As the site is quick to point out, many leading sex educators, porn stars, and pornographers-Nina Hartley, Al Goldstein, and Susie Bright, for instance-explicitly connect their sex activism with their Judaism. The site links these identifications with the rebellious and subversive nature of many Jews: "While few Jews are radical, many radicals are Jews, writes (non-Jew) Ernest van den Haag in his book The Jewish Mystique, adding that "the most important result of the domination of [secular] Jews in [the media] is their war on traditional values."

Even without xenophobes like van den Haag, if, as Jews, we identify with the oppressed, the marginalized, and the stranger rather than with the powerful and the xenophobic, then we have a reason beyond our common enemy and our own suspected sexual deviance to support women, queers, and sex radicals right now. But let's prove van den Haag right! While we should not oversimplistically equate Jewishness with marginality of all kinds, it is still fair to argue that both Jewishness and sex radicalism posit alternatives both to the particular normative ethic being imposed by the theocratic Bush administration and the general notion that a normative ethic must be imposed at all. Ashcroft's incursions on civil liberties are of a piece with his sexual Puritanism. Bush's warmongering is connected through his very public religiosity to his institutionalized homophobia and intolerance. Resistance to one side of the equation is resistance to the other. We are living in a time of the unthinkable: wiretaps without warrants, a president who believes that God is on our side, enriching the rich at the cost of the poor, and throughout, a justification of God, family, and country of which heteronormative, monogamous sexuality ("family" as understood by the Right) is a central part.

Like Emma Goldman in 1915, we're at the dawn of a new kind of global militarization, a new Western theory of war that will affect us for years or decades in ways we do not yet understand. Like Goldman and her comrades, who would soon face new sedition acts and vigorous political persecution, we face encroachment upon all of our civil and human rights, currently including the rights to e-mail privacy, due process, health care, abortion, and the right to have any variety of consensual sex without fear. As in the 1910's, encroachments are not applied equally-it's women, people of color, the queer, the nonmonogamous, the poor, the kinky, and those in the Third World whose pleasure, health, and lives are most expendable. In recognizing the physicality of oppression for those vulnerable to assault, unwanted pregnancy, HIV and AIDS, bad health care, and malign neglect, it must be recognized that the right to pleasure and the right to health and life are inseparable. An ethical Judaism, therefore, one that identified with the persecuted among us and around us, might say that this is not only a strange but also a promising, a hopeful, and a righteous time for sex radicals and our allies, if only we will grasp it.

[1]       [2]       [3]       [4]       5 Image: Frederic Brenner, Jewish Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors with their Mothers, 1994

Marissa Pareles's work has appeared in Best Lesbian Erotica 2003, Girlfriends, On Our Backs, Current, Common Sense, and Lambda Book Report. She is a Yiddish and queer nationalist, and is graduating from Yale this month.

For more information on sex radicalism, see:
www.alternativestomarriage.org
www.worsethanqueer.com
Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Duke University Press, 2000)
Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Lizst, The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities (Greenery Press, 1998)
Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, The New Topping Book (Greenery Press, 2003)
and Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, The New Bottoming Book (Greenery Press, 2001)
Staci Haines, The Survivor's Guide to Sex (Cleis Press, 1999)

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