrate left anti-fascism and promote the interests of ethno-nationalist establishments. But we should remember who really killed the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ of the Second World War.

Partisans of the World

For many people who risked their lives to defeat Nazism, aiding the post-war movements against a dying but vicious colonialism was the next step in the fight to realise their anti-fascist ideals.

Acid Japonisme

Visionary Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki anticipated our present malaise decades ago, in writing that combines melancholy for the failure of sixties radicalism with scepticism about a world of ubiquitous screens.

Laissez-Faire Listening

The Swedish tech giant has rigged the music industry against artists, mined listeners for data, and made music boring for everyone. Or is that just what the major recording labels want you to believe?

Party Poetics

The new poetry collection by London writer Caleb Femi is a modern epic based on the institution of the ‘shoobs’ (or house party) and its under-explored experimental potential.

Erik Satie for the People

The elusive French composer is the subject of a freewheeling new Ian Penman book and an intense, eighteen-hour performance directed by Marina Abramovic. How seriously should we take their versions of the Satie myth?

Fiddling While Rome Burns

A new book about Trump’s 2024 election victory is a profoundly unsettling account of the Democratic Party machinery’s refusal to respect their own voters or offer any answers to America’s problems beyond maintaining the status quo.

Baggins of Downing Street

In delivering his toxic ‘Island of Strangers’ speech on immigration earlier this week, Keir Starmer aligned with a bizarre conservative tendency inspired in equal measure by Enoch Powell and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Landlords Never Really Die

Since its publication last year, Nick Bano’s book ‘Against Landlords’ has generated much debate about the housing crisis — and laid the ground for a new trend in left publishing.

Britain Must Stop Arms to Israel Now

As a High Court case seeking to block sale of British munitions used by Israel in Gaza begins, one of the campaigners involved — former UN Assistant Secretary-General Andrew Gilmour — argues that Britain’s role in the process must end immediately.

Israeli Settlers are Erasing the West Bank

Louis Theroux’s recent documentary about settler violence in the West Bank drew attention to the plight of the region — but in the Hebron Hills, where Palestinians and Jewish activists face settler devastation, the reality is even more shocking.

VE Day at 80: Antifascism is Ours

As we mark the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism in Europe, the radical antifascist legacy of the Second World War is in danger of being forgotten. For the sake of survival, we can’t let that happen.

A Murky Clarity

Politicians’ pronouncements that last month’s Supreme Court judgement ‘clarifies’ sex and gender feeds into a wider right-wing narrative that the Left is in denial about the truth of human nature — and that hostility to minorities is the only way to deal with reality.

Not Just Where, But How We Live

In the year of the Renters’ Rights Bill, how should the tenants movement respond to changing ideas around how the current housing crisis is exacerbated by patriarchal and capitalist notions?

Finding Solace in Organising

In January, workers at Tower Hamlets’ primary independent domestic violence service were threatened with redundancies. By unionising, they not only saved their jobs — they also defended the survivors who rely on their support.