• The European Union is expanding sanctions against Syria. [WSJ]

• A nice tribute to Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a German official kicked off Kristallnacht 73 years ago yesterday. [Heeb]

• Retired Jewish ballplayers Shawn Green, Brad Ausmus, and Gabe Kapler are all in on the national Israeli baseball team. [ESPN]

• Great article on Kreayshawn. Most people don’t realize Kreayshawn is Jewish! [NYT Magazine]

• Great article on TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. Most people don’t realize Arrington is Jewish! [Bloomberg Businessweek]

• Great article by Tablet Magazine columnist Shalom Auslander on his obsession with hard-core pornography. I think most people realize that Auslander is Jewish. [GQ/Longform]

Jewish rapper Drake has not cancelled his planned show at Penn State tonight. Tweeted Salon’s Alex Pareene, “This is Drake’s ‘James Brown saves Boston’ moment.” It was nice to laugh a little last night.

“Dad? You know how you’re always talking about how you want to know what I’m doing with my life, but I never tell you anything?”

“Yes. You guard your privacy jealously. Like a jackal. You haven’t told us a single thing about Los Angeles since you moved there.”

“Well, I decided you were right. It’s not good, and I owe you an apology.”

“Accepted,” he said. “Thank you for saying that.”

“Would you like to know what I’m doing with my life?”

“Please, mystery man.”

“I’m producing porn.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, I’m producing porn.”

“And what do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said. You wanted to know what I’m doing with my life. Well, against all odds, I’ve managed to insinuate myself into the porn industry. Pretty cool, huh?”

He cleared his throat. “Ellen, get on the line.” He waited until my mom clicked on. “How long have you been doing this?”

“To be honest, I’ve sort of been in the business for about half a year now. Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, Sam,” she said. “What’s this nonsense?”

“Oh, I make porn,” I explained.

“But what about the juice bar?” snapped my father.

“I worked there. Part-time. But now I make porn.”

My father’s temper had held remarkably well to this point, but now he exploded. “But this is nonsense! Ellen, say something, please! What has our son gotten himself into this time?”

“Dad,” I said calmly, “there’s no need to get all riled up. I’m part of a very well-established, historically sound industry. Stood the test of time. In fact, you could sort of say it’s the second-oldest profession.”

“That thousand dollars I lent you,” he mumbled, remembering. “This was your business plan?”

My mother spoke up. “This is some kind of elaborate joke, right?”

“Look,” I continued, “I can understand your reaction. Heck, if I had a son who went to work in the porn business, I might be a tad bit disturbed, too. But what you don’t get yet is that I’m out to produce a different kind of porn. A progressive kind.”

“What does that mean?” he snapped. “Porn is porn. Our son, the pornographer.”

“Sam, you’re not ‘acting,’ are you?” pleaded my mom. “I don’t care what you do, just tell me you’re not ‘acting.’ ”

“Our son, the pornographer?” repeated my father. “Holy God. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud.”

“But don’t you see? All porn isn’t cut from the same cloth,” I proclaimed proudly. “My mission is to change the game. From the inside out. I am going to make porn that’s art.”

“Ellen, did you know about this? Have you two been keeping this from me?”

“Have you lost your mind?” said my mom. “What are you implying?”

“Jesus,” I said, annoyed. “Will you two listen? I’m making movies that are actually movies. I’m trying to make videos that help you know the people inside the bodies. You know, their personalities and stuff. Their motivations.” I paused, then took a small chance. “It’s very Freudian.”

“Don’t you dare try to hook me!” yelled my dad.

“Seriously, Dad?” I said. “You might like them. Listen, I have an idea. I’m going to send you one of my movies. Would that be all right with you? Would you watch it? It’s about domination. And urination.”

“Oh, wonderful,” he said, exasperated. “We’ll screen that very soon. Then we’ll both wheel ourselves over to the hospital and have brain aneurysms.”

“You guys,” I said, “I have to go now. I have to go make porn. For the record, I think you were right: I haven’t let you in on my life enough recently. From here on out, it’s all about truth, openness, and honesty. Talk to you later.”

***

Though my parents and I weren’t exactly on the same page when it came to porno, I nevertheless felt the urge to apprise them of my newfound success. I knew I wouldn’t be able to turn them around on the whole issue, but with so much money coming in, I figured maybe we could find some common ground.

“Daddy?”

“Son of mine. So nice to hear your voice. How are you?”

“Great, Dad, but how are you? How’s the head-shrinking business?”

“Fine, just fine. I’ve found something that keeps me out of trouble. Not to mention my job assists me in staying up-to-date with the world around me. Did you know, for instance, that more and more people are using coffee shops as places to find life partners?”

“Is one of your clients a coffee shop owner?”

“I can’t tell you that, of course. You see, my boy, there’s a little thing called a confidentiality agreement that I enter into. You may have heard about it?”

“Barista?”

“It would be inappropriate for me to say.”

Continue reading: Sex and money

Top Pinto Aid Tied to Porn Sales and Legal Trouble [Forward]
Earlier: Where the Rabbi Gets His Money
LeBron Consults Shady Kabbalist Rabbi

• Sen. John McCain came out in favor of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s release. [JTA]

• Aaron David Miller on why 2011 “is going to be a great year for Middle East peace initiatives, but likely a very bad one for Middle East peace”—“a lot of process but not much peace.” [IHT]

• H&M sells tallit now. Punch-line not necessary. [Jezebel]

• The new Israeli left. [The Nation]

• Porn (artistic porn!) collides with neighboring Hasidim on the Lower East Side. [Art Info]

• Some Orthodox Israeli rabbis are marrying gay men to lesbians. [Haaretz]

News of Dan Snyder’s evil has reached Taiwan. This can only be for the good.

If a magazine’s history can be divided into eras, the 1960s should be remembered as Playboy’s Jewish decade. Those were the years in which a cadre of young Jewish editors, including Lehrman, reinvigorated the publication, embracing and fomenting the sexual revolution. Yet Playboy has often been thought of as an essentially WASP phenomenon, because Hefner, the magazine’s founder, served back then, and always, as Playboy’s public face—and also because, thanks to neurotic icons like Alexander Portnoy and Alvy Singer, it has been difficult to imagine nice Jewish boys convincing a different perky co-ed to strip her clothes off every month.

