And married a seventh,” and the late Harold Brodkey’s immortal line from his short story “Innocence,” about the sexual conquest of a co-ed named Orra: “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” Though Bukiet succeeds in his quest “to hit 100 on both the Jew-o-meter and the sex-o-meter,” how could he choose a scene from Philip Roth’s Counterlife instead of Portnoy’s Complaint? We want the liver! “Witness the people of the book, in bed,” says Melvin Jules Bukiet in the introduction to his wonderful anthology Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. How could one go wrong with 26 fictional excerpts by Cynthia Ozick, Erica Jong, Francine Prose, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer and a one-act play by the ever-randy Saul Bellow? Personal favorites include the beginning of Jong’s infamous Fear of Flying: “There were 177 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. One consequence of this: a lot of sex books.

JEWS ARE PURPORTED TO BE the best-educated group in this country, as well as the most sexually liberal. The Oy of Sex: Jewish Women Write Erotica, edited by Marcy Sheiner, Cleis Press, $14.95īittersweet Journey: A Moderately Erotic Novel of Love, Longing and Chocolate, by Enid Futterman, Viking, $20.95 Slut! Growing up Female With a Bad Reputation, by Leora Tanenbaum, Perennial, $13 Run, Catch, Kiss by Amy Sohn, Scribner, $12 Neurotica, edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet, Norton, $14.95