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 by right of God and the ideals of democracy: the Blacks dragged over from Africa as slaves, and the Jews chased out of their European exile. The two groups came into significant contact at the beginning of the 20th century when the Black peasants of the Great Migration settled in the same northern cities that hosted the masses of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Soon an alliance developed between the two groups to fight nativist prejudice and to promote civil equality. This so-called Grand Alliance midwifed the birth and growth of the NAACP, encouraged the flow of money from Jews for philanthropic purposes (most famously the 5000 Rosenwald schools built in the South) and the funding of civil rights organizations, and orchestrated a Fight for Freedom campaign in the 1950s that eventually culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Grand Alliance was based, in part, on the benign fiction that a "fellow feeling" existed between the two groups rooted in mutual recognition of a common oppression. Less discussed was the unequal power dynamic between these allies. Jews had the money, but Blacks were on the front lines. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank shocked the Jewish community, but that episode also spurred the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which killed a hell of a lot more African Americans over the next 40 years. Furthermore, Jews used their money and social capital to direct the initiatives of the Alliance in ways that may have been well-intentioned but often came off as patronizing. Thus, it was that when the major cultural shifts of the 1960s hit, a segment of Black activists, the folks who eventually coalesced into a Black nationalist wing, were ready to dispense with not only Jewish participation but any white participation. (This often perplexed Jews, as many didn't see themselves as fully white.) The breakpoint came in 1967, but there was already trouble brewing earlier in the decade. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, but his posthumously published Autobiography brought the radical teachings of the Nation of Islam to the attention of the mainstream. The Nation of Islam had been one of many fringe groups in African American history, but the personality and eloquence of Malcolm X brought out of the shadows a popular Black nationalism that hadn't been seen since the days of Marcus Garvey. 1967 ushered in the defeat by Israel of its Arab neighbors and the occupation of new territories with Arab populations. That same year, SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, published an article in its newsletter denouncing Zionism and charging the Israelis with inflicting atrocities upon the Arabs. This was a major speedbump for the Grand Alliance, but Black Power ideology was rapidly changing the thinking not only of Black America but of the anti-Establishment generation of students, anti-war protestors, hippies, and dropouts. Nonetheless, the major Black organizations -- the NAACP and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference -- dissociated themselves from Black Power, and the Alliance saw major victories and advances in the Civil Rights Movement. However, the following decades brought plenty of shocks: Whites, a disproportionately high number of them Jewish -- were expelled from SNCC in 1968. That same year, a New York City teachers' strike pitted a predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers against the Black Ocean Hill Brownsville school districts. Before the century was over, Louis Farrakhan, the new leader of the Nation of Islam, gained notoriety for his antisemitic remarks; Jesse Jackson referred to New York City as "Hymitetown" during a presidential campaign, and Andrew Young, President Carter's ambassador to the U.N. was forced to resign because he had held an unauthorized meeting with an official from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The spectacular three-day Crown Heights riots of 1991 drove the final nail in the coffin. Though nobody held a funeral, the Grand Alliance was dead. It's interesting that the first rupture was over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Given how important Jews were to the Civil Rights movement, siding with Palestine seemed like an act of folly, and indeed, SNCC disappeared soon after its Jewish supporters stopped donating money. However, SNCC's analysis of the Mideast conflict was one of the first to define that history as a critique of Western colonialism, deploying a Third World analysis rather than the "fellow sufferer" perspective of American discourse. It was financially foolish but ideologically consistent with the liberation theology of Black Power. When, nine years later, the United Nations passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism, the battle for the hearts and minds of progressives had been long lost. Unless you were Jewish or an American foreign policy official, you could not support Israel. And that was especially true for Blacks when they learned that Israel had allied itself with the white apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1980s. So here we are again, and nothing has changed since 1967. The Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter posted the following statement on Instagram after the October 7 massacre: "When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned.” To be fair, this one chapter of BLM doesn't speak for all African Americans (who does?), but it's probably close to what a lot of them think. Although the analysis is not wrong, the conclusion does not follow and is a little short of catastrophic. Of course, we should condemn the slaughter of 1400 Israelis, the greatest one-day death toll in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Alas, it appears that all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to resurrect the Grand Alliance. And that's a pity because the two groups have more that should unite them than what divides them. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Zionist Phase SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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 know, please read up on it or, better yet, watch it. Grey Gardens was the direct cinema documentary classic, released in 1975, that added to the lustrous filmography of the Maysles brothers, David and Albert. After its premiere, Grey Gardens circulated subterraneously in film classes, lived on as a gay cult phenomenon, and finally exploded into visibility as a Broadway musical in 2006, then an HBO movie in 2009.  In 2007, I excitedly attended my first-ever film festival as a director. The Queens International had selected my maiden made-in-film-class music video, " Ma Rainey's Lesbian Licks ." A gay man, Roger, with whom I had been in correspondence, offered me the hospitality of his Sunnyside apartment for the four days I planned to be in New York. I took Roger to the film festival, and he, in turn, suggested that we visit his friend Jerry Torre, also gay and also a resident of Sunnyside. "Who's Jerry Torre?" I asked. Roger arched a queenly eyebrow. "He's the Marble Faun in Grey Gardens ." I still looked blank, "The handyman," Roger continued. "Little Edie called him the Marble Faun." It had been years since I'd seen Grey Gardens , and Jerry didn't figure very prominently, so I could be forgiven not being able to instantly place him. Nonetheless, as I was now in "the film world," so to speak, Roger brought me to Jerry's apartment, a ground floor unit festooned with indoor plants and its own beautiful garden, where he lived with his much younger lover, Ted, The relationship was still new, dating from the opening night of the Grey Gardens musical on Broadway to which Jerry had been given two tickets. Ted had been the manager of a Grey Gardens Facebook fan group specializing in The Marble Faun. Though they had only corresponded (Ted was living in Philadelphia), Jerry invited Ted to the opening knowing that it would be a special fanboy treat. Ted came to New York and never left.  