IS IT BED FOR THE JEWS?

...Didn't we all hear it at some time or another, if not from a parent then from a respected relative or rabbi...

...It's not that the Sages were much worse than other priests of their times, but that they weren't the prematurely enlightened Earth Fathers that our own liberal rabbis have suggested they were...

...Buchwald is certainly correct...

...In a nation where the imagination — the imaging — was previously dominated by the New England products of the English tradition, anyone with dark hair was immediately believed to be sensual and passionate...

...We" are the middle-aged, middle-class American Jews who were assured from childhood by virtuously enlightened parents that Jews were more rational about sex than the gentiles...

...If so, according to Hagiga 16a, he should satisfy his desire by going to a place where people do not know him, and wear dark clothes...

...and when we do it's with the knowledge that you don't have to have a Ph.D...

...In Maimonides's famous discussion of the "conjugal schedules" to be expected by the wives of various men, he points out that for scholars the once-a-week frequency may be altered, since "disciples of the wise may absent themselves for the purpose of study of the Torah without their wives' permission for as long as two or three years...

...What matters more is that there is still a general feeling among Americans that Jews are good lovers...

...If they do, they are protected from things other than sexual experience...

...I used to think Woody Allen was making up his bizarre rabbinical fantasies...

...Maybe so, but having decided that homosexuals deserve death by stoning [Niddah 13 b] and that the desire to commit adultery is equivalent to the act itself, the Sages don't seem all that different from the parish priest...

...Why not...

...The Talmud does deal with sexual techniques, but only to prohibit those which might make conception unlikely or harm the marriage (or marriages — Jewish polygamy was rather soft-pedaled in our Hebrew classes...

...Michael Halberstam Is a physician in Washington, DC...

...On the other hand . . ." On the other hand...

...The Sages could have changed places with the Jesuits working on Annulment Decrees and have gotten the feel of the new Office in a few days' time...

...Kinsey's statistics were hardly representative and were not concerned with images, and if you want to know what the Happy Hooker thought about Jews as lovers, you'll have to look it up in the original...

...but a great deal with the Jew as Stranger...

...The image of the Jew as a mistress is another story...

...Gentile writers poured out novels in which sensitive Anglo-Saxon girls from benighted families and/or small towns went to college and met sensitive Jewish boys who proved that intel-lectualism and heterosexuality were not incompatible...

...Ministers were allowed to be married, but were still, we were told, uneasy in the presence of sex...

...People who have more sense than to go up to Negroes and engage them in conversation about 'rhythm' have come up to me and asked me about my 'warmth.' They think it is flattering — and they think it is true...

...The aura of neuroticism which once hung over intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals, has disappeared...

...The sexual practices of Protestants, like other aspects of their lives, were believed to be paler copies of the Catholics...

...to be a little bit kinky...

...Indeed, the sensitive yet passionate Jew of the fiction of the 1950's and '60's was merely the successor to a whole series of stock characters — the passionate gypsies (or gamekeepers) who once lent color to English fiction, the sensitive yet passionate Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards who turned literary Englishwomen weak with desire in the 19th century, the robust yet sensitive Greeks or Italians who pop up with regularity in 20th century American fiction...

...I got in with a bunch of high school athletic coaches, but even those guys would lie around in bed afterwards, worrying about how good they had been or whether they were being fair to me or their wives or whatever...

...Writing "The Talmud on Sex," psychiatrist Samuel Spector (Jewish Spectator, February, 1969) expounded the conventional view: the Talmud stresses that procreation is the purpose of sex, "yet the pleasure principle is not denied...

...As a physician, I assume that my patients, male and female, are sexually active, and I am rarely wrong, except when the inactivity is involuntary...

...Fourteen-year-old girls may not be able to handle the emotional or physical import of intercourse, but they are having it anyway...

...The nasty jokes about the "Jewish American Princess" who makes love in positions designed to protect her hairdo are not the product of Middle America...

...We are not told explicitly what is meant by "sheer foolishness," but it is clear why there are no Jewish Kama Sutras and no Jewish pillow books...

