The Kibbitz
P EGGY KLEINPLATZ is a professor in the faculty of family medicine at the University of Ottawa. I first came across her work via a book she wrote (with A. Dana Ménard) called Mag- nificent Sex: Lessons from Extraor- dinary Lovers . I have since come to learn that she has written many oth- er classics in the field of sex thera- py and edited a standard textbook on the topic (New Directions in Sex Therapy: Innovations and Alternatives) . She is the sex ther- apist’s sex therapist, appearing in books and podcasts from leading figures including Esther Perel and Emily Nagoski. She has also studied Holocaust survivors and infertility, pos- iting a compelling theory that women were fed synthetic ste- roids in concentration camps, which permanently affected their reproductive health. • I had a wide-reaching discussion with her that was both entertaining and informative, touching on many aspects of Jewish life and sexuality.
around Christian women in a way that very much parallels attitudes towards Black men in the antebellum South. We see the switch in 1960s Amer- ican culture, when the “sexual revolu- tion” occurred. We see antisemitism shifting to say that Jewish women were all “frigid” and Jewish men were un- appealing, inexperienced, neurotic. There’s this huge shift between the 1930s and the 1960s in the context of the antisemitism that used sexual- ity as a pivot point, creating whatev- er stereotypes about Jews’ sexuality would most resonate with the domi- nant culture and succeed in othering Jews and keeping Jews marginalized. I keep coming back to niddah (the halakhic status of a woman during menstruation). My thinking about this is that, historically, between nursing and pregnancy and mal- nourishment, women likely men- struated maybe once a year. Be- ing separate from your husband for 12 days out of every 28 would have been very unlikely. Yet here we are in, the twentieth century, people are healthy, pregnancy rates are down, and as a result, women that keep niddah menstruate regularly. There are dozens, hundreds of examples of rabbis and rebbetzins and educa- tors talking about how niddah and the mikveh are the best things that could ever happen to a couple, be- cause they create a honeymoon ev- ery month: that pause in sexual re- lations keeps the marriage fresh. I think it’s really an anachronism. I have a hard time teaching about this because I don’t like ascribing emotional or psychological benefits to things that we’re required to do because of the law—things change over time, and maybe the psycho- logical effects are different now than they once were. But is there research
As a rabbi who officiates weddings, I get a lot of questions about sexuality from a Jewish perspective. What are some of the benefits and challenges of talking about sexuality within a re- ligious culture? My impression is that all the religious traditions have a sex-positive and a sex-negative stream. In my teaching, I have the choice of focusing on the positive and the negative. There are a lot of people, including some who consider themselves fairly learned about Judaism, who were not taught much about authentic, tradi- tional aspects of sexuality within Ju- daism. The tradition, going all the way back to Abraham and Sarah, is fairly small-l liberal. Judaism has always been a very sex-positive religion. I have sources that I often share with couples about Jewish sex ethics. One
of the things I like to point out is that there are trends in Jewish sex ethics that closely mirror what is going on in general society. When you are in a sexually permissive world, Judaism tends to go in that direction. I would say you’ve just captured real- ly accurately one side of the coin that comes from within Jewish traditions, and where they’re situated at a given point in time and history. The prob- lem is that Jews have always been a small minority in wherever they’ve lived for the last couple of thousand years. The other influences on sexuali- ty have been non-Jews’ attitudes to- wards Jews and, in particular, an- tisemitism. So if we look at the 1900s and the period up to, we’ll say 1938 in Poland, the belief was that Jewish women were “nymphomaniacs” and Jewish men were not to be trusted
26 SPRING 2025
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