Reuben Sturman: ‘Walt Disney of Pornography’
“The problem, therefore, is harder to solve, especially with the enemy trying to fascinate the Negro with his lower class girls and women, arraying them partly nude before the Negroes in every public news media (cheap daily newspapers, and magazines, radio, TV) and the Negro is quick to imitate.”
—The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad
Pornography is defined as printed or visual material containing explicit sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. The word itself is derived from the Greek word meaning prostitute, and such sexualized artwork is found on artifacts of ancient Rome and Greece and early Eurasian and Mesopotamian civilizations. The profit-driven distribution of pornography has been linked to the prevalence of rape, domestic violence, marital and family collapse, and child sexual abuse.
In Torchlight for America THE HONORABLE MINISTER LOUIS FARRAKHAN decried “the degenerative kind of display of nakedness and filth in movies, television, songs, books and magazines,” adding,
no wonder teenage sex and teenage pregnancy and teenage violence is greater now than it ever was. This is a vicious circle of death dealing for the sake of profit. And who is the loser? The American people, especially black people and particularly black men.
This mirrors the findings of a presidential commission empaneled in 1970 by Pres. Richard Nixon:
The warped and brutal portrayal of sex in books, plays, magazines, and movies, if not halted and reversed, could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization.
The pollution of our culture, the pollution of our civilization with smut and filth is as serious a situation for the American people as the pollution of our once-pure air and water.
In fact, Nixon was lectured on that very topic by none other than the Christian evangelist and “preacher to the presidents,” the Rev. Billy Graham:
The Bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They’re the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They’re the ones putting out these obscene films.
It is well known that Jewish businessmen owned and controlled Hollywood since its very beginning, but lesser known is the Jewish control of the business of pornography. Jews were prominent in the distribution of sexually explicit novels, books of “dirty jokes,” and obscene publications. In 2005 Jewish professor of film studies Nathan Abrams wrote the Jewish Quarterly article “Jews in the American porn industry”:
[T]hereʼs no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ʻtrue blue Jewsʼ.
Abrams’ romanticized view of the filmed rapes of America’s desperate and misguided young women and men is trumped by his almost prideful declaration to a Jewish audience at the University of Nottingham that “Anal sex is Jewish sex.”
In the Jewish Quarterly Abrams recognized that the prevalence of Jews in the smut business makes them vulnerable to the charge that the Jews’ aim is the destruction of Christian society:
Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.
In the mid-20th century America’s most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, dubbed the “Walt Disney of Porn.” The Cleveland-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Sturman started out as a distributor of comic books until he saw that peddling obscenity was twenty times more profitable. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, by the late 1960s Sturman, using twenty different aliases, controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country. Like his co-religionists in illegal drugs and bootleg liquor Reuben Sturman is credited with innovating and industrializing the smut industry. He owned over 200 X-rated retail stores, which by the late 1970s were estimated to be making him $1 million per day. Sturman was “one of the first, if not THE first,” to distribute explicit photos of Black women.
Under the guise of “free speech” Sturman was the man behind the distribution of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, and in 1980 the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was so appreciative of the magazine’s role in sexualizing women that the Jewish organization presented Hefner with its “Torch of Liberty” award. The ADL praised Hefner’s “unique idea for a magazine and a philosophy of social change” and his “far-reaching impact, not only on the publishing industry, but on the mores of American society as well.”
Sturman’s most lucrative contribution to the pornography business was the “peep show”—a phone booth-like enclosure that customers would feed 25 cents to view nude women for thirty seconds at a time. Sturman installed those booths all over America, generating an estimated $2 billion in the 1970s. Ultimately, Reuben Sturman’s personal fortune was estimated to be $300 million before he was sent to prison on extortion and tax-evasion charges, where he died in 1997, leaving his seedy empire to his son.
