Yiddish ONANIZM: How Jews Took Sexuality into Their own Hands

• In Event: Yiddish Discourses of Body, Gender, and Sexuality (1880–1939)

Abstract

This talk will delve into the archives of Eastern European Yiddish sexology, by looking at on one particular act, masturbation, which has been widely recognized by scholars of sexuality as a key site of power, “the first form of prohibition and, historically, the first form of problematization of sexuality.” (Foucault 2011, 391). Here masturbation will serve specifically as a site for identifying the ideologies animating Yiddish sexology and exposing its intertextual and cross-cultural dialogues (Ajzenstadt and Cavaglion 2002). I will explore the perception of masturbation in the works of two physicians, Meir Gottlieb and Leonard Landis, representing the movement between Eastern Europe and the United States, between Warsaw and New York, two centers of Yiddish life at the turn of the twentieth century. Both authors draw on a combination of religious discourse on masturbation and on a range of medical and moral understandings reflecting diverse views of the turn of the century. By way of this comparison glimpse into the intricate workings within texts and across texts of the Yiddish science of sex. Yiddish masturbation, I will show, linked the religious and the secular, playing a role in shaping scientific discourse, and with it modern Jewish corporeality and subjectivity.

Author

• Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev