Folsom Street Fair 2019 --- not bad for 69  Way back in 1981, I was living in Washington, DC, with my first lover. I was only three years into my new gay identity, had only begun sleeping with men at the age of twenty-seven and was still battling my way through internalized homophobia. Falling in love with Michael helped, but he was not out to his Black family in rural Maryland, although he certainly enjoyed dancing at the numerous gay bars near Dupont Circle.   Coming out was, for me, a jagged and stuttering process. Some people I told fairly quickly; with others, I stayed closeted way longer than was necessary. I had not learned to introduce the subject casually, so the "revelation" took on the shameful coloration of confession. Also, being out at work was not advisable. AIDS was just spreading into the gay male community, and that certainly complicated the possibilities for acceptance. However, it was from a colleague at work that I learned about the three stages of gay acceptance.    Roger was an attractive young man who projected an ambiguous sexuality and didn't seem concerned about what others might think. In our enclave of the federal bureaucracy, all the gays knew one another, and I was the beneficiary of some valuable professional mentoring. Roger was not a mentor, but he wore his homosexuality in a free and easy manner. I asked him about it one day. How had he come to this enviable equilibrium?    "I went through three stages," he explained. "O God, is it me?" I nodded in recognition. My denial had been so pervasive that I didn't even recognize that I was attracted to men until I was nineteen. "The second stage was, 'O God, it is me!'"  I knew that one too. I had spent years in that stage. From the age of nineteen to twenty-seven, I continued to sleep with women or remained simply celibate, all the while burning with lust for the attractive young men my expatriate years (Africa, then Paris) threw my way. Then Roger divulged his third stage, "Thank God, it's me!"    That flummoxed me. I was gay, but I didn't want to be gay. When some unenlightened acquaintance opined that being gay was a choice, I said, "Why would anybody choose a sexual orientation that was viewed with such disdain, that alienated one from friends and family, that so drastically reduced the pool of sexual partners?" Gay pride? Thank God, it's me? It took me years to get there.     Am I proud to be gay? No. Why should I be proud of a sexual orientation or identity which I didn't choose, which forced itself upon me? I'm not proud of being Jewish, of being male, of being American. I didn't choose any of it, so why should I be proud to be gay? However, I am grateful to be gay, and that's where I concur with my friend Roger. Thank God it's me!    Why? I never had to hew to the heterosexist nonsense about the value of masculinity, monogamy, or how men can't truly be friends with women. As shallow as I might find the imperative to cultivate and maintain physical beauty, it kept me physically active, attentive to dress and grooming, and led to many hot encounters. I've had far more sex and at a much later age than had I been straight. And the fun I've had at gay events, at the clubs! Call me superficial, tax me with a lack of gravitas, but I'll be seventy-five next year, and for most of those years, I've had a great time!    And finally, I doubt I would have stumbled into my career as a filmmaker, public intellectual, or snarky contrarian (after all, you're still reading this, aren't you?) had I not benefitted from the launchpad of queer identity and culture.     It is ironic that the identity I struggled so hard to understand and accept is so boring these days! A gay cis male whose pronouns are he/him? Is there anything to talk about here? However, you'd be surprised at the number of unnecessarily closeted men I meet even here in the Bay Area, so I guess it can still pack a punch for the fearful, the bearers of bad faith, and those in denial.    "O God, is it me?" If you're even asking the question, you're already at stage 2. It is you! Let's hope you can make it to stage 3 so you can live with some kind of authenticity.      – Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Queer Eye for the Renaissance Guy: The Impact of Alain Locke SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Alain Locke’s claim to immortality rightly rests on his epochal 1925 anthology, “The New Negro” and midwifing the first generation of Harlem Renaissance writers. But Locke was a polymath, and his thumbprint was all over African American cultural productions of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Locke was also gay, short, effeminate and politically astute enough to avoid getting blown up by a sexual orientation he couldn’t change and refused to bury. Besides literature, Locke’s contribution to the theorization of a Black visual aesthetic was seminal. He wrested an early interpretation of African art from the crazy and controlling Albert Barnes; he was an avid advocate for the visual arts, championing the work of Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthé, and Jacob Lawrence. He frequently contributed essays to exhibition catalogs and, in 1927, he organized a landmark exhibition of African art from the Blondiau-Theatre Arts collection.  When the Harmon Foundation stumbled into its role as the principal early promoter of African American art, its white lesbian director, Mary Beattie Brady, turned to Locke to organize its two important shows of 1931 and 1933. No one in the Harmon Foundation had any formal art or art history background. The criterion of evaluation was based on race, not aesthetic excellence. (In a 1934 essay, a young Romare Bearden excoriated the Foundation on this point.) Nonetheless, Locke made sure that every important African American artist of the period was represented in the shows. In his contribution to the catalogs, Locke argued for the development of an art that consciously connected to African art and that focused on Black representation. (Miss Brady didn’t like that idea at all.) What was revolutionary about Locke’s position was that he championed the beauty of the Black body against the grain of an American tradition which either rated the Black body as beneath the consideration of Fine Art or as suitable only for caricature. (There were exceptions, such as Henry O. Tanner’s “The Banjo Lesson,” but they were rare.)  Hard to believe that the Black face and body were considered “ugly” by mainstream America, but such was the case. And, of course, at that time, what white America believed was largely adopted by the aspiring African American “Talented Tenth” elites. But because Locke was gay and a race man, he loved the Black body, especially the male Black body. Fortunately, he had a Western art historical tradition through which he could “redeem” that Black body – the male nude. Enter Richmond Barthé, also gay, also enamored of the Black body. Prior to Barhé’s work in the 30s and 40s, depictions of African American nudes were considered beyond the Pale. Barthé broke that taboo again and again, and the results were so striking and self-evidently “artistic” that a space was made for the representation of the Black as a figure of beauty and dignity (and also of homoerotic desire, but we don’t talk about that). If Richmond Barthé hadn’t appeared on the Harlem Renaissance scene in 1929, Alain Locke would have had to invent him.  All well and good. The Queer Harlem Renaissance in the visual arts gets its due – or does it? None of this condensed history is hard to uncover. Jeffrey C. Stewart lays it all out in his magisterial biography of Locke, “The New Negro” (2018). Isaac Julien created a five-screen installation for the Barnes Foundation, “Once Again …. (Statues Never Die” (2022), that really rams the point home. That same year, Kobena Mercer published a whole book, “Alain Locke and the Visual Arts.”  Part of Shoga Films’ mission is to educate and spread awareness about the Queer Harlem Renaissance. As far as the literature of the movement is concerned, that battle has been won. (Look for a “Langston Countee Wallace Richard Bruce” shirt near you!) That’s not so much the case with the queer contributions of Alain Locke, Richmond Barthé, and Richard Bruce Nugent to the African American visual arts. I’ll look for a mention of it when I visit the New York Met’s exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” later this month, but I’m not optimistic. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in The Three Stages of Gay Acceptance SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Garvey handcuffed to U.S. Marshal on his way to prison.  Marcus Garvey was, without question, one of the most consequential and infuriating Black thinkers and activists of the twentieth century. Born and raised in Jamaica, Garvey had his world rocked reading Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery. "Where is the black man's government?" Garvey asked himself. "Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his ambassador, his country, his men of big affairs? I could not find them," he said, "and then declared, 'I will help to make them. In 1914, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica. By May of 1917, Garvey relocated the UNIA in Harlem and began to use speeches and his newspaper, The Negro World, to spread his message across the United States to an increasingly receptive African American community.  Garvyism resonated with the rapidly urbanizing black community and spread beyond the United States to the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Regardless of the locale, Garvey's UNIA promised black economic uplift via self-reliance, political equality via self-determination, and the "liberation of Africa from European colonialism via a Black army marching under the Red, Black, and Green flag of Black manhood." Garvey's most ambitious effort was the establishment of the Black Star Steamship Line. Garvey hoped that this joint stock corporation would develop lucrative commercial networks between the United States, the Caribbean, and the continent of Africa.  He also hoped that his three ships would help in the return of millions of Blacks in the diaspora to Mother Africa. However, because of heavy debt and mismanagement, the steamship line went bankrupt, and Garvey, in January 1922, was arrested and charged with using the US Mail to defraud stock investors. The long-delayed trial finally took place in the spring of 1923, and Garvey, in accordance with the hubris that had both made and destroyed him, once again proved the maxim that "the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client."He blew his defense in court, and the jury found him guilty. Upon this pronouncement, Garvey burst into a storm of rage, denouncing both the judge and district attorney as "damned dirty Jews."  Fuming at the perceived injustice of the verdict, he wrote that night, "The peculiar and outstanding feature of the whole case is that I am being punished for the crime of the Jew, Silverstone … who has caused the ruin of the company … I was prosecuted by Maxwell Mattuck, another Jew, and I am to be sentenced by Judge Julian Mack, the erminent Jewish Jurist." This is factually correct. All of these men were Jews, but were they acting in concert as part of a Jewish conspiracy? Prior to the trial, Garvey had never displayed antisemitic tendencies. Rather, he had celebrated Jewish thrift and group solidarity and voiced common cause with the concept of Zionism – applied to Africa rather than to Israel. I believe that in his anger, Garvey reached for the antisemitic trope of Jewish conspiracies that was always in the air and ready to hand. Antisemitism was never a sustained theme of Garveyism, and Garvey himself only spoke of a Jewish cabal in connection with his trial. His remarks, though not widely disseminated, may have influenced Judge Mack (a prominent Zionist and president of the first American Jewish Congress) to impose the maximum penalty: five years in jail and a fine of $1000. Based on this one incident, calling Garvey an antisemite could be overstating the case. But he never repudiated his statements, and there was nothing to stop antisemitism from encrusting itself into the ideological children of Garvey's movement, most notably the Black nationalism of the 1960s.  Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's person experience with this foray in I Translate Black Nationalism For the State Department SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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, Marcus Garvey's Antisemitic Flare-Up SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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