Jerry was engaging, full of stories about his iconically gay life -- the club scene in the New York of the 70s; Provincetown and the sometimes paramour of Wayland Flowers; business success, the AIDS inferno, and drug addiction in the 80s; the unexpected resurfacing of Grey Gardens in the 90s. At the end of it all, he asked, "Would you like to meet Albert? He runs a production studio and documentary center in Harlem." Thus it was, a few days later, I found myself sitting across from Albert Maysles, half of the legendary Maysles brothers. (David had died in 1987.) This octogenarian was wizened, spry, and so zestful that his documentary center was full of young folks working on the small screening room downstairs and their own projects upstairs. Albert and I had a generic, pleasant conversation with no particular agenda until I asked him if he was working on a film at present. "Have you ever heard of the blood libel?” he asked in his gravelly Boston accent. "I'm Jewish," I replied. That changed the tenor of the conversation. This son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants suddenly took me in as a person of interest. "I want to make a documentary about the blood libel in the United States." "Messina, New York." I returned. Startled, Albert Maysles looked at me even more sharply. Most people, most Jews , don't know about the infamous accusation of blood libel in America, but I had researched antisemitism for my own projects. He was impressed. When I asked him how he proposed to make a documentary in the direct cinema style he had pioneered about an incident that had occurred eighty years ago, he was even more impressed. I had demonstrated my knowledge of film and Jewish history simultaneously. "It's not history," he replied. "The blood libel is alive and kicking. There's a Syrian-Lebanese mini-series that was broadcast during Ramadan a couple of years ago. In one of the storylines, a rabbi enlists a member of his synagogue to help him kidnap and murder a Christian child, whose blood they drain and use to bake the matzoh served to the congregation on Passover. By focusing on the present-ness of this myth that never seems to go away, I have a justification for going into the past." In his turn, Albert asked me what film projects I was working on. "I'm in New York not only for the film festival but to research a documentary on gay and lesbian contributions to the Harlem Renaissance." "Wonderful!" Albert enthused. "When you get ready to film, let me know. I could be your cinematographer." Now, it was my turn to be floored. True it would be a local gig, and I suppose he would have accepted one of the lower cameraman rates of $25/hour. But I recognized the professional version of a sweet nothing. Still, it was a grand gesture, and I thanked him profusely.  Albert Maysles died in 2015. He never finished "The Jew on Trial," nor does his name appear as a cinematographer in any of my Queer Harlem Renaissance films. It is a story to dine out on, but I don't often tell it because it requires so much background. These anecdotes are best served in hot, quick strokes, such as "The first film festival I ever screened at went defunct because the founder had been scamming everybody for years, and it finally caught up with her." Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, When We Were Victims: The Blood Libel SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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 Muslim lands. The gamut of acceptance has run from grudging tolerance at best to ... o well, I don't need to spell it out. Throughout our history there has been many a curious fabrication about who we are (Christ killers) and what we do (world domination), but one of the more grotesque slanders to surface was the conviction that Jews used the blood of Christians (usually children) for their unholy religious rituals. (Though no recipes have yet turned up in Jewish cookbooks, the blood of Christian babies seems to be an essential ingredient for Passover matzoh.) This unsavory canard, born in medieval times and continuing right up to the present (O yes! Check out what Salah Eldeen Sultan, a lecturer on Muslim jurisprudence at Cairo University, had to say in a 2010 address that aired on Al-Aqsa TV) has come to be known as the Blood Libel. It wasn't the Jews who gave it that name, but it was the Jews who suffered the consequences: massacres in London and York in 1190; torture, execution, expulsion in Bern in 1293. One cute story coming out of Bazin in present-day Slovakia told of a nine-year-old boy abducted and bled to death. Thirty Jews confessed to the crime under "enhanced interrogation techniques" and were publicly burned. Shortly afterwards the child was found inconveniently alive in Vienna where he had been taken by the accuser, Count Wolf of Bazin, as a means of ridding himself of his Jewish creditors. One of the presumed victims of Jewish ritual murder in 1475, Simon of Trent, was not so fortunate. The Italian boy was found in a watercourse running beneath the property of Samuel, the head of the local Jewish community. Even though it was the Jews who reported finding the body to the authorities, the entire community (both men and women) were arrested and forced under torture to confess to having murdered Simon to use his blood for ritual purposes. (See the woodcut above, naming not only Simon but prominent members of the Jewish community as well.) Top Catholic authorities, including the pope, had their doubts about the veracity of The Blood Libel accusation, but the fifteen Jewish men in the small community were burned at the stake anyway. Over the subsequent centuries, this "boy martyr" became the object of a cult with all the trappings of relics and annual processions. We've just scratched the surface and haven't even come to the modern era. The sites of these imaginary crimes and the very real repercussions for local Jews -- pogroms, expulsions, sensational trials, imprisonment, death dealt out in any number of ways -- roll on: Velizh (1823), Rhodes (1840), Tiszaeszlár (1882), Kishinev (1903). The formal indictment and trial of Mendel Biellis, a Jewish supervisor of a brick factory in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, sparked the greatest international scrutiny and criticism of the Blood Libel. In 1911, a 13-year-old child disappeared on his way to school. Eight days later, his mutilated body, drained of blood, was discovered in a cave near the brick factory. Beilis was arrested months later after a lamplighter testified that the boy had been kidnapped by a Jew. He spent more than two years in prison under horrendous conditions awaiting trial. During the trial, the trumped up nature of the prosecution's case was so obvious that the majority of the all-Christian jury voted to acquit him, although a finding of ritual murder (upheld in the face of a local police investigation that convincingly demonstrated the culpability of a gang of criminals) was allowed to stand. The Nazis made propaganda hay out of that 25 years later. And then, in 1928, in the small manufacturing town of Messina, New York, four-year-old Barbara Griffiths wandered into the surrounding woods and disappeared. Hundreds of locals, organized by Massena’s police and firefighters, searched frantically through the night and into the next day. Yom Kippur was only two days away, and the Blood Libel began to spread. The theory caught fire not only with the townsfolk, but in the powerful figures of the state police and the town mayor. Rabbi Berel Brennglass, leader of the town's synagogue, was brought in for interrogation about the possibility of ritual murder. Brennglass rebuked his interrogators and expressed outrage that people believed such lies in the United States in the 20th century. Later that day Barbara Griffiths wandered back out of the woods where, she told authorities, she had gotten lost and had slept through the night. Messina's pillars of society would have been more than happy to let the matter rest there, but Rabbi Brennglass brought in the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress who made it a national affair and extracted unwilling apologies