|
|
Nathan Abrams on Jews in the
American porn industry
A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin,
the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the
‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from
the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to
play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry
in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history
in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe
subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana.
These are the ‘true blue Jews’.
|
| |
|
Smut Peddlers And Artists
Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes
overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews
make up only two per cent of the American population, they have
been prominent in pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book
trade between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin.
According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of Bookleggers and
Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ‘Jews were prominent in
the distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and
books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually explicit
novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials’.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
The 'Walt Disney' Of Porn
In the postwar era, America’s
most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the ‘Walt Disney
of Porn’. According to the US Department of Justice, throughout
the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography circulating
in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland’s East
Side.
|
| |
|
He Soon Had Hundreds Of
Book Stores
Initially, he sold comics
and magazines, but when he realized sex magazines produced
twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively
into porn, eventually producing his own titles and setting up
retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the
top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned
over 200 adult bookstores.
|
 |
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Sturman Introduced The 'Glory
Booth' At His Porn Shops
I Sturman also introduced
updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth (typically
a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can
view X-rated videos). It was said that Sturman did not simply
control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the industry.
Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes
and died, disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David,
continued running the family business.
|
| |
|
|
Steven Hirsh Is Today's Porn
Kingpin
The contemporary incarnation of
Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has
been described as ‘the Donald Trump of porno’. The link between
the two is Steve’s father, Fred, who was a
stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman.
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
His Poppa Is Part Of The
Business
The link between the two is
Steve’s father, Fred, who was a stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to
Sturman.
|
| |
|
| |
|
This Is A Big Business
Today Hirsch runs the Vivid
Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of
the porn world, the top producer of ‘adult’ films in the US.
His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques
into the porn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood
studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in its
exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by
Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality
TV show recently broadcast on Channel 4.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
Nice Jewish Girls And Boys
Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well as
a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies of the 1970s and
‘80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the
trade as ‘the Hedgehog’, Jeremy is one of America’s biggest porn
stars. The 51-year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class
Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, and has since appeared in more
than 1,600 adult movies, as well as directing over 100.
|
|
Men Felt Liberated
Jeremy has achieved iconic
status in America, a hero to males of all ages, Jewish and
gentile alike - he’s the nebbischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy who
gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of
a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the
traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar
he.
|
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
 |
Young Israelis Adored Him
His stature was recently
cemented with the release of a pornomentary about his life,
Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most
famous Jewish male porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the
psyche of Jewish men in America. Jeremy has also just released
a compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. For £7.99 (including
delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy Jeremy’s
hand-picked favourite porno grooves along with narration by
‘the legend’ himself. As the publicity blurb gushes, ‘Out of
the brown paper wrappings and into the mainstream’.
|
| |
|
|
Today's Porn Star
Seymore Butts,
aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is not: young,
handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old New York Jew, opened a
gym in 1991 in Los Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a
video camera for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited
a woman, then headed back to his gym and started shooting.
Although the movie stank, with a bit of chutzpah and a few
business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer and started
cranking out films.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
His Buddies From The Gym
Within a few years, ‘Seymore
Butts’ – his nom de porn which is simultaneously his sales
pitch – became one of the largest franchises in the adult-film
business. As the king of the gonzo genre (marked by handheld
cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a low-tech aesthetic
meant to suggest reality), he is today probably the most
famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company,
releases about 36 films annually, most of them shot for less
than $15,000, each of them grossing more than 10 times that
sum. Glasser employs 12 people, including his mother and
cousin Stevie as respectively genial company accountant (and
matchmaker for her single son) and lovable but roguish general
gopher. Glasser currently even has his own reality TV show (also
broadcast on Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family
Business, whose opening credits show Glasser’s barmitzvah
photo.
|
| |
|
| |
|
They Brought Porn From
Eastern Europe
Jews became involved in the
porn industry for much the same reasons that their
co-religionists became involved in Hollywood. They were
attracted to an industry primarily because it admitted them.
Its newness meant that restrictive barriers had not yet been
erected, as they had in so many other areas of American life.
In porn, there was no discrimination against Jews.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
In search of a buck
During the early part of the twentieth century, an entrepreneur
did not require large sums of money to make a start in the film
business; cinema was considered a passing fad. In the porn
business, it was similarly straightforward to get going. To show
‘stag’ movies or loops, as they were known, all one needed was a
projector, screen and a few chairs. Not tied up with the status
quo and with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were open to new
ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that
|
| |
|
Jews Have Run This Since The
Beginning Of Time
"Jews, when they found
themselves excluded from a field of endeavour, turned to a
profession in which they sensed they could eventually thrive by
cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews
have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents
of middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities".
The adult entertainment business required something that Jews
possessed in abundance: chutzpah. Early Jewish pornographers were
marketing geniuses and ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness,
intelligence and boundless self-confidence were responsible for
their successes.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
The 'Off-Color' Hollywood
Of course, the large number of
Jews in porn were mainly motivated by the desire to make profits.
Just as their counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream factory
for Americans, a blank screen upon which the Jewish moguls’
visions of America could be created and projected, so the
porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public tastes.
What better way to provide the stuff of dreams and fantasies than
through the adult-entertainment industry? Performers did porn for
the money. As ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented,
‘Those Jews who enter the pornography industry have done so as
individuals pursuing the American dream.’
|
| |
|
Porn Now Pushes The Jewish
American Princess
Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn do not
usually do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of
the performers and pornographers are Jewish culturally but not
religiously. Many are entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman,
however, identified as a Jew - he was a generous donator to Jewish
charities - and performer Richard Pacheco once interviewed to be a
rabbinical student.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
Nina Still Works The
Adult Shows
Very few, if any, porn films
have overtly Jewish themes, although Jeremy once tried to get
several Jewish porn stars together to make a kosher porn film.
The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina Hartley
plays a sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex
with anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well,
spawned a couple of sequels and is currently very hard to buy
- perhaps indicating a new niche to exploit. Indeed, according
to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish Students website,
|
| |
|
| |
|
Young Girls Adulate
This Trash
The young Yenta crowd
from Brandeis considers it 'Womens lib'.
7
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
The Fun Of Schtupping A
Shiksa
Is there a deeper reason, beyond
the mere financial, as to why Jews in particular have become
involved in porn? There is surely an element of rebellion in
Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden nature
serves to make it attractive. As I written in these pages before,
treyf signifies ‘the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the
sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to
lie . . .’ (‘Reel Kashrut: Jewish food in film’, JQ 189 [Spring
2003]).
According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael
Jones in the magazine Culture Wars (May 2003), ‘the leading male
performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings
and the females from Roman Catholic day schools’. The standard
porn scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of sthe Catholic
shiksa.
|
| |
|
Web Cams Anyone?
Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and
porn gossipmonger Luke Ford explains on his website (lukeford.net):
‘Porn is just one expression of [the] rebellion against standards,
against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a
Jew living Judaism.’ It is also a revolt against (often
middle-class) parents who wish their children to be lawyers,
doctors and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr put it on the
same website, ‘It’s an “up yours” to the uncles with the pinky
rings who got down on me as a kid for wanting to be musician.’
|
 |
| |
|
 |
The Girls Come Out Of The
Closet
As religious influences waned
and were replaced by secular ones,
free-thinking Jews,
especially those from California’s Bay Area, viewed sex as a means
of personal and political liberation. America provided the freest
society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the growth of the
adult industry.
|
|
| |
|
The Stigma Of Bisexual
Intercourse Is Gone
Those Jewish women who have
sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp contradiction to the
stereotype of the ‘Jewish American Princess’.
|
 |
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
The Feminist Movement
They (and I’m speculating
here) may have seen themselves as fulfilling the promise of
liberation, emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty
Friedan in 1963 called the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of
the household as they set out into the Promised Land of the
porno sets of Southern California. It signified their economic
and social freedom: they were free to choose to enter, rather
than coerced into it by economic and other circumstances. Once
they had lain down, they could stand on their own two feet,
particularly as female performers typically earn twice as much
as their male counterparts.
|
| |
|
|
Sexual Revolutionaries Or
Porn Peddlers?
Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated
industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire
WASP establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves
as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian
America and secular humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated
actors often brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual
gadflies to the puritanical beast’.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
Seeing Women As Sexual
Toys
Jewish involvement in porn,
by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of
Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant
culture in America by moral subversion. Astyr remembers having
‘to run or fight for it in grammar school because I was a Jew.
It could very well be that part of my porn career is an “up
yours” to these people’. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw,
said (on lukeford.net), ‘The only reason that Jews are in
pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism
sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.’
|
| |
|
The Thrill Of Shiksas
Pornography thus becomes a
way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the
very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt
consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character
becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the ‘what the
Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new
extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn
aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire
to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear.
|
 |
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Look To Freud
It is a case of the traditional
revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being
channelled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews
have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over
the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the
porn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries.
|
|
Freud Took An Unnatural
Interest in His Daughter
Goodman wrote of the
‘beautiful cultural consequences’ that would follow from
legalizing pornography: it would ‘ennoble all our art’ and
‘humanize sexuality’. Pacheco was one Jewish porn star who
read Reich’s intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx (lukeford.net):
|
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
 |
The Famous Jewish Writers
A large amount of the
material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at
the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a
more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the
vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich,
Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and
Lenin as required revolutionary reading. Reich’s central
preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse
prophesied that a socialist utopia would free individuals to
achieve sexual satisfaction.
|
| |
|
|
We Must Not Be Ruled By The
Torah
As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put
it (E. Michael Jones, ‘Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos’
Culture Wars, May 2003), ‘Jewish rebellion has broken out on
several levels’, one being ‘the prominent role of Jews as
advocates to sexual experimentation’. Overall, then, porn
performers are a group of people who praise rebellion,
self-fulfilment and promiscuity.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
The Thrill Of A White Woman
This brief overview and analysis
of the role and motivations behind pornographers and performers is
intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American Jewish
popular culture. Little has been written about it. Books such as
Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America (New York:
Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the topic. And you can bet that the
350th anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in the United States
did not include any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this
field. Even the usually tolerant Time Out New York has been too
prim to deal with it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb plans an
issue on it. In light of the relatively tolerant Jewish view of
sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the porn industry?
We might not like it, but the Jewish role in this field has been
significant and it is about time it was written about seriously.
Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the
University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book on
neo-conservatism in the United States.
|
| |
|
|
