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Source:
https://www.jewishquarterly.org/issuearchive/articled325.html?articleid=38
Nathan Abrams on
Jews in the American porn industry
Nathan Abrams
| Winter 2004 - Number 196
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
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’.
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. 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 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.
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. 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. 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. 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’.
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. 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.
In search of a buck
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. 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, 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.
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.’
Secular sex
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.
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,
"there are thousands of people searching for Jewish porn. After things
like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish
festivals comes ‘Jewish porn’ in the list of top search keywords that
GoTo.com provide".
Sexual rebels
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 schtupping the Catholic shiksa.
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.’
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. Those Jewish women who have sex onscreen certainly
stand in sharp contradiction to the stereotype of the ‘Jewish American
Princess’. 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
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’. 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.’ 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.
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. 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.
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):
"Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went down to an
audition for an X-rated film with my hair down to my ass, a copy of
Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work,
'love and sex'."
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.
What are we ashamed
of?
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.
Meanwhile, in
Israel...
Source:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/ministers-vote-to-keep-lists-of-users-who-access-porn-online-1.5455056
Israeli Ministers
Vote to Keep Lists of Users Who Access Porn Online
Government-backed bill would filter sites deemed offensive by default.
The block would only be removed at the customer's request.
Jonathan Lis
Oct 31, 2016 9:10 AM
A ministerial panel on Sunday voted to give government backing to a
bill that would require internet service providers to block access to
pornographic websites, as well as other sites defined as offensive, by
default.
To remove the block, a customer will be required to contact the
internet provider. If approved, the bill would result in the creation
of lists of internet users requesting access pornographic sites.
The bill is sponsored by 26 Knesset members from parties across the
political divide. Only MKs from Meretz refused to support the proposed
law.
This is not the first attempt to pass such a law: Five similar bills
were introduced in the past three Knessets, but none advanced. Two
similar bills have been introduced in this Knesset alone. The present
initiative is expected to receive a large majority in the Knesset due
to widespread support from both the governing coalition and opposition
parties.
The bill’s chief sponsor is MK Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Habayit Hayehudi),
along with MKs from the Zionist Union, Kulanu, Joint List, Yesh Atid,
Shas, United Torah Judaism, Yisrael Beiteinu, Habayit Hayehudi and
Likud.
The bill would require ISPs to supply a free-of-charge filter against
offensive websites and content. Any customer wishing to remove the
filter will be required to make a request in writing, by telephone or
through the company’s website.
“The damaging influence of watching, and addiction to, pornographic and
severe violence has been proven in many studies, with great harm to
children. Today, it is easier for a child to consume harsh content on
the internet than to buy an ice cream at the local kiosk,” said
Moalem-Refaeli. “We must prevent such access by making the default of
the internet provider to filter such content, unless the customer has
asked to be exposed to it,” she added.
MK Miki Zohar (Likud), who sponsored a similar bill, attacked Justice
Minister Ayelet Shaked, who is the chairwoman of the Ministerial
Committee for Legislation, after members rejected his bill in favor of
Moalem-Refaeli’s. Zohar said on Sunday that Shaked – also a member of
Habayit Hayehudi – acted hypocritically to steal the credit from Likud.
Attorney Jonathan Klinger from the Digital Rights Movement warns
against such a bill. "The Ministerial Committee for Legislation today
added the State of Israel to a list of countries that censor the
internet, joining China, Iran, Turkey and other non-democratic
countries," he said on Sunday. "Under the guise of protecting children,
the state promotes invasion of privacy by creating a database of
blacklists of those interested in full-access internet, while creating
expensive and inefficient filters that will harm the population."
Source:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/israel-bans-tv-pornography
Thu Jul 11, 2002 -
12:15 pm EST
ISRAEL BANS TV PORNOGRAPHY
TEL AVIV, July 11, 2002 (LSN.ca) - The Israeli parliament has voted to
ban cable and satellite broadcasters from showing pornography. In a
striking display of unity across cultural and religious lines, Muslim
and Christian Arab members voted alongside conservative and religious
Jewish members to get the bill through. The measure adds cable
and satellite pay-per-view channels to the law after ordinary channels
were prohibited from transmitting pornography last year. The new law
will, however, allow pornographic material to be shown “if it has a
cultural, scientific or journalistic value, although it does not
stipulate who would decide,” the BBC points out. Opponents argued
that adults could be given digital cards to allow them to access
anything they want—ignoring the argument that some things are harmful
for adults to watch and degrade the wider culture by their mere
existence.
Supporters of the bill said pornography is “based on the exploitation
of women and children” and “encourages a slave trade in women.”
National Religious Party member Zevulun Orlev, the bill’s sponsor, said
the measure was not “religious” in motive or intended effect, “but
cultural and social”. For BBC News coverage see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_2121000/2121341.stm
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