MARCH 2007
Nathan Abrams on Jews in
the American porn industry
WHAT ARE WE ASHAMED
OF?
Nathan Abrams | Winter 2004 -
Number 196
Jewish Quarterly
Wed, February 28th 2007 - 10th Adar, 5767
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=38
A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s
seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d
prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’
didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from
the
fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to
play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film
industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography
has a long history in the United
States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe
subculture into what has become a primary constituent of
Americana. These are the ‘true blue Jews’.
Smut peddlers
Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two
(sometimes overlapping) groups: pornographers and
performers. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the
American population, they have been prominent in
pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade
between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German
origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of
Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica,
1920-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1999), ‘Jews were prominent in the
distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and
books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually
explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious
materials’.
In the postwar era, America’s most notorious
pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the ‘Walt 
Disney of Porn’. According to the US
Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman
controlled most of the pornography circulating in the
country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland’s
East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but
when he realized sex magazines produced twenty times the
revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively into porn,
eventually producing his own titles and setting up retail
stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the
top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he
owned over 200 adult bookstores. Sturman also introduced
updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth
(typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which
the viewer can view X-rated videos). It was said that
Sturman did not simply control the adult-entertainment
industry; he was the industry. Eventually he was
convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died,
disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David, continued
running the family business.
The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old
Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described
as ‘the Donald Trump of porno’. The link
between the two is Steve’s father, Fred, who was a
stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs
the Vivid Entertainment Group, which has been called the
Microsoft of the porn world, the top producer of ‘adult’
films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream
marketing techniques into the porn business. Indeed,
Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s
and 1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to
porn stars who are hired and moulded by Hirsch. Vivid was
the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show
recently broadcast on Channel 4.
Nice Jewish girls and boys
Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as
well as a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies
of the 1970s and ‘80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs
is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as ‘the Hedgehog’,
Jeremy is one of America’s biggest porn stars. The
51-year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class
Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, and has since appeared
in more than 1,600 adult movies, as well as directing
over 100. Jeremy has achieved iconic status in America, a
hero to males of all ages, Jewish and gentile alike - he’s
the nebbischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy who gets to bed
dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of a
modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes
the traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud
scholar he. His stature was recently cemented with the
release of a pornomentary about his life, Porn Star: The
Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish
male porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of
Jewish men in America. Jeremy has also just released a
compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. For £7.99
(including delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy
Jeremy’s hand-picked favourite porno grooves along
with narration by ‘the legend’ himself. As the
publicity blurb gushes, ‘Out of the brown paper
wrappings and into the mainstream’.
Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that
Jeremy is not: young, handsome and toned. Glasser, a
39-year-old New York Jew, opened a gym in 1991 in Los
Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a video camera
for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited a
woman,
then headed back to his gym and started shooting.
Although the movie stank, with a bit of chutzpah and a
few business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer
and started cranking out films. Within a few years,
‘Seymore Butts’ – his nom de porn which is
simultaneously his sales pitch – became one of the
largest franchises in the adult-film business. As the
king of the gonzo genre (marked by handheld cameras, the
illusion of spontaneity and a low-tech aesthetic meant to
suggest reality), he is today probably the most famous
Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company,
releases about 36 films annually, most of them shot for
less than $15,000, each of them grossing more than 10
times that sum. Glasser employs 12 people, including his
mother and cousin Stevie as respectively genial company
accountant (and matchmaker for her single son) and
lovable but roguish general gopher. Glasser currently
even has his own reality TV show (also broadcast on
Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family
Business, whose opening credits show Glasser’s
barmitzvah photo.
In search of a buck
Jews became involved in the porn industry for much the
same reasons that their co-religionists became involved
in Hollywood. They were attracted to an industry
primarily because it admitted them. Its newness meant
that restrictive barriers had not yet been erected, as
they had in so many other areas of American life. In
porn, there was no discrimination against Jews. During
the early part of the twentieth century, an entrepreneur
did not require large sums of money to make a start in
the film business; cinema was considered a passing fad.
In the porn business, it was similarly straightforward to
get going. To show ‘stag’ movies or loops, as
they were known, all one needed was a projector, screen
and a few chairs. Not tied up with the status quo and
with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were open to new
ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that
"Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a
field of endeavour, turned to a profession in which they
sensed they could eventually thrive by cooperating with
colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews have for a
very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of
middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities".
The adult entertainment business required something that
Jews possessed in abundance: chutzpah. Early Jewish
pornographers were marketing geniuses and ambitious
entrepreneurs whose toughness, intelligence and boundless
self-confidence were responsible for their successes.
Of course, the large number of Jews in porn were mainly
motivated by the desire to make profits. Just as their
counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream factory for
Americans, a blank screen upon which the Jewish moguls’
visions of America could be created and projected, so the
porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public
tastes. What better way to provide the stuff of dreams
and fantasies than through the adult-entertainment
industry? Performers did porn for the money. As ADL
National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, ‘Those
Jews who enter the pornography industry have done so as
individuals pursuing the American dream.’
