Four Jews The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and offensive, isn’t very much used and contains nowhere near the dynamite of the former. Simply saying “Jew” with the right tone of contempt or hatred conveys the poison without recourse to a special word. Nonetheless, “kike” is what we’ve got, and where does it come from? There are several theories that we needn’t go into here, but there’s agreement that the term originally surfaced in the wake of the millions of Eastern European immigrants who flooded the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. In fact, some of the richer and more established Western European immigrants, somewhat appalled by this massive influx of benighted raggedy-ass Ostjuden, used the slur themselves as a marker of their difference and superiority. In the American context, the major interethnic division was between (broadly speaking) “German” Jews (my father’s side of the family) and Eastern European Jews (my mother’s). Sephardic Jews? Never heard of them. Did I possess even a theoretical knowledge that there were Jews who didn’t look white? I don’t believe so. Like the proverbial fish who isn’t aware of the existence of water because that is his world and all he knows, I uncritically equated Jew with Ashkenazi. This unconscious bias was so strong that I filtered out any evidence to the contrary. When I spent five months on a kinnutz in 1969 and toured Israel, I must have seen many non-Ashkenazi Jews, but I have no memory of them. Everybody on the kibbutz, the major players in the history of Zionism and of the kibbutz movement, were Ashenazi Jews. The Jews uprooted and incinerated during the Holocaust were Ashkenzi Jews. Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax were Ashkenazi Jews. My literary studies didn’t help. All of the Jewish writers who were then in vogue and widely read were Ashkenazi Jews: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Grace Paley. Bernard Malamud wrote many of his acclaimed short stories in a Yiddishsized English that glorified and memorialized that dying language. But only Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish. I’d never heard of Ladino. Finally, my historical research brought other kinds of Jews into my ken. While writing about the “embrace” of Blacks and Jews occasioned by of Enlightenment thinking, I learned that the French 1790 decree granting civic emancipation applied only to the well-to-do more acculturated Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, not to the poorer Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace and Lorraine (although as the French Revolution progressed, these, too, were emancipated in 1791). Because of my specialization in African studies, I knew of the existence of Ethiopian Jews, but they were never more than a demographic oddity to me, even after that community had been so dramatically airlifted into Israel in 1991 and became a (discriminated and disadvantaged) part of Israeli society thenceforth. They didn’t come to the United States in significant numbers, and I referred to them as “falashas” (Amharic for “stranger” or “outsider”) without knowing that the term was pejorative. Yet still, I was unaware of my Ashkenazi blinders. The two sons of my romantic partner during the '90s were the issue of their Black father and their Jewish mother. I never thought of them as Jewish, and the topic of our shared Jewishness never came up. Since they look Black by the peculiar racial codes of American society, that is how the world perceives them and mostly how they move through that world. In fact, because their mother made sure they received a Jewish education, they have a greater Jewish literacy than I do! The older son has become quite famous as an actor and rapper, but he is never perceived as Jewish. Drake doesn’t acknowledge him as a colleague or co-religionist. But like Drake, Daveed rarely plays his Jewish card … with one major exception. At the behest of the Disney studios, he wrote and recorded a song destined to enter the slim musical offerings of this minor Jewish holiday, “Puppies for Hannukah” (His autotuned but perfect delivery of the brucha draws from his mastery of both rap and Jewish literacy). So the blinders are off. I watched the amazing documentary Little White Lie, learned about the Lemba of Southern Africa, have been harangued on social media by Raven Schwam-Curtis, and shared a stage at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival with the founder of Jews in ALL Hues. I’ve been schooled. However, I will not watch the YouTube video of Sammy Davis, Jr., in full shtetl drag singing “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. There are depths in my quest for multiculti authenticity to which I will not descend. --Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Black Israelites SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The Commandment Keepers of Harlem    First of all, they’re not Jews – at least not as understood by Jewish consensus. (Jews are either born of a Jewish mother or have formally converted to Judaism.) If they identify as Israelites rather than African-American Jews (small in number but growing), their denominations originated in the Messianic stew bubbling up in the worst of Jim Crow times (post-Reconstruction) and places (the American South).  They are fringe-y for sure but hardly unified in their beliefs and practices. Some make an effort to hew more closely to Judaic beliefs and practices, most notably The Commandment Keepers, based in New York. Others retain such a close connection to their Christian origins that they accept Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God.  What they all have in common is the conviction that the Biblical Israelites were Black and that they are the true descendants of the Twelve Tribes. This obviously puts them in opposition to the dominant historical narratives and mainstream teachings of both Christianity and Judaism. Born of an oppositional and Black nationalist ideology, some sects are openly and unapologetically antisemitic.   Frank Cherry, the first African American to whom God vouchsafed the vision of authentic Biblical blackness, established the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations, in 1886 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he preached that white people were inherently evil and hated by God. Cherry also espoused antisemitism, claimed that the earth is square, and professed that Jesus would return in the year 2000 to start a race war.  The ideology and beliefs of some Black Israelite sects actually resulted in the establishment of colonies conceived as a return to the “homeland.” Coming through the ranks of the Garvey movement in the 1920s, Arnold Josiah Ford founded the Beth B’nai Israel in Harlem, declared himself a rabbi, and took a small group of followers to Ethiopia where he hoped to create the nucleus of a community that would unite Black Israelites with their Ethiopian brethren.    Ben Ammi Ben-Israel established the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem in Chicago in 1966 when Black nationalism was on the rise. In 1969, Ben Ammi and 30 Hebrew Israelites moved to Israel, followed by 600 more members over the next 20 years. When the first Black Hebrews arrived, they claimed citizenship under the Law of Return. This didn't convince the Israeli government, which ruled in 1973, that the group did not qualify for automatic citizenship because they could not prove Jewish descent and had not undergone Orthodox conversion. Although they continued to (illegally) immigrate -- now numbering over 3000 souls, the Black Hebrews were denied work permits and state benefits.  