Born in 1950, I knew about Richard Nixon from the dawn of consciousness -- and he was synonymous with Evil. I inherited my contempt of...

Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan meet with troops on the Golan Heights On October 5, 1973, the State of Israel...

Alice Philipson - Berkeley based solo practitioner, 1987 In the 1980s, queer lawyers were still reluctant to come out publicly. They...

Alice Dunbar-Nelson painted by Laura Wheeler Waring “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes, but in the case of the possible...

Watts Rebellion, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 1965 Having grown up swathed in unrecognized white privilege (i.e. The Fifties), I...

Arna Bontemps For scholars and historians of the period, it is well understood that the Harlem Renaissance refers to a quickening of...

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...

Raising her family in a newly-created suburban neighborhood on a Pasadena mesa during the 1950s, my mother always knew she was a square...

Our home town Christmas tree, Union Square, San Francisco Jewish holidays fall broadly into two categories – those confirming the...

Christmas is upon us, and I glide through the capitalist frenzy and social anxiety with frictionless insouciance. I buy no Christmas...

HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in...

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...

Nous quatre a Paris Jazz paved the way for the establishment of an African American expatriate community in Paris. The French were blown...

Ethiopian Jews Airlifted to Israel During the height of King Solomon’s reign of glory, o Best Beloved!, the dark-skinned Queen of Sheba,...

The young ulpanist in the rose greenhouse.   Aliyah. In its Biblical context, “aliyah” is a Hebrew word meaning “to rise up” and...

The Commandment Keepers of Harlem    First of all, they’re not Jews – at least not as understood by Jewish consensus. (Jews are either...

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...

The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and offensive,...

Garvey handcuffed to U.S. Marshal on his way to prison.  Marcus Garvey was, without question, one of the most consequential and...

Alain Locke’s claim to immortality rightly rests on his epochal 1925 anthology, “The New Negro” and midwifing the first generation of...