J. Lester Feder

Featured Writing

A community of urban ballroom dancers in Detroit has been decimated by covid. But the survivors aim to keep on dancing.

The Washington Post Magazine, Feb. 2, 2022.

Charlotte Andrews has hazy memories from the three weeks she spent on a ventilator in the early part of the pandemic... Her life wasn’t the only thing that hung in the balance. Andrews, who is 72, was put on a ventilator March 16, the same day that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an emergency order closing bars and restaurants across Michigan. That order shuttered Club Yesterday’s, a nightclub Andrews opened in 1996 to be a home to Detroit’s distinctive style of couples dancing, known as club ballroom, urban ballroom or Detroit-style ballroom. The dance community she had been building and celebrating for nearly a quarter-century was also fighting for its life...

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Putin Is Showing Us What Homophobia Looks Like as a Weapon of War

The New York Times, March 15, 2022.

Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay.

Mr. Polukhin recalled one of the guards calling him an anti-gay slur and forcing him to strip naked on the street. (This is a common practice by Russian forces, nominally to search for nationalist tattoos.) After he was dressed again, Mr. Polukhin said that the soldiers took the opportunity to humiliate him further, calling over a random passerby to ask what should be done with gays in his city.

“I think that all of them should be killed,” Mr. Polukhin said the man responded.

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They Wanted to Be a Better Class of White Nationalists. They Claimed This Man as Their Father.

BuzzFeed News, Dec. 27, 2017.

PARIS — The man the alt-right claims as its spiritual father is a 74-year-old who lives with four cats in a Paris apartment around the corner from a Creole restaurant, a West African clothing store, and a Peruvian supermarket.... His work helped give an aura of respectability to the notion that European “identity” needs to be defended against erasure by immigration, global trade, multinational institutions, and left-wing multiculturalism.... He now sees himself as more left than right and says he would have voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US election. He rejects any link between his New Right and the alt-right that supported Donald Trump.

“Maybe people consider me their spiritual father, but I don’t consider them my spiritual sons,” he said.

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Galleries

Between Dances: Ballroom Dance in Detroit After Covid

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  • Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York, 2020.
  • Coney Island, New York, 2020.
  • Coney Island, New York, 2020.
  • Canarsie, Brooklyn, 2020.

My COVID New York

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  • Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 2020.
  • Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 2020.
  • Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York, 2020.
  • Crown Heights, New York, 2020.

Independence Day, Brooklyn 2020

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  • Puebla, Mexico, 2009.
  • Bangkok, Thailand, 2013.
  • Mexico City, Mexico, 2009.
  • Penang, Malaysia, 2013.

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Copyright © 2020 J. Lester Feder
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