The Black Hebrews accused the Israeli government of racist discrimination, but In 1981, a group of American civil rights activists led by Bayard Rustin investigated and concluded that racism was not the cause of the dilemma in which they found themselves. In 1990, Illinois legislators helped negotiate an agreement that resolved their legal status. Members of the group are permitted to work, and also have access to housing and social services. The Black Hebrews reclaimed their American citizenship and have received aid from the U.S. government to build a school and additional housing. They’re still not “real Jews,” but in traditional areas of Black excellence, they can be useful to the Jewish state. Young men from the Black Hebrew community serve in the IDF, have entered international sporting events under the Israeli flag, as well as having represented Israel twice in the Eurovision song contest. Make no mistake, however, Black Israelites have always been a thorn in the traditional Judaic hide. They cannot claim a continuous Jewish practice as have the Black Ethiopians nor will they abandon their fundamental belief that they are the true descendants and carriers of Biblical Judaism. Because these two historical narratives are in direct opposition, Black Israelites will never be able to integrate (nor are they interested) into the Jewish community. Whether religious, non-observant, conservative or liberal, Jews need only invoke the First of the 10 Commandments in their defense: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.  Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Ashkenazi Blinders SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The young ulpanist in the rose greenhouse.   Aliyah. In its Biblical context, “aliyah” is a Hebrew word meaning “to rise up” and specifically denotes ascending to Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish Feasts. In modern context, it now refers to the “return” of Jews to the Land of Israel. This subset of “immigration” automatically includes all Jews and excludes everybody else. In that regard, as an immigration policy reduced to one word, it is unique. “How nice!” one might think, “that there is a place of refuge in the event that my own country turns fascist or encourages anti-semitism to the extent that I no longer feel safe.” I’ve had Jewish friends who “made aliyah,” and many American Jews have relatives who emigrated. “Aliyah” is never an option I have considered or would consider. There are five principal reasons which I will cover in ascending order of importance. 1. I do not want to learn Hebrew In 1969 I spent five months in Israel as part of a university-sponsored group to study living conditions in the kibbutz, an experiment in nation-building and socialist living that was unique in its time. In line with its nation-building mandate, the larger kibbutzim took in young people and gave them food and shelter in exchange for their labor. These programs were called ulpans, and the richer, more organized kibbutzim taught their ulpanists Hebrew. Hebrew, a dead liturgical language, had been resurrected by the Zionists as the language of Jews and as the official language of the State of Israel. It was a Quixotic choice, but the whole Zionist enterprise in its early days up to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was Quixotic. Our group had Hebrew classes all morning and worked in the kibbutz orchards, green houses, and meatpacking plant in the afternoon. By dint of study and immersion in the linguistic bath, I gained a rudimentary understanding of the simplified Hebrew that many Israelis pitched to the level of the foreigners. Reading and writing, however, were definitively closed to me. Had I had a Jewish education as a boy culminating in a bar mitzvah, I would have been familiar with the Hebrew alphabet and its prehistoric right-to-left orientation (because, you know, if you’re right-handed and chiseling on a tablet, that’s the only way you’re going to flow). But I had not had such an education, and, to compound the despair of the linguistic Gentile, Hebrew newspapers, books, and signs had dispensed with vowel dots, s tht th rdng xprnc wld lk lk ths! Hopeless! I was not willing then, nor since, to cripple my participation in a new national life with a painful and insufficient mastery of its official language. I’ve seen how low English skills have blighted the lives of many immigrants to America. 2. I’m not desperate to emigrate God knows the United States has its flaws, but I’ve experienced countries under dictatorship (the Central African Republic), with rampant crime and social unrest (Brazil), where antisemitism is so pervasive and ineradicable that it fucks with its Jewish citizens heads (France), and where recent apartheid policies have permanently sabotaged and distorted race relations (Namibia). We have serious inequalities and divisions in the United States, but I don’t think these will ever lead to civil war. Furthermore, I was born and raised in the upper middle class, and due to the generational wealth, which my parents of The Greatest Generation accumulated, my financial berth is secure. Life’s pretty good and always has been. 3. I do not want to live in an apartheid state The Six-Day War of 1969 brought more than one million Palestinians into the occupied territories under Israeli rule. Israeli citizenship was never conceived of as a possible resolution and in the ensuing decades, a two-state solution was eventually strangled by extremists on both sides of the conflict. The acquisition of Gaza and the West Bank has poisoned the Israeli body politic, and, for the same reason, I would not choose to live in Mississippi, I do not want to have even casual contact with racists, religious fanatics, and right-wing extremists. 4. I do not want to live in a country with a state-sponsored religion Orthodox Jews have a stranglehold on Judaism and its rituals. You cannot have a Jewish wedding unless it’s officiated by an Orthodox Rabbi. Other modes of Jewish worship – Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist – are not only not recognized, but if religious Israeli Jews had their way, these “heresies” would be stamped out everywhere forever. Orthodox rabbis have an outsized influence on Israeli policy, have contributed to the hopeless tangle of the Palestinian problem with the belief that the occupied territories have been bestowed by God to be part of what they call Greater Israel, and are reproducing at such a rapid rate that they will gain the demographic (and therefore electoral) upper hand against secular (and Arab) Israelis. 5. Why would I want to project myself into that mess? This should be self-explanatory. If I have to plan for a “safe room” in a house I build or acquire, shouldn’t that give me pause about my choice of residence? It’s been a year since Hamas – another extremist group – unleashed the Israeli-Gaza War with increasingly violent repercussions in Southern Lebanon and the West Bank. Benjamin Netanyahu, the most corrupt and disastrous Jewish leader of modern history, is still Prime Minister with no end of his reign or the war which keeps him in power in sight. Violence escalates; innocent Palestinians perish by the tens of thousands; fanatical rogue Israeli “settlers” terrorize and kill Palestinians with impunity; Israeli society drifts, lurches, or is driven rightwards. Who in their right mind wants to “go up” into THAT! --Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Operation Moses SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Ethiopian Jews Airlifted to Israel During the height of King Solomon’s reign of glory, o Best Beloved!, the dark-skinned Queen of Sheba, hearing of Solomon’s wisdom, traveled to Jerusalem to learn from him. The story is differently told in the Bible, the Qur’an, and in the Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian holy book, but in the Ethiopian version, the virtuous Queen is tricked into sleeping with the wily Solomon and returns to Ethiopia pregnant with his child. The son, Menelik, became the first emperor of Ethiopia, thus establishing the Solomonic dynasty claimed by the ruling family of Ethiopia until the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1975. Ethiopia famously became a bastion of Christianity from the 4th century onwards (the Land of Prester John), but somewhere in the nebulous mists of myth, history, and continuous opposition to a centralized empire emerged an Ethiopian populace who considered themselves the descendants of Solomon and Sheba, and who called themselves Jews.  