Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, explores the significant role played by American Jews in the fight to end obscenity censorship. He looks at such varied figures as publisher Horace Liveright, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, ACLU attorney Harriet Pilpel, novelist Philip Roth, and comedian and TV star Larry David. In the 1920s, motives for fighting obscenity laws was to build “cultural capital” by engaging in, publishing, or defending the frank, explicit writing of such modernist heroes as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. During the 1930s and early ’40s, battles against sexual repression stemmed from a critique of the role it was viewed as having played in the rise of Nazism. Lambert’s last, and most interesting, chapter deals not with obscenity, but rather the focus on modesty by some Orthodox writers and thinkers, noting a paradox in, for instance, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s writing quite explicitly about sexual immodesty in his advocacy of the opposite. Although Lambert is prone to overly complex, run-on sentences, in general he presents what is engaging material, demonstrating how “taboo words and explicit representations of sex were meaningful to American Jews during the 20th-century... in contingent and historically specific ways.” (Dec.)