Discussions take place at 
The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street, New York City. 1-3 pm.

The 1950s is commonly viewed as a socially conservative and sexually repressive decade. Yet it was also a time of incredibly subversive, and highly political art and popular culture, much of which came out of Jewish and queer experiences. This series will explore the work of these artists and performers and look at how the challenged prevailing ideas about gender, sexuality, ethnicity, identity, and sexual politics, and examining the overlaps between dissident queer and Jewish sensibilities. We will be looking at films with Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis, television work by Jack Benny and Gertrude Berg, listening to "dirty" Jewish women comics Belle Barth and Pearl Williams (as well as Lenny Bruce), and reading Allan Ginsberg, Patricia Highsmith, Paul Goodman, Laura Z. Hobson, and Herbert Marcuse, as well as selected critical essays on the period.