Today’s internet is now the domain of another crop of tech-savvy Jewish pornographers. The “contemporary incarnation of Sturman,” writes Prof. Abrams, is “Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as ‘the Donald Trump of porno.’” His company Vivid Entertainment is called the “Microsoft of the porn world,” and is the top producer of “adult films” in the U.S. Mike Kulich, the Jewish owner of Monarchy Distribution, is one of the largest pornography companies in America. Hirsch’s father was a lieutenant in Reuben Sturman’s operation and Kulich claims that Sturman was his godfather. Kulich spoke at the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture in 2013 and made an unsurprising admission about the pornography industry:
Jews in the adult industry, there’s a lot of them….[T]hey gravitated toward the porn industry because it’s kind of the seedier cousin of the Hollywood industry, which had already been controlled by the Jews. Basically, they pretty much took it over [and] revolutionized the adult industry and made it their own. So there was no space for antisemitism. And they basically controlled everything….So what they did was they created all these companies that manufactured DVDs and VHS and Beta and printing and all the companies pretty much had to go through the Jews.
Kulich discussed his fellow pornographers:
And for the most part, the business side is still controlled by Jews. Steve Hirsch, who runs Vivid; Steve Orenstein, who runs Wicked; you have me who runs the [second] biggest porn company [Monarchy] in the world. But for the most part, the business owners are pretty much Jewish or have Jewish ties, or at some point worked for a Jew in the business to get their start.
REFERENCES
“History of erotic depictions,” last edited March 19, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_erotic_depictions.
A Torchlight for America (Chicago: FCN Publishing, 1993), 139–40; Message To The Blackman (1965), 127, 271; The Theology of Time, lecture, July 9, 1972:
He is so wicked and so filthy that God calls him the Skunk of the Planet Earth. Look at him going nude. This just fits him—a skunk. Taking your wives and daughters and stripping them, then parading them up and down the street. All of your knowledge spent trying to make and model a nice respectable daughter, and he goes out there and makes her disrespectful, pulling off her clothes, showing her shame up and down in the public. The Holy Qur’an [7:27] says, “He [Satan] pulls off their clothes and shows the nation their shame.”
According to a website that collects addiction studies, the science “support[s] the premise that internet porn use can cause addiction-related brain changes…” See “Brain Studies on Porn Users & Sex Addicts,” https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-articles-about-the-studies/brain-studies-on-porn-users-sex-addicts/. Ted Talks analyzing the effects of pornography are Maria Ahlin, “Let’s Talk Porn,” TEDxGöteborg, June 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBTb71UzPmY; Gary Wilson, “The Great Porn Experiment,” TEDxGlasgow, May 16, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU.
Richard Nixon, “Statement About the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography,” Oct. 24, 1970, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-about-the-report-the-commission-obscenity-and-pornography.
For the full transcript and audio of the Graham–Nixon White House conversation, see “Billy Graham Warned Nixon of ‘Synagogue of Satan,’” NOI Research Group, https://noirg.org/articles/billy-graham-warned-nixon-of-synagogue-of-satan/.
Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (New York: Crown, 1988).
Nathan Abrams, “Jews in the American porn industry,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004/05 issue.
“U.K. Conference Discusses Sex Ed, Israeli Rock,” Haaretz, Dec. 31, 2004, https://www.haaretz.com/1.4842406.
“Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry,” Jewish Quarterly, no. 196 (Winter 2004).
Tiffani Jones, “Secret History of the Black Pin Up: From Tease to Sleaze,” Oct. 20, 2011, https://www.coffeerhetoric.com/2011/10/secret-history-of-black-pin-up-from.html.
William F. Buckley, Jr., “The ADL defames itself by honoring Hefner,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 19, 1980. Buckley writes: “The tawdriness of the symbolism is driven home. Even as Hugh Hefner sells pictures of parted pudenda in order to make a dollar, a nickel of which he donates to institutions devoted to the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, and of fellow pornographers to hawk their wares…”
Frederick S. Lane, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 48–49.
“Jews In Porn,” uploaded Sept. 5, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAvlxSZMBQ. The video is part of a talk on Jews and adult entertainment given by Mike Kulich of Monarchy Distribution, Inc., and Rabbi Gary Katz as part of the Taboo Talks series presented at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in San Diego on May 8, 2013. The talk can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/jews_in_porn. See also the flyer at https://www.sdcjc.org/docs/InTheMix/JewsAdultEntertainmentFlyer13.pdf.