Hefner, who turns 84 in April, still represents Playboy, to the amusement of celebrity bloggers and to the chagrin of at least one stockholder, who chided Hef in a lawsuit earlier this month for hurting the company in his refusal to “give up the parade of busty blonds, the fancy mansion and the reality TV show.” Lehrman, the long-retired engineer of the magazine’s sexual progressivism, meanwhile seeks comparatively simple pleasures at Sarasota’s delis and jazz clubs, his physical activities extending to nothing racier these days than an occasional set of mixed doubles.

Playboy recently made 53 of its back issues available, for free, online, and the magazine’s complete archives can be purchased in DVD box sets by mail order. Readers who look back at issues from the 1960s with an eye for anything other than nude snapshots of women who are by now well into their 70s may be surprised by what they find. In that decade, the magazine was at its richest and most complex: not simply a purveyor of airbrushed nudes and hi-fi reviews, but a vital, progressive, and surprisingly Jewish voice in American culture during the most turbulent decade of the last century. Much of the magazine’s achievement in changing the way Americans talk abut sex resulted from Lehrman’s activities, and from his willingness to buck convention while never indulging in Hefnerian hedonism or rebellion for its own sake.

***

As a kid, Lehrman didn’t cause much trouble. Born a few months before Black Tuesday, in 1929, he remembers the Brooklyn he grew up in as “a slum,” though it had “a Jewish deli on nearly every corner—almost as many as there were candy stores,” as he once wrote in a letter to the New York Times. He protected his younger brother, Marvin, from local toughs and developed an enduring taste for latkes in his mother’s kitchen. While, like many Yiddish-speaking children of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lehrman’s parents had no fondness for synagogue attendance, they sent their sons to Hebrew school nonetheless. “And then I found out,” Lehrman recalls, “after spending six years to get bar mitzvahed, that my father never got bar mitzvahed himself. I wanted to kill somebody.”

He decided early on that his father wasn’t much of a career role model, either. Louis Lehrman eked out a living in factories, manufacturing clothes, and the family had little enough income to qualify for an apartment in the Williamsburg Houses, one of the first public housing projects in New York City. Louis saved and borrowed to open a shop of his own after World War II, and he occasionally asked his teenaged son to lend a hand. “He was so proud to have his own business, so proud his son was working there,” Lehrman remembers, with a laugh, “that he would point to all this crap and say, ‘Someday, son, this will all be yours.’” The teenager had grander ambitions, envisioning himself as a future shipping tycoon or Madison Avenue copywriter.

Nat Lehrman and Kazuko Miyajima in 1957

The Gent, June 1961

Even in Lehrman’s college years, nothing augured a career editing America’s foremost pornographic magazine, his dating record included. He lapped up socialist thought—in Reaching for Paradise, an excellent study of Playboy published in 1978, Thomas Weyr refers to Lehrman as “a liberal intellectual out of Brooklyn College at the bare-ass tail-end of the old left”—but free love had never been on the curriculum. “Brooklyn College was very leftist about politics,” Lehrman recalls, “but not about sex; they were very conservative, as any college was.” Not that he wasn’t intrigued by the subject: “I would’ve liked to have lived a less conservative experience, but it didn’t come my way.”

Lerhman’s rebelliousness didn’t surface until later, when he was drafted after receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953. He served 18 peaceful months in Nara, Japan, and while there, courted a Japanese interpreter named Kazuko Miyajima, to whom he proposed in a letter; he brought her to New York in 1957 and married her.This was an astonishingly unconventional move. At that time, the Japanese had not yet shed their image as the murderous kamikazes who bombed Pearl Harbor; the film classic Bridge on the River Kwai, featuring Japanese officers as either ruthless or bumbling taskmasters, took home seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in the year of Lehrman’s wedding. Considering how many Brooklynites just a few years older than him had fought and died in the Pacific, Lehrman’s marriage demonstrated a remarkable disdain for the prevailing prejudices, not to mention his own parents’. “That was really an explosion in the family,” Lehrman’s brother Marvin says of Nat’s choice of a spouse.

“My mother had threatened to kill herself when she learned of our nuptial plans,” Lehrman remembers. “The idea of a mixed marriage in the Lehrman family—especially a racially mixed marriage—was more than she could bear.” But Lehrman didn’t spurn his parents, or elope; he and Kazuko managed to bring them around. The first time she met her son’s fiancée, Lehrman says his mother “came to the front door looking grim.” Undaunted, Kazuko “threw her arms around her and said with a big smile, ‘Hi, Mom,’” and Lehrman’s mother instinctively reciprocated. As Marvin recalls, it soon turned out in the neighborhood that “nobody really cared that he was married to a Japanese woman.” It must have helped that Kazuko eagerly learned her mother-in-law’s recipes for matzah ball soup and latkes, and that Lehrman never wavered in his identification as a Jew. “I love everything Jewish, except the religion,” he says.

Compared to his choice of a spouse, Lehrman’s career decisions were uncontroversial. Upon his return to New York after his military service, he worked as a fundraiser for the United Jewish Appeal until an employment agency scored him editing gigs at the Automobile Association of America, and then at a short-lived travel magazine. When that folded, Lehrman found himself transferred to two magazines owned by the same distributor. By chance, he landed at Dude and Gent, Playboy imitators that cropped up in the wake of Hefner’s early successes. That his employers published nude photos didn’t bother Lehrman, or his wife. “She married me when we were both broke,” he says. “She, like my mother, was very happy that I was making a living.” The only problem, really, was that Lehrman had plenty of intellectual energy—he attended NYU after work, picking up a master’s in English in 1960 with a long essay on George Eliot’s Middlemarch—and his bosses didn’t regard their magazines as anything but commercial shlock. “They were all kind of crummy and never got better than that,” Lehrman says.

***

Playboy, by contrast, was steadily improving. Having sold out 70,000 copies of his first issue in December 1953, and having himself written the text accompanying the infamous nude photos of Marilyn Monroe, Hefner built his circulation up to a million by 1959. His staff grew apace. By 1956, a couple of Jewish editors had joined the magazine in key positions, a natural enough development given Hefner’s anti-discriminatory bent and respect for Jewish intellectuals. According to Steven Watts’ recent biography, Mr. Playboy , Hefner had been dismayed by the anti-Semitism he witnessed in the army and abjured Esquire’s restrictive hiring practices when he was employed there; his favorite college professor had been Samson Raphaelson, author of “The Day of Atonement,” the story upon which Al Jolson’s classic film The Jazz Singer was based. Still, even with Hefner’s support, and with Jews rising to prominence throughout American culture in the 1950s, Playboy’s first Jewish editors did not flaunt their ethnicity.

One of them, Jack Kessie, contributed columns on men’s fashion under the ethnically whitewashed pseudonym “Blake Rutherford.” Another, Hefner’s second-in-command, was a debonair New York litterateur named Auguste Comte Spectorsky. Though Spectorsky’s father was a professional Jewish educator, Spectorsky took pains to paper over his Jewish background. As Lehrman puts it, “It would never come out that [Spectorsky] was Jewish unless you put your hand on his throat and said, ‘Are you Jewish?’”

In the 1960s, as the magazine prospered, Spectorsky’s hires included a couple more Jewish editors, Sheldon Wax and Arthur Kretchmer, who quickly rose to prominent positions on the masthead. Hefner didn’t object; many of his closest associates and personal assistants, including Bobbie Arnstein and Dick Rosenzweig, were Jews. Indeed, in the “Playboy Philosophy,” the ponderous series of articles that he published beginning in late 1962 to air his beliefs about sexual morality and sundry topics, Hefner professed a frank admiration for American Jews, who, he wrote—“while not nearly as sexually permissive as the Hebrews of the Old Testament—are more liberal than either American Catholics or the mainstream of American Protestantism.”

Masthead and table of contents, January 1966

Hefner wasn’t unique in viewing Jews as extraordinarily sexual—around 110 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus characterized the Jews a “nation … prone to lust,” and leading anti-Semites regularly railed against alleged Jewish lechery and pornography in the late 19th century—but Playboy’s staff demonstrates that the prominence of Jews among free-speech advocates and erotica publishers can be ascribed neither to some innate hypersexuality in Jewish nature (as anti-Semites, to this day, continue to claim), nor to the Talmud’s comfort with sexuality or any other essential aspect of Jewish culture, as some contemporary Jewish boosters propose. Spectorsky and Lehrman, to take two examples, had very little in common, and they chose to work for Hefner for different reasons that may have had something to do with their feelings as Jews—but, even if so, they weren’t the same feelings. Some Jews entered the pornography industry because of their belief that the representation of sex constitutes a necessary component of art, which seems to have been Spectorsky’s attitude; others got involved because, as anarchists, they believed in absolute freedom of speech. Many Jewish lawyers and judges defended obscenity because of their Freudianism or their commitments to minority rights. A few Jews just got off on publishing porn, of course, while others, from Irving Kristol to Andrea Dworkin, have understood the proliferation of obscenity as a threat to traditional values. There is no single, or essential, Jewish attitude towards sex.

Lehrman himself cannot precisely explain the connection between his Jewish identity and his line of work. “Being Jewish, you understand that it drives you in a certain way,” he says, vaguely. “Not because you’re Jewish, but because you grew up in an environment that makes you liberal in certain areas and conservative in certain areas.” In his case, liberalism came through in his political bent and his sympathy for sexual radicals, while his conservatism manifested itself in his loyalty to his family.

***

Spectorsky hired Lehrman early in 1963, pleased to have found an intellectual with a master’s in English who boasted years of editorial experience in “the skin field.” At first, Lehrman pitched in wherever he was needed, writing captions for pictorials and editing “Party Jokes,” but soon he gravitated to the magazine’s features on human sexuality. He provided research assistance for Hefner’s “Philosophy,” and when Hefner lazily quoted long passages without attribution, Lehrman mollified the aggrieved authors. Morris Ploscowe, an eminent jurist whose 1951 study Sex and the Law Hefner had plagiarized, called Lehrman up with an offer: “He was cute,” Lehrman recalls. “He said, ‘Well, you’re using all my material anyhow, so why don’t you pay me for it?’ So I hired him.” Hefner loved the outlines Ploscowe delivered, and Lehrman earned the boss’s gratitude.

Whether dismayed by his critics, or acknowledging that he performed better as an impresario than as a philosopher, Hefner wrapped up the “Philosophy” not long after Lehrman’s arrival, but he kept assigning Lehrman to similar projects. “People get to know what your specialties are,” Lehrman explains; his became sexual politics and social activism. He edited the “Playboy Forum,” the letters section inaugurated in 1963, which offered experts and laypeople a platform to weigh in on the issues of the day, ranging from homosexual rights and free speech to sex education and birth control. Hefner’s nonprofit Playboy Foundation, which Lehrman managed, meanwhile supported sexologists, abortion activists, and defendants charged under arcane American sex laws—“civil rights, civil liberties, all that good stuff,” as Lehrman says.

Lehrman’s babies, the “Forum” and “The Playboy Advisor,” both treated sex not as the glossy fantasy of the magazine’s centerfold, but in all its gritty details. “I was the sex editor,” Lehrman boasts, “the world’s greatest authority on sex, in journalism.” His success in this position wasn’t the result of any particular knowledge or training—“I didn’t have any more sex interest or education than anybody else,” he admits—but a function of his work ethic. “When they told me to learn something, I learned it.”

He cultivated a group of professional experts, forming close relationships with William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the researchers from Washington University in St. Louis who went Kinsey one better by filming prostitutes, married couples, and strangers having sex in their lab so as to analyze the physiology of human sexual interactions. After interviewing them for the May 1968 issue, Lehrman wrote and edited a 1970 guide to their research for non-medical readers, titled Masters and Johnson Explained. “To have refused the privilege of editing an authorized popularization of the work of these two pioneering geniuses,” Lehrman noted, “would have been tantamount, in my opinion, to turning down a like opportunity to collaborate with Freud or Kinsey.” The respect was mutual: Masters characterized Playboy, with Lehrman’s “Forum” at its front, as “the best available medium for sex education in America today.”

Indeed, with a circulation reaching as high as 7 million copies a month—more than the current numbers for The New Yorker, Time, and Entertainment Weekly combined—Playboy delivered debates about abortion, civil rights, and homosexuality into more American hands than any other single source. Lehrman edited much of this revolutionary material. He personally interviewed Mary Calderone, a leading proponent of sex education, and produced the magazine’s first major feature on feminism.

As second-wave feminism boomed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lehrman’s attempts to engage its leaders in discussion had been repeatedly rebuffed. One of his protégés,  Barbara Nellis, contacted Betty Friedan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and spokeswomen for the Redstockings and National Organization for Women, but no one would speak to Playboy. When Germaine Greer finally agreed to an interview, Lehrman himself spent a week in Tuscany with her. Having scripted faux-Marx Brothers routines with his brother back in their Brooklyn boyhoods, Lehrman was prepared to play Greer’s, ahem, straight man:

Greer: I think every man should be fucked up the arse as a prelude to fucking women, so that he’ll know what it’s like to be the receiver. Otherwise, he’ll forever go about thinking that he’s doling out joy unlimited to every woman he fucks.