from the mayor and the state police to the rabbi, the town's Jews, and all Jews of the United States. And that was the end of it in the West, right? Ah ah ah! Don't forget about the Nazis! They used The Blood Libel in full force for anti-Jewish propaganda. A 1934 edition of the Nazi daily, Der Sturmer, devoted a special illustrated number to the Blood Libel, in which German scientists openly served Nazi aims. While in power, the Nazis revived old allegations and instituted reinvestigations and trials in territories under their rule or influence: Memel in 1936; Bamberg in 1937; and Velhartice, Bohemia, in 1940. Once the Nazis were defeated and six million Jews had perished at their hands, who could invoke the Blood Libel again? The Poles, of course! Murderous antisemitism was part of their DNA. In the town of Kielce in 1939, one third of the population, approximately 24,000, was Jewish. Almost all of them were murdered during the Holocaust. However in the summer of 1946, about 200 survivors had straggled back. But ... on July 1, a nine-year-old Gentile boy left his home without informing his parents. When he returned on July 3, the boy told his parents and the police, in an effort to avoid punishment, that he had been kidnapped and hidden in the basement of the local Jewish Committee building. The lie was a patent one (the building in question had no basement), but the adult Poles knew the Blood Libel script as well as the mendacious child, and -- bang! -- another pogrom! A mob of Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians murdered 42 Jews and injured 40 others. The Kielce Pogrom convinced many a traumatized survivor that there was no longer a place for Jews in Europe and that perhaps in Palestine they might find refuge from the Blood Libel. Ah, but the Arabs took it up and made it a staple of anti-Jewish propaganda. (No escape!) I will spare you the roll call, but, as an example, an October 2000 of the Egyptian-govenment sponsored newspaper, Al -Ahram, published a full-page article titled “Jewish Matzah Made from Arab Blood." But surely these medieval beliefs no longer carry currency in contemporary America! Wrong again! Just last year, the QAnon crazies used a sculpture of Simon of Trent to promote the theory that Hollywood elites are harvesting adrenochrome from children through Satanic ritual abuse in order to become immortal. (No escape!)  Strangely enough, the very outrageousness of the Blood Libel can offer Jews some kind of weird consolation in dark times when the world is telling us how evil we are. I know I'm asking for it by quoting Ahad Ha'am, a Jewish essayist and purveyor of cultural Zionism (who died in 1927, well before the State of Israel was a gleam in Ben-Gurion's eye), but ... “This accusation is the solitary case in which the general acceptance of an idea about ourselves does not make us doubt whether all the world can be wrong, and we right, because it is based on an absolute lie. Every Jew who has been brought up among Jews knows as an indisputable fact that throughout the length and breadth of Jewry there is not a single individual who drinks human blood for religious purposes…. ‘But’ – you ask – ‘is it possible that everybody can be wrong, and the Jews right?’" I am sorry if any of this can be interpreted as justification for the State of Israel's misdeeds. It is not. Being a victim conveys no special moral authority. Wrong is wrong no matter who is the perpetrator. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in I Uncover the Queer and Jewish Undercurrents of a Documentary Classic SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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, note the lighter skin color. I didn't make this sh*t up.  In 2005, I was teaching computer literacy skills in a high school that served one of the poorest areas of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Having endured 70 years of South African rule as a League of Nations Mandate (don't ask), Namibia was forced into the same social deformation of apartheid and meticulous racial categorization, even though there were far fewer whites in that relatively distant land. Nonetheless, the hierarchy was established with whites at the top and Black Africans at the bottom.  And then there were the Coloureds, spawn of Boer fathers and Black mothers -- at least initially. Even though such couplings violated the laws of God and nature, Coloured children arrived -- and in the millions (the Coloured population of South Africa currently clocks in at 5 million, a little over 8%). Everything in Namibia followed this tripartite racial division, which still held force even fifteen years after the Black Namibians wrested their independence from a recalcitrant South Africa. Namibia has been ruled by a majority-Black government since 1990. There's been a gradual relaxation of the barriers and snobbery between Black Africans and the Coloureds, but the Namibian whites still live in their privileged and segregated world -- no social mixing from their sector. During my year of teaching, I was given the house of the high school principal to stay in and gained some notoriety as The Only White Man in Khomasdal, the area of Windhoek that had been designated and built as the Coloured "location" (the local term for ghetto).  The principal arranged for me to be picked up and driven to school by one of the teachers on her staff, Melvin Gallant. Over the course of the year, we became friendly, although Melvin was older than the rest of the teaching staff and not socially outgoing. Also, he was from Cape Town, the Paris of the Coloured world, and that, too, presented a barrier. The other teachers read his reticence as arrogance, and although I personally felt that Melvin was being maligned, it wasn't my place to defend him. There were socially entrenched attitudes that I couldn't have knocked down anyway.   The Coloureds naturally considered themselves superior to the Blacks. And just as naturally, the Blacks, now that they were in power, made sure that the Coloureds didn't share in the state spoils. The poor guys couldn't win for losing. Too Black to be white and too white to be Black, the Coloureds were second-class citizens under apartheid and under Black democracy.  Nonetheless, because they were a step closer to the white ideal under apartheid, many of the city Coloureds have several generations of economic and educational advantage under their belts. While they may be marginalized politically, they often enjoy a relative business prosperity, although there are lots of poor Coloureds as well. Khomasdal, established as a Coloured township, is better off than Katatura, the Black location.  For reasons I was never able to fathom, Melvin was hellbent on establishing Namibian citizenship. It took years because, in addition to the glacial pace of African bureaucracy, he had to surmount the double disadvantage of South African origin (bad former colonial power) and being Coloured (wrong race), he was tough or persistent or perhaps just thick, but he eventually succeeded. The victory didn't add much joy to what I came to appreciate as his heart of gold. You couldn't ask for a sweeter guy, but his view of humanity was bleak, bleak, bleak! Every morning, Melvin regaled me with tales of bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency. “Can you believe it?” was his refrain after informing me of the latest scandal, teen pregnancy, suicide, betrayal, and sexual misconduct. Even though he proved himself (to me at least) the most generous and self-sacrificing teacher at the school, he remained socially isolated. In fact, none of the four Coloured staff members mixed much with the others.  