Formerly called “Falashas” by outsiders, a label now considered derogatory, the Beta Israel held the Five Books of Moses as their central religious text, upholding many of the laws and commandments set forth in the Torah, including dietary restrictions, the observance of the Sabbath, and major biblical festivals. For fifteen centuries, the Beta Israel clung to their Jewish identity and religious practice in complete isolation and in ignorance of the rabbinical traditions developed by world Jewry elsewhere. They knew nothing of later Jewish texts like the Talmud or the Mishnah, central to Rabbinic Judaism. By the nineteenth century, when, in its devouring embrace, European imperialism attempted to conquer the independent kingdom of Ethiopia, knowledge of the Beta Israel began seeping into the West. The Beta Israel had, by this time, been forced into remote poverty by the Ethiopian ruling powers, but the scrum of Christian missionaries overrunning the territories was an even greater threat to the community’s survival. Lone Western Jewish defenders, such as Joseph Halévy and Jacques Faitlovich, made it their mission to stanch the flow of conversion by connecting the Beta Israel to the rest of world Jewry. Faitlovitch secured two letters from rabbis abroad acknowledging Beta Israel as fellow Jews. The second letter from 1921, written by the revered Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Palestine, called on the Jewish people worldwide to save the Beta Israel — “50,000 holy souls of the house of Israel” — from “extinction and contamination.”  The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 set the stage for a protracted discussion about the legitimacy of Beta Israel as authentic Jews and their right to immigrate to Israel. Finally, in 1975, the government of Yitzhak Rabin officially accepted the Beta Israel as Jews for the purpose of the Law of Return. In that same year, Emperor Haile Selassie was strangled and a military junta known as the Derg ruled Ethiopia as a Marxist-Leninist state. During the 1980s, a protracted civil war, drought, famine, economic decline, and a repressive dictatorship made life unbearable not only for Ethiopian Jews but for Ethiopians in general. Tens of thousands, including the Beta Israel, undertook a dangerous overland trek to refugee camps in neighboring Sudan to escape. Thousands perished along the way. The refugee camps were themselves swamps of corruption, disease, and for the Beta Israel, the site of continued stigmatization by fellow refugees who considered them sorcerers and Christ-killers. The death toll among the Beta Israel continued unabated and was even greater than amongst other refugees. After receiving accounts of the persecution of Ethiopian Jews in the refugee camps, Associate U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affair Richard Krieger came up with the idea of wholesale airlift of the population to Israel and met with Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA, and Sudanese representatives to put into place what was called Operation Moses. After a secret Israeli cabinet meeting in November 1984, the decision was made to go forward. Between November 21, 1984, and January 5, 1985, 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were secretly flown from Sudan to Israel. Operation Moses was the first of these mass evacuations. Six years later, Operation Solomon, a covert Israeli military operation in 1991, airlifted over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours. Although Ethiopian Jews suffer anti-black discrimination and higher rates of poverty than the general Israeli population, there’s no question that they would have faced extinction as a community had they remained in Ethiopia. In this one case, at least, a communal religious identity trumped race. Israel proactively brought thousands of Africans – strange, impoverished, ignorant of Western ways and modern lifestyles – and declared them to be citizens because they were Jews. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience into this foray in Aliyah Holds No Allure For Me SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Nous quatre a Paris Jazz paved the way for the establishment of an African American expatriate community in Paris. The French were blown away by the syncopation introduced during World War I through the Harlem Hellfighters regimental band. African Americans were seen as musical, exotic, and paragons of entertainment. If you were already in France, faced with the choice of staying in a country that – naively perhaps – blew up your talents or returning to an America in the throes of the deadliest, most extended set of race riots in its history (the Red Summer of 1919) … well, only the pull of family and culture might bring you back home.  Warranted or not, Paris gained a sheen as a bastion of freedom for American Blacks. Countee Cullen expressed the deep appreciation for the respite from the unrelenting racism felt by many African Americans in a 1932 sonnet, “To France.”  As he whose eyes are gouged craves light to see, And he whose limbs are broken strength to run So have I sought in you that alchemy  That knits my bones and returns me to the sun And found across a continent of foam What was denied my hungry heart at home.  Many entertainers had a good run there. Some like Josephine Baker and Bricktop settled as permanent residents. Others, like Adelaide Hall, lived there for shorter periods. Clarinetist Sidney Bechet would have stayed in France longer than his first four-year stint, but after serving an eleven-month prison term for an accidental shooting of a woman during a brawl, he was deported. (The story ends happily. He eventually emigrated to France in 1951 after his performance as a soloist at the Paris Jazz Fair caused a surge in his popularity.)  As the interwar capital of the visual arts – as well as seedbed for any number of modernist movements – a sojourn in Paris immeasurably enhanced the techniques and reputations of those African American artists who managed to get there: Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, Archibald Motley, Jr., and Augusta Savage.  The great obstacle encountered in expatriating oneself to France was the language. You didn’t necessarily need to master French in order to blow a clarinet, but you were likely to be living on the economic edge and not speaking French closed many doors. Langston Hughes spent six months in Montmartre in 1924 eking out a living as a cook and dishwasher. “Stay home!” he warned Countee Cullen in a letter.  Jobs in Paris are like needles in hay-stacks for everybody, and especially English-speaking foreigners. The city is over-run with Spaniards and Italians who work for nothing, literally nothing. And all French wages are low enough anyway. I've never in my life seen so many English and Americans, colored and white, male and female, broke and without a place to sleep as I have seen here.  Cullen didn’t listen. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928, he lived a year in Paris working on his poetry, spent summers in France as often as he could, and, when he had to find a “day job” in 1934 to support his writing, did so as a French teacher in a Harlem junior high school.  