Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair  In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family...

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

Me and Ebrahim Hussein  In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of...

In the fall of 1922, two young American writers, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, traveled together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for...

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

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

The raffish director strikes a casual pose in front of the Queens Film Festival banner Grey Gardens , if you must know. And if you don't...

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

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

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

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

One blanket statement we can endorse about American Jewish boys and men is that we are neurotically attached to our mothers. Since our...

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

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

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

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

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

America hates old people. Aging out of relevance, health, and a community of peers as they die off is no fun even if one has wealth or...

Before there was the record producer John Hammond (not to be confused with the white blues musician John P. Hammond), before there was...

And when I say "clueless," I'm talking specifically about African American culture. I grew up in Pasadena during the 50s and 60s. There...