Lehrman: Thank you for the suggestion. Let’s change subjects.

Greer devoted most of the conversation to attacks on Playboy’s exploitation of women, but Lehrman held his ground. She did finally acknowledge that Playboy’s “editorial matter is more liberal than that of other large-circulation magazines.” Surveying this period in a recent doctoral dissertation on Playboy’s politics, historian Carrie Pitzulo affirms Greer’s impression and refutes the absurd but familiar claim, made most recently by an ill-informed n+1 reviewer, that “politics, judgments, or restrictions … the things involved in a public discourse about sex … have always been excluded from Playboy.” On the contrary, Pitzulo characterizes the magazine as having “served as a regular, progressive, and mainstream forum for discussions of women’s expanding roles in society.”

***

February 1967

By the mid-1960s, Playboy’s young editors were charting the magazine’s course. “The whole staff, practically, was Jewish,” Lehrman recalls. “We were the dominant, probably the brighter ones.” Under Spectorsky, Lehrman, Wax, and Kretchmer, and always with Hefner’s approval, Playboy at the same time began to feature Jewish writers, artists, and themes more prominently than ever before.

Literary critics Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler contributed essays early in the decade, while the stable of fiction writers grew to include a virtual Jewish all-star team, including Bruce Jay Friedman, Herbert Gold, Leonard Michaels, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and, eventually, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Shel Silverstein, a close friend of Hefner’s, published cartoons regularly in the magazine, as did Jules Feiffer, to whom Hefner paid a retainer in exchange for exclusive first-look privileges. In 1964 and 1965, the magazine serialized Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, and Mel Brooks kibitzed his way through a Playboy interview in the May 1966 issue, unabashedly characterizing himself as “spectacularly Jewish,” and explaining the prominence of Jews in American comedy as a result of their people’s history: “When the tall, blond Teutons have been nipping at your heels for thousands of years, you find it enervating to keep wailing. So you make jokes.” Perhaps only Commentary could be considered a more central platform for American Jewish cultural achievement in the 1960s, and of course Commentary at its zenith could never boast even a tenth of Playboy’s circulation.

Barbi Benton, March 1970

The magazine included Jewish women prominently in its photographs. In 1968, Hefner met Barbara Klein, a self-described Jewish American Princess from Sacramento. Renaming herself Barbi Benton at Hefner’s suggestion, she inspired his purchase of a Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles and graced the magazine’s cover in 1969, 1970, and 1972. Lehrman remembers Benton’s first visit to frigid Chicago, when Hefner bought her “two expensive fur coats”: “a mink and a chinchilla, or something like that. … I looked at my wife, and I said, ‘See, now he knows what it’s like to marry Jewish girls.’”

It gets better: in April 1970, the magazine presented a piece of unabashedly Zionist sexual propaganda, “The Girls of Israel,” a pictorial accompanied by an essay unselfconsciously echoing Portnoy’s Complaint with its encomiums to sabras: “A Jewish girl who is a natural blonde, looking as if she lives in Copenhagen? Yes, it’s true.”

Lehrman insists that he never set out to deal with Jewishness in Playboy. He doesn’t remember “The Girls of Israel,” and says that in any case, he and his fellow editors would never have introduced material of Jewish interest into the magazine with any sort of ethnic chauvinism in mind: “Nobody thinks ‘I’m going to publish this guy who’s Jewish because I’m Jewish.’ In a million years you would never hear that at Playboy.” Some Jews involved in the sexual revolution were accused of the ancient canard of Jewish sexual deviance: Ralph Ginzburg, the Eros publisher convicted by the Supreme Court of pandering in March 1966, remarked in his Playboy interview that while anti-Semitic prejudice against him was “impossible to document on official levels,” he often received “hate mail saying, ‘Good for you, you kike Ginzburg!’” As far as Lehrman remembers, he never encountered such bigotry. “I can’t think of anti-Semitism hurting us in any way.”

***

While he covered sexual radicalism in all its diversity in the magazine, Lehrman maintained his own traditional family. He dedicated Masters and Johnson Explained to his wife, son, and daughter, “whose love, patience and support made it possible to produce this book during evenings and weekends that rightfully belonged to them.” Lehrman enrolled his kids at Francis W. Parker, a progressive Lincoln Park prep school boasting alumni including Barney Rosset and David Mamet. His daughter Cynthia Hochswender remembers that compared to her classmates’ parents, hers were “super-strict” and “very anti-drug,” even if “they always had the magazine around the house” and invited sex researchers and unionized prostitutes over for dinner.

Analyzing Playboy in an influential essay in her 1983 collection The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich implied that Hefner’s lifestyle choices served as office policy: “I don’t want my editors marrying anyone,” she quotes Hefner as saying, “and getting a lot of foolish notions in their heads about ‘togetherness,’ home, family, and all that jazz.” But Lehrman, who arrived at Playboy happily married, and remained that way for more than half a century until his wife’s death in March 2008, reveals this as no more than Hefnerian bluster. “Surely you don’t believe,” Lehrman once remarked, “that any mature man confuses his wife or girlfriend with a Playmate … or that his fantasies about any of these beautiful women impinge on his actual sex life.”

Lehrman with his children, around 1965

In fact, most of Hefner’s top editors in the 1960s were also married and, in Lehrman’s phrase, “pretty square.” Hochswender, who grew up around her father’s colleagues, calls them “the tweediest bunch of guys you ever met. It wasn’t like they would come over and they’d all be smoking pot or whatever. They’d come over and they used to sing bluegrass music at our house.” A few of them may have developed a bit of a swagger around the office—Barbara Nellis remembers a bunch of “awkward, gawky Jewish boys … just agog at how important they got, very quickly, with the power of this magazine behind them”—and the editors did attend the infamous festivities at the Mansion. Yet editorial staffers, like longtime copyeditor Arlene Bourras, recall a strict divide between themselves and Hefner’s social coterie. “Up to a certain point, everyone was welcome, everyone was equal,” Bourras says. Still, “there was a certain point when we,” the editors, “went home, and the others took off their clothes and went into the swimming pool.” As for Lehrman, he doesn’t remember joining any of Hef’s orgies: “I just drank the wine; maybe I danced with a Bunny once in a while, but that was it,” he says. “Hefner took care of the fantasies all by himself.… We made the magazine, he made the life.”

