Unclean lips: Obscenity and Jews in American literature

This dissertation examines Jews' literary, social, and legal interventions in controversies about obscenity in the United States in the 20th century. Scholars acknowledge obscenity debates as crucial in the development of modern American literature, but the roles Jews played in this history as publishers, lawyers, judges, and authors have not yet been interrogated. Insisting that no single explanation adequately accounts for the range of American Jews' influential interventions, the dissertation proposes four ways in which obscenity mattered to American Jews, as Jews, given their specific historical circumstances. The production and defense of obscenity contributed to Jews' attempts to counter sexual anti-Semitism; to obtain cultural capital that was otherwise denied to them; to defend contraception; and to advocate for minority rights. The decentralization of authority in Diasporic societies and resulting diversity also helps to explain the vigor with which some American Jews intervened in these debates.;The body of the dissertation presents a series of literary case studies. Analysis of the legal, literary, and linguistic contexts of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1935) clarifies that Roth's emphasis on dirtiness and use of "dirty words" represent an attempt to atone for his personal sexual deviance---which he, like other modern writers, understood as a Jewish trait---through the techniques of Anglo-American modernism. Close readings of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and Adele Wiseman's Crackpot (1974) propose that these novels radicalize a set of sexual allegories common throughout Biblical, rabbinic, and ethnic American literature. Attention to visual and to legal sources reveal how in the late 1970s, Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer deployed explicit visual representations of sexual frustration to realign comic books in the field of cultural production and establish the "graphic novel" as a genre of literature suitable for adult readers. Through these case studies, the project proposes that obscenity and the debates surrounding it have been a crucial element in the development of contemporary Jewish culture in the U.S, and, no less strikingly, that the interventions of Jews have been vital in the development of American attitudes about, policies on, and treatments of obscenity.