Sexuality in American Jewish History: The State of an Emerging Sub-Field

Rachel Kranson It has been over forty years since scholars of women and gender transformed the field of American Jewish history by insisting that areas of inquiry that had long been neglected as part of the private women's sphere—such as the home, the kitchen, marriage, and the family—properly belonged within the scholarly record. Drawing from the feminist adage that "the personal is political," scholars of women's history likewise insisted that the personal was also historical. Their research on the private lives of American Jews, and American Jewish women in particular, now comprises an integral part of the American Jewish historical canon.¹

In spite of the now rich collection of scholarship that includes dimensions of American Jewish history that were once considered too personal and private to be appropriate sites for analysis, the literature on sexuality remains surprisingly thin. The study of sexuality—which I'm defining here as the social assumptions that surround and shape the biological capacity for arousal, desire, or genital contact through which certain, statistically unusual configurations may lead to reproduction—has thus far proved marginal to the development of our field.² For instance, in the twenty years leading up to the publication of this special issue on American Jewish sexuality, not one article within American Jewish History has contained the word "sex" or "sexuality" in its title (though a number of essays do deal with the subject indirectly as they addressed other central questions).³ Of the three most recent synthetic overviews of the history of American Jews and Judaism, none include more than cursory mentions of sex, sexual identity, sex work, or reproductive methods and choices.⁴ In my own subspecialty of late-twentieth century American Jews, major works of political history do not include any discussion of sexual politics.⁵ And finally, though this review includes quite a few monographs that reference topics related to sexuality, no more than a handful primarily organize their arguments around that issue. This is particularly remarkable since the topic of sexuality has gained so much traction in the broader fields within which many historians of American Jews also position themselves, such as American history, American religious history, modern Jewish history, and the history of women and gender.⁶

This relative lack of focus on sexuality is not only surprising but unfortunate, as issues of sexuality have the potential to illuminate some of the most fundamental questions of American Jewish history. The relationship between America's Jews and the wider American public, the ways in which non-Jewish Americans have made sense of Jewish difference, and the ways that American Jews constructed their own identities, have all been influenced by perceptions of Jewish sexual behavior. After all, as Ann Taves has noted, sexual norms—and assumptions about who may or may not be ascribing to those norms—are central to the process of creating communal bonds and determining who is inside or outside of a particular social group. A careful examination of sexuality can be particularly fruitful for a field that so often addresses the question of how American Jews have negotiated the project of integrating into American society, and how they attempted to remain distinctly Jewish following the relative success of that integration.⁷

Because of the relative paucity of scholarship in the field of American Jewish history that engages deeply with sexuality, this state of the field essay must do more than review the literature. Certainly, it provides an overview of the scholarship that preceded the special issue on American Jewish sexuality in which this essay appears. But in addition, it explores some possible reasons for why American Jewish historians have written less about sex than have scholars in related fields. And perhaps most importantly, it makes a case for why more research on this topic has the potential to significantly strengthen the project of American Jewish history.

The best-documented area in which the history of sexuality has intersected with the field of American Jewish history has been in the study of sexual crime. This area...