Because of his appreciation for the visual arts, Cullen bridged both the literary and artistic community of Black visitors and expatriates. Hale Woodruff, perfecting modernist techniques during his French sojourn, daubed a famous painting of Cullen while the both were in Paris in 1928.  The transatlantic influence didn’t run just one way. The writings of the Harlem Renaissance served as an inspiration to the African and Caribbean leaders of the Negritude movement that came to birth in the 1930s. They were particularly appreciative of Claude McKay’s second novel, Banjo (1929) which manifested a fully pan-Africanist worldview, centering on a community of Black seamen in Marseilles and critiquing how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan colonies.  The deepening of the Great Depression forced many Black intellectuals, notably McKay himself, back to America where a change of zeitgeist and economic hard times had drained the Harlem Renaissance of its vitality.  That was not the end of the story, however. One of Countee Cullen’s students at Frederick Douglass Junior High was James Baldwin who matriculated there from 1935 to 38. Perhaps le bon professeur taught him more than just French … Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's experience into this foray in A Basset in Paris

Lady Hamlet and her humans, 1961 It wasn’t easy for a dog used to the freedom of the San Gabriel Mountains to accommodate herself to the constraints of an apartment. She was taken out six times a day. The schedule was stable, and everybody had their allotted times. But Hamlet could never resign herself to the regimen of the leash; her pace never quite matched that of her companion. She made a great hit on the sidewalks, though. A basset was not a common sight in 1961, and she looked so tortured in her collar that even the proverbially stony Parisian hearts would soften. “Does she bite?” they asked. “No, but I do,” I replied, for I was eleven and thought that the height of humor. It was during my four o’clock walks with Hamlet that I grew to know Paris in its inward life: the housewives shopping with their net-string bags, the men playing boules in the park, the white-grey colors of the squat, serried buildings.Hamlet, alas, was less appreciative. I had been given a pair of three-wheeled skates from Italy, and I would sometimes put these on, forcing Hamlet to trot miserably behind as I rolled down the Champs-Élysées in my schoolboy shorts. On Avenue Foch, with its bordered lawns, tall chestnuts, and signs reading ne pas marcher sur la pelouse, we could sometimes let her off the leash if there were no gendarmes about. But Paris is a city of stone and iron, pedestrians and pigeons. Its pocket parks and grated trees could not satisfy a California dog’s craving for dusty trails and the smell of sagebrush. Though she liked disbanding parliaments of pigeons, though the world’s most famous monuments offered themselves for her peeing pleasure, Hamlet was not enriched by her sojourn.             Unfortunately, she not only urinated on the Arc de Triomphe – a mere two blocks away – she left landmarks of her own in our apartment. She knew this was defendu but acted purely in the spirit of revenge. She did not like to be left alone. When we came back from an evening out, we could be sure of finding a sign of her displeasure. However much we beat her, she was a refractory hound. Because we lived in mortal terror of our concierge (who never did come into the apartment), we were always moving furniture around to hide the latest spot. The concierge and his wife also had a dog, a large standard poodle named Vulcan who threw himself in barking fury against the window of their apartment at the appearance of anybody, whether a stranger or tenant of 10 years standing. Hamlet regarded Vulcan with disdain. When she was angry, as when some curious male would sniff her backside, she’d growl once, bare her teeth, and turn on her suitor in a flash – end of courtship.             As for humans, they never disturbed Hamlet’s composure unless they bore food or had rattled her leash. Even though she had no talent for them, Hamlet was avid for walks. If she heard the clink of her leash, though you might have touched it by the merest accident, you were committed to taking her out. She could be dead asleep (or wide awake – even connoisseurs of the breed have trouble distinguishing between the two states), the softest chink would bring her bounding and barking into the foyer. It got to the point where we had to spell the word “w-a-l-k.”   But there were fabulous promenades in our part of Paris. Each street raying from the Étoile had its own ambiance: cosmopolitan Kléber framing the Eiffel Tower, Victor Hugo with its elegant shops and window displays, park-lined Foch, quiet Carnot, and the white, glamorous sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées. My favorite walk was one we sometimes took at night on the quays of the Seine. The windows of Notre Dame might glow in the distance or we might see a lacework of light ring the Place de la Concorde, but on the quays of the river it was shadowed, fresh, and lonely. In that dark artery of Paris, we walked in quiet, in leisure, and – the veils of nostalgia drop heavily here – in peace. For me, the family found its perfect unity in these dark moments, surrounded by the city. And Hamlet, as unconscious as we, padded along the stone quays by the murmuring waters of the Seine. Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Paris, je t'aime! SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in tribal/sectarian violence. Men and young boys indiscriminately shoot and maim whoever gets in their path, women, children, innocent bystanders, one another. The world cries in horror; insufficient troops from the outside may or may not be sent in to protect the capital and its airport; the slaughter continues; world leaders point fingers and counsel moderation; millions of lives are blasted and disrupted; refugees huddle, flee, starve, provide horrific images for Western news consumption. Yes, we’ve seen the like amongst white people (a tear for Yugoslavia), but surely that was an anomaly! This kind of savagery is endemic to the African continent, isn’t it? Not to be racist about it, but … What’s the difference between the sectarian violence now being visited upon that perennial basket case of a country, the Central African Republic (even the name testifies to its artificial nature) and Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sudan? Only my personal history, for I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and lived there from 1974 to 1977. The high school in which I taught is now a refugee camp for 8,000 Muslims too terrified to return to their homes, many now destroyed or burnt out. Another 35,000 Christian refugees are massed around the Catholic mission in the town’s center. Bossangoa, formerly a peaceable savannah subprefecture of 50,000 people, is now a string of blackened buildings. The thing I find most shocking about this turn of events is that when I lived there in the mid-70s, there was no whisper of the sectarian hatred that has how turned this country into a cauldron of violence. Tribal rivalries there were aplenty and then dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa provided a colorful twist on the usual narrative of a cardboard democracy, installed by the departing colonial powers, overturned by a military dictator. (Bokassa brought unusual notoriety to his fiefdom by declaring himself emperor and staging a shockingly opulent coronation modeled on that of Napoleon.) Muslims had always been a quiescent trading minority (barely 15%) in this country of mostly Christians and animists. If I were placing bets at that time on who would be hacking whom, Muslims vs. Christians would have been low on the list. HOW DID WE GET HERE? Beats me, but I have a theory. You may have noticed that for the past couple of decades, the Muslim world