Unclean Lips

Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

Josh Lambert

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479895229
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Winner of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award presented by the Association for Jewish Studies

Jews have played an integral role in the history of obscenity in America. For most of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and editors led the charge against obscenity laws. Jewish lawyers battled literary censorship even when their non-Jewish counterparts refused to do so, and they won court decisions in favor of texts including Ulysses, A Howl, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer. Jewish literary critics have provided some of the most influential courtroom testimony on behalf of freedom of expression. The anti-Semitic stereotype of the lascivious Jew has made many historians hesitant to draw a direct link between Jewishness and obscenity. In Unclean Lips, Josh Lambert addresses the Jewishness of participants in obscenity controversies in the U.S. directly, exploring the transformative roles played by a host of neglected figures in the development of modern and postmodern American culture. The diversity of American Jewry means that there is no single explanation for Jews' interventions in this field. Rejecting generalizations, this bookoffers case studies that pair cultural histories with close readings of both contested texts and trial transcripts to reveal the ways in which specific engagements with obscenity mattered to particular American Jews at discrete historical moments. Reading American culture from Theodore Dreiser and Henry Miller to Curb Your Enthusiasm and FCC v. Fox, Unclean Lips analyzes the variable historical and cultural factors that account for the central role Jews have played in the struggles over obscenity and censorship in the modern United States.

1
Sexual Anti-Semitism and Pornotopia

Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, and The Harrad Experiment

One Friday night in 1917, Theodore Dreiser accompanied Irwin Granich, a young Jewish playwright associated with the Provincetown Players, to the apartment on Chrystie Street, on New York’s Lower East Side, where Granich and his mother lived.¹ Dreiser wanted atmospheric details for a play he had been writing about poor tenement dwellers. Though he had written about immigrant Jews as a journalist and had included Jews as minor characters in some of his fiction, this play was to be the only one of his literary works in which a Jewish character figured as the protagonist.²

When Dreiser had finished a draft of the four-act play, he sent it over to H. L. Mencken. Mencken was a supporter of free speech and of Dreiser’s work; he had lately campaigned on behalf of Dreiser’s novel The “Genius,” which had been suppressed as obscene in 1916 by John Sumner, Anthony Comstock’s successor at the NYSSV. Yet, having read Dreiser’s Jewish play, Mencken reacted unequivocally: “Put the ms. behind the clock,” he wrote, “and thank me and God for saving you from a mess.”³ Horace Liveright—the newly established Jewish publisher who was so eager to add Dreiser to his list in 1917 that he offered the celebrated author an unusually generous 25% royalty rate—felt similarly. According to the publisher’s biographer, despite Liveright’s general enthusiasm for Dreiser’s work, he had no desire to see this particular play in print, and, after first demurring, Liveright finally “agreed to publish the play solely to retain Dreiser as an author.”⁴ When Liveright eventually did publish it, in the fall of 1919, as The Hand of the Potter, many critics agreed with Mencken’s and Liveright’s initial assessments. One reviewer in Chicago expressed her disgust emphatically: “Ugh! It’s a horrible thing,” she wrote. “If I were a censor I would bar ‘The Hand of the Potter’ from circulation and turn Mr. Dreiser over to the psychiatric ward.”⁵

It is not difficult to guess what all these readers found objectionable: The Hand of the Potter focuses on Isadore Berchansky, a young Jewish man who, as the play opens, is a convicted child rapist who has just returned from two years at the state penitentiary to his parents’ apartment in East Harlem.⁶ His time away has not dampened his unhealthy desires: “It’s their faces an’ their nice make-ups an’ the way they do their hair,” he says, describing the lure of young women on the street. “That’s what’s the matter with me. It’s their stockin’s an’ their open shirtwaists an’ their shoulders an’ arms. I can’t stand it no more. I can’t seem to think of nothin’ else” (34). Isadore’s “uncontrolled and unnatural sex-interest” (42) so overwhelms him that he even makes overtures to his own younger sister (36). Dreiser’s stage directions have him stare at an eleven-year-old neighbor in a “a greedy, savage, half-insane way” (49), and these adjectives link Isadore’s uncontrollable lusts to the stereotypes of Jewish avariciousness, primitiveness, and mental illness that were common during the fin de siècle.⁷ The drama’s first act ends with Isadore raping and killing the eleven-year-old neighbor, offstage, and the remaining acts detail the police investigation and Isadore’s suicide. Combining sexual accusations that surfaced during the 1910s around the Leo Frank trial (Jewish perversion leading to child rape and then murder) and, a few decades earlier, during the Jack the Ripper scandal in England (the notion that the murderer’s poor Jewish peers shielded him from the police)⁸ and folding these in with conventional trappings of literary representations of Jews in the period, including plenty of Jewish dialect speech and a reference to a “mezuze,” The Hand of the Potter seems to collect in a single literary work just about all the sexual anti-Semitic discourse that had been circulating in Europe and America since the mid-19th century. No wonder, then, that some Jewish critics have lambasted the play as purveying the most egregious racist stereotypes: the theater scholar Ellen Schiff, for example, characterizes The Hand of the Potter as “one of the few blatantly anti-Semitic works in the American repertory.”⁹

