Description:
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.Brief description: Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English at Wellesley College, and author of Unclean Lips and The Literary Mafia.
Review Quotes: "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"