Jewish pornography questions the limits of assimilation

Jewish pornography questions the limits of assimilation

By Joshua Cohen

New York Press — Volume 16, Issue 10 - 3/5/2003

A man gets drunk and lays down with his two virgin daughters. A man secures permission from his two wives to lay down with his two slave girls. A woman disguises herself as a whore and lays down with her father-in-law.

This is the original Jewish pornography, as found in the book of Genesis. But is it really Jewish Pornography? In typical Jewish fashion, the answer is yet another question: Would you masturbate to it?

Probably not. Why? The Tanakh—the Old Testament and the Jewish Scriptures—is full of incest and the taking of virgins. In a literature where the idea of “barely legal" has absolutely no meaning, scripture and pornography overlap more than you’d think.

But the Bible isn’t Jewish Porn. Philip Roth isn’t Jewish Porn, either. Al Goldstein isn’t Jewish Porn. Even Ron Jeremy—known to his proud mother as Ron Hyatt—isn’t Jewish Porn. Traci Lords—who would have been Nora Louise Kuzma at her bat mitzvah—is just another shaven screen starlet. She has nothing to do with Jewish Porn.

What of Playboy playmate Lindsey Vuolo? In the November 2001 issue, the 20-year-old Philadelphia-area co-ed identified herself as a Jew and included a photograph from her bat mitzvah. The media maydel became a joke for synagogue lobbies across America by inadvertently questioning the limits of assimilation in Jewish life. Playboy is not selling her religion, and neither is her religion selling magazines. Her tits are. Her ass is. Nobody’s jerking off to little Lindsey from the suburbs because she’s a Jewess, but because she’s hot.

Jewish Porn (JP) fetishizes Jewish women. In the Jew-run Vivid Video’s The Burning Bush… Hot, Jewish Babe Vivid, Sex Action, one can enjoy “4 Hrs. of Fiddling on the Roof!" Jeanna Fine, Sindee Cox, Melissa Monet, Nina Hartley (nee Hartman) and Alexandra Silk suck and fuck as in any film—the only difference is these girls are said to be Jewish.

But even this is a thin broth. For the real JP, head to the Web, where the pop-up windows accumulate thick like locusts. There you’ll find pornography about Jews made for Jews and their admirers to masturbate to, to enact the age-old sin of Onan, of the thirty-eighth chapter of Genesis.

In JP, as in other porn, large-breasted and well-tanned women pose and perform sexual acts. Except here, the women are Hebrews, recipients of the Law at Sinai, the women who sang with Miriam at the parting of the Red Sea, the women—brides and queens in religious imagery—who are metaphors for theShechinah, or Godhead, for the soul. At least that’s what they’re supposed to be.

The photos and movies emphasize the stereotype of heavy-breasted women with large noses, dark curly hair and unshaven genitals. They’re heavily made up and wear ostentatious jewelry—dangling amber necklaces and loud diamond rings. Their faces often twist into superior, snobbish sneers.

In some cases, these daughters of Sarah are screwed by uncircumcised men, and in bright-pink dialogue bubbles, they make much of how this religio-surgical fact would enrage their mothers. Their faux biographies profess a predilection for money. Consider the following website come-ons (inserting “[sic]" at will):

These babes are Pretty, Perky and Pareve
Young Yentas with big boobs
JAP’s getting down n’ dirty
Enough streaming video to make you PLOTZ
Rich New York chicks, raised in the lap of luxury, ready to feel a real man inside them.
Oy! Don’t tell their mommas what you see in here!
These aren’t the kind of girls you’d invite over for passover, But I wouldn’t mind spending a high holy day with any of them.
Fresh from a summer on the Kabutz these pretty little Jewish Coeds are ready for a little action and it shows! If their Rabbi’s find out about this there would be more than a little Jewish guilt to dish out!

At the Jewish Twin Sister Incest website, twin Jewish sisters can be seen “Washing, Posing, Spanking, Undressing, Bondage, Master Bating." All, it seems, without a trace of satire. The identical twins in question may be known to some New Yorkers—they’re Victoria and Marissa of the Sisters Grimm, the trash-rock band that appeared regularly at Coney Island High. Others may know them as Rocket and Leather from More Dirty Debutantes “88″ and other adult videos. In private, these nice Jewish girls—originally from Brooklyn—may smirk and giggle about their foray into porn, but there’s nary a wink on the site. They’re working the Jew angle hard, and make it clear that in order to see the goods, you must first sign up for Adult Check, the online porn industry’s standard pay system.

