Debbie Nathan

“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.