The Coloureds are linguistically differentiated as well. Because of its South African heritage, Afrikaans is the common language of roughly half of the Namibian population, but the other half are the numerically and politically dominant Ovambo who had been excluded from the colonial economy of the time, never learned Afrikaans, and had no interest in maintaining the language. Thus, upon independence, English was arbitrarily declared the country's official language, even though nobody spoke it as a mother tongue. Black Namibians could communicate with one another in their own tribal tongues outside of a sometimes uncertain grasp of English, but even though Afrikaans was still the informal lingua franca of the non-Ovambo population, it was on the historical chopping block -- probably destined to die out. It's not taught in school (as are some of the tribal languages), and the fact that Afrikaans is still the first language of 60% of the small but rich white minority doesn't boost its prestige.  -Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Inescapable Blackness of Jean Toomer (And the Escapable Jewishness of Waldo Frank) SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In the fall of 1922, two young American writers, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, traveled together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for research on novels that both were writing at the time. Toomer, of mixed ancestry, was oftentimes light enough to pass for white but did not wish to do so on this particular occasion because his subject was Negro life in the rural South. Waldo Frank was a Jewish writer, famous at that time in modernist circles, who had also conceived of a novel (“Holiday”) that dealt with race in the Deep South. Through the medium of a literary correspondence (Frank lived in New York; Toomer, Washington, DC), they discovered themselves to be kindred spirits, striving to bring about the upheaval of spiritual yearning and frustration below the surface of ordinary life. Although Toomer was beginning to get his short pieces and poetry published in the little magazines that promoted modernist writing, Frank had already published a psychoanalytic novel – an innovation for the time – and had two more modernist experimental novels in the works, as well as being an associate editor of the influential Seven Arts journal. During their brief but intense friendship, Frank not only guided Toomer through the composition of “Cane” but brought the manuscript to his own publisher of Boni and Liverwright. (Horace Liverwright was one of the Jewish upstarts, along with Alfred Knopf, who forced upon the hidebound publishing world the writings of Negroes and modernists, but that is another, although related, story.) Waldo Frank’s imprint is visible in “Cane.” Not only did he write the Introduction, but Toomer dedicated its longest section, “Kabnis,” to his friend. As “Cane” was being published in 1923, Frank managed to bring his friend to New York City to live the literary life in Greenwich Village. And so Toomer did but soon became disenchanted with the egos and quarrels and clashes. More significantly, however, Toomer wanted to go beyond mere literature and conceived of himself not as a writer but as a spiritual seeker. He soon fell under the influence of the Russian philosopher, mystic, and spiritual leader George Gurdjieff and wrote out of that worldview until the mid-1930s. It was a worldview that transcended race, and that was, for Toomer, part of its appeal. As a light-skinned African American, Toomer had spent his life crisscrossing the color line – Black in DC, where he had grown up the grandson of a famous Black politician, white in other places where he traveled for education (the midwest) and as a young man finding himself. When he spent four months in Sparta, Georgia as a substitute principal in a Black school, he tapped a current of creativity that spurted out the astonishing sketches and poems that were later collected in “Cane.” It was a one-off, but what a one-off! American writing was producing other High Modernist classics from that period (“Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson, “Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters), but “Cane” was the first to treat of African American life. The irony was that Toomer was the first Black author who did not believe that Black ancestry made him Black.  He grudgingly gave his approval to have “Cane” marketed as a Negro novel but quickly came to regret it. As he wrote to his publisher, "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone may determine.” It wasn’t true, but he refused to accept it. He held himself aloof from the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance of the later 1920s – or rather engaged with its writers only as a teacher of Gurdjeffian philosophy. He had gone beyond writing and never published anything of significance again. Although Toomer was, in appearance, racially indeterminate and tried to retreat into the anonymity of Quakerism in the Midwest, his subsequent marriages to white women ignited anti-miscegenation firestorms in newspapers and magazines. In a final historical irony, Toomer became acclaimed as a great American writer because “Cane” was rediscovered (and appreciated in a way that it had not been at the time of its publication) as part of the reclamation of African American literature spurred by the celebration of Black consciousness in the 1960s. And what of Waldo Frank? After his friendship with Toomer ended in 1923, Frank went on to have a productive, influential career in journalism, leftwing politics, and, most importantly, as a cultural ambassador between North and Latin America. He continued to write novels, sometimes with Jewish characters (“Summer Never Ends", 1941) and even published “The Jew In Our Day'' in 1944. However, Frank was never defined or circumscribed by his Jewish ancestry. The novel that he was researching during his trip to the South with Toomer was published shortly after “Cane” and disappeared quickly, an unrevivable failure. Dying in 1967, Frank lived long enough to know about “Cane”’s remarkable efflorescence of literary glory, but what his reaction may have been to the book in whose making he had played such a significant role remains unknown – or at least subject to further research. Even as a putatively Jewish writer, Waldo Frank is all but forgotten. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Coloured Friend SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Me and Ebrahim Hussein  In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of African studies worldwide," in which I recounted my conscientious preparation, and ultimate checkmate, in my quest to secure an academic position teaching Black and African literature.  This may seem like a Quixotic choice in the angry fragmentation of knowledge stemming from our post Black-Lives-Matter upheavals, but w-a-a-y back in the 1970s, when I made my selection of academic studies, most professors of African studies in America were white, and there was still a kum-ba-ya quality to the whole enterprise.  I ticked off the stages of my preparatory journey, and -- I have to admit -- I was impressed by my own achievements. First there was three years of Peace Corps Service in the "Heart of Darkness" (aka The Central African Republic). That provided the experiential foundation of my studies to follow. The Central African Republic had been a former colony of French Equatorial Africa, and since literature was my foreordained area of specialty, it only followed that my time in Africa segued into a year of study at the University of Paris, where I perfected my French and took courses in francophone literature taught by well-meaning Frenchmen and -women who had spent time in the former colonies and had turned their service there into literary specialties by reading works written by the intellectuals of their particular fiefdom.  Returning to the States, I enrolled at Indiana University which boasted an excellent African Studies program and employed in its Department of Comparative Literature one of America's leading francophone experts, a charming, convivial Frenchman of slender academic achievement and no knowledge of an African language. "Screw that!" I thought to myself. "I'm going to be a different kind of Africanist," and I set about learning Swahili. Ten years later, I joined the Department of Kiswahili at the University of Dar es Salaam as a Research Associate as I prepared and wrote my dissertation on East Africa's leading literary light, an untranslated Swahili playwright by the name of Ebrahim Hussein. I befriended the great man himself, and when he began voluntarily conversing with me in Swahili rather than English (which, of course, he knew as well as a native speaker), I felt I had broken through to a rarefied level of linguistic intimacy.  I put myself on the job market the following year and was confident of the aces in my hand. The University of Wisconsin was certainly a reputable institution (I had changed schools during my graduate studies), and I had demonstrated fluency in not only French but in an African language. I had just had an article accepted in a major peer-reviewed journal; three of the papers I had delivered at conferences of the African Literature Association had been selected for inclusion in their subsequent anthologies -- an unheard-of achievement for a graduate student. Surely with my newly-minted Ph.D. I was a hot prospect!  Then I hit The Wall. OMG! I was a white! Worse, I was a white man! Actually, I was a gay Jewish man, but having my own experience of minority status and what is now called intersectionality mattered as little to the college hiring committees as my laborious acquisition of Swahili. They needed candidates of color or, failing that, at least a woman. I was screwed -- but I had done it to myself. And there was a philosophical side to all of this. I found out that not only was I politically unsuited to teaching Black literature (even though I was doing so at such institutions as New York University and several campuses of the University of California), I was ontologically incapable as well. While researching a graduate course in African poetry, I came across the following sentiment by a Nigerian critic. "By what feat of imagination, or metaphorical slip of the tongue, can one assert that a white person can understand what it is to be a black man? All dictates of common sense and reason suggest the contrary to be the case: that only a black man -- whether in America, Africa, Europe or elsewhere--can understand what it is to be black."  When I read those lines, my blood ran cold. All of the books, all of the years of learning Swahili and East African culture, all of the hours of conversation and exchange with Black colleagues, teachers, students, friends, lovers -- none of it meant anything. I was white and therefore could not "understand."  Is it true? Am I trapped inside my class/racial/gendered box? Is my emotional attraction to a culture and experience outside my "birthright" a pathology? A conscious or unconscious power play for dominance? An aggression, no matter how well-informed or well-meaning? Does that inviolable kernel of experience -- "it's a Black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- incapacitate all effort at friendship, allyship, or even love?  What does it mean if I write that same line -- "It's a Black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- in a script that a Black lesbian delivers to a white man coming from an interracial relationship? Wait! That just happened in Shoga's latest narrative short, "The Knowing." It's like three-dimensional identity politics checkers! Who's really speaking here, and what does that do to the reality of the No Trespassing sign? If somebody figures it out, please leave a note at the front desk of whatever mental institution accepts me because this kind of s**t just blows out my circuits!  -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, What Do We Do About Carlo? SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1931, James P. Johnson wrote and recorded a song, "Go Harlem," extolling the extraordinary life of New York's Black Mecca. Among the lyrics: "Like Van Vechten/Start inspection'./Go Harlem!/Go Harlem!/Go Harlem/ Startin' right now." Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, journalist, photographer, and tastemaker, was such an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance that within the artistic and intellectual circles of the movement he needed no introduction. Hence, the lyric penned by the incomparable Andy Razaf. Born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one would not have pegged Van Vechten as the most consequential booster of the Harlem Renaissance, but in 1924 when he discovered that there were Negroes who possessed and created products of High Culture, he became, in his words, "violently attracted to Negroes,” a predilection that was to last the rest of his life. The list of Van Vechten's achievements as a promoter of the Renaissance is long and seminal. He arranged for the publication of Langston Hughes' first book of poetry, The Weary Blues . He got Paul Robeson singing on concert stages. He introduced white America to the blues through influential articles published in Vanity Fair . He encouraged Nella Larson to write, then arranged for the publication of the two best novels to come out of the Renaissance. Turning to photography in the 1930s, he captured the portraits, many of them iconic, of every African American celebrity, achiever, and person of interest during the next three decades. He arranged for important archives and collections of African American materials to be housed and cataloged at Yale, Fisk, and other institutions. His Manhattan apartment on West 55th Street where he threw interracial parties -- a groundbreaking contravention of social norms -- was referred to by Walter White, its President, as "the midtown headquarters of the NAACP." Yet there were deeply problematic aspects to Van Vechten's patronage. DuBois felt that the bisexual dandified writer introduced a note of European-style decadence that ruined the productions of the younger Black artists. When Van Vechten brought downtown whites to Harlem as a tour guide, there were Harlemites who were offended by his proprietary air, that this was a culture that he had discovered and cultivated. In 1926 he published the first novel describing (not unsympathetically) Harlem's social scene but gave it the title Nigger Heaven , which set off a bomb that tarnishes his reputation to this day. Many were suspicious of Van Vechten's motives, but some, most notably Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, defended Van Vechten's novel and evinced a genuine, lifelong affection for the man. Others who were won over to "Carlo," as he encouraged his friends to call him, were Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Zora Neale Hurston. Rudolph Fisher, a Black physician and minor novelist, called Van Vechten "the only pro-Negro Nordic on earth with whom I am constantly comfortable." For the final fourteen years of his life before his tragic death in a 1938 automobile accident, the polymath J. W. Johnson celebrated his birthday together with Carlo and publisher Alfred A. Knopf — all of whom shared the June 17 date. To honor his friend after his death, Van Vechten made sure that the greatest archive of African American literature, after the Schomberg, was called The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection . Like it or not, Carlo played an outsized role in the development of Negro music and literature, partly a comment on how beholden Black artists were to the white power structure. One well-connected white man could influence the course of a movement by writing some articles and making some introductions. So, when celebrating the Harlem Renaissance as an early pinnacle of Black achievement, what do we do about Carlo? -- and Julius Rosenwald (arts and education)? the Spingarn brothers (civil rights)? William E. Hurston (the visual arts)? Shall we leave them out of the account for the month of February? How do we keep Black history Black? Carlo screws everything up. To quote one of his most perceptive critics, Dr. Emily Bernard, "He walked the messy, murky line between appropriation and appreciation boldly and unapologetically." Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in The Making and Unmaking of A "White" Africanist SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair  In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family two days a week, which rapidly turned into five days a week. My mother hired her to help clean the house, do the laundry, and look after the kids. "Looking after the kids" became the dominant component of her job. There were four of us, ranging in 1954 from my youngest sister, two years old, to my older brother, turning ten and already suffering under the behavioral disorders that would plague his life and ours as a family.   