According to his brother, daughter, and colleagues, Lehrman’s work at Playboy never troubled his family. Whenever someone asked his wife how she could abide her husband working with all those pretty girls, she replied, Lehrman says, that she felt less cause for concern “with the Playmates, than if he was a teacher and all those adoring students would come after him.” Marvin Lehrman believes that the family, and especially his parents, learned a major lesson when Nat and Kazuko married back in the 1950s; once they understood that Nat’s choice of a spouse wasn’t a rejection of them or their values, they could see Playboy the same way. Lehrman’s mother would shep nakhes, “tongue in cheek,” and her classic line for a laugh was, “My son, the pornographer.” “The biggest issue with the family,” Marvin says, “was people calling up wanting free subscriptions.”

Lehrman’s household maintained traditions from his own Brooklyn childhood and his wife’s Japanese one, while consistently eschewing religion. “I’m a secular Jew, and that covers it,” Lehrman says, and, when asked during a telephone interview for an example of the Jewish folk music he loves, he launched into a few bars of the classic Zionist work song “Zum gali gali.” Hochswender fondly describes her father’s and her uncle’s unrelenting Borsht Belt humor, replete with Yiddish slang: “It was like living with Shecky Green.” Kazuko’s recipes, meanwhile, shared at a memorial service for her in 2008, exhibit the family’s embrace of both Jewish and Japanese traditions. She would alternate between serving miso and matzah ball soups, and fry latkes on an electric pan at the center of the dining room table as if they were okonomiyaki. Hochswender tells the tale of how her mother once faxed a recipe for potato latkes to her office; even without an addressee, Hochswender’s officemates knew “who it was meant for: a Jewish recipe that included the instruction, ‘Use chopsticks to turn the pancake over.’”

***

By the early 1970s, shifts in the zeitgeist and the editors’ lives presented challenges to Playboy’s dominance of the men’s magazine field. Spectorsky died suddenly in 1972, and Hefner tapped Kretchmer to replace him, disappointing some of his colleagues. Circulation dropped as Bob Guiccione’s Penthouse captured market share with pictorials considered raunchier than Playboy’s. Fighting back, Hefner purchased American rights to a French Playboy imitation, and Lehrman headed up the new magazine, Oui, which is now remembered, if at all, for David Mamet’s having gotten his start writing captions for the nudes there. After bringing Oui into the black, Lehrman accepted a promotion to associate publisher of Playboy in 1976, but he has “always had mixed feelings about that.” “I’m removed, at least at one level, from the substance of the magazines, the fun part,” he noted at the time, but he also recognized that the moment was right for a change. Sure, he had had to give up his title as Playboy’s sex editor, but, he admitted, “advancing age helps me not regret it too much.”

Lehrman with his granddaughter Kate in Florida, around 1998

As Lehrman, Wax, and Kretchmer shuffled up the corporate ladder, Playboy’s Jewish decade came to an end, at least in one sense. Jews have remained prominent on the magazine’s masthead; even when Kretchmer stepped down in 2002 as the magazine’s top editor, his replacement turned out to be James Kaminsky, a veteran of Maxim and cousin of Mel Brooks. But since the early 1970s, when the kind of sexual journalism that Lehrman favored could be found in any mainstream magazine, Playboy has no longer led the charge for sexual progressivism with the revolutionary spirit Lehrman espoused.

Lehrman himself stepped down in 1985, informing reporters that the move was not “a result of any corporate infighting”—but also admitting, in an atmosphere of gloom about the future of the men’s magazines, that Hefner “is 60 and obviously out of touch.” Naturally enough, given his wife’s joke about teachers being tempted by their students more than a Playboy editor would be by the Playmates, Lehrman pursued a second career as a professor of journalism, and department chair, at Columbia College in Chicago, where he could establish once more his respectability.

While Hefner continues to play America’s Casanova into his dotage and beyond, Lehrman smoothly transitioned into academia and from there to his senior’s community in Sarasota. He remains enthusiastic about tennis and classical guitar, but has been more than content to cede the trenches of sexual warfare to younger battlers. Hefner’s influence on American culture cannot be overstated, of course, and he surely deserves the notoriety—the tell-all biographies, the reality shows, the gossip—that accrues around him. But Lehrman presents another side to the story of Playboy, having been a different sort of partisan of the sexual revolution. He was a rebel who didn’t need to embrace hedonism or exploit young women for his personal gratification, or even to alienate his parents, to expand the boundaries of sexual discourse in America.

Suggesting how far he has come from his days at Playboy, and how far he has always been from Hefner’s love of the spotlight, Lehrman’s most recent publication, in October 2007, was an appreciation of his retirement community’s “modest but lovely tennis club” in the community’s monthly newsletter, the sort of heymish article that could have been written by any of his neighbors. Only one line of the story hints that Lehrman, now just another Jewish grandfather in Florida, was once among the most influential editors in the country. Praising the courts’ clay surface, “similar to the red clay used in the French Open,” Lehrman notes that he once asked a tennis pro why hard clay courts are preferable to grass or asphalt. The pro’s answer, which Lehrman approvingly quotes, is a reminder of how he balanced defiance and moderation throughout his life, and of his un-Hefnerian comfort in having left the spotlight behind: the great thing about clay courts, he says, is that “they wear your knees out quicker and enable you to retire earlier.”

Josh Lambert, a Tablet contributing editor, is Dorot Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. The author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide, he is currently revising his dissertation, “Unclean Lips: Obscenity and Jews in American Literature,” for publication.



Wayne Hoffman profiled Lucas for Tablet Magazine last year:

In gay porn, where there’s less room for nebbishes and clowns, openly Jewish men have been virtually absent or invisible. In fact, the only one in recent memory is, well, Michael Lucas. …

In [Lucas’s] Men of Israel, the guys are all Israeli, all Jewish, and they’re not hiding it. Sure, their names are probably fakes—no parents would name their son Morr Foxx unless they knew he’d grow up to be a gay porn star. But at least their names sound plausibly Israeli, plausibly Jewish: Matan Shalev, Avi Dar, Naor Tal.

Lucas has long seen himself as something of an evangelist for Israel: “His website extols the virtues of a country rich with natural wonders, intriguing museums, liberal politics, and friendly locals,” Hoffman pointed out. “More than a biblical theme park, Lucas’s Israel is a tourist destination, a place where lovely beaches beckon and muscle-bound men have sex with each other.”

Porn Star Michael Lucas to Lead Tour of Israel [Heeb]

Related: Great Exxxpectations [Tablet Magazine]

Although a blogger on Jezebel notes, “I invite you to find a subset of the population that porn has not at one point or another fetishized,” that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rejoice in our status. Ladies, let’s throw on those cheerleader uniforms, get us some “goyfriends,” and take over the world!