has been “waking up,” if you will, from its centuries of sleep. This has included all manner of unpleasantness from bombings in Mumbai (Lashkar-e-Taiba) to church killings in Nigeria (Boko Haram). You might not have pegged the Central African Republic as a likely domino in the spread of Allah-inspired violence, but the C.A.R.’s immediate neighbor to the north, Chad, and to the east, Sudan, were very much roiled by Islamic fighters. These battle-hardened men made up an available pool of thuggery for the ambitions of the C.A.R.’s first Muslim “politician” of note, Michel Djotodia. I put the word “politician” in quotes because even though the Western-imposed form of putative democracy is sometimes sketched out as the playing field, the actual struggle for power and the ability to rape the country’s meager resources plays out in a bewildering round of coups, failed coups, sabotaged elections, rebellions, and worthless peace deals featuring the same names – Patassé, Kolingba, Goumba, Bozizé – in endless competition for Supreme Kleptocrat, aka the President. As you might imagine, orderly rule of a country the size of France was always beyond the capability of this turbulent, self-immolating central power. Djotodia, though ambitious for the Presidency, was always a 2nd tier rider on this merry-go-round until the Muslim turmoil of the neighboring states really revved up. He became a key leader in a coalition of Muslim fighters called the Séléka, which means “alliance” in Sango, the country’s lingua franca. In 2013, the Séléka quickly overran the country’s army, invaded the capital, Bangui, and installed Djotodia as President. Then the wholesale killing, raping and pillage of Christians, unarmed at this point, began in earnest. Djotodia proved incapable of rebottling the bloodthirsty genii he had let loose, and the sickening carnage finally rose to the level of global visibility via the Western press. The balance of power teetered back toward the Christian majority, not because they turned the other cheek but because they formed their own, equally arbitrary and bloodthirsty lynch mobs, called the Anti-Balaka (“anti-machete”). Djotodia tried to disband the Séléka, but that only sent the mercenaries out into the bush where their violence and pillage went completely unchecked as they made their way back home. That left the hapless Muslim resident minority at the tender mercies of an enraged decentralized Christian militia. Under internal and external pressure, Djotodia resigned as President January and went into a peaceful and unrepentant exile in the Republic of Benin. What he has left in his wake is a country that is, as the U.N. has declared, on the verge of genocide. THE HOARY CANARD RETURNS As I contemplate this ravaged landscape from afar, I prefer not to think about the fates of former colleagues and students. I lost touch with my Central African friends long ago. Who would have guessed that the 10-year reign of the buffoonish Bokossa would constitute a Golden Age of stability? There was plenty of fear and corruption when I lived there but no widespread violence, and even the streets of Bangui were safe at night. This all deteriorated as Bokassa, driven mad by unchecked power, descended into full-blown megalomania. His $20-million coronation, costing a full quarter of the country’s pathetic GDP, fuelled a popular unrest that first manifested itself in a 1979 revolt of schoolchildren who refused to purchase uniforms made in a factory “owned” by one of his 19 wives. During the street riots that followed, Bokassa was accused not only of personally supervising the massacre of 100 schoolchildren but of cannibalism! Shortly after the school protests, the French magazine Paris Match published photos allegedly showing fridges containing bodies of children. That was proof enough, and, in fact, when Bokassa was put on trial for treason and murder in 1986, cannibalism was one the charges. (He was cleared of that due to lack of evidence.) Cannibalism? Now? In the harsh glare of our present-day knowledge? Recent and current dictators, the Kim Jong Ils, the Pol Pots, the Muammar Kaddafis, have their little sanguinary foibles, but only African dictators get tarred with accusations of cannibalism. Because, you know, they’re Africans, and Africans do that. And guess what? The hoary canard returns. In January the media lit up with the story (and photos – I’ll spare you the link) of a young Central African known as Mad Dog on the streets of Bangui eating from the body of a lynched Muslim. THE TAKE-AWAY It’s easy to condemn all of this from the comfort and safety of the American middle class. What the Central Africans taught me was the reality of my white male privilege. God willing, I’ll never see my home destroyed, my family raped and slaughtered, my own body mutilated by neighbors and acquaintances following the lead of some bloodthirsty demagogue. That might drive me to equally violent paroxysms of vengeance (I know how angry Americans can get behind the wheel of a car), but I’ll never be tested in such a manner. Outside of donations to Medecins sans frontiers, doing heroic work in the C.A.R., there is little I care to do. My life has moved on. My Central African days date from almost 40 years ago. Still, I cannot help but follow the news from the C.A.R. with unusual interest and a phantom sense of connection. The fitful spotlight of Western media will move to fresher catastrophes, and the tragic parody of nation-statehood that the French contrived in their effort to extract diamonds and hardwoods from that part of Africa will thrash about at even lower levels of desperate survival or splinter into of fiefdoms of local power. The Central African Republic was a failed state from its moment of birth. And yet, the country was beautiful, the people were lovely, and their misfortunes were never solely self-inflicted. There but for the grace of God, go I. Au revoir mon beau pays de souvenir. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Christmas is upon us, and I glide through the capitalist frenzy and social anxiety with frictionless insouciance. I buy no Christmas presents; I have no Christmas tree; I don’t know what I’m doing Christmas day, and I don’t care. I won’t say it’s a day like any other. Obviously, it’s not. But I have sloughed off the rituals and cultural expectations implanted deep in my childhood. Being Jewish, I could never confuse my sentimental connection to Christmas with the holiday’s presumably religious roots. The Babe in the Manger, the Three Wise Men, the Littlest Angel, or the Little Drummer Boy never moved me. Like all kids, Jewish or not, I got jacked up by Santa, the pile of presents, the trimmed Christmas fir, “Now, DASHER! now, DANCER! Now, PRANCER and VIXEN!