• Sexuality in American Jewish History:The State of an Emerging Sub-Field
• Rachel Kranson (bio)

Rachel Kranson It has been over forty years since scholars of women and gender transformed the field of American Jewish history by insisting that areas of inquiry that had long been neglected as part of the private women's sphere—such as the home, the kitchen, marriage, and the family—properly belonged within the scholarly record. Drawing from the feminist adage that "the personal is political," scholars of women's history likewise insisted that the personal was also historical. Their research on the private lives of American Jews, and American Jewish women in particular, now comprises an integral part of the American Jewish historical canon.¹

In spite of the now rich collection of scholarship that includes dimensions of American Jewish history that were once considered too personal and private to be appropriate sites for analysis, the literature on sexuality remains surprisingly thin. The study of sexuality—which I'm defining here as the social assumptions that surround and shape the biological capacity for arousal, desire, or genital contact through which certain, statistically unusual configurations may lead to reproduction—has thus [End Page 493] far proved marginal to the development of our field.² For instance, in the twenty years leading up to the publication of this special issue on American Jewish sexuality, not one article within American Jewish History has contained the word "sex" or "sexuality" in its title (though a number of essays do deal with the subject indirectly as they addressed other central questions).³ Of the three most recent synthetic overviews of the history of American Jews and Judaism, none include more than cursory mentions of sex, sexual identity, sex work, or reproductive methods and choices.⁴ In my own subspecialty of late-twentieth century American Jews, major works of political history do not include any discussion of sexual politics.⁵ And finally, though this review includes quite a few monographs that reference topics related to sexuality, no more than a handful primarily organize their arguments around that issue. This is particularly remarkable since the topic of sexuality has gained so much traction in the broader fields within which many historians [End Page 494] of American Jews also position themselves, such as American history, American religious history, modern Jewish history, and the history of women and gender.⁶

This relative lack of focus on sexuality is not only surprising but unfortunate, as issues of sexuality have the potential to illuminate some of the most fundamental questions of American Jewish history. The relationship between America's Jews and the wider American public, the ways in which non-Jewish Americans have made sense of Jewish difference, and the ways that American Jews constructed their own identities, have all been influenced by perceptions of Jewish sexual behavior. After all, as Ann Taves has noted, sexual norms—and assumptions about who may or may not be ascribing to those norms—are central to the process of creating communal bonds and determining who is inside or outside of a particular social group. A careful examination of sexuality can be particularly fruitful for a field that so often addresses the question of how American Jews have negotiated the project of integrating into American society, and how they attempted to remain distinctly Jewish following the relative success of that integration.⁷

Because of the relative paucity of scholarship in the field of American Jewish history that engages deeply with sexuality, this state of the field essay must do more than review the literature. Certainly, it provides an overview of the scholarship that preceded the special issue on American Jewish sexuality in which this essay appears. But in addition, it explores some possible reasons for why American Jewish historians have written less about sex than have scholars in related fields. And perhaps most [End Page 495] importantly, it makes a case for why more research on this topic has the potential to significantly strengthen the project of American Jewish history.

The best-documented area in which the history of sexuality has intersected with the field of American Jewish history has been in the study of sexual crime. This area...

• 美国犹太历史上的性行为：新兴子领域的状态
• 雷切尔·克兰森（生物）

瑞秋·克兰森（Rachel Kranson）自从女性和性别学者改变美国犹太历史领域以来，已有40多年的历史了，他们坚持认为，早已被人们视为私人女性领域一部分的调查领域，例如家庭，厨房，婚姻，和家庭-正确地属于学术记录。从女性主义格言“个人就是政治”的角度出发，女性历史学者同样坚持认为个人也是历史的。他们对美国犹太人，特别是美国犹太妇女的私生活的研究，现已成为美国犹太历史经典的组成部分。^1个

尽管现在有丰富的学术收藏，其中包括曾经被认为过于个人和私人以至于无法进行分析的美国犹太历史的各个方面，但有关性的文献却令人惊讶地稀少。性欲，这我在这里定义为社会假设环绕和形状，兴奋，渴望，或生殖器接触生物能力通过一定的，不同寻常的统计配置可能导致的研究再现，也由此[尾页493]远事实证明，这对我们领域的发展至关重要。²例如，在本期关于美国犹太人性行为的特刊发表之前的二十年中，《美国犹太人历史》中没有一篇文章标题中包含“性”或“性”一词（尽管许多论文在涉及其他核心问题时确实间接涉及该主题）。³在关于美国犹太人和犹太教历史的三个最新综合概述中，没有任何内容比对性，性身份，性工作或生殖方法和选择的粗略提及。⁴在我自己的二十世纪末美国犹太人的专长中，政治历史的主要著作不包括有关性政治的任何讨论。⁵最后，尽管这篇评论包括许多涉及性话题的专着，但只有少数主要组织了他们关于该问题的论点。这是特别引人注目的，因为性的话题在更广泛的领域中引起了广泛的关注，在这些领域中，许多美国犹太人的历史学家[End Page 494]也在其中定位自己，例如美国历史，美国宗教历史，现代犹太历史以及历史。妇女和性别。⁶

这种相对缺乏对性的关注不仅令人惊讶，而且不幸，因为性问题有可能阐明美国犹太历史上一些最基本的问题。美国犹太人与更广泛的美国公众之间的关系，非犹太美国人理解犹太人差异的方式以及美国犹太人建立自己的身份的方式，都受到对犹太人性行为看法的影响。毕竟，正如安·塔夫斯（Ann Taves）所指出的那样，性规范以及关于谁可能或可能不遵循这些规范的假设，对于建立公共纽带和确定谁在特定社会群体之内或之外是至关重要的。⁷

由于在美国犹太人历史领域中与性有关的学术研究相对较少，因此该领域的论文状态不仅仅需要回顾文学。当然，它概述了这篇文章出现之前有关美国犹太人性行为的特殊问题之前的奖学金。但是除此之外，它探索了一些可能的原因，为什么美国犹太历史学家撰写的关于性的文章少于相关领域的学者。也许最重要的是[End Page 495]，这说明了为什么对此主题进行更多研究有可能显着增强美国犹太人历史计划的潜力。

性历史与美国犹太历史领域相交的记录最充分的领域是性犯罪研究。这片区域...