“No Jewish whores” at the NY Times online, but what about in print?
Fascinating article in today’s Times about Israeli unease over a closeted genre of 1960s-era porn novels – stuff so outré that it even seems to have spooked editors in New York.
Stalags, the porn is called. It first appeared around the time of the Eichmann trial. It was inspired by the testimony and work of one K. Tzetnik, a concentration camp survivor who wrote a trashy book called House of Dolls after the war. According to the Times, the book “told the story of a character purporting to be the author’s sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.” The article goes on to discuss how the brothel story is treated as historical fact by many Israelis, and how K. Tzetnik’s porny writings are still used in Israeli high school curricula and on tours of Auschwitz for teenagers.
But, the Times quotes Israeli holocaust researcher Na’ama Shik saying, K. Tzetnik’s tales of sex slavery are myth. “It was fiction. Block 24 didn’t exist,” she comments.
Actually, Shik says a little more in the version that appears online today at the Times web site. “There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz,” she adds there (click to see the onine article).
But that sentence is missing from the paper for sale in New York, and from the archived item available for posterity on Lexis-Nexis.
What should we make of this? “There were no Jewish whores” goes beyond simply saying none in Block 24. It’s a more comprehensive denial of debauchery and sexual victimization of Jewish women at Auschwitz. Which could be some small comfort to Jews, and you’d think the editors would want to preserve it. On the other hand, the point of this troubling piece is the extent to which Jews – like everyone else – often fantasize the darkest terrains of sexuality, including, sometimes, by using their own historical tragedy as grist (again, not unusual across cultures). Shik’s sentence, with its titillating word “whore,” just might add to the mill.
Apparently, some editor at the Times kind of got this, then another didn’t, and something got cut in print but not in woolier cyberspace, preserving greater frankness (and truth?) in the latter.
And media shirts ask why fewer and fewer people read newspapers and go online instead.
September 6th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
So glad you brought this to my attention! I had heard Andrea Dworkin speak about this kind of Israeli pornography– she was outraged, as you can imagine– in the early 80s. But she didn’t say the name of it. I wonder if the film will come to the US. The way the NYT reporter describes it, it sounds like the filmmaker is critiqueing the fiction of it all, without understanding the “shadow impulse” of pornography, as you outline.
This must have been some of the impetus for the film, Night Porter, don’t you think?
Susie
September 6th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Seems to me the operative word is “whore,” which would mean the women were paid. “Sex slaves,” implying victimization, is obviously an acceptable term: the Times also uses it to describe Japanese “comfort women,” an analogous role to that no doubt played by many Jewish women during WWII. The really outre part of “whore” is (pace Andrea Dworkin)its association with female agency: prostitutes do it voluntarily. Interesting to me, too, is the last guy’s comment in the article that part of what keeps the holocaust memory alive is “pornography” — that is, prurient interest in its sadism. Susie mentions “The Night Porter.” I’m thinking of Pasolini’s “Salo.”
September 6th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Per Ms Levine’s comment: In addition to connoting agency and income, it is significant to me that the term “whore” is yet so often loaded with negative connotations.
Holocaust study is a personal interest of mine, not a professional academic interest. Given that, in my experience with the subject, it was not uncommon for women targets of the Final Solution to trade sex for valuables, food, and/or favors that kept them alive. I’m definitely uncomfortable calling them whores, even though they’re signified with less accuracy by the term “sex-slave.” As far as I’m concerned, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a woman or a man choosing to exchange sex for survival-enhancing commodities or opportunities in any context, but especially not in the middle of genocide. I don’t want to activate the negative connotations of “whore” in connection with women in the Shoah.
It’s also true, of course, that “whore” has been recuperated by the sex positive movement and some sex workers to signify an empowered agent making his/her living as s/he sees fit. (I’m a fan of the term, myself.) But that’s a contemporary evolution, and just not one that fits for me with Holocaust victims.
September 8th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
I’d like to add some thoughts about the Stalag article and maybe a larger context of how Jewish women are perceived. Being a ‘whore’ seems to require a partnership; a buyer and seller, dominator, dominated. These roles are in reality elusive and sometimes blurred. A woman on her knees appears dominated, but she knows in those few moments, she is all powerful. In Egypt, and likely elsewhere, a common expression is ‘*ussy runs the world’
Men I’ve met who are not Jewish always implied up front that my oral ‘abilities’, sexual proclivities were something they were drawn to and feared, wanted to experience, wanted to conquer (debase would be more accurate). Based on nothing other than cultural mythology, not dating or intimacy.
I lived many years in a chassidic community and a decade with muslims. Women, in both matriarchal and patriarchal societies are objectified for purposes that have so little to do with actual sexual issues.
The Stalag series is not about Jewish whores any more than Western, Asian or Euro pornography is about their own particular ‘whores.’
We derail the message by explaining to ourselves or others that women were or weren’t justified in being ‘whores’ in a particular circumstance. It’s understandable, if she do it to survive or feed the kids, or pay the bills…or is it?
Andrea Dworkin, G-d bless her memory, understood these images are only tools employed to subjugate women; because we contain within us ineffable power and that power has to be controlled. How better to accomplish that, than debasing, humiliating, abusing, mutilating and ultimately redefining woman as ‘whore’? Men can sit back in full confidence that they are indeed, in charge of something so filthy and insignificant.
Even women choosing to work in the industry perpetuating the concept that women are ‘out of control sexually’ (movies, videos, clubs, etc) and need to be restrained, know full well they are exploiting and getting rich off the mythology men believe so they can live with themselves.
The Stalag series, in particular, is a powerful example of role reversal and control. For devout people believing that each sexual encounter simultaeously aligns with a spiritual counteraction, the Stalag images only appear as a sexual insult, but resonate for the non-Jewish world’s a politically and spiritually obscene perception of the ‘insatiable Jew.’
September 11th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Some may find the following novel regarding a woman trying to survive during the holocaust relevant:
Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S.
by Arnost Lustig
ISBN: 0810113473