Yet Dreiser understood his play not as a work of hateful anti-Semitic propaganda but, on the contrary, as evidence of the depth of his sympathy for American Jews. What is more, authoritative Jewish critics of the period—Abraham Cahan and Ludwig Lewisohn among them—agreed with him.¹⁰ To understand why Dreiser, Cahan, and Lewisohn felt that publishing and staging a dramatization of a Jewish man’s uncontrollable pedophilia could be an act of support for and friendship with the American Jewish community, it is necessary to attend in more detail to the claims that had been made about Jewish sexuality in anti-Semitic propaganda, as well as in popular and highbrow literature, in Europe and the United States since the 1880s and how such claims were refuted by the sexological theory on which Dreiser relied for his understanding of sexual abnormality.

Reading Dreiser’s play as a response to anti-Semitic discourse—particularly in its insistence on the relevance of the explicit representation of sex to sexological theory—allows us to understand it as a crucial example of one way in which obscenity mattered to American Jews. It also helps to explain, as this chapter goes on to explore, why, in the decades after World War II, writers began to understand the explicit representation of sexuality and the embrace of sexual pleasure as effective strategies to counter the grievous anti-Semitism and other hatreds on the march in America and Europe—such that, by the 1960s, a best-selling, mass-market novel by a non-Jewish writer, billed as “the sex manifesto of the free love generation,” could figure pornography, group marriage, and other facets of sexual radicalism as solutions to the persisting problem of “indirect” American anti-Semitism.

Sexual Anti-Semitism in the Fin de Siècle

The sexual anti-Semitism that circulated in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries concentrated not only on the “Jew editors” discussed in the introduction but also on Jews in other sexually threatening roles, especially those of pimp, prostitute, and pedophile. One of the main tenets of the international “white-slavery panic,” for example, was the accusation that Jewish pimps sold non-Jewish young women into sexual slavery. Such claims did not spring up from nowhere but had their basis in the rhetorical excesses of scientific studies of prostitution that began to proliferate in the mid-19th century: indeed, “The Jews” were the subject of the very first chapter of the book that Walter Kendrick characterizes as marking the U.S. arrival of “hygienic pornography,” that is, writing (graphos) about prostitutes (porne) with the goal of social and medical reform.¹¹

At the outset of that book, The History of Prostitution (1858), Dr. William W. Sanger notes that “prostitution is coeval with society,” but he emphasizes first and foremost that “prostitutes were common among Jews in the eighteenth century before Christ.” Sanger’s readings of the Bible suggests that though Moses commanded his people not to prostitute their daughters, the lawgiver “appears to have connived at the intercourse of [the Jews’] young men with foreign prostitutes,” having taken “an Egyptian concubine himself.” Sanger presents prostitution as widespread and generally accepted among ancient Jews: it was “legally domiciled in Judaea at a very early period and never lost the foothold it had gained,” and it “continued to be practiced generally and openly until the destruction of the old Jewish nation.” The Israelites were not just pioneers of prostitution, according to this view, but also excessive in their patronage and legal toleration of it: “it may be questioned whether it ever assumed more revoltingly public forms in any other country,” Sanger declares.¹²

These descriptions of ancient Jewish prostitution could neatly be aligned with reports of Jewish pimping in the present so as to produce broad, transhistorical claims about Jewish sexuality. Another hygienic pornographer echoed Sanger’s claims in an American medical journal in 1895, noting that “the Hebrew people were one of the agents in propagating syphilis and prostitution in times of antiquity” and that “prostitution enjoyed the greatest liberty among the Israelites, and was not even considered infamous.” Yet this was the heyday of white-slavery panic, and the author, a French doctor, went further than Sanger, quoting an unnamed source to the effect that “the plague of prostitution always remained attached like leprosy to the Jewish nation”¹³—a statement that, with its metaphor of prostitution as contagious disease, could be interpreted as asserting that whether ancient or contemporary, Jews “always” carried the germ of prostitution—and that they involved themselves in the practice in modern times just as excessively as their ancestors did. In fact, in the publications that fomented the white-slavery panic, modern Jews were, at times, explicitly linked to their Biblical ancestors: George Kibbe Turner’s “The Daughters of the Poor,” an infamous muckraking exposé printed in McClure’s in 1909, uses the word “ancient” repeatedly to refer to the contemporary Jewish pimp, describing him, for example, as distinguished by “his long beard—the badge of his ancient faith.”¹⁴ Moreover, as the historian Edward Bristow notes in his excellent study of Jews and the white-slavery panics, anti-Semites often neglected to mention that most of the women victimized by Jewish procurers and traffickers were themselves Jewish, an omission that thereby fomented fears about Jews preying on Christian women and also echoed Sanger’s description of the ancient Israelites’ fondness for “foreign prostitutes.”¹⁵ As several observers have pointed out, such claims about Jewish pimps resonated with more general ideas about Jewish difference, greed, and sexual immorality.¹⁶