Doris had come from a large Black family in Blythe, California, but had been the twelfth of fourteen children, so they hadn't had much experience in child care. Neither had she spent much time around white folks (let alone Jews) nor in middle-class environments. She was understandably nervous when my parents left Doris in charge of the household after just four weeks for a week of travel. But nobody died, as they say today, and Doris became our de facto mother during my parents' frequent travels, as well as being around quite a bit otherwise. She shared my bedroom with me. The house was not designed with a "servant's quarter," and we never thought of her that way. In fact, we never thought of her as any way. She was a person in our family life. She came to love us, and the feeling was mutual. Though she married twice, she couldn't have children of her own. We were as close as she got to motherhood.  One cringe-inducing comment that we avoided was the decorous lie that white families often apply to their longtime Black workers/servants/menials. "She's just like one of the family." This is patently untrue. Does she inherit like other members of the family? Does she sit at the dinner table during the holidays? Does she go on family vacations? Probably not and certainly Doris didn't during the years she was most involved with our family.  What role did Doris play in our family's life? "Mammy" springs immediately to mind, but I recoil at the term. It's so freighted with racism and yet the realities of racial and class inequities were the same that structured our relationship with Doris. Ours was much more than a commercial relationship – the exchange of services for money – but what was it? We never asked the question and in the relative innocence of the latter half of the 20th century, we never gave it any thought. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 had nothing to do with us. Except for its relative geographical proximity (we lived in Pasadena), the Watts Riots of 1965 had nothing to do with us. All we knew was that we loved Doris and that she was always there for us, even after we no longer needed a babysitter after she married her second husband and moved to Richmond, California. She would take care of the house when my parents traveled on some of their more extended vacations. She organized the wedding banquet in our backyard when my older sister was married. She spent weeks nursing my mother during the final four months of her life in 1985 when she died of a brain tumor.  The gifts of relationship didn't only flow in one direction. When my older sister and I lived in the East Bay, we visited Doris every few months. She and her husband had moved to Stockton to be closer to her sister. Doris had severe diabetes and couldn't drive by then. We had to come to her, but we did so gladly. When her husband died (heart failure), we felt it was more important than ever to keep up the connection. Her lack of mobility kept her housebound, but we found ways of taking her out – to a meal downtown or to a park. The San Joaquin County Fair takes place in Stockton. We knew she wanted to go but wouldn't consider it because she couldn't walk anymore. My sister and I took her out for a "surprise destination" – the county fair, which we toured in a wheelchair, much to our great delight. It is one of my cherished memories, and I've been to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. If I had to select only one of those experiences, the county fair with Doris and my sister would win hands down.   When Doris died, we contributed to the expenses of her final illness and burial arrangements to take some of the burden off her sister. And that was the end of it, right? Not quite …   In the early 90s, I had the idea that I wanted to write a family memoir. I taped an interview with Doris and eventually turned it into a chapter called "Skinny." A voiceover artist has recorded the chapter itself and it will drop as a Shoga Speaks podcast. There you can hear Doris describe her life in her own words as a not-quite-member-of-the-family. It is also the way I'd like to end this essay–in her voice. But be forewarned: Doris expressed herself in her own Black English. If encountering that within a white context will offend you, then don't listen to the podcast and stop reading here. Otherwise …   "I know people have a hard time seein one another. Some people look at you and all they see is the outside. And they see you different from what you really are cause they don't get to know you. Miz Philipson to me was my friend. She was my employer but she was my friend. I never did understand it. I was just glad. When I came to work for her I didn't have no references. Later on I asked her why she took me in when she didn't know anything about me. She says, "Oh Doris, you was so skinny. I knew you was all right."                        -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Two Maids of Ethel Waters SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1950, the superstar singer and actor Ethel Waters checked off another box in her list of African American firsts when she starred in a weekly television series, Beulah. As the name indicates, Beulah was a maid whose raison d'être was to serve her white employers, "Mr. and Mrs. Henderson," and act as a nanny to their son, "Donnie." Although Waters brought as much warmth and humor as she could to the stereotype, the other Black characters portrayed were even flatter and more offensive: "Bill," the unemployed beau who is a braggart and a screw-up; and "Oriole," a ditzy maid (played by Butterfly McQueen, no less!) who works for the family next door. Despite its landmark status, African American critics hated the show. "Beulah defiles and desecrates colored people," wrote a critic for The Pittsburgh Courier. "The dread and despised stereotype--that of colored people presenting themselves as buffoons, slavish menials and ne'er-do-wells." Of course, white America had no problem with the familiar minstrelsy and Beulah ran for three seasons, although Waters left after the first. The same year that Beulah went into production Ethel Waters was enjoying a triumphant comeback on the Broadway stage playing -- an earth-mother mammy, wouldn't you know! Adapted from her successful 1946 novel, Carson McCullers co-wrote The Member of the Wedding into an unlikely Broadway hit. The story focuses on the quirky dialogue and braided interplay between three outsiders in a small Southern town: Frankie, an overly emotional tomboy on the cusp of adolescence; her six-year-old cousin John Henry; and Berenice, the fount of maternal warmth and stability. Berenice is probably the greatest mammy role in American letters. She has a family (a doomed brother destined for jail like many Black men in the South), an interior life glimpsed through the occasional monologue, deep folk wisdom and emotional intelligence, and she keeps up with Frankie's overwrought longings and verbal ping-ponging. When she embraces both her outsider "children" in a rendition of "His Eye is on the Sparrow," only the most jaded viewer is supposed to remain unmoved. (Waters used the same title for her 1951 autobiography.) To the greatest mammy role came one of the greatest Black talents of the twentieth century. Ethel Waters had been scoring "firsts" and successes since she began her career recording blues sides for Black Swan Records in 1921. Thirty years and 300 pounds later, she had lived through, suffered, and triumphed enough to bring true gravitas to McCullers' menial. When the play was turned into a major Hollywood movie, it was her name that went above the title – another first. (Ironically, because of that, Waters couldn't be nominated for an Oscar for what would be her best on-screen performance. No African American could be considered for a best leading role, although she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1949 for her portrayal of yet another mammy in Pinky.) There were other stereotypes upon which Hollywood continued to draw: the Black Siren (Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones) and the Tragic Mulatto (always played by white actresses). But until the spirit of the Sixties broke open these shopworn shells, Waters' maids represented the limits of Black female representation in popular culture. Still, even within those constraints, an authentic chord could be struck. Check out the final 60 seconds of The Member of the Wedding . Berenice has lost her family – to prison, to a fatal illness, and, in the case of Frankie, to the heedless abandonment of a mother the adolescent no longer needs. The pain on Mammy's face in that final close-up is far more affecting than the set piece of "His Eye is on the Sparrow." Berenice's sorrow is for herself; Waters' talent forces us to recognize the humanity of the women who work in our kitchens. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in "She's Just Like One of the Family" SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