Does this contribute to anti-Semitism? Or is it just a convenient site for multi-fetishism? Where else can one find real twin Jewesses engaging in incestuous lesbianism with a touch of bondage and sadomasochism?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the spiritual guru who wrote the bestselling Kosher Sex. He has an excellent reputation in matters both religious and secular and his specialty is sex, so he seemed like the logical guy to consult about Jewish Porn. When asked about JP, he responded that he was “strongly opposed to any such thing" and had no time to comment further on it.

I interviewed 11 rabbis, none of whom had any idea that Jewish Pornography even exists. When I explained JP to them, they requested that their names not be included in this article. My own rabbi was one of them. His only comment: “You worry about Jewish pornography when your people die in Israel?" My own mother was shocked: “Don’t people hate us enough?" Among my friends, the reactions were predictable. The ones who had heard of Jewish Porn shared their favorite sites with me, while those who hadn’t were surprised. “You mean something like that actually exists?" one female friend asked.

David, a good Jew, observed: “It’s a strange thing. It’s more funny than erotic. I laugh and then I jerk off." But why does he choose it in the first place? Clues may be found in the Kabbalah, in which dualities of masculine and feminine are forever interpolated. Gershom Scholem, in Origins of Kabbalah, points out one of the most interesting dualities: the Double Sophia (represented ashokhmah), the bride and the daughter, one a “virgin of light" in the upper world of the pleroma. The other, lower Sophia “succumbed to the temptation of the hyle and fell from the pleroma into the lower worlds, where it is…in exile."

The Upper Sophia is often referred to as the “Wisdom of God," while the lower Sophia was known as the “Wisdom of Solomon"—or worldly knowledge. This is an interesting mirror of the Kabbalistic idea of Lilith and Eve. Lilith was the sinful temptress of Adam; she was the real first woman and she fell. She was replaced with Eve, a more innocent woman, whose “evil" was strictly an exterior matter—that famous piece of produce. Many Jewish men grow up assuming that they’ll fuck a Lilith and marry an Eve. Jewish Porn is the Lilith of the college Jew-boy.

Jewish Pornography is about Jewish women, and just as other specialty porn plays up stereotypes, so, too, does JP. Get beyond the JAP stereotypes ("Who says Jewish girls don’t give head?"asks more than one website), and you’ll find more subtle themes. For example, the modesty of the Orthodox.

On some websites, the women wear the single-female uniform of modern orthodoxy: ankle-length, dark-colored skirts and long-sleeved shirts, and sometimes wigs, or shaidels. This modesty is intended to render them more erotic than if they were naked. The Jewish idea of modesty, peeking through the mechitza of taboo, is related to another interesting subculture—Jewish submissives in the world of bondage and sadomasochism (BDSM). On one website, “m" writes: “as a Jewish female submissive I believe my worlds [Judaism and sex] still mesh quite well… Being and knowing I am submissive allows me to be more of me…and that is what being Jewish is about… For me, it is a pleasure and an honor to serve… And similar to Judaism, that is what BDSM is all about…respect."

This literate website is part of JPEX, the Jewish Power Exchange, a website and mailing list owned by one Princess Laya, who offers this explanation: “When the Hebrews were asked by Hashem if they would accept the Torah, they responded, Na’aseh V’Nishma, we will hear and we will do. The ultimate form of submission is to be willing to do the bidding of one’s Master with trust before receiving instructions."

Another recurring motif in JP is the idea of the Mikvah, the ritual bath, as it relates to a woman’s menstruation and the sacred purification process. One site suggests that a Mikvah is an excellent place to pick up Jew-girls. These aspects of Judaism are more than mere set pieces for masturbating. There is a deeper significance. If all male Jews died out, there would still be Jews, in a Talmudic sense. Jewish women are the hosts of the bloodline, the givers of the ethnicity. There are only more Jews because of Jewish women, so it’s not unnatural that they may be venerated and sexualized, admired as Jews first, women second. In consuming JP, are Jewish men driven by a fear of extinction?

From Upper West Side penthouses with views of the park to suburban living rooms, from hairy and bespectacled Jewish men to tanned, pre-rhinoplasty JAPs, Jewish Porn is a virtual homeland of neuroses, an Israel of the fetishized. One image that sticks in my head is a picture of Yarden Godowsky, one of the “Kosher Cuties" at cooldiggygirls.com who is “pretty, perk and pareve." In her own words: “I was born in Russia and now live in Ashdod, Israel. The one universal in my travels is my love of big boobs. It’s great to have DD’s."

She is pictured in what appears to be her Ashdod living room, crouching in a cutoff tank top and holding a hula hoop against patterned wallpaper. She has a boy’s haircut and lipstick as red as the first-plague Nile. She is a greenhorn, an immigrant, and this is her absorption. She is the classic intersection of laughter and seriousness in Jewish identity, updated for the new millennium.

JEwish Porn is hardly the only brand of religious smut on the market. Admirers of Catholic schoolgirls are legion, and Angry- White-Man-on-Muslim-Woman material has proliferated since the first Gulf War. The first has, for the most part, been stripped of its religious significance. They’re Catholic—so what? They’re being naughty—let’s hope they don’t tell Mother Superior. Most erotic is the discipline aspect and the recollection of childhood exploration. The second, anti-Muslim porn, is less about religion than it is the embodiment of directionless hate in the form of sexual violence. It’s about ripping off that burka to see what’s underneath. It’s about the myth of the Manifest White Dick exploring and Christianizing the heathens in Holy scrotum-water.

Likewise, Jewish Porn is not religious pornography. Despite the occasional use of ritual objects in the acts of sodomy, this is anethnic pornography. It fetishizes a small yet vital segment of the American populace. Catholic schoolgirls wait at their bus stop, skipping rope and doing whatever it is that Catholic schoolgirls do—a man watches from his wood-paneled sedan and masturbates. On the opposite corner, Jewish school girls wait for their bus to day school, doing whatever it is that Jewish girls do. They, too, have their masturbating man in the wood-paneled sedan.

I was wrong to ask the rabbis why JP exists. It exists because it exists. If goyim in Uncircumcised, Oklahoma can eat bagels and knishes and drink black cherry soda, then Jews have the right to indulge in something outside their Kollective Ken. If they can do it, we can do it.

The average JP consumer is my friend David who laughs and then jerks off. Harmless entertainment. Let him have his Lilith, and let the goyim have their JAP fantasies. In the larger scheme, full split shots of “hairy Hebraic vaginas" are hardly small steps to the railcars. Or are they?

At the extreme end of Jewish Porn, the terror of the concentration camps is re-enacted for sexual gratification. In Holocaust Porn, Jewish women are shown squatting and defecating in packed trains. They are shown having their heads shaved. They are emaciated, with their ribs poking out. They are incinerated in open ovens. They are gassed. They are sodomized with severed limbs, sometimes their own limbs.

One can find staged photographs of a naked and shivering woman under a showerhead in a tiled hygienic facility. I have seen photos of a man dressed as a stormtrooper emptying a tank labeled “Gasoline" into a woman’s mouth. The woman holds the funnel and masturbates the Nazi with her right hand. These photos are grainy black-and-whites, yet are clearly contemporary. And here things get dirty: The Holocaust Porn industry is based in Israel. The films are mostly made by Israelis, and they are also mostly purchased by Israelis. The actresses are overwhelmingly Israeli-Russian immigrants.

Is Israeli involvement in Holocaust Porn a sick manifestation of an addiction to persecution? Is it a reaction to assimilation—or a product of it? Is it the blackest form of satire? How different are these re-enactments from those rare bits of genuine Holocaust footage passed around for erotic consumption? In an essay on Holocaust Porn, Andrea Dworkin writes that the victims have become the victimizers. That’s not quite the point: the victims have become the victimizers while remaining the victims.

The level of victimization found in more mainstream forms of JP is open to debate. Some, like Dworkin, herself from a family of survivors, argue that it is, if not a direct line, at least a slippery slope. Maybe. But one thing is sure: Anyone who stars in Holocaust Porn, or directs it or does editing or contributes in any way in its production or facilitates its distribution, or has masturbated to it or watched it, or snickered after overhearing a fleeting reference at the urinals in the synagogue—all of these people are going to hell, gehinnon, that mythic valley outside of Jerusalem’s walls.

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