| Unclean Lips |
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Sunday, November 09 2008, 11:00am - 12:30pm |
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Unclean Lips: Jews and Obscenity in American Life
Josh Lambert
Everyone who has read American Jewish novels—and not just the works of Philip Roth—knows that these books devote a great deal of attention to what some would call “obscenity.” The crucial role Jews played in the transformation of American obscenity standards in both law and culture, which made it possible for such novels to be published in the first place, isn’t as widely discussed, and neither are the stereotypes about Jewish sexuality--the Jew as lecher, pimp, pornographer, and child molester--that circulated widely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gathering sources from legal and social history, and focusing on a set of novels published before, during, and after the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, Josh Lambert’s dissertation explores all these issues and more.
Josh Lambert is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the niversity of Michigan, and, is a fellow at the Center for Jewish istory in New York. He has written and edited for publications ncluding the Forward, the Harvard Lampoon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and nextbook.org
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