Shoga Speaks — First Person

Three months after his first visit, Robert Philipson returned to Zanzibar in July of 1988 and reconnected with his friends: Haroub, the object of infatuation; Abou, the civil servant with a wild streak, and his former teacher, mwalimu Jecha. During this visit, each revealed a new side. Haroub’s tenderness towards his ailing mother, Abou’s outrageous antics in front of the baraza boys,, Jecha takin...

In March 1988, Robert Philipson, working on a dissertation about an untranslated Swahili playwright, arrived in Zanzibar for a two-week intensive language course at the Swahili Institute, but the island had other lessons to teach. Within hours of landing in Stone Town, he found himself adopted by the baraza called "Jaws," a gathering of men who socialized in one of the public squares on...

The phrase "HIV Negative" implies the diagnosis "HIV positive," a precursor to the AIDS epidemic which decimated the gay male population in the 1980s and beyond.  The stigma, still a force in some sectors of our society, delayed the mobilization for effective treatment when the epidemic first appeared in the early 80s. It took Ronald Reagan five years to even mention the word &...

Sam and Daniel are in Israel, circa 1969. They are on a kibbutz, learning Hebrew in the morning and working for their room and board in the afternoon. Sam follows Daniel in his effort to deepen his Jewish identity. They go to Mount Tabor, site of a battle between the Israelites and the Canaanites, spend a weekend at a Chassidic yeshiva where Daniel is ardently proselytized by a recent convert. Fin...

America 1968. Everything was up for grabs. All passion and creativity seemed to gush from the counterculture. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven." I was young, 18, and enrolled as an undergraduate in the fourth year of the great experimental campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The spirit of the 60s was everywhere, in our music and our...

What's in a bedtime story? More than you might imagine. As we were growing up, my father introduced his version of imaginary creatures, the goops, into our household and family life. Created as negative role models to teach manners to Victorian children, the goops first saw life in books of moralistic doggerel published in 1900 and after. "But it was their bad behavior that led my father...

"I have concluded from the melancholy nature of my subsequent development that the artifacts hung up on a child's wall can have a permanent effect on his life." So begins the essay on the role the Art played in my formation, an evolution spanning Southern California, France, the groovy Sixties, Africa. "Still Life" will reveal the malefic influence of "the original Jo...

Meet Doris Hale, the most intimate and important African American that my famlly knew and trusted, in her own words. Dr. Philipson conducted and transcribed the interview back in the early 90s. In anticipation of releasing the manuscript of the family memoir, we present certain chapters as podcasts performed by voice actors. "Skinny" was recorded and mixed by Joyce Licorish. Host Info Ho...

In the conclusion of The Artificial Grandma , Dr. Robert Philipson continues his journey through post-college drift, emotional illness, and the disillusionment of returning home. Set against the backdrop of a failed commune dream, an acid-laced revelation, and the oppressive weight of family history, Philipson navigates his internal crisis from the smoggy mountaintops of Southern California back t...

Dr. Robert Philipson reflects on the emotional limbo of post-college life in 1970s Pasadena, where returning home sparks a spiral of depression, existential doubt, and a search for meaning. Amid the decay of suburban sprawl and family disconnection, a psychedelic night with friends offers a vision of communal living rooted in shared purpose and simplicity. Philipson explores internal disillusionme...

Dr. Robert Philipson reflects on the layered history and personal meaning of his childhood home in Southern California, weaving together Indigenous displacement, colonial conquest, and postwar suburban life. As he moves room by room through The Old House , Philipson unpacks memories of joy, loneliness, family ritual, and quiet grief, transforming the house into a central character in a story about...

Host Dr. Robert Philipson guides listeners through a lyrical meditation on memory, identity, and the lasting imprint of Paris. Framed by a moment of reflection on the banks of the Oubangui River in the Central African Republic, Philipson recalls the two years of his childhood spent in Paris—an experience that profoundly shaped both him and his mother, despite their outward return to American life....

Host Dr. Robert Philipson reflects on the life of his maternal grandmother, Jeanette, tracing a family legacy shaped by mismatched love, unspoken expectations, and the emotional weight of generational silence. From her immigrant roots and ill-fated marriage to her slow decline into senility, Jeanette’s story becomes a lens through which Dr. Philipson explores maternal power, cultural identity, soc...

In this deeply personal and thought-provoking episode, Robert Philipson traces the intertwined threads of family, faith, and identity, beginning with his great-uncle, Reform Judaism leader Rabbi David Philipson, and winding through his own complex upbringing in mid-century America. From the unlikely honor of portraying Shylock in a high school English class to confronting assimilation, antisemitis...

Our choice of pets says a lot about who we are … and we are all very different. There are cat people; there are dog people; there are bird people; there are reptile people and on and on. The famlly pet can mark a child’s development for better or worse, but if a dog or cat lives out the full term of its life, it is a part of that family for 12 or 14 or 19 years. These days most marriages don’t las...

Part Two continues the story of Marion's unbroken involvement with the Philipson family, maintained over the next four decades in spite of the distance that separated Paris from Pasadena. Dr. Philipson, whose development through French culture and language was the deepest and most sustained, reunited with Marion at age 27 and formed a relationship that lasted the rest of her life, one the wit...

Dr. Philipson looks back at the life of his cousin Marion, a fiercely independent anti-colonialist and socialist documentary filmmaker, known for her work with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Philipson explores how, from an unpromising bourgeois Jewish background in Cleveland, she lived in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, surrounding herself with artists and progressive intellectuals, how...