Mention circumcision in a crowd — even a virtual crowd — of liberal Jews (or liberal anything, I guess) and it never fails to spark rhetorical fire. And so, when I saw a recent post on the Park Slope Parents listserv from a woman whose daughter is pregnant and not sure about having a son…
Sandra Bullock’s husband, Jesse James, may have been photographed in Nazi garb, giving a Nazi salute, but Bullock wants to make it perfectly clear that she’s no antisemite. And she went so far as to have a bris for her newly adopted son, Louis. Because she and James wanted to keep the adoption a secret…
On Capitol Hill recently, amid preposterously high kites and blooming cherry blossoms, a peaceful anti-circumcision protest took place. It was small. The protest that is. Men wore sandwich boards and a mother-daughter team jiggered signs that read: “Circumcision Is Torture” and “Circumcision Decreases Sensitivity.” Pony-tailed joggers posed for a photo with their thumbs up in…
Philip Sherman has a good claim to have handled more foreskins than any man alive. And possibly more Jewish foreskins than anyone in history. He’s a Mohel who markets himself as a dependable cutter rather than someone who is going to make each bris memorable. Based in Manhattan, but prepared to hop from borough to…
I love Rebecca’s new post about the commitment it takes for a Jewish woman to give birth to a boy and, usually on his eighth day of life, turn him over to the (hopefully skilled) hands of a mohel. It brought back that moment when, 15 years ago, I stood in our shul, weak winter…
How do you measure commitment? That’s the question I was left pondering after reading Elana Sztokman’s post on the double standard for Orthodox women. Some women’s tardiness for services has become a justification for shutting out the entire gender from a whole host of responsibilities, as late arrival to shul apparently signifies a lack of…
I was living in Berlin when I found out that I was pregnant. My doctor there, a very exuberant Chilean woman, was doing an ultrasound around 14-weeks when she suddenly paused near the baby’s abdomen. “Oh! I see a tiny, tiny, oh so small little penis!” she exclaimed. This, of course, did not thrill my…
The best-selling, Pulitzer-winning, famously Jewish author, Michael Chabon, is ready to tell us how he really feels about a particular halakhic ritual. Page Six reports that in Chabon’s forthcoming memoir, “Manhood for Amateurs,” the author passionately indicts the practice of circumcision, writing: Mutilation [is] the only honest name for this raw act that my wife…
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