Sexual deviance helped create
‘The Genocidal Mind,’ says sociologist
What does sex have to do with the Holocaust? Plenty, and in ways many people are too “puritanical and squeamish” to discuss, says Milwaukee-raised sociologist Jack Nusan Porter.
That is why he has titled his newest book “The Genocidal Mind: Sociological and Sexual Perspectives” (University Press of America, 290 pages, $35 paperback).
To Porter, “historians have dominated Holocaust studies for too long,” and that is a problem because their approach “only presents one side of the picture and avoids a lot of issues.”
In his book, he cites Alan Bullock, a British biographer of Adolf Hitler. When asked in an interview why he didn’t investigate more deeply Hitler’s sexual issues, Bullock indicated that “gentlemen scholars” don’t do that.
“In sociology, we deal with sexual deviance,” Porter said in a recent interview at The Chronicle office. “And to understand the Nazi mind, you have to understand that they were sexual deviants” — all the way up to Hitler himself.
And this isn’t the only controversy Porter enters in his general approach to studying the Holocaust and resistance to it. Some of these issues he will treat in a future book, he said.
In the interview, he criticized “the stranglehold of the second generation” — i.e., of the children of Holocaust survivors — “on certain issues. They have a certain image” of themselves and their parents “that they want to project.”
He also takes issue with claims that almost anything Jews did to endure and survive the persecution constituted resistance.
“Just simply to survive is not the same thing as being a resistance fighter,” Porter said. “Teaching Hebrew prayers was not going to help stop the war. Picking up a gun was.”
Much of “The Genocidal Mind” consists of reprinted essays that Porter, 61, has written over the past 30 years; but it also includes some new essays.
The book, he said, represents the end of a 10-year period of “writer’s block” since the last book he edited — an anthology of works about agunot (Orthodox Jewish women who can’t obtain Jewish legal divorces), titled “Women in Chains” (1995, Jason Aronson Inc.).
The new book also constitutes the first in a projected several-volume series of his collected essays. The topics of the anthologies will range from issues of sociology to Porter’s “radical writings” from the 1960s, when he was a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society and a civil rights activist.
The child of Jewish resistance fighters, Porter was born in Ukraine in 1944 and came with his parents to Milwaukee in the later 1940s. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsn-Milwaukee and his doctorate at Northwestern University. He has written or edited more than 30 books on topics of Jewish and general sociology.
He said he wanted the first book in the series of essay anthologies to treat the Holocaust because “I had to get the demons out. I don’t write about the Holocaust too much anymore, but I was obsessed with it for a long time.”
And even these anthologies aren’t his only projects. Porter is working as a “junior writer” with former Chronicle editor Andrew Muchin on a book about the history of Milwaukee Jewry since 1950.
And Porter, who has lived in Boston for the past 33 years, is considering moving back to Midwest, settling either in Milwaukee or Chicago.
“I’m tired of the rudeness and the cost of living,” he said.
And Milwaukee is a strong contender because “I have a lot of friends here, and people who still remember my family,” Porter said. “It’s always great to come back.”
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