Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

by Josh Lambert

Overview

Winner of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award presented by the Association for Jewish Studies


Jews have played an integral role in the history of obscenity in America. For most of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and editors led the charge against obscenity laws. Jewish lawyers battled literary censorship even when their non-Jewish counterparts refused to do so, and they won court decisions in favor of texts including Ulysses, A Howl, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer. Jewish literary critics have provided some of the most influential courtroom testimony on behalf of freedom of expression.

The anti-Semitic stereotype of the lascivious Jew has made many historians hesitant to draw a direct link between Jewishness and obscenity. In Unclean Lips, Josh Lambert addresses the Jewishness of participants in obscenity controversies in the U.S. directly, exploring the transformative roles played by a host of neglected figures in the development of modern and postmodern American culture.

The diversity of American Jewry means that there is no single explanation for Jews' interventions in this field. Rejecting generalizations, this book offers case studies that pair cultural histories with close readings of both contested texts and trial transcripts to reveal the ways in which specific engagements with obscenity mattered to particular American Jews at discrete historical moments.

Reading American culture from Theodore Dreiser and Henry Miller to Curb Your Enthusiasm and FCC v. Fox, Unclean Lips analyzes the variable historical and cultural factors that account for the central role Jews have played in the struggles over obscenity and censorship in the modern United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479876433
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/25/2013
Series:	Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History , #10
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Josh Lambert is Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English at Wellesley College. He is author of one book and numerous articles, including Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (NYU Press, 2013); “Publishing Jews at Knopf” in Book History, Vol. 21 (Johns
Hopkins UniversityPress, 2018); and “Fictions of Anti-Semitism and the Beginnings of Holocaust Literature” in American Literature in Transition, 1940-
1950 (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2017). Selected as he has expertise on Yiddish publishing in the US and has similarly addressed Jewish writers who have influenced the development of modern American culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Sexual Anti-Semitism and Pornotopia: Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, and The Harrad Experiment
2 The Prestige of Dirty Words and Pictures: Horace Liveright, Henry Roth, and the Graphic Novel
3 Otherfuckers and Motherfuckers: Reproduction and Allegory in Philip Roth and Adele Wiseman
4 Seductive Modesty: Censorship versus Yiddish and Orthodox Tsnies
Conclusion: Dirty Jews and the Christian Right: Larry David and FCC v. Fox
Notes
Index
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

10/07/2013
Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, explores the significant role played by American Jews in the fight to end obscenity censorship. He looks at such varied figures as publisher Horace Liveright, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, ACLU attorney Harriet Pilpel, novelist Philip Roth, and comedian and TV star Larry David. In the 1920s, motives for fighting obscenity laws was to build “cultural capital” by engaging in, publishing, or defending the frank, explicit writing of such modernist heroes as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. During the 1930s and early ’40s, battles against sexual repression stemmed from a critique of the role it was viewed as having played in the rise of Nazism. Lambert’s last, and most interesting, chapter deals not with obscenity, but rather the focus on modesty by some Orthodox writers and thinkers, noting a paradox in, for instance, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s writing quite explicitly about sexual immodesty in his advocacy of the opposite. Although Lambert is prone to overly complex, run-on sentences, in general he presents what is engaging material, demonstrating how “taboo words and explicit representations of sex were meaningful to American Jews during the 20th-century... in contingent and historically specific ways.” (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"[] Lambert has written a lively account of a little-known history that deserves a wide audience."

The Historian

"Who would have thought that some American Jews at the dawn of this century supported 'smutty' literature as a way of entering exclusive cultural circles, rather than getting thrown out? This is just one of the many surprising, strange and fascinating pieces of literary history found in Josh Lambert's detailed chronicle of Jews and obscenity in America, Unclean Lips."

Lilith - Sarah Seltzer

"Lambert is to be congratulated on skillfully steering between the two rocks and producing a detailed and balanced picture that considers both legal and literary questions . . . . This book is an interesting and well-informed study of a fascinating subject."

Journal of Contemporary Religion

"The strength in his argument is not only in finding social meaning in smut but also in moving beyond the ready cliches of Jewish marginalization to an astute recognition of Jewish power. Lambert discovers in obscene speech, beyond its associations with subversion and marginality, the ability to arouse attention, confer status, and create capital."

The Chronicle of Higher Education - Naomi Seidman

"In his study, Lambert, a professor of English, provides new angles on the connection of Jews and obscenity, as well as that connection's surprising relationships to eternal questions about Jewish difference: does it exist? what is it? and wherefore?"

Religion Dispatches - Rachel Gordan

"Josh Lambert breaks new ground in his complex, original, and important work on Jews and obscenity. His story weaves together Jewish publishers, writers, birth control crusaders, Orthodox advocates for modesty, and comedians as well as non Jews writing about Jews. He recenters debates about obscenity on Jewishness, as well as centering them within American Jewish culture. Unclean Lips is a timely and fascinating study of American culture itself."

Riv-Ellen Prell

"This is a well-written, at times playful, book and is accessible for readers who are familiar with some but not all of the discussed texts. Lambert evidently enjoyed reading, thinking, and writing about his source materials...Thoroughly researched and thoughtful volume."

The American Jewish Archives Journal

"Josh Lambert'sUnclean Lipsis brilliant not only for its erudition and wit but also for the freshness and originality of its insights into the critical role that Jews have played in the history of American obscenity. Lambert takes the anti-Semitic canard that Jews are a people of unclean lips with a perverse obsession with obscenity and explores both the harm done to Jews charged with obscenity and the ways Jews in different eras have exploited their relationship with obscenity to gain cultural capital and to advance themselves individually and as a marginalized group."

The Journal of American History

"Josh Lambert undermines many cliches about Jews, obscenity, and even 'sexual anti-Semitism' in this engrossing book. He brilliantly navigates us through many episodes of sexual representation, some familiar, some quite unexpected, along with the social and legal conflicts that surrounded them. Lucidly written and arduously researched, this is an exceptional work of cultural history."

Morris Dickstein

"[H]e presents what is engaging material, demonstrating how 'taboo words and explicit representations of sex were meaningful to American Jews during the 20th-century... in contingent and historically specific ways.'"-Publishers Weekly,

From the Publisher