An even purer expression of the sexual anti-Semitism of the period was the claim, echoing Tacitus’s contention that Jews are “prone to lust,” that Jewish men—just like Dreiser’s Isadore Berchansky—harbor intense, uncontrollable sexual desires. Timayenis led the hateful charge, as usual, proclaiming in The American Jew (1888), “Next to his lust for money, the strongest passion in the Jew is his licentiousness.” He closes his chapter on “the licentious Jew” suggesting that “such is the insatiability of [the Jew’s] carnal appetites, and to such an extent does he give rein to his lasciviousness, that his debauches only too frequently exceed the ordinary limits of lust.”¹⁷ In other words, Timayenis suggests, hypertrophied Jewish sexuality leads inevitably to rape, child abuse, and murder. In this vision, a stereotypical Jewish economic exploiter, the sweatshop owner, could quickly be transformed into a sexual criminal: “Not long ago,” Timayenis claimed, “in New York, the officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children neatly trapped a Jew employer who was in the habit of inducing little girls under fourteen to remain after work-hours, and debauching them.”¹⁸ Two decades later, in a well-known case with uncannily similar details, Leo Frank, the superintendent of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, was accused of killing one of his thirteen-year-old employees, a girl named Mary Phagan. The suggestion that Frank was a sexual deviant, possibly a homosexual, whose lust for girls had led him to rape and murder Phagan, constituted a major tenet of his accusers’ case and of his unjust conviction and then played a part in the organization of a mob of Atlanta residents to kidnap and lynch him after he was granted clemency by the governor.¹⁹

Such visions of Jews as sexual predators and child molesters appeared not only in the rantings of populist anti-Semitic demagogues and mobs but also in popular and literary fiction written by European and American authors during the same period. H. Rider Haggard’s adventure tale Benita: An African Romance (1906) features a German Jew, Jacob Meyer, whose “insane passions” for riches and for the heroine’s body drive the novel’s plot. Like Svengali, the frightening Jewish antagonist of the wildly popular Trilby (1894), Meyer practices mind control that could gain him access to the body of the vulnerable heroine, Benita. “In the beginning,” she explains fearfully to her father, “Mr. Meyer only wanted the gold. Now he wants more, me as well as the gold. … I have read a good deal about this mesmerism, and seen it once or twice, and who knows? If once I allowed his mind to master my mind, although I hate him so much, I might become his slave.”²⁰ Linking visions of Jewish greed, lust, and mind control even more explicitly to the international white-slavery panic, Reginald Wright Kauffman’s muckraking novel House of Bondage (1910) begins with a Hungarian Jew who sexually exploits an innocent non-Jewish American girl. In the book’s first chapter, Max Crossman (“not my real name,” he says, “because I vas born in Hungary an’ nobody could say my real name ofer here”) lures a sixteen-year-old American girl named Mary Denbigh away from her parents’ small-town home with promises of urban luxury and then promptly sells her as a sexual “slave” to a brothel keeper.²¹

In the more prestigious literary culture of the period, similar Jewish sexual excesses tended to be more subtly represented or simply implied. This was not only a matter of delicacy or subtlety on the part of the writers, of course, but also an imposition of obscenity laws that reigned in the representation of sexuality. Still, many celebrated novels featured Jews who, like Haggard’s and Kauffman’s, combine acquisitiveness, vulgarity, and an extraordinary lust, especially directed toward young, non-Jewish women. Émile Zola’s Nana (1880) features a German Jewish banker, Steiner, whose desire for wealth, and skill for acquiring it, is exceeded only by his insatiable sexual lust:

The terrible German Jew, the great hatcher of businesses whose hands founded millions, became quite a fool whenever he had a hankering after a woman; and he wanted them all. One could never appear at a theatre but he secured her, no matter at what price. The most incredible amounts were mentioned. Twice during his life had his furious appetite for the fair sex ruined him.²²

Zola does not particularly distinguish Steiner’s “furieux appétit des filles” from those of other non-Jewish characters entranced by Nana. Other portraits of Jews in Zola’s fiction, and his reaction to the Dreyfus affair, exculpate him from any reductive claims of anti-Semitism, but Steiner, a Jew prone to extreme lust, nevertheless reproduces a common stereotype of Jewish sexual deviance.

Other characters followed suit in the naturalist American fiction inspired by Zola’s example. Simon Rosedale, the “plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type” in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), for one familiar case, conflates his economic desires with sexual ones. “If I could get Paul Morpeth to paint [Lily Bart] like that,” he is reported to say, almost as if acknowledging the financial possibilities of erotic portraiture, “the picture’d appreciate a hundred per cent in ten years.” Of course, Rosedale, unlike Zola’s Steiner, finally prioritizes his financial and social aspirations over his sexual desires, agreeing with Lily that his “idea of good friends” would be “making love to [her] without asking [her] to marry [him].”²³ While it must be noted that Zola’s and Wharton’s multifaceted literary characters can be read in multiple ways, and to dismiss Rosedale or Steiner as anti-Semitic caricatures would be a reductive mistake,²⁴ it is difficult to deny that these authors traffic in representations of Jewish lust that overlap with the stereotypical characters of Haggard’s Benita, Kauffman’s House of Bondage, and even Timayenis’s hateful screeds.²⁵

Modernist and Sexological Defenses of Jewish Sexuality

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