Secular sex
Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn
do not usually do so as representatives of their
religious group. Most of the performers and pornographers
are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Many are
entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman, however,
identified as a Jew - he was a generous donator to Jewish
charities - and performer Richard Pacheco once
interviewed to be a rabbinical student.
Very few, if any, porn films have overtly Jewish themes,
although Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish porn
stars together to make a kosher porn film. The exception
is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina Hartley plays a
sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex with
anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well,
spawned a couple of sequels and is currently very hard to
buy - perhaps indicating a new niche to exploit. Indeed,
according to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish
Students website,
"there are thousands of people searching for Jewish
porn. After things like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles,
Jewish dating, and Jewish festivals comes ‘Jewish
porn’ in the list of top search keywords that
GoTo.com provide".
Sexual rebels
Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as
to why Jews in particular have become involved in porn?
There is surely an element of rebellion in Jewish X-rated
involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden nature serves
to make it attractive. As I have written in these pages
before, this signifies ‘the whole world of forbidden
sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the
delights are imagined to lie . . .’ (‘Reel
Kashrut: Jewish food in film’, JQ 189 [Spring
2003]).
According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E.
Michael Jones in the magazine Culture Wars (May 2003),
‘the leading male performers through the 1980s came
from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from
Roman Catholic day schools’. The standard porn
scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of
schtupping the Catholic shiksa.
Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger Luke
Ford explains on his website (lukeford.net): ‘Porn
is just one expression of [the] rebellion against
standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to
Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.’ It is also a
revolt against (often middle-class) parents who wish
their children to be lawyers, doctors and accountants. As
performer Bobby Astyr put it on the same website, ‘It’s
an “up yours” to the uncles with the pinky
rings who got down on me as a kid for wanting to be
musician.’
As religious influences waned and were replaced by
secular ones, free-thinking Jews, especially those from
California’s Bay Area, viewed sex as a means of
personal and political liberation. America provided the
freest society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the
growth of the adult industry. Those Jewish women who have
sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp contradiction to
the stereotype of the ‘Jewish American Princess’.
They (and I’m speculating here) may have seen
themselves as fulfilling the promise of liberation,
emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty Friedan
in 1963 called the ‘comfortable concentration camp’
of the household as they set out into the Promised Land
of the porno sets of Southern California. It signified
their economic and social freedom: they were free to
choose to enter, rather than coerced into it by economic
and other circumstances. Once they had lain down, they
could stand on their own two feet, particularly as female
performers typically earn twice as much as their male
counterparts.
Sexual revolutionaries
Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in
the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two
fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America. Some
porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the
spiritual battle between Christian America and secular
humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often
brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual
gadflies to the puritanical beast’. Jewish
involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of
an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are
trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral
subversion. Astyr remembers having ‘to run or fight
for it in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could
very well be that part of my porn career is an “up
yours” to these people’. Al Goldstein, the
publisher of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), ‘The
only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think
that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t
believe in authoritarianism.’ Pornography thus
becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it
penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream
(and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its
subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no
longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic
type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal
that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new
sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as
well as entertain) seems clear.
It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical
drive of immigrant Jews in America being channelled into
sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have
been disproportionately represented in radical movements
over the years, so they are also disproportionately
represented in the porn industry. Jews in America have
been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the
material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those
at the forefront of the movement which forced America to
adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were
also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the
1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman
replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required
revolutionary reading. Reich’s central
preoccupations were
work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied that a
socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual
satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the ‘beautiful
cultural consequences’ that would follow from
legalizing pornography: it would ‘ennoble all our
art’ and ‘humanize sexuality’. Pacheco was
one Jewish porn star who read Reich’s intellectual
marriage of Freud and Marx (lukeford.net):
"Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went
down to an audition for an X-rated film with my hair down
to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual
Revolution under my arm and yelling about work, 'love and
sex'."
As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E. Michael Jones,
‘Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos’
Culture Wars, May 2003), ‘Jewish rebellion has
broken out on several levels’, one being ‘the
prominent role of Jews as advocates to sexual
experimentation’. Overall, then, porn performers are
a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment
and promiscuity.
What are we ashamed of?
This brief overview and analysis of the role and
motivations behind pornographers and performers is
intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American
Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it.
Books such as Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the
Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the
topic. And you can bet that the 350th anniversary of the
arrival of the Jews in the United States did not include
any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this field. Even
the usually tolerant Time Out New York has been too prim
to deal with it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb
plans an issue on it. In light of the relatively tolerant
Jewish view of sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role
in the porn industry? We might not like it, but the
Jewish role in this field has been significant and it is
about time it was written about seriously.
Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at
the University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book
on neo-conservatism in the United States.
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