Introducing our new Whatsapp group
A way for our paid subscribers to connect more deeply
In case you missed it, last week’s SEA essay was A Fistful of Salt by Zoya Naaz Rehman. SEA is continuing on its usual biweekly schedule, with our next piece coming on Tuesday, November 7th. Another relevant read at the moment is House of Meat by Rachel Hobley, a tale of resistance from our WAR issue which follows three generations of women in occupied Bethlehem as they source and cook with tomatoes. On Palestine, we can also recommend the work of Fikra, Jewish Currents, Lux, and LRB. On food specifically,
has an excellent piece on soft power called ‘Food, Wine, and Palestine’ followed by a reading list.Happy Halloween!
This year we’re dressing up as two editors stoked to see our humble publication growing but hoping a few more of you will support us financially so that we can keep innovating and experimenting. How did we do?
Hopefully, your spooky season plans are more exciting than ours. (I swear, we do lead wilder lives on occasion.) But in service of our lacklustre costumes, we’re thrilled to finally announce the launch of our WhatsApp group for paid subscribers. We’ve mentioned it a few times over the last few months; its creation is inspired by feedback we received in our reader survey back in June, where many of you said you’d like to engage more personally.
We envision this group as a place for us to connect on a deeper level — to ask questions about FFJ content, share other thought-provoking writing and podcasts, highlight the work of inspiring people, and discuss larger happenings in the world of gender and food. But we can also just send photos of our dogs if you’re into that. It will be moderated by me, Isabela, and Zoë will of course be part of it as well.
Why WhatsApp? It’s something that most people have access to regardless of operating system, and we’re feeling a bit Slack/Discord-ed out — so many tabs to open, different notifications to click, and platforms to keep track of. We didn’t get much engagement on Substack Chat (people need to have the app installed and we suspect few of you do). Whatsapp is easy, casual, portable; it’s where we conduct most of our own communications, and this is really designed to be a personal space where we can come together as a community in our day-to-day. It’s also an experiment. We’re keenly aware that building an online community is much more challenging than it may appear, so please, let us know what you think about the initiative.
Paid subscribers will find a QR code and link to join Friends of FFJ below the paywall. We have a few recommended reads to greet our first joiners. If you’d like to become a member, please sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription — we’re offering these at 25% off for a limited time. The newsletter in your inbox won’t update live, so after subscribing you’ll have to revisit this post on our Substack homepage to find the QR code at the end.
So…see you there? - IV