'the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular
Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools'.
The standard **** scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of
schtupping the Catholic ****ksa.'
Triple-exthnics
Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American **** 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
dispro****tionate role throughout the adult film industry in America.
Jewish involvement in ****ography 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 **** industry divides into two (sometimes
overlapping) groups: ****ographers and performers. Though Jews make up
only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent
in ****ography. Many *****ca 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 *****ca,
1920-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),
'Jews were prominent in the distribution of gallantiana [fiction on
*****c themes and books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde
***ually explicit novels, *** pulps, ***ology, and flagitious
materials'.
In the postwar era, America's most notorious ****ographer was Reuben
Sturman, the 'Walt Disney of ****'. According to the US Department of
Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the
****ography 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 *** magazines produced twenty times the revenue of
comic books, he moved exclusively into ****, 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 contem****ary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish
Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as 'the Donald Trump
of ****o'. The link between the two is Steve's father, Fred, who was a
stockbroker-***-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid
Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the ****
world, the top producer of 'adult' films in the US. His specialty was
to im****t mainstream marketing techniques into the **** business.
Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and
1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to **** 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 **** 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 **** stars. The 51-
year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in
Flu****ng, 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 ****omentary about his life, **** Star:
The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish male ****
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 =A37.99 (including delivery), the lucky listener gets to
enjoy Jeremy's hand-picked favourite ****o 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 **** 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 **** 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 **** 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 ****, 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 **** 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 ****ographers 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 **** 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 ****-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 **** for the
money. As ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, 'Those
Jews who enter the ****ography industry have done so as individuals
pursuing the American dream.'
Secular ***
Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter **** do not usually
do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of the
performers and ****ographers 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, **** films have overtly Jewish themes, although
Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish **** stars together to make a
kosher **** film. The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina
Hartley plays a ***ually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys ***
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 ****. After things
like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish
festivals comes 'Jewish ****' in the list of top search keywords that
GoTo.com provide".
***ual rebels
Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why Jews in
particular have become involved in ****? 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 ***uality, the
***uality 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 **** scenario became as
a result a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic ****ksa.
Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and **** gossipmonger Luke Ford explains
on his website (lukeford.net): '**** 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 ***
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 *** 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 ****o 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 cir***stances. 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.
***ual 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 **** 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, ***ual gadflies to the
puritanical beast'. Jewish involvement in ****, 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 **** 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
****ography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We
don't believe in authoritarianism.' ****ography 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. **** is no
longer of the 'what the Butler saw' voyeuristic type; instead, it is
driven to new extremes of ****trayal that stretch the boundaries of the
**** aesthetic. As new ***ual positions are ****trayed, 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 ***ual rather than
leftist politics. Just as Jews have been dispro****tionately
represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also
dispro****tionately represented in the **** industry. Jews in America
have been ***ual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on
***ual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the
movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of *** were
Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the ***ual 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 ***, while Marcuse prophesied that
a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve ***ual
satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the 'beautiful cultural consequences'
that would follow from legalizing ****ography: it would 'ennoble all
our art' and 'humanize ***uality'. Pacheco was one Jewish **** 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 ***ual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work,
'love and ***'."
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 ***ual experimentation'. Overall, then, ****
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
****ographers 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 ***,
why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the **** 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.
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=3D38
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