Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

3. Otherfuckers and Motherfuckers: Reproduction and Allegory in Philip Roth and Adele Wiseman

99  3 Otherfuckers and Motherfuckers Reproduction and Allegory in Philip Roth and Adele Wiseman Another way that the debates about the law of obscenity resonated with particular intensity for some American Jews is in relation to their shifting anxieties about reproduction, both biological and cultural. The emphasis on reproduction in rabbinic Judaism would be hard to overstate : it is frequently noted that the first mitzvah (commandment) that appears in the Torah is 6Ÿ’:KK:’K (pru urvu), in Genesis 1:28. Typically translated as “Be fruitful and multiply,” this conveys the divine imperative to reproduce. As basic a command as this may seem, rabbinical tradition anticipated contemporary theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu in acknowledging the complex interweaving of the biological and the cultural in processes of reproduction, and individual Jews and Jewish communities have often understood reproduction and its challenges in vastly divergent ways.1 To be specific, American Jews’ attitudes toward reproduction have shifted dramatically in the period between the establishment of modern obscenity laws in the 1870s and the present. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many American Jews resisted the Comstock laws (which criminalized both sexual representation and the circulation of information about birth control) because their anxieties about Jewish overpopulation made individual control of biological reproduction seem necessary, especially as it pertained to the marketing of contraception and making abortion accessible to poor, urban immigrants. Between the 1920s and 1960s, the symbolic subject of contraception ˒ʡ ʍ ʸ˒˒ʸʍ˝ 100  Otherfuckers and Motherfuckers activism was extended beyond the crushingly poor (prototypically Jewish ) “factory girl” to the middle-class (often Jewish) working woman. This transformation of reproductive rights from an issue understood to affect the urban poor to one meaningful as a broader cause can be traced in nationally celebrated literary texts, too; in the postwar period, such texts went so far as to count even male, Jewish intellectuals among the potential victims of anticontraception Comstockery. That historical trajectory, in which American Jews contributed to the legitimation and normalization of birth control and abortion from the beginning of the Comstock laws to their overturning, met its countertendency in the postwar decades, when, in the wake of the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders began to see contraception and abortion as threats to the waning Jewish population. Surveying these legal and cultural engagements, this chapter turns to focus on the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, examining how novels of that period use explicit representations of sexuality, formerly prohibited as obscene, to allegorize the particular Jewish reproductive anxieties of that moment—specifically, fears about the failures of Jewish cultural reproduction, that is, of American Jews’ inability to produce identifiably Jewish offspring—in ways that revisited traditional Jewish literary tropes, revivifying them to reflect on and to resonate in the postwar period. This chapter demonstrates how, for American Jews, the stakes of the law of obscenity, and of the constraints it placed on reproductive freedom and literary expression, changed with Jewish demographics —and that obscenity, in the age of its liberalization, made possible the reinvigoration of a set of classic Jewish narrative tropes. Comstock and Sadie Sachs The 1873 federal statute that has been called the Comstock Act, in tribute to its most ardent proponent, forthrightly criminalized the mailing of any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character” but also “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or producing an abortion . . . [and] any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means 101  Otherfuckers and Motherfuckers either of the things mentioned may be obtained or made.”2 The Comstock Act, in other words, yoked together textual explicitness about sex, birth control devices, and information about abortion into one conceptual category, presenting itself as a means through which the Christian establishment could rein in the excesses of what it understood as sinful, un-Christian sexuality.3 Notwithstanding the religious imperative commanding Jews to reproduce, there was little support among American Jews for the Comstock Act. Indeed, as mentioned in the introduction, those laws were passed in part so as to give Comstock an edge over abortionists as well as manufacturers and distributors of birth control devices, a number of whom were deliberately identified in Comstock’s papers and in the press as Jewish.4 That generation of abortionists...