I'm a poet And my feet know it. They’re longfellas. This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts itself off from rhyme and meter – two qualities of the English language for which I have some facility. Anybody who writes in rhyme either condemns him- or herself to Hallmark card banality or does so with an ironic wink. Let me present, as exhibit A, a bagatelle I tossed off for a friend who aspired to monogamy. I can’t always say yes, but I never say no I can’t always go fast, but I never go slow My relationships last, and they’re always true love I’m not always on top, but I’m always above You say that you only want love for the night You say that you’re into just keeping it light Well for me, babe, Lite’s beer, not a human response But I think that you’re hot, so I’ll do it – just once See what I mean? Low risk, low reward. Poetry – serious poetry – is considered to be the highest form of literary art. Although it continues to be produced and published, it is sustained (like opera) by a small coterie of enthusiasts, usually academics and other poets. I never considered myself a Poet, but there were swells of emotion that occasionally extruded themselves as attempts at serious poetry. The best I can say of the results is that they missed being embarrassing – but not by much. When I was an English major in college and (like all English majors) an aspiring writer, my premature encounter with modernist poetry (what 19-year-old can understand Eliot’s “Wasteland”?) conditioned me to accept that I was not going to enjoy or understand the vast majority of contemporary poetry that came my way. If I couldn’t read it, I certainly couldn’t write it. I kicked against this unjust state of literary affairs with the following masterpiece. This is a poem because I say it is Look at the typography Does it not scream ART? I need no rhyme or scansion I need only me to transform urinals to fountains Benefit from my exquisite corps sensibility Hear through me the Mallarmean music of the spheres Marvel at how lightly I wear my erudition (Critics may give me my due, champion my subtle puns, my modernist armor, my post-m irreverence, and dada field of dreams . . .) No audience need validate my pose But you may read and thus enlarge your soul (Bonus points: What is the name of the famous artist hidden in the text?) Thus I condemned modernist poetry and its arrogant progeny as elitist irrelevance. Ah, but Erato, the muse of erotic and lyric poetry, would not leave me in peace! During the aughts, when online dating took off, I read hundreds of profiles that gay men put online. Many of them were funny, sad, cynical, deluded, or revealing in ways their authors didn’t intend. How easy it would be, I thought, to turn these self-portraits into poems! And so my one book of (self-published) poems was born, “Very Good-Looking Seeks Same.” Damn it! I was writing poetry–and enjoying it! But it was another version of Poetry Lite, so I could take pleasure in it. Low risk, low reward. Since I was writing free verse, I had to seriously confront issues of spacing, what to place within a stanza, where to break the line. But I now understood the freedom of free verse. Also, none of these poems were confessional. They were persona poems, and I enjoyed putting on the various masks. One example: Water Baby I like snowboarding Jet skiing, paintball, motocross Ricky Carmichael! My build is athletic I’m definitely a partier As a paramedic I get off on the adrenaline rush You must be possessed of the following three nonnegotiable items a job a car a place to stay besides your parents’ house Do not talk to me if you are a shallow judgmental person who evaluates people based on color race drug usage or anything else People do things for reasons I may or may not agree with I do not judge them My dad, who introduced me to water and bikes, judged me so I had to get a job a car a place to stay at 17 Conforming to the endless self-promotion encouraged – no, demanded! – by our capitalist society, I must inform you that you can purchase your very own copy of “Very Good-Looking Seeks Same” on your favorite discounted book website. You can also hear a dramatic reading of selected poems slyly inserted into the myth of Narcissus as the Shoga Treat, “The Modern Narcissists.” – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Tortured Antisemitism of Amiri Baraka SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. These lines, published in a much-anthologized poem written in 1966, spurted from the pen of the most influential and widely known Black writer/poet in America, Amiri Baraka. The poem, “Black Art,” advocated a poetry of violence and revenge: “ Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons/ leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland .” Other enemies of Black liberation get their meed of bile, but Jews are called out three times, including the invocation of “ Another bad poem cracking/steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth .” This last image is particularly shocking as it can’t be justified as retribution against Jewish slumlords (“owner-Jews”) or hypocritical liberals. Baraka’s rage taps into an antisemitism that tarred the whole Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (along with sexism and homophobia). Would it surprise you to learn that his first wife, Hettie Jones (née Cohen), was Jewish, as were the two daughters he had by her? What makes Baraka’s Jew hate particularly poisonous is that it is an infected form of Jew love. And what makes Baraka’s antisemitism so culturally percussive is that he’s a really powerful poet. His one poem exclusively devoted to pillorying the Jews, “The Black Man Is Making New Gods,” published in a 1967 issue of “The Evergreen Review,” an avant-garde literary journal, makes the point for better and for worse. I reproduce it elsewhere in the newsletter for those who can stomach its full force. However, the opening lines are pungently representative. Atheist jews double crossers stole our secrets crossed The white desert to spill them and turn into wops and bulgarians The great sin of the Jews, according to Baraka, was that in crossing the white desert, they had repeated the role they had played earlier in history. Once, the Jews had been part of a slave culture. When they gained their freedom, left Africa, they crossed the desert and eventually spawned Christianity, the slave religion par excellence. “The Fag’s Death/they gave us on a cross.” The Diaspora sent the Jews into Europe where, “their escape/with our power/with our secrets and knowledge, they turned into “wops and bulgarians.” Likewise in America Jews had come as a persecuted band. Here too they crossed the white desert and assimilated into Amerika – the oppressor. Literally as well as figuratively “Atheist jews” (modern Jews having long stopped believing in Jehova) were “double crossers.” But Baraka’s antisemitism is fueled by self-hatred as well. The culture that birthed