The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl [Details]

Lucas—a porn actor and director, and founder of the New York-based gay porn production company Lucas Entertainment—sees his new film Men of Israel as a tool, if you will, to promote tourism, at least among gay men. Before you laugh this off, know that it’s happened before, when the Bel Ami studio’s movies helped turn Prague into a major gay destination soon after the Iron Curtain fell, or when porn director Kristen Bjorn’s Australian trilogy put Sydney on the gay map nearly 20 years ago. The Russian-born Lucas has been ratcheting up the heat for weeks in anticipation of the film’s release tomorrow. His website—MenOfIsraelXXX.com—features still photos of the actors and excerpted video clips, as well as text explaining the performers’ biographies and Lucas’s Zionist motivations for making the film.

Journalists from The Atlantic to Out Magazine to Yediot Aharonot have taken notice, deeming the project a landmark because it is the first gay adult film to feature an “all-Israeli” cast. Fair enough. But they’ve missed the larger story: Men of Israel is a landmark because it is the first gay porn film to feature an all-Jewish cast.

Jewish involvement in the adult industry has been widely documented over the years. And even though that involvement usually happens behind the scenes, where viewers never notice, or gets erased when Jewish performers adopt deracinated porn names, there have been some openly Jewish stars in straight porn. Nina Hartley, Joanna Angel, Heather Pink, and other women have succeeded without hiding their backgrounds in interviews. A smaller number of Jewish men have done the same in straight porn, although they often play their parts with tongue in cheek. (Think of uber-nebbish Ron Jeremy, or Harry Reems—born Herbert Streicher—whose on-screen persona was as close to Groucho Marx as it was to fellow ’70s super-stud John Holmes.)

But in gay porn, where there’s less room for nebbishes and clowns, openly Jewish men have been virtually absent or invisible. In fact, the only one in recent memory is, well, Michael Lucas.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been Jewish guys in gay films. Just two years ago, for instance, Dror Barak made it big as a hirsute hunk making movies for Raging Stallion Studios; but Barak—who worked in the Israeli Consulate in New York until news of his other career broke—performed under the name Roman Ragazzi. (It seemed like not much has changed since I came out 20 years earlier and got this bit of advice from an older Jewish friend: If you want to date a guy, tell him you’re Jewish, but if you want to get laid, tell him you’re Italian.)

In Men of Israel, the guys are all Israeli, all Jewish, and they’re not hiding it. Sure, their names are probably fakes—no parents would name their son Morr Foxx unless they knew he’d grow up to be a gay porn star. But at least their names sound plausibly Israeli, plausibly Jewish: Matan Shalev, Avi Dar, Naor Tal.

So will Lucas’s self-proclaimed landmark film change things? For Israel, perhaps. The director’s goal is to help viewers realize that Israel is a place of unique beauty and history, he says, but also a place that’s not so different from Prague or Sydney or Palm Springs— all places where hot men have sex with each other on film, and all nice places to take a perfectly innocent gay-cation. To that extent, the project seems likely to succeed.

As for Jewish men, the question remains open. Will Jewish men become a religion-based fetish category for consumers of gay porn, who can already choose narrow types of men to watch based on their race or ethnicity (Latinos, African-Americans) or age (daddies, college boys) or body type (big bears, skinny twinks)? Will their Jewishness become a signifier for a certain type of sexual prowess or desirability? Will Italian guys start wearing mezuzahs and telling people they’re Jewish—and will that make them seem more virile, better endowed, hotter?

I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s possible that Men of Israel will herald a golden age for Jewish guys in gay porn, but it’s just as possible that the few “openly Jewish” performers who have made it in gay porn have gotten away with it because they are still somehow “exotic” foreigners—Israelis with unfamiliar names or, like Lucas, Russian born —rather than the Jewish boy next door. I’ll know that Jewish guys have truly arrived when I see a magazine called Jewish Inches, or a DVD titled Dirty Jews, or a blond, blue-eyed Midwestern performer who adopts a name like Lance Bornstein or Rod Horowitz.

“We’re at a historic moment,” said Obama.

“Get involved!” shouted Kos.

“This time it’s important!” implored Sullivan.

Okey-dokey, I thought. I’m fired up!

I have some writing ideas, some notions, some characters I work on here and there, but they’re not right, they’re not core to me. They’re peripheral. There’s something else. Something in me wants out. I don’t know what it is, or what it looks like, but I can hear it sometimes. It groans uncomfortably when I work on something that isn’t quite it. It kicks when I spend my time on personal essays or magazine articles. It sounds a bit like my three-year-old son, tossing and whining in the middle of the night as I listen to him through the child monitor beside the bed. A moan, a rumble, a grumble.

What is it saying?

What does it want?

What am I afraid of?

I want to find out, really I do—and I will, just as soon as I’ve checked The Huffington Post. Bill Clinton might have just said something that could possibly be interpreted as maybe meaning something else, and Arianna’s got the video.

When I was young, my mother told me I had thin skin. She told me that I was too sensitive. It was her strategy for coping—or not coping—with our emotionally impaired family. The problem wasn’t the fighting, the hitting, the shouting, the punching, or the kicking; the problem was me. It wasn’t that the war was bad, it was that I was bad at war. Karl Rove has nothing on dysfunctional parents. The hope, I suppose, was that after my father threw a left hook or my brother threw a right cross, I would say to myself, “You’re too sensitive. Toughen up!” and instead of crying, I would steel myself and realize that nothing bad was actually happening. The plan backfired: As the tears filled my eyes, I thought, “She’s right! I’m too sensitive! I’m a sensitive person! I can’t take this!” and I would crawl underneath my steel-framed bed and curl up on my side and press my face into the baseboard radiator and lie there among the dustbunnies and lost coins and wonder how anybody with skin as thin as mine was supposed to make it through this horrible shithole of a world. Some people, I thought, are good at living. And some, particularly the ones shivering in fear beneath their beds, are not. I had a toy at the time, an action figure whose torso was made of clear plastic and when you pressed a button on his back, you could see the blood running through him, all the way out to his hands and feet, courtesy of plastic tubing running the length of his limbs. I knew how he felt. That’s me, I thought—skin so thin you can see my blood.