/On, COMET! on CUPID! on, DONNER and BLITZEN!” Like many families, we had our peculiar Christmas quirks. Every year, my mother would wrap a hideous plastic Santa wreath with a For JOE From SANTA label on it, and my father would open it, seemingly unaware that he was falling again for the old running gag. It always cracked us up. Every year, my penny-pinching father would wait until the night before Christmas to buy a tree at fire sale prices. Every year, we decorated the antlers of the mounted moose head above the piano with bulbs and tinsel. I didn’t know it at the time – and nobody explained it to me – but Christmas was about family and tradition and where my place was within the charmed circle. Living at home with no major disruptions – no deaths, divorce, or estrangement – I fashioned an illusory continuity that I maintained through my college and young adult years. An expatriate period followed. I no longer lived near my family and couldn’t go home. My Christmas nostalgia peaked, and in a dark studio apartment of a gritty working-class suburb of Paris, I penned my longing memories of home, which became the basis of the podcast “Xmas.” I returned to the States, the Midwest and the East Coast, but the horrors of traveling cross country during the holidays reoriented me towards celebrating Christmas with an adopted family based in Pittsburgh. My mother found out I was gay, and I no longer had a place within the charmed circle. Then she died, and my father remarried. My older brother estranged himself from the family, and my younger sister joined a cult. There was no more charmed circle. But my older sister encouraged me to live near her. She helped me buy an Oakland home, and with that as a base, I set about to reproduce my own Christmas. I bought a Christmas tree stand and a fresh fir every December, and my cache of ornaments grew. I purchased Christmas gifts, wrapped them, and sent out Christmas cards for a while, although that was the first of the traditions to go. I had a house, a tree, and sometimes a boyfriend, but I often woke up by myself on Christmas day. Still I persisted with the rituals until my last boyfriend sat on the living room couch, crossed his arms, and refused to join me in trimming the tree. “Who am I doing this for?” I thought. “There’s no joy in it.” And just like that, I unplugged from Christmas. There were no more trees. The ornaments stayed packed up. If I felt like it, I sent Christmas cards to those who had sent them first, and that number diminished over the years. I explained to the people I cared about that I didn’t want any presents and wasn’t going to engage in a Christmas gift exchange ever again. They didn’t care, and what a liberation! From then on I could cherry-pick my Christmas experiences – a Nutcracker here, a choral concert there. There were still parties, dinners, and social gatherings, but none represented a referendum on my popularity or intrinsic worth. I could take it or leave it – all of it! So I enjoy Christmas because there’s nothing at stake for me. I have my memories of childhood Christmases, and I know damn well that they’re rose-colored fabrications. So what? I’m beyond trying to recapture that past. And if I want to experience the good old-fashioned Christmas that set such an impossibly high bar, I can stream Miracle on 34th Street to my heart’s content. Happy holidays. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Christmas Clobbers Hanukkah SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Our home town Christmas tree, Union Square, San Francisco Jewish holidays fall broadly into two categories – those confirming the greatness of Jehovah (Yom Kippur) and those celebrating the unlikely survival of the Jewish people against lopsided odds (Passover). The major Jewish holidays are Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in October and Passover in April. The Jewish holiday best known to Americans, however, is the minor holiday Hannukah, which is celebrated in December. Hannukah’s temporal proximity to Christmas made it the only festive contender to put up against the Christian juggernaut. The outcome of this contest was a foregone conclusion and this was for several reasons. Christmas is a major holiday; Hannukah, a minor one. The stories behind the two holidays are of a different order of importance altogether. Hannukah celebrates the miracle of a one-day oil supply of the newly rededicated Temple of Jerusalem’s menorah, feeding the sacred flame for eight days. It’s cool enough as miracles go but not as dramatic as parting the Red Sea or walking on water. Furthermore, Christmas celebrates THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH WHO HAS COME TO SAVE ALL MANKIND! -- a religious rock star. We Jews are still waiting for our Messiah. Once again, a distinct lack of drama. Furthermore, America’s version of Hannukah got hyped in direct response to the invention of Christmas at the end of the 19th century. Two Cincinnati rabbis, hugely influential promoters of Reform Judaism, saw that we needed something to offer the kids to keep them in the fold. The main draw was all the Christmas loot. We couldn’t justify the lavish expenditures of an increasingly prosperous and urbanized middle class (and as Jews, we weren’t that rich yet), but we spaced our gift-giving out over the eight days of Hanukkah. Compare one gift a day to the riot of wrapped presents to be torn through on Christmas morning. Lighting the menorah candles possesses a pleasing ritual gravitas, but what is that to a kid compared to trimming a fir tree with bulbs and tinsel? Every newly unwrapped toy testifies to the bounty of Christmas. What do we have at Hannukah? – sad little dreidel games accompanied by the sad little dreidel song. “Dreidel dreidel dreidel, I made it out of clay/And when it’s dry and ready, dreidel I will play.” That doesn’t stand up against any Christmas carol. Quite unfairly, all the Currier and Ives winter imagery gets associated with Christmas, not Hanukkah. (Imagine those Central Park skaters in black caftans and fur hats, women on one side and men on the other.) “Jingle Bells” is not a Christmas song, and yet it gets thrown in with paeans to the Baby Jesus. And just when Hannukah is down for the count, America’s Teutonic heritage provides the coup de grace – Santa Claus, the flying reindeer, the huge sack of presents. And yet . . . Jewish difference, the refusal to submit to cultural or physical extinction, manifests itself once again. We put our indelible stamp on the culture. Practically all of the great Christmas songs were written by Jews: “White Christmas” (Israel Beilin), “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (Hugh Martin), “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (Walter Kaufman), and the poison pill that may ultimately kill Christmas in a better future, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (John David Marks). --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience into this foray in Unplugging from Christmas SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Raising her family in a newly-created suburban neighborhood on a Pasadena mesa during the 1950s, my mother always knew she was a square peg in a round hole. For a long time, we were the only Jewish family on the block, the street, and probably the whole damn mesa. But almost as bad was the fact that my parents were Democrats and made no secret of it. While driving to a neighborhood party (there were plenty of those in the 50s and 60s), my mother querulously remarked, "I wonder why we're invited. They don't like our politics, and I'm sure they don't like Jews." "They have to," my father replied, "or they'll lose their federal funding." The linkage of Jewishness to commie proclivities was hardly new to the neighbors. While they may not have known the particulars of history, they'd probably heard the recognizably Jewish names of Rosa Luxemburg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg, and wasn't Karl Marx himself a Jew? Nobody explained how a cabal of Jews directed capitalism from behind the scenes on the one hand while working for the victory of communism on the other, but this diffuse antisemitism was rarely put under a spotlight and so never needed to leave the shadows of innuendo and prejudice. One of our right-wing neighbors, an early member of the John Birch Society, tried to alert the authorities that my father, who occasionally attended scientific conferences (he was consulting polymer chemist) behind the Iron Curtain, was in all probability a Soviet informer but was frustrated in his patriotic duty by the fact that the CIA had already asked my father to debrief them about those same conferences and went with their blessing. In the spring of 1966, the escalating catastrophe of the Vietnam War ruined or ended the lives of ever greater numbers of young American men, and since the Establishment (as we called it then) hadn't yet realized that you could fling your troops in harm's way with impunity if they were poor or colored or both, the draft was universal and imperiled the children of the middle class as well. (The rich always found a way to get around it; pace George Bush.) My brother, born in 1946, was required to register with the local draft board in 1964 when he turned 18. (My turn came in 1968.) There were escape hatches to being sent into this senseless slaughter, most notably the student deferment offered to those who were enrolled in higher education. In 1966, my brother was in his second year of attending Pasadena City College. In May of that year, a neighbor ("a good Democrat,") informed my mother that the talk at a ladies' luncheon had turned to the draft and the danger it posed to their boys. Unprovoked, one woman piped up, "Well, Amy doesn't have to worry. David will never be drafted because he's a communist." Here, I let my mother pick up the tale: The ladies pooh-poohed her, saying that they have known us a long time and all are impressed with Joe's secret confidential super security clearance, and they have always known that we are liberal Democrats and they are almost used to it. When she was questioned, this dumb dame said that she knew David was a communist because she had worked at the US employment office and when David had filled out his application, he had written on it that he was a communist. Mother was aghast at the gossip. My parents had lived through the McCarthy era and knew that if the label stuck, David might find it impossible to get work, and it could have even threatened my father's security clearance. So I decided to do battle and stop it right there. I realized that she was lying foolishly, for there is nothing on a federal application to show race, creed, color, church, etc. I telephoned the supervisor of the office in Pasadena and told him the story. He turned out to be a nice guy and was horrified. That kind of question was against the law anyway. Then he told me I could see the file, which was absolutely clean. Now I had her. She lied about his having put his name to be "that thing," and so I went to work. I telephoned her best friend, who had been at the party, and told her what had happened and expressed sorrowfully that I was considering a libel suit and was, of course, going to talk with Joe and our lawyer. I was terribly sorry, but I was sick of being talked about and really decided to see it through this time. As I hoped, the woman I called got in touch with my antagonist and told her I was sore and had proof she had lied. Then, I did nothing for a week so that the rumor would spread of what she had done and how I had checked her. It worked like I was a professional. I finally telephoned her and said I wanted to see her—that she had said something quite damaging about David and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I was very nice. When we got together, she was a shaking mass of apologies. Yes, she had said that about David, didn't know why, for they always liked us and she wouldn't do anything in the world to hurt us (like fun) and she was so sorry, so sorry. She also said that the rumor didn't come from anyone—that she had started it. She told me the story would stop there and she would call the people at the party. I was very nice and forgave her and said I was sorry too and this was a good lesson the whole neighborhood would learn for a long time to come. But even though my mother had emerged victorious, it hurt her too, proving yet again (as if we needed it) that we could easily be targeted for our "difference." You know, I had a feeling of relief, gratitude, pity and was also a little sick to my stomach. In so many ways this is such a magnificent country and these people want to tear it down and destroy us. This name-calling is a bad business and I am glad I followed it through, but it took a lot out of me. Nobody wants to start a fight. I'm glad she's dead and doesn't have to witness this awful renewal of antisemitism and liberal vilification. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Evilest Queer Jew in America SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

A panel from the AIDS quilt The list of evil queer Jews with any sort of public profile isn't long, but Roy Cohn, lawyer to the worst actors in mid-20th century America, amoral snake, and Svengali to Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, easily comes out on top. (Although he was a bottom in his drug-and-money-fueled pursuit of the handsome blond men who tickled his fancy.)I had some hazy knowledge of Roy Cohn before the AIDS crisis because my father was vehemently against McCarthyism and all it stood for, fueling his hatred not only of "Tail Gunner Joe" but other slimy opportunists who used the Red Scare to further their political careers, notably Richard Nixon.Interestingly -- and this is little commented upon -- Cohn's homosexual proclivities landed McCarthy in the hot water that finally scalded his seemingly impenetrable skin. Cohn became infatuated with a rich, handsome young anti-communist crusader, G. David Schine, whom he brought onto McCarthy's staff as an unpaid "chief consultant." Though Schine was straight and probably never returned Cohn's sexual interest, that didn't stop the young lawyer from conducting a campaign of hectoring telephone calls and threats to military officials when Schine was drafted into the army.  The military refused to grant Private Schine special privileges, and Cohn, maddened by encountering an entity that wouldn't cave, vowed to "wreck the Army" if his demands were not met. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which exposed the senator's dishonest, bullying tactics before a wide television audience. (The Army's defense attorney publicly shamed McCarthy by angrily demanding, "Have you no decency?" -- a tactic that would get no traction in these postlapsarian times.) Losing his credibility, McCarthy was censured in the Senate and drank himself to death three years later.  All the while, Cohn and McCarthy destroyed the lives and careers of numerous homosexuals in a collateral Lavender Scare because, of course, identified sex perverts were susceptible to blackmail and had to be stamped out as yet another security risk. Leaving a disgraced McCarthy and having inflicted incalculable damage upon the struggling and inchoate gay community, Cohn returned to private practice as a New York attorney. Because I wasn't a mafia don (Carmine Galante) or following the antics of the uber-rich (Aristotle Onassis), the extremely corrupt (Roger Stone), and the rampant avariciousness of the rising fascist elite (he introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch in the 1970s), I wasn't aware of Cohn's poisonous but extremely lucrative calling as lawyer and advisor to the richest dregs of humanity. On some level, I knew that Cohn was a faggot. When he died of AIDS in 1986, protesting loudly to the end that he was afflicted with liver cancer, I consigned him to the same bin of self-hating homosexuals as Liberace and Freddie Mercury. Still, it was a shock to run across the panel in the AIDS quilt that some compassionate individual had fashioned for this rotted disaster whose evil against homosexuals surpassed even that of the gay Nazi, Ernst Röhm. But for another queer Jew, Tony Kushner, the life and death of Roy Cohn led to the monumental achievement of Angels In America, first performed in San Francisco in 1991. Kushner's portrayal of Cohn as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite (a different kind of screaming queen) has seared him forever into the American consciousness (probably with greater humanity than he deserved). Through the medium of the play, Kushner brought other facets of Cohn's evils to light. In his delirium, he is confronted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he prosecuted by extorting a false confession from her brother-in-law and who was executed after Cohn illegally lobbied the judge for the death penalty. "I'd have pulled the switch myself if they let me," Cohn brags in the play.  