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The Tortured Antisemitism of Amiri Baraka
We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. These lines, published in a...

Shoga Films
Apr 3, 20244 min read


Poetry Lite
I'm a poet And my feet know it. They’re longfellas. This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts...

Shoga Films
Apr 3, 20243 min read


The Two Maids of Ethel Waters
In 1950, the superstar singer and actor Ethel Waters checked off another box in her list of African American firsts when she starred in a...

Shoga Films
Mar 6, 20243 min read


"She's Just Like One of the Family"
Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family...

Shoga Films
Mar 6, 20244 min read


What Do We Do About Carlo?
In 1931, James P. Johnson wrote and recorded a song, "Go Harlem," extolling the extraordinary life of New York's Black Mecca. Among the...

Shoga Films
Feb 13, 20243 min read


The Making and Unmaking of A "White" Africanist
Me and Ebrahim Hussein In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of...

Shoga Films
Feb 8, 20244 min read


The Inescapable Blackness of Jean Toomer (And the Escapable Jewishness of Waldo Frank)
In the fall of 1922, two young American writers, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, traveled together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for...

Shoga Films
Jan 10, 20244 min read


My Coloured Friend
Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured. First of all, note the British spelling. Second of all,...

Shoga Films
Jan 10, 20244 min read


When We Were Victims: The Blood Libel
When We Were Victims: The Blood Libel It's safe to say, I think, that Jews have never been well regarded, especially in Christian and...

Shoga Films
Dec 7, 20236 min read


I Uncover the Queer and Jewish Undercurrents of a Documentary Classic
The raffish director strikes a casual pose in front of the Queens Film Festival banner Grey Gardens , if you must know. And if you don't...

Shoga Films
Dec 7, 20234 min read


The Grand Alliance Falls Apart
Once upon a time, in an America far, far away lived two pariah peoples in a land that the Anglo-Saxon ruling class considered as theirs...

Shoga Films
Nov 3, 20234 min read


My Zionist Phase
As a mid-century Jewish American child, I was enrolled in the Zionist project without my knowledge or acquiescence. I was born in 1950,...

Shoga Films
Nov 1, 20234 min read


The Forgotten Pansy Craze
October is LGBT History Month, and so we should remember the Pansy Craze of the early 1930s, one of the few bright spots of pre-Stonewall...

Shoga Films
Oct 4, 20233 min read


Fear of a Little Black Dress
When I was coming out in the Stone Age of the 1980s, drag was not well understood (at least by me) or widely accepted, even in the gay...

Shoga Films
Oct 4, 20234 min read


"My Son, the Fegeleh"
One blanket statement we can endorse about American Jewish boys and men is that we are neurotically attached to our mothers. Since our...

Shoga Films
Sep 7, 20233 min read


The Central African Republic: Requiem for a Failed Nation(2014)
HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in...

Shoga Films
Sep 5, 20236 min read


Leviticus 18:22
"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination." Well, there it is. Case closed and not much more to say...

Shoga Films
Sep 2, 20233 min read


My Aborted Jazz Career
One of the Victorian legacies of the middle-class homes of the 1950s which bespoke of aspirations to gentility was the piano in the...

Shoga Films
Aug 2, 20234 min read


The Jewish Mystery of the Great American Songbook
Ask an American what areas and sectors of America are controlled by Jews, and you’ll get a variety of responses from “nothing” to...

Shoga Films
Aug 1, 20233 min read


On Aging as a Gay Man
On the right! Look at the guy on the right! That’s me at age 69. The physical specimen with his arm around me is Adam, my personal...

Shoga Films
Jun 6, 20233 min read
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