So when I came home one day last week and my wife said to me, “They found a lump in my breast,” we hugged and tried to stay calm and decided that, there was no point in freaking out until the mammogram came back and that after all, the doctor thought the prognostic indicators were good and anyone using the term “prognostic indicator” probably knows what they’re talking about. Then we fed our son and put him to bed and then we went to bed, too, and pretty soon my wife fell asleep and once she had, I climbed quietly out of bed, went into the living room, sat on the couch, cried, and thought, “I can’t handle this.” If there’d been a steel-frame bed around, I’d have crawled underneath it.

It’s purely anecdotal, of course, but everyone I speak to in New York is pulling for Obama, and I’m not talking about New York City, I’m talking about upstate, so maybe it can go either way.

Another good distraction from writing is reading about writing, and one thing nobody seems to discuss much is courage. Tone, character, structure, voice. But not courage. Maybe that’s why I also don’t read many books that seem all that courageous; on the contrary, most new books I read seem pandering, desperate for respect and admiration, but nothing that seems like a risk, nothing that seems like the author just went out there and said, “Fuck it, this is what I feel. Be it sick, be it wrong, be it contrary to everything I ever wrote before.” Maybe I’m reading the wrong books. Maybe we talk about plot and character because we can’t talk about courage, because there’s nothing we can do about it, because no amount of pages or instruction is going to help you when you sit down at the computer with all your pride and dreams and insecurities and fears, with all the faces of all the people you’ve ever met staring over your shoulder and waiting to see what you do. Because no book or article is going to get you to crawl out from under that bed, thin skin and all, and walk with your head up through this horrible shithole of a world.

Friday afternoon, my wife phoned to tell me that the mammogram was clear and the ultrasound looked good, too. We went out to celebrate that night, and celebrated again last night with some other friends.

“I haven’t been able to think about anything else,” I confided to my friend Guy.

He handed me a glass of wine, and we had a toast to my wife’s good health.

“At least now you can get back to writing,” he said.

We got home about an hour ago, around midnight, and I’m sitting here in bed with my laptop. The babysitter has left, the dogs have gone to sleep, it’s quiet in the house and a perfect time to write. Unfortunately, John Edwards just announced he’s dropping out of the race. Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo thinks Edwards supporters will mostly break for Obama, Politico has video of his speech, and Andrew Sullivan is linking to a post somewhere else that links back to his post about the post he posted earlier about that other poster’s post.

It’s going to be a long night.

David Rakoff

In another, a fox, bleeding and exhausted, “beside himself with rage and fear,” stumbles into a clearing, pursued by a hunter’s hound. The fox first pleads with the hound, one canine to another. Then, understanding the inevitability of his approaching end, he suddenly sits erect and speaks in a voice bitter as gall: “Aren’t you ashamed, you traitor…You turncoat…You spy.”

The denunciation is taken up by others in the forest. “Traitor!” screams the magpie, “Spy!” shrieks the jay.

The dog responds in kind, denouncing their benighted naiveté. Besides, he isn’t the only traitor. What about the cow, the sheep, the chicken?

“They’re rabble!” snarls the fox—his last defiant words as the hound sets upon him, a fine spray of blood dyeing the snow.

Salten’s writing has not a trace of anthropomorphized cuteness. Bambi‘s forest is peopled (creatured?) with characters by turns arrogant, venal, gossipy, and engaging—as flawed and varied as the cosmopolitan fauna Salten must have encountered daily in his life in Vienna.

Felix Salten

The novel was immediately popular with both children and adults. An English-language edition followed in 1929 (translated, curiously enough, by Whittaker Chambers, who took the job to supplement the paltry salary he earned as editor of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker), with a foreword by novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, who deemed it “a little masterpiece,” and signed off with, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”

Sportsmen, however, were less enthusiastic, at least insofar as the Disney version was concerned. When the feature-length cartoon was released in 1942, the American Riflemen’s Association tried to get the studio to tack a pro-hunting prologue onto the movie, something Uncle Walt declined to do. The gun lobby was justified in its worry, since entire generations of American children would go on to identify the death of Bambi’s mother as among their earliest and most wrenching psychological terrors. (Disney used to have a stringent policy of withdrawing films for years at a time, so my pre-DVD childhood was Bambi-less. Whatever dead-cartoon-mom angst I was imprinted with was located in Dumbo, specifically the scene in which, chained inside a boxcar, Dumbo’s mother dandles him in the cradle of her trunk, the only extremity she can get through the barred window. It is unutterably sad. I still cannot watch it.)

But as harrowing as the celluloid rendition of Bambi’s maternal loss may be, it is nothing compared to Salten’s original chapter, where things are bad to begin with and only become more horrible. It is winter and the once cordial animals have begun to turn on one another in the madness of hunger. The near-famine conditions have “spread bitterness and brutality.” The crows kill the hare’s sick young son for sport. The ferret wounds the squirrel mortally, the fox has torn the admired and stately pheasant to pieces. “It’s hard to believe that it will ever be better,” says Bambi’s dispirited mother. Bambi himself is skittish and exhausted with hunger and cold.

Suddenly, one of the young bucks prickles with a vague presentiment of trouble. From the farthest edge of the wood, a murder of crows comes flying by, agitated. The magpies begin to screech to one another from the trees, and finally the deer can smell “that fearful scent [that] kept streaming on in a wider wave, sending terror into their hearts and uniting them all in one mad fear, in a single feverish impulse to flee, to save themselves.”

The forest roars with the sound of hunters advancing from all sides, snapping twigs, beating on tree trunks to drive out the animals. A pheasant flies into the air and is killed in front of everyone. “Don’t lose your head…. Just run, run, run!” one of his surviving compatriots panics to the others. But it is all too much for the bird and, crazed with fear, he too takes off into the air, only to be shot down.

“Then everyone lost his senses.” Creatures swarm over one another to get away. All is tumult and thunder and death. The old hare is murdered before their eyes, the sky is darkened by a rain of blood and feathers. Bambi follows behind his mother to the edge of the thicket. They are to run across the clearing and he is to keep running, regardless of what he might see happen to her. Well, you know what happens to her. Salten and Disney share a restraint by not showing us. The chapter ends simply, “Bambi never saw his mother again.”

* * *

Like many an artist, Salten first tasted prominence in death, though not his own. Born Siegmund Salzmann in 1869 in Budapest, he moved with his parents to Vienna when he was three weeks old. The city had begun granting Jews the rare privilege of full citizenship just two years prior, prompting a large Jewish migration from elsewhere in the Hapsburg Empire. Salten grew up poor in the Vienna slums, with little formal education. He labored in a series of menial, clerical jobs in the insurance business while sending out his work to little or no effect until 1902, when his obituary of Emile Zola, by all accounts a moving and noteworthy piece of writing, received widespread notice and provided Salten entrée into the Jung Wien, the Young Vienna Movement, a loose conglomeration of progressive bohemians. Artists and writers, most of them Jews, Jung Wien counted among its members composer Franz Lehar, playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig. Once enfolded into this rarefied klatch, Salten became a prolific novelist and a noted theater critic for various publications, shuttling back and forth between Berlin and Vienna.

Salten received only nominal Jewish instruction, it seems. He even served as an altar boy, which might account for the novel’s vaguely Christian sensibility. Humans are referred to using the God-like “He” and “Him” throughout. It seems a fitting moniker for a largely unseen force that is quick to ire and possessed of awesome, arbitrary, and obliterating power. Ultimately, a grown Bambi realizes that “there is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him,” A force of unquantifiable strength, but one also imbued with the attributes of mercy and lovingkindness. And yet, even if Salten hadn’t known the experience directly, even the casual reader cannot fail to see in the young fawn’s life of precarious freedom and probationary ease what can only be described as a deep Jewish uncertainty. The entrapment and slaughter of the scene rings with the authenticity of nothing less than a sylvan pogrom. There is other evidence to suggest that Salten’s Jewish consciousness was not entirely dormant. In 1910, when Vienna’s beloved mayor Karl Lueger died, Salten took some heat for an obituary he wrote in the Presse newspaper criticizing the encoded anti-Semitism in Lueger’s falsely populist anti-intellectualism, that “disintegrates the physicians, insults the professors, jeers at learning.” Salten’s lingering vestigial Jewishness did not go unnoticed in Bambi either, at least not by one of the members of Jung Wien. The writer Karl Kraus, a Czech-born Jew who renounced his Judaism and was baptized as a Catholic at age 37, criticized Salten for muddying the purity of the German tongue by putting Yiddishisms in the mouths of his animal characters.

* * *

Bambi’s religion may have been a matter of some dispute, but his gender never was. He is most assuredly a male fawn, despite his name’s adoption by subsequent generations of female porn stars. It’s an oddly appropriate fate, given Salten’s own foray into filth. The Memoirs of Josephine, authored by one Josephine Mutzenbacher, was a pseudonymous “autobiography” told from the point of view of an older woman looking back over her life as a courtesan. As Josephine, or “Pepi,” says near the beginning, whoring “saved me from suffocating in the slums and permitted me to live like any woman of good society.”

The book, a prequel to Pepi’s later genteel life, documents her childhood in the destitute Ottakring district of Vienna, in a crowded tenement with her parents and two older brothers. A series of boarders who sleep in the tiny apartment’s kitchen educate the juvenile Pepi in the ways of sex, although her main and most energetic instructor is her next-older brother, along with a pair of precocious siblings who live upstairs.

Salten wrote the book in 1906, seventeen years before Bambi, and just four years after his redemptive Zola obituary. The indignities of Pepi’s youthful privation are clearly and minutely recalled by a writer whose own relief at having “gotten out” must have still been quite fresh.

There is no indication that The Memoirs of Josephine was a standout in its field, either critically or commercially. Salten didn’t vocally claim authorship of the material and, deeply felt psychological roots notwithstanding, the book reads like pretty standard porn. There is squalor, but menace and any real hardship are largely absent from the narrative. To be sure, no one is sitting down to lavish meals or clothing themselves in finery, but one can’t help wondering, why aren’t these children being beaten in dingy school rooms by ignorant, malodorous teachers with filthy beards and long fingers? Or else having their own digits caught in the gnashing maws of early industrial factory machines? Instead of the usual Jacob Riis-style hijinks one might expect from Pepi and her ragamuffin pals—stealing from pushcarts, rolling hoops, lobbing bricks through storefront windows—they seem to spend their free time (and they have an awful lot of it) screwing around. Her days stretch out before her, with hours during which to experiment with her urchin pals, with bored housewives, with a seriously unqualified governess, a great, massy coal wagoneer in the cellar, the corrupting priest Father Mayer, an “art” photographer named Capucci, and, after the death of her mother, her own father.

It’s a regular Melroseplatz. For a little girl sprung from the mind of a compatriot and contemporary of Freud, she is remarkably lacking in sexual trauma, although Salten’s explanation for this has to do with class and privilege. “In my childhood, boys and girls like my brother and I were all sexually aware and eager to practice that premature knowledge,” Pepi reports. “Boys did it with their sisters and girlfriends as a matter of course. They had never heard the word incest, or taboo, like the rich kids who had the opportunity to listen to the conversations of educated adults. Brothers and sisters of the poor proletarian class saw each other as males and females and would have been quite surprised if they had been told that relationships should make them see one another differently. When I could do any reading in my later years I discovered that the children in primitive societies felt and acted exactly as we did.”

There is the sense from these repeated, falsely erudite primitivist fantasies from an adult Pepi that the The Memoirs of Josephine aspires to something more than mere stroke book. We learn that, although it might have been Pepi’s beauty and lack of sexual squeamishness that eventually afforded her her financial independence, it was her curious intellect that led her to a life of music and art and culture (a life not dissimilar from the one that Salten himself was delivered to once he was accepted at the tables of the Café Griensteidl). It gave her existence beauty and meaning and it gave us, the lucky readers, these pages. Yet we never get even a glimpse of this earthly reward. The Memoirs of Josephine ends years before the salons, the conversations, the evening musicales. It’s like being invited over to someone’s house for supper and being regaled with the tantalizing rigors of her Cordon Bleu training and the resultant meal she’s going to cook for tomorrow night’s guest. In the meantime, all we get is repetitive, consequence-free pistoning and probing. It is surpassingly dull.

And while I cannot speak to the book’s authenticity—having never been Viennese, female, or sexually unbridled myself under anything but the most metaphorical circumstances, and even then only when drunk—it has the ring of falsehood about it. Salten’s forest seems less idealized and idyllic than his Vienna, a city he fled at the start of World War II. He settled in Zurich and died there in 1945.

Salten and his Viennese cohort were among the first Jews raised in a largely secular milieu, allowing them to live lives and make art independent of a strictly Jewish experience. They filled the exciting new void left behind by abandoned religious traditions with an exuberant secularism, which would go on to inform painting, writing, theater, psychoanalysis, and just about every other aspect of a dynamic age hurtling into the future. A few decades later all of this would fall under the entartete, or “degenerate,” rubric. Ironic, seeing as how there would be almost no more iconic a Nazi image than a proud stag in the forest.