April 17 at 1pm
When a group of Jewish men in Butte, Montana joined the growing wave of American Jewish agitation against Jewish prostitution networks in 1909, they exiled, incarcerated, and/or deported many Jewish women and men enmeshed in Butte’s sex industry. But their efforts could not dislodge the powerful red-light district landlord and synagogue president they saw as Butte’s “chief malefactor” — until the 1910 Mann Act, which banned the interstate transportation of women for “immoral purpose[s],” enabled his conviction for a fluke trip across state lines. The saga of Butte’s Jewish sex work battles demonstrates how the Mann Act’s legal emphasis on interstate commerce redirected the focus of American Jewish anti-sex work campaigns away from profit structures and toward the surveillance of marriage and migration. It further demonstrates how carceral anti-prostitution tactics, which so many American Jews enthusiastically adopted to target Jewish men, unleashed state violence on the most vulnerable, particularly women and non-citizens. Finally, this episode illustrates how the structural conditions of American Jewishness in a Western mining boomtown shaped local Jewish sexual politics.
Cassandra Euphrat Weston is a doctoral candidate in History and a graduate certificate student in Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a Lapidus Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in 2023-2024, working on a dissertation provisionally entitled "Sexual Dissidence, Jewishness, and American Radicalism, 1900-1930."
Tara Zahra is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Her most recent book is Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (Norton, 2023).