...Philip Roth has pointed out that a recurrent theme of Jewish men in his creative writing class is that of a friendship between a Jewish boy and a lower-middle-class male classmate...

...Roth wrote his original essay in 1961, however, though he included it in Reading Myself and Others (1975...

...Do not come back at me with tirades about the narrowness of my vision and how I forgot that Jews could passionately love God, justice, learning, or money...

...We will be talking dirty...

...If we accept that there is a racial, hereditary aspect to sex, we back ourselves into the same position as the black man who denies a racial aspect to intelligence, but has no doubt about why there are so many black basketball players...

...In fact, anyone with dark hair probably was sensual and passionate, compared to the ruling Anglo-Saxons...

...Most of my female patients have long ago settled this debate, too...

...One could guess that a generation of gerbils might arise from protected middle-class boys whose sexual initiation takes place over a period of two years' petting...

...Sweet young secretaries who in 1950 would have been living with two other girls from their home town and sublimating at the movies are now "dating" two or three different men a week, and getting cystitis for their efforts...

...Furthermore, because of current American usage, I'll be writing mostly about men...

...While Jewish men might have spurned Jewish women as being more interested in their hairdos than in sex, gentile men did not share this image...

...Women today speak of having "lovers," heterosexual men do not...

...Convent-bred ladies have the moves of Japanese courtesans, probably learned from the same books...

...Jews were (traditionally) just as screwed up about sex as anyone else...

...Dark-eyed or sloe-eyed beauties haunt American fiction with almost the same frequency as their ruggedly sensitive brothers...

...From interviews with friends and patients, I am sure that the "warmth-sensuality" image persists...

...Another genre concerned the still shy and sensitive gentile girl who graduates from college and goes to New York (a.k.a...

...but our attitudes about each other...

...Dark blood, dark flesh, tribal oil and wine, sweat and genocide...

...An image developed of Jews as people at ease with sex, though it was an image based more It is clear why there are no Jewish Kama Sutras and no Jewish pillow books...

...Because Jews wrote and talked more in general, particularly on "hidden" topics, it was only natural that they would talk and write more on sex, and that not only psychoanalysis, but sexual research, would attract many Jews...

...Jews were still exotic then, the way gypsies used to be in English painting and legend...

...It was acknowledged that desire might overcome a scholar...

...In bed, I mean...

...It should be clear that, from a person who is sexually interested in you, this kind of conversation is a sexual opening, and that "warmth" for some people is a synonym for sensuality...

...The dissemination of psychologic knowledge and insight throughout the population has been so great that one woman I know complained, "I don't know where to go for men anymore...

...A study of this literature reveals that we were all the victims of a gigantic con...

...It is wrong, however, to believe that the Jew can be substituted ad lib in American fiction for any Stranger...

...In a whole series of monumentally forgettable novels during the 1950's, Jews — particularly Jewish men — appeared as the intellectual and sexual enlighteners of gentile women...

...One woman I asked about Jews as lovers replied, "Gerbils...

...It may, as I suggest later, be based on a monumental misunderstanding, but it exists nonetheless...

...There is lots of promiscuity, not much love, not all that much fun...

...has noted that "There does seem to be a fascination these days with the idea of Jewish emotionalism...

...How they would have loved those arguments on what constitutes "consummation" of a marriage...

...This article will therefore be limited to "lover" in the sensual meaning...

...To speak of images, we must first examine the image we have of ourselves, and the first thing I learned is that we all have been taught a lie...

...I think it comes from too much petting in cars...

...Sex distracted from the main purpose of life — love of learning and, thus, God — and, accordingly, scholars were expected to indulge in intercourse at only weekly intervals, while less exalted occupations had a higher frequency...

...And I'm always willing to learn...

...One takes what one can, under any auspices this side of outright fraud...

...Apart from the conventional wisdom that "Jews make good husbands," there is an undercurrent belief that Jews are better sexually...

...What the hero envies the gentile boy is his parents' indifference, and largely, it would seem, because of the opportunities it affords him for sexual adventures," Roth writes...

...And now his Anglo-Saxon sperm, pale and callow, moved into strangeness like tiny Vikings in a dark sea...

...The deepest truth about the image of Jew as lover comes when we examine not only the mythic roles that gentile fiction has assigned to us...

...There is a fine point here to be made between writing-talking sex and doing sex...

...Sex was not a necessary evil for the Sages, but, rather, a necessary bother...

...I didn't forget about the other dimensions of the word "lover" and neither did the editor — it's just that the editor wanted to know about the images of Jews as lovers — "really, as sex partners...

...As Rabbi Leo Jung wrote, "On the one hand Judaism does not look down on physical love...

...It may be that Jews are truly better as sexual partners than your run-of-the-mill member of Western Civilization...

...It's myth, but don't tell anyone...

...on talk than on action...

...Art Buchwald, Washington's resident tzaddik, says, "Everyone thinks Jews are better lovers...

...I truly mean no mockery, but I find nothing particularly enlightened about the endless quibbling about menstrual signs in Niddah or the measurement of pubic hair...

...We are jomposed of body and soul, and it is natural, human, and legitimate that love express itself in both forms...

...It hasn't so much disappeared, perhaps, as been distributed evenly among the entire population...

...Indeed they were, and it is in the context of property rights and family preservation that the Talmud deals with sex...

...The romantic ideal still persists — men and women would like to settle down with one partner whom they love and who loves them...

...When I admitted bafflement, she said, "Haven't you ever seen a kid's gerbils screw...

...Jews are great lovers," one woman told me, "because they're thoughtful...

...Buchwald I wouldn't tell...

...Philip Roth (no imagist he — it's the real thing...

...Thomas Wolfe succumbed, but Gene Lyons in these pages was more succinct, though less poetic: "Jewish girls seemed to be on franker terms with their desires and less concerned with maintaining about their flesh an aura of mysticism than their shiksa counterparts...

...Tiny Vikings and all, the book won the National Book Award for fiction...

...An intriguing idea and one in which the literature is, to say the least, scanty...

...Italians, Greeks, and, to a lesser extent, Spaniards and Latin Americans are physically interchangeable (blacks are a special subset...

...We all heard marriage ceremonies in which the rabbi read the Song of Solomon and then talked about "the beauty of the physical side of marriage, which we, as Jews, have never hidden, but, indeed, celebrated...

...Jewish men are not rhapsodic about Jewish women as sexual objects...

...He (or she) can be put in only at the proper position — "dark-haired, passionate Stranger...

...America isn't much good on producing sturdy, uncomplicated peasant types — even our gamekeepers are dropout Ph.D's...

...The truth is that for our ancestors sex was a matter of property and procreation, and any fun attached to the act was purely accidental...

...who writes for a variety of publications...

...The classmate, always a gentile, is seen as belonging to the real world, symbolized by his sexual experience, while the Jewish narrator feels smothered by his parents who care too much about him...

...They're willing to take their time and find out what you want...

...Anne Roiphe has made it clear — our teenagers aren't anguished petters any more...

...It is even less common in the big cities, and Washington is no exception...

...No young man or woman in the throes of adolescence is particularly interested in why someone of the opposite sex is interested...

...Still, it is possible that by imagining ourselves to be more enlightened about sex, we Jews perhaps were more enlightened...

...Copyright © 1976 by Michael Halberstam...

...Why should I be asked to write about it...

...Cosmopolitan and Red-book no longer debate the wisdom of premarital sex, but discuss the desirability for women of "one-night stands...

...Failing that, however, they will settle down with almost anyone...

...In such company Jews are just as normal as everyone else...

...Bang, bang — it's over...

...I promised Mr...

...The study (or practice) of sexuality can consume a lifetime, but the images of sexuality should go no further than a Ph.D...

...The attraction has nothing particularly to do with the Jew as Jew...

...Far be it from him to disillusion her...

...If there is anyone out there who has made a life's work of the image of the Jew as lover, he has misspent his life...

...Catholics believe that sex is evil and so their priests can't marry, while we Jews believe that sex is beautiful — a rabbi is supposed to be married...

...And, while the literature is scantier on the subject, Jewish women — in print, anyway — don't moon over curly-haired boychiks, but imagine zipless encounters with Aryan blonds, cunning Orientals, and languid aristocrats...

...One got it out of the way, rather like daily tooth-brushing or jogging...

...Nothing human was alien to the Sages of the Talmud — as a result, the Talmud is human and humane...

...And there is no doubt that one part of the image of the Jew as a lover is as a more sensual, even more passionate, person...

...The real test of the image, it seems to me, is what is current in the popular mind...

...The same with Jewish men...

...The epitome of this genre can be found in Thomas Williams's 1966 campus novel, The Hair of Harold Roux, in which a major male character muses after intercourse, "Dark Naomi, the Jewess, daughter of a people leading back through ancient times in caravans, with herds of goats into the Old Testament and beyond...

...They just don't have so many hang-ups about sex as us Protestants, and even we've got the Catholics beat...

...I doubt if those middle-class Jewish adolescents still exist...

...Now I see that he knows more about Judaism than most Jews (and, in fact, by satirizing the Sages, dispels some of that condescension that we Jews felt toward priests who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin...

...A woman from Texas with more than an average amount of playing time says, "Jews —they're studs...

...Chastity is not very common in the United States in the 1970's...

...When it comes to the nitty-gritty, the Talmud clearly puts sexual pleasure secondary to procreation: "If a man should subject his wife to a vow to make violent motions during intercourse in order to prevent conception or to act in the manner of fools or to do things that have no substance, but are sheer foolishness, he must divorce her and pay her the Ketibah...

...Boston, Washington, San Francisco) and meets a sensitive Jewish man who proves the same thing...

...The article thus proceeds from a male, heterosexual viewpoint, but encompasses others...

...Jews were not...

...That was the secret to it all...

...The sanctimonious notion of Jewish sexual views as somehow just a bit behind Freud and Henry Miller was generally accepted by Jewish parents and Jewish children only because, as moderately assimilated Americans, neither knew very much about Tal-mudic writings on sex...

...thesis...

...The formal sexual literature is rather thin on the image of the Jew as a lover...

...As the noted translator from the Yiddish, Dorothy Bilik, has written, "The Sages were just as insecure about having a bastard inherit their property as any Greek, Elizabethan, or 20th century male — and just as fearful of cuckoldry...

...We don't use the word "neurotic" so much as we used to, One woman I asked about Jews as lovers replied, "Gerbils...

...The attitude is not unanimous...

...Oh, of course individual Anglo-Saxons are lusty and exuberant, but it's no accident that everywhere the English went in the world they marveled at the colorful natives...

...And, as much as the next man or woman, I've thought about, talked about, lived some of those images, and in my work I bump up against them all the time...

...Woody Allen again...

...In this physically experienced group, on the fringes of the singles world and the swinger's world, Jews maintain an image as good lovers...

...On the other hand, all that "dark blood, dark flesh, tribal oil and wine" comes from gentile typewriters...

...Woody Allen's dictum that "Sex with love is best, but sex without love is still pretty good" has been taken to heart...

...In sex, more than in most human activities, expectation is directly linked to fulfillment, and in today's world one needs every little edge that one can honestly gain...

...It was a time when Jewish acceptance into college, particularly high-prestige colleges, had accelerated geometrically, a time when young gentiles were encountering young Jews for the first time on equal grounds...

...If a college girl wants to go out with a Jewish boy because she has heard that Jews are sexier, she is hardly likely to inform him of her reasons in advance and he is hardly likely to turn her down (if she's otherwise appealing) no matter what her motives...

...Among adults, however, the image of the Jew as a superior lover still exists...

...Not that it matters all that much...

...Full sexual experience has moved another five or ten years down the scale...