In Defense of Obscenity: Josh Lambert’s Unclean Lips

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EM: The stereotype of the “dirty Jew” is what seems to propel Unclean Lips, as well as the relationship of Jewish obscenity to anti-Semitism. What draws you to studying this history? Does your Jewish experience or background inform your interests?

JL: I was lucky to grow up in a time and place—in the Toronto Jewish community in the 1980s—in which I was exposed to almost no anti-Semitism of any kind. I think growing up in a large, connected, and supportive Jewish community, attending excellent Jewish schools and camps, has shaped me profoundly as a Jewish Studies scholar. Like the porn star James Deen, I grew up questioning my rabbis, and I was always praised for doing so. That’s maybe one reason that, as a scholar, I don’t hesitate to deal with subjects that previous generations of scholars might have found threatening.

EM: Who would you say is your favorite unclean-lipped author, or what do you think is the most pivotal or interesting obscenity case and why?

JL: The most fascinating works of literature aren’t always at issue in the most legally influential cases, so I’m going to give two answers.

If I had to choose one author who deals with Jewishness and obscenity, it would always be Adele Wiseman. Her novel, Crackpot, is just incredible, and truly baffling—it’s brutal, and difficult to read at times, and marvelously brave. I don’t think there’s a more open-hearted, complex portrait of a sex worker in modern literature.

If I had to choose one case, it would be Roth v. US (1957). That’s the most important legal precedent for everything that happened in terms of sexual representation in the 1960s and beyond, and the opinion that Jerome Frank wrote—which spurred the Supreme Court to reconsider obscenity—is absolutely fascinating. And the defendant, Sam Roth, was a character who would not be plausible in fiction: he was a Zionist poet, a publisher of James Joyce, a mystic who communed with Jesus, a leading anti-Semite, and a convicted pornographer. Jay Gertzman just wrote an excellent biography of Roth called Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist.

EM: You also write wonderful pieces for Tablet Magazine, primarily centered around these Dirty Jews (the late Al Goldstein of Screw and Sarah Silverman). How do Jewish smut and Jewish comedy connect?

JL: Obscenity is absolutely crucial in modern comedy, and there are many Jewish comedians who do amazing and important (and sometimes disturbing things) with sex. But I don’t think Jewish comics have any stronger relationship to obscenity than non-Jews. For every Lenny Bruce there’s a George Carlin and a Richard Pryor.

EM: Although there is no single explanation for why American Jews were involved in the history of obscenity, do Jews understand sexuality differently than other groups of people? Are there marked differences in the ways that secular and religious Jews approach sex?

JL: As you can tell from the book, I resist generalizations about American Jews. It’s one thing to ask whether Judaism, the religion—or, perhaps more usefully, one particular denomination or tradition of thought in Judaism—has a specific and distinct perspective on sexuality. That might be true, or at least it’s worth talking about. But from everything I’ve read and seen, you can’t predict how prudish or exuberant a person will be, when it comes to sexuality, on the basis of his or her religious, ethnic, or racial background. Almost every family I know has some members who are more open, and some members who are more squeamish about sex—and if we can’t generalize about the members of a single family, how could we generalize about all American Jews?

If I’d hazard a generalization about the difference between secular and religious Jews (both of which are also huge, complex categories), it would just be, simply, that religious Jews are much more likely to see sexuality as sacred and with divinely-ordained limits. But that’s basically a tautology—it’s like saying that religious Jews will think about sex religiously.

EM: In addition to writing and teaching, you are also the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center. Could you describe the kinds of sexual expression one might encounter in Yiddish language texts?

JL: There are so many fascinating treatments of sex in Yiddish literature—this deserves a book of its own!—but I’ll mention a few examples. Celia Dropkin’s poems radiate a delicious, dangerous, intense sexuality, using violent images; I love “The Circus Dame,” for example. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories are dazzlingly open to the diversity of human sexual expression, but often view sex as sinful; so you’ll get a story like “Yentl,” which is about an F2M trans guy, but remains ambivalent and rather weepy about his predicament. In Yehoshue Perle’s wonderful novel Yidn fun a gants yor (Everyday Jews), rumors circulate that the neighborhood whore “loudly say[s] her prayers” (in Yiddish, “leyent zi hoikh krias-shma”) with the “wealthy landowners” who visit her: here the metaphor for exuberant sexuality is the recitation of prayer.

EM: Do you foresee a future or clear trajectory for the Jews in relation to obscenity?

JL: It’s impossible to predict. Various forms of obscenity have already been used by formerly religious Jews to criticize the ultra-Orthodox community (I’m thinking of Shalom Auslander here) and I imagine that will continue and perhaps intensify in the coming years. There will almost certainly be increasingly prominent debates in the coming years, too, about the way the sexuality of adolescents is regulated by the law in America. I imagine Jews and Jewishness might factor into those debates (recently, scholars have voiced suspicion that the paradigmatic hebephile, Humbert Humbert, might be a jew, and one of the old anti-Semitic claims about Jews is that the Talmud condones pedophilia). But who knows how Jewish thinkers, writers, and organizations, or anti-Semites, will engage in these debates as they develop?

EM: What role do you think Jewrotica plays in the understanding of Jewish obscenity or sexuality?

JL: Here’s the role that I hope Jewrotica can play: I hope it can expose readers to the complexity and diversity of Jews’ sexualities, and help to connect contemporary Jews’ experiences of sexuality with the long, strange history of Jewish thinking about bodies. And of course I hope it helps Jews who are thinking seriously and deeply about sex feel that they have a community and forum in which to be heard.

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Managing Editor of Jewrotica, Emma moonlights as a librarian. She also writes Jewish horoscopes, short stories, essays and a supernatural noir novella.