him as a poet had many Jewish midwives. Allen Ginsberg, Jules Feiffer, and Norman Mailer were among “the little arty bastards” who helped create the Beat movement of the fifties. When he was married to the enemy, the couple’s Greenwich Village apartment served as a salon and nexus where America’s most revolutionary poetry was conceived. But as Baraka became increasingly radicalized by the rise of Black Power in the civil rights struggle, the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 pushed him over the edge. Leroi Jones left his Jewish wife and their Village scene, moved to Harlem, and founded the Black Arts Movement. “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet,” published in the same collection as “Black Art,” reveals how much Black intellectuals were influenced by the Jews. (Brace yourselves!) You screamed and slobbered on me, to hear you. And I didn’t. Shacked up with a fat jew girl. Talking about Shakespeare, I didn’t hear you, brother. But Tom Postell’s final words are, “The jews are talking through my mouth.” The insoluble contradiction for the modernist poet is that his culture, his literary culture, is Western. As long as the Black writer communicates in this mode, the Jews are talking through his mouth. “ I got the Hitler syndrome figured ,” Baraka writes later, “ What that simpleton meant. He can’t/stand their desert smell, their closeness to the truth .” And what makes it even more galling is that even though the Jews are historical sellouts, they still get the twentieth-century prize for suffering: “ cinemascope the jews do it/big .” The strength of the Jews derives from the fact that they were originally in the non-Western camp; all their power comes from the people they ripped off. They suffered; now they oppress. As oppressors, they mock the wisdom they once possessed. Their success is no model for the Blacks but weaves itself into the texture of American exploitation. So, rejecting that legacy – as he must – “The Black Man Is Making New Gods.” And out of this antisemitic logic comes a poem – a poem not devoid of literary merit. Shocking as they are, some of the lines are brilliant in their compression. hanging stupidly from a cross, in an oven, the pantomime of our torture There are others (“ Suck you pricks .”) that seem less inspired. This is a bridge much farther than the genteel antisemitism of such other modernist gods as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The blast furnace of Baraka’s hate, no matter how understandable its origins, no matter how “artistically” expressed, incinerates all possible dialogue between Black nationalists and Jews of any stripe. (But perhaps not his daughters? It’s all very confusing!) Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in Poetry Lite SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1954, Jean Guyard, a Frenchman working as a civil servant in the tax department of the French Republic, married my cousin Marion Michelle, who had settled permanently in Paris after the dissolution of her five-year affair with the famous left-wing documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. Jean had grown up in the Morvan, one of the poorer regions of France, and had not been blessed with a bourgeois family or upbringing. However, he gravitated to Paris after World War Two, where he acquired an urban sheen and enjoyed the occasional stint as a radio actor. He’d had little exposure to the visual arts and had shown no indication that he would go down that road. Marion, however, had always been with men who were artists (her first husband, Joseph Vogel, studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and launched a modestly successful career through the auspices of the Federal Arts Project, a New Deal program). Under Marion’s influence, Jean discovered his vocation as a painter and pursued it with passion for the rest of his life. He was 37 when he picked up his palette. “Well Gauguin was 35 when he quit his job as a stockbroker to devote himself full time to his art (with a wife and five children),” you might reply. Yes, but even though painting entered Gauguin’s life as a hobby, he rubbed shoulders with the Impressionists and studied under Camille Pissaro. Jean Guyard, though personable, remained a loner in the art world and never took a lesson in his life. Everything came from within. What emerged on canvas were colorful shapes transmogrifying, some vaguely anthropomorphic, meltingly contiguous – all resolutely non-representational. Since Jean had emerged with no knowledge of or interest in art history nor any style that was immediately recognizable, I could not see any movement or development in the hundreds of paintings he produced in a span of almost six decades. I met Jean in 1961 when I was eleven years old, and my family relocated to Paris for two years. Marion had apprehensively invited the Philipson brood to her apartment in the 7th arrondissement, where my mother had to stanch the flow of childish derision triggered by the stacks of (to us) incomprehensible paintings that took up half the living room. Thereafter I was a frequent visitor (and sometimes sojourner) to Paris and knew Jean until his death. I can’t say we were close. Jean was as uninterested in our family as we were in his art. He adored Marion, however, and Marion adored her cousin, my mother. I benefited from that and felt that Jean and Marion were family in the fullest sense. Once I had grown up and had mastered French sufficiently enough to listen to his rants about the craven machinations of the French left, a grudging tendril of acceptance entered his heart. But we never talked about art. He painted alone and mostly on the weekends. Occasionally he would retail his near-misses with the art world. Apparently, a potentially major one-man show was planned for a gallery in Beirut when Lebanon was called “the Switzerland of the Middle East” (gone are the days!), but political unrest disrupted those plans. And I remember another exhibition in a left-bank gallery that produced a nice poster, a small catalog, and no sales. To my knowledge, Jean never sold a painting in his life. He wasn’t interested in marketing or working in the art scene; he just wanted to paint. As Jean entered the precincts of what the French call “le troisième age,” he came to terms with the probability that he would not become famous in his lifetime. Then, his hopes rested on posthumous discovery. In one sad exchange during the early aughts when Marion was dying and my visits to Paris were frequent, he asked me if I would be his artistic executor. He had a painting gifted to him by Édouard Pignon that he was sure would cover whatever costs were involved. I was able to refuse without hurting his feelings by explaining that it was not a practical undertaking, given that I was an American citizen living almost halfway around the world. Jean Guyard died in 2010. His one living relative, a schoolteacher niece, inherited the trove; God knows how she faired with that! Jean’s passion of 58 years disappeared without a trace. Non-commercial art has been defined as unmotivated or disinterested activity. We don’t do it for practical reasons. We do it because we want to “express ourselves.” Most of us, like Jean, are Sunday painters. Like Jean, our ambition and desire for recognition outrun our talent. (I include myself here.) Jean would have been happier had he not felt the need for outside validation. Producing art is not enough. It rarely is. To riff on Pascal’s famous quote, all of your problems stem from your inability to create quietly in your room alone. Expect no recognition and you will not be disappointed. But undermining the bitter wisdom of the artiste manqué, we believe in our inmost hearts that our genius must eventually announce itself to the world. Look at Vincent Van Gogh! He sold only one painting while he was alive! Better not to look at Vincent, I say. His genius far exceeds yours. Paint your cats and take your pleasure there. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Queer Harlem Renaissance and the Visual Arts: Richmond Barthé SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts