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Reading the fuzzy line between pornography and eroticism
Jews & Sex. Edited
By Nathan Abrams.
Five Leaves £12.99. order this book
SEX wasn’t something you talked about in nice Jewish households when I was growing up. But like Woody Allen says, you tended to practise it on your own.
Ever since God said “Go forth and multiply” Jews have been standard-bearers for sex, according to academic Nathan Abrams, who has edited a new collection of essays entitled Jews & Sex.
For example, as well as dominating the Hollywood film industry, there’s a huge Jewish presence in pornography. There’s a suggestion that great Jewish thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich may have heralded the so-called 1960s sex revolution.
On a lighter note, how many know that in 1959 a Jewish woman invented the most famous girls’ toy of the 20th century – the bosomy Barbie doll? Or that that there’s a growing interest in the Yiddish community in previously taboo lesbian poetry? I can imagine how my old granny would have responded to that one.
Mr Abrams, who lectures on film at Bangor University, has assembled essayists writing on Jewish erotic poetry, sex in contemporary British Jewish novels, and homosexuality in Israeli society. Then there’s “vaginal voyages” and sexuality and the Jewish female body.
For those fed up with the male macho stereotypes there’s an appraisal of Woody Allen, “feminised Jewish male”, as an intellectual sex symbol for a generation of post-war, college-educated “neurotic” Americans.
There are a few jokes, thank goodness, in the Allen chapter. Like the very thin girl who had her nose lifted by a golf pro. There’s the Jew who was married by a Reform Rabbi, “a very Reform Rabbi – he was a Nazi”. The couple celebrated with “chicken Himmler” soup.
On the serious side, Jews have their fair share of extreme forms of behaviour. The religious Hassidic woman’s idea of modesty and purity is to shave off her hair and then, bizarrely, wear a wig. At the same time she is prohibited from wearing clothing that may reveal the shape of her body and thus must wear long dresses or skirts.
The chapter “Polymorphous and Perverse: Sex in Contemporary British Jewish Novels,” examines the work of Linda Grant, Howard Jacobson, Adam Thirlwell and Naomi Alderman. Grant is described as tending to “reaffirm gender stereotypes” in one novel while Jacobson explores the “fuzzy line between pornography and eroticism”. Naomi Alderman’s award-winning debut novel Disobedience deals with a lesbian character trying to relate to a “repressed” Orthodox Jewish community in Golders Green, who manage to combine the British “stiff upper lip” with the “Jewish fear of being noticed”.
The book reveals other Jewish figures like Annie Spinkle, an American self-confessed porn star and prostitute turned sex guru and performance artist. Her one-woman shows include titles like “A public cervix announcement” and a “bosom ballet”.
Mr Abrams grew up in Highgate and attended the Jewish Free School when it was based in Camden. “It all started with an essay I wrote for the Jewish Quarterly on pornography and then my publisher contacted me about doing a book,” he said. “Let’s face it, everyone is interested in sex, but little has been written about the subject and Jews. I think people are pretty open-minded these days so it shouldn’t cause offence.”
PETER GRUNER
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