But Baraka is more than just a provocateur, and his critics have valid reasons for calling his work anti-Semitic. In 1980, Baraka published the essay "Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite" in the Village Voice. It's a long piece that starts with his childhood in Newark and chronicles his artistic growth in Greenwich Village, his prominent role in the Black Arts Movement and the writing of his most famous work, "The Dutchman," in 1964. That play, an attack on white liberalism, was an Obie Award-winner.

At the time, Baraka was married to a Jewish woman named Hettie Cohen. But after Malcolm X's assassination, Baraka embraced black nationalism. He divorced Cohen around this time, writing in the article that, "As a Black man married to a white woman, I began to feel estranged from her ... How could someone be married to the enemy?" Baraka later moved back to Newark and adopted Marxism.

Although Baraka insists that it was a Village Voice editor, not Baraka, who came up with the title "Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite," the essay does read like a confession, or at least like an explanation of Baraka's controversial beliefs. He doesn't deny that anti-Semitism factored into his political growth. While he stipulates that his dislike for Jews stems from his problem with whites in general, it's obvious that he has a more complex problem with Jews.

"We also know that much of the vaunted Jewish support of Black civil rights organizations was in order to use them," Baraka wrote. "Jews, finally, are white, and suffer from the same kind of white chauvinism that separates a great many whites from Black struggle." Much of his problem with Jews seems to stem from resentment of their claims to the status of an oppressed people: "... these Jewish intellectuals have been able to pass over the into the Promised Land of American privilege." He also addresses his rejection of Israel: "Zionism is a form of racism."

Baraka comes clean in the end. "Anti-Semitism is as ugly an idea and as deadly as white racism and Zionism ... As for my personal trek through the wasteland of anti-Semitism, it was momentary and never completely real."

Still, a look at Baraka's poetry -- lines of which he cites in this essay -- would suggest that his anti-Semitism was very real. In some, his hatred toward Jews is matched by his hatred toward other groups, such as Italians and the Irish. "I have written only one poem that has definite aspects of anti-Semitism ... and I have repudiated it as thoroughly as I can," he wrote. That poem, "For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet" includes lines like the following: "I got the extermination blues, jewboys" and "so come for the rent, jewboys."

It's lines like these that have compelled such critics as Jerry Gafio Watts, a recent biographer of Baraka, and commentator Stanley Crouch to call attention to the anti-Semitism in Baraka's work.

"The governor has it all wrong," Crouch wrote in the Daily News. "Jones [Crouch insists on calling Baraka by his given name] should not be asked to resign. Those who appointed him should resign ... if they have read his work over the last 35 years. It's an incoherent mix of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, black nationalism, anarchy and ad hominem attacks relying on comic book and horror film characters and images that he has used over and over and over."

Black conservative activist and anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly went further, bluntly suggesting that the committee who selected Baraka were trying to be politically correct.

"It is inconceivable that a white, anti-Semitic bigot who produced 'poetry' like Mr. Baraka's would ever get funding from the New Jersey Arts Council, let alone be appointed as the state's poet laureate," Connerly wrote in the Washington Times. "... Yet, because Mr. Baraka is seen as an 'authentic' black artistic voice, he gets a pass from the council on matters of decency and taste."

It's not only the New Jersey Arts Council who considers Baraka an important poet. Baraka is featured in the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (of course, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, also anti-Semites, are included in other Norton anthologies). Last year, he was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters, whose members include Stephen Sondheim, Jasper Johns and Mark Twain (members are selected by their peers). The list of notables who think of Baraka as, at the very least, an influential figure, is fairly long. For example, Stanford scholar Arnold Rampersad puts him in league with Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison as one of eight writers "who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture."

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