Cohn conducted his professional life as a closeted gay man (although his homosexuality was very much an open secret), but he couldn't run away from his Jewish identity. His name and origins in the affluent Jewish community of the Bronx marked him indelibly. He was a mama's boy, of course, but that's a condition shared by both gay men and Jews. In Cohn's case, Mama was even more of a warping influence on her only child than the usual run of such characters. Mother and son lived together until her death in 1967 and she was constantly attentive to his grades, appearance and relationships. When Cohn's father insisted that Roy be sent to a summer camp, his mother rented a house nearby. Predictably, after his mother's death, Cohn's frenzied promiscuity reached almost visible heights.  Writing that Cohn's sins finally caught up with him would be nice. In 1975, Cohn entered the hospital room of a dying and unconscious client, forced a pen into his hand, and applied it to a document appointing himself as executor. (The gambit didn't work.) He beat three trials for unethical and unprofessional conduct before finally being disbarred in 1986, but by that time, he was on his way out. He died at age 59, seemingly without remorse or any self-awareness. But how could he hate himself as much as others did?  In 1950, communists were identified with two minorities–Jews and homosexuals. Cohn was both. What better way to inoculate himself against the slanders he knew would be coming his way than by proving himself the most resolute of red baiters and acquiring enough clout to silence those who threatened to out him or subject him to antisemitism? He perfected the techniques of bullying and passed his playbook on to his mentee, Donald Trump: never admit wrongdoing, never apologize, and attack attack attack.  What a legacy!  --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in My Mother Scotches A Communist Smear Campaign SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Arna Bontemps For scholars and historians of the period, it is well understood that the Harlem Renaissance refers to a quickening of Black art and culture in many of the urban conglomerations of African Americans, not just Harlem. There was plenty going on in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Atlanta. When this quickening became so noticeable as to require a name, "Negro Renaissance" was the first appellation, and it's a pity something analogous didn't stick. But "Harlem Renaissance" became widely accepted even though it led to an overvaluation of Harlem as the unofficial Black capital and a slighting of other seedbeds of Black creativity. Several cosmopolitan "stars" of the Renaissance only passed through Harlem and went on to careers elsewhere (Jean Toomer, Josephine Baker, Claude McKay). Certainly Harlem itself was a magnet and drew to its bosom the brightest and most ambitious of the race. Countee Cullen, who came of age and spent his life in Harlem, was more the exception than the rule. The biggest names of the Harlem Renaissance came from elsewhere: Langston Hughes, Missouri; Aaron Douglas, Kansas, Zora Neale Hurston, Florida. What was California's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance? Even though the Los Angeles Black community outgrew all others in the Far West (almost 16,000 in 1920), the Great Migration that gave rise to Chicago's Southside and Harlem itself bypassed western cities. In contrast to the racial homogeneity of these enclaves, L.A.'s "Blackest" district, Central Avenue, housed one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation. Even though practically all of L.A.'s Blacks lived in proximity to Central Avenue, they topped out at 20% of the district's population, which included "white" immigrants from Europe, people of Mexican descent -- native-born and immigrants – and the Japanese. Not to mention white Americans from the Northeast and Midwest. Yet L.A.'s Black community resonated with the cultural trends emanating from Harlem. Marcus Garvey's UNIA took Black L.A. by storm in the early 1920s, but the enthusiasm quickly vanished in the wake of Garvey's fiscal mismanagement and the fiasco of the Black Star Line. The L.A. branch of the NAACP was convened in 1914, two years after the organization's founding. In 1928, it hosted the NAACP's national annual convention to great acclaim. But the cultural currents only ran from east to west. Two Western writers made the pilgrimage to Harlem to participate in the Renaissance, but only Arna Bontemps was raised in California. His middle-class parents, devoutly embracing Seventh-Day Adventism, raised their children to assimilate into the dominant culture. Bontemps lived in majority-white neighborhoods and was (excellently) educated at majority-white schools. By the time he graduated from Pacific Union College (an Adventist institution), he felt he'd been robbed of his birthright. Rebelling against his upbringing, he moved to Harlem in 1924 and, being a writer of some talent, entered the stabler cohort of younger writers and forged lasting friendships with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. But not being a writer of first-rate talent, the two Renaissance novels he produced are rarely taught and even less discussed. And, of course, the subject matter is Black AF, but since he didn't grow up in the South, his God Sends Sunday (1931) is rife with the stereotypes that W.E.B. Du Bois ticked off in his ticked-off review: "sordid crime, drinking, gambling, whore-mongering, and murder." Bontemps's second novel, Black Thunder, about the Gabriel Prosser slave rebellion of 1800 (another attempt to kill the white father) was far more artistically successful and broke ground in African American literature as historical fiction, but its 1936 publication came after the Depression had scattered the principal players of the Renaissance to safer harbors than a now-ravaged Harlem. Wallace Thurman, born and raised in Salt Lake City -- mostly -- was a Westerner, and his peripatetic life before relocating to Harlem in 1925 encompassed three years in Los Angeles, where he dropped out of the University of Southern California and met Arna Bontemps while both worked in the post office. Bontemps and Thurman promoted their own two-man Negro Renaissance to little effect in California, but when Bontemps made the move to Harlem as the literary Renaissance was rising to public notice, Thurman followed hard on his heels. The friendship between the two Western writers did not last. Thurman was extremely conflicted, maniacally productive, and undoubtedly the leading iconoclast of the Harlem Renaissance until he drank himself to death in 1931 -- also gay, which didn't help matters. He evinces little love for his Western origins in his fictional transgender autobiography, The Blacker the Berry (1929) and briskly skewers the shallow values of the aspiring Blacks at USC. (My father, who had won a fellowship in chemistry at USC in 1942, similarly hated the social climbing student body and dropped out in his turn.) Slim pickings, all told. I could complicate matters further by examining the astonishing and successful career of Claude Sergeant Johnson, a (voluntarily) Black sculptor who conducted his long professional life out of San Francisco, but this essay has gone on quite long enough. California, especially Los Angeles, made a group contribution to African American culture, but that came well after the Richard Wright generation had buried the Harlem Renaissance. And Octavia Butler wasn't born until 1947. --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Black Rebellions I Have Known: The L.A. Episodes SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts