Those who are in denial that Jews play a big role in the **** industry in
the US.
From the Jewish Quarterly
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=38
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
£7.99 (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.
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