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January 30, 2009
Exploring Jewish sex
British work is an uneven collection of essays.
FAITH JONES
This is the fourth in a monthly series co-ordinated by the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library and the Jewish Independent, featuring local community members reviewing books that they have recently read.
Jewish sex is as varied as Jews themselves, which is why it is a little surprising to find a book in this day and age called simply Jews & Sex. And, indeed, editor Nathan Abrams sets out to cover it soup to nuts – or, we might say, Shulkhan Arukh to Annie Sprinkle – in about 200 pages. Good value for the money, I suppose, but the result is a scattershot volume, a bit short on connections between the topics and greatly varying in quality from essay to essay.
The book was published in England (Five Leaves, 2008), and a number of the essays focus on British topics. This is a good thing, as it introduces the element of surprise for those who are more familiar with the North American Jewish experience. I knew, for example, that London's East End was the traditional home of the Jewish immigrant masses. What I didn't realize before reading this book is that it is also the home of the porn, stripping and burlesque industries, and that there is still a Jewish presence in that world.
Another essay examines the difficulty English society had in creating a dominant representation of Jews, because of two conflicting stories about Jewish sexuality. In one eugenic narrative, Jews are sexually healthy because of their presumed refusal to procreate with non-Jews: Nothing to worry about folks, the Jews will not contaminate us! But against that stands the sometimes-vicious depiction of Jews as prostitutes, procurers and corrupters of Christian womanhood. "With remarkable inconsistency," author Gavin Schaffer writes, "Jews have been labelled at different moments as sexually pure and sexually amoral, as corrupted and as hygienic, as predatory and as clannish."
A large number of the essays are film criticism, and this preponderance skews the volume somewhat. While some of these pieces are interesting, it is hard to be that interested in deep analyses of films you haven't seen. The writers have to describe images and visual impressions, which only weakens their effect. Several of the Israeli films described at length have never been shown in regular release in Vancouver – you would really have to seek them out. On the other hand, the obligatory essay on Woody Allen suffers from overexposure, if you will. There just isn't that much left to say and it sometimes seems that only the fascination Jewish men feel for other Jewish men keeps him in the conversation at all.
Of the film essays, I thought Judith Lewin's examination of the 1998 British movie The Governess was quite good. This movie seems to have left little impression on Jewish culture, but it deserves a more serious look. The heroine in this film, Lewin posits, is a response to the Jewess of George Eliot novels, as well as historical figures such as Sarah Bernhardt. Lewin's analysis shows how Jewishness re-writes the narrative of 19th-century women. In general, though, the film essays are a bit, uh, limp.
Abrams' own contribution to the volume relates to Jews in the porn industry. He is careful in his assessment of it. Do we really know how many Jewish people are involved? How can we judge the wildly varying numbers given (12 per cent in one account; 50 per cent in another)? He cautions us to be wary of each of the two main sources for information: one that serves to use the presence of Jews in porn as a further anti-Semitic excuse and the less obvious but equally problematic focus on smart, liberated, freely participating Jewish porn stars, which is put forward by the most vocal participants in the industry themselves. Abrams is equally unimpressed with the response of mainstream Jewish community organizations that simply distance themselves from the issue by claiming that Jews in the porn industry are simply individuals who do not represent Jewishness in any way. If Jews are in porn, Abrams insists, we should try to understand how many, why and with what cultural effect.
For me, the highlight of the volume was Hinde Ena Burstin's essay about what she terms "lesbo-sensuous Yiddish poetry." In 10 years of studying Yiddish literature, I have come across almost no same-sex eroticism, and absolutely no scholarship on the topic. Since it is a first, preliminary work on the subject, Burstin draws almost no conclusion from these works, other than as an affirmation that same-sex love, lust and relationships apparently existed in Jewish communities in earlier times, no matter how concealed. Which goes to show that there are still many unexplored areas to investigate further – and many more Jewish sexualities than we understand even yet.
Faith Jones is electronic resources librarian at Simon Fraser University. She previously worked as Yiddish bibliographer in the Jewish division of the New York Public Library.
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