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Abstract
Until the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which explored the science of the individual's sexual response, Alfred Kinsey's work on sexual behavior in males and females, which described population behavior, was not only the landmark reference on sexology but also the source of tremendous and varied reaction among moral leaders in America. In spite of the common moral ground implied by the newly popular "Judeo-Christian tradition," Jewish and Christian responses to Kinsey revealed fundamental differences in attitude. Christians felt generally threatened, whereas some Jews found much that affirmed their traditions. Substituting Nazi ideology's stereotypes of the carnal Jew (a stereotype with an ancient tradition) with an image of the sexually inhibited Jewish male, Kinsey's portrayal of the Jewish approach to sex was almost as damning as what it replaced. Yet rather than attack Kinsey, a few Modern Orthodox voices used the occasion of his popularity as an opportunity to champion a Jewish approach to sex that spoke as much to Cold War heteronormativity as it did to post-Holocaust desires for a vital Orthodox Judaism.
Key words: sex, Modern Orthodoxy, Kinsey, post-World War II, Holocaust
In a section designated "Love and Marriage" in his 1959 best-selling primer on Judaism titled This Is My God, the novelist and self-described Orthodox Jew Herman Wouk recounted the uproar created by Alfred K insey's reports on human sexuality in the 1950s:
A respectable, opaque scientific study of sex manners in the United States, it became a best-seller, much to the surprise of its sober publishers. . . . Not one purchaser in a thousand, I imagine, read the whole report. . . . They rooted hopefully through the wadded prose and the puzzling charts, graphs, and tables, sniffing-often in vain-for a few tasty truffles of fact. What they mainly learned was that it took science to make sex uninteresting.1
Wouk's observations echo what later cultural historians recognized as Kinsey's special legacy-that Kinsey was both scientist and celeb - rity and that the influence of his science had in fact made him a celebrity. In her study of the impact of K insey's reports on American identity, historian Miriam Reumann writes of Kinsey's two volumes, "In 1948 and 1953, the United States was rocked by events that...