A controversial court ruling in Cologne that effectively prohibits most circumcisions in that city has touched a nerve worldwide, and sparked an outcry in Germany that has united Jews and Muslims in a rare common protest. The judgment, delivered on May 5 but only published on June 26, found that the circumcision of a four-year-old…
The New York City Health Commissioner has issued a strongly worded statement calling for an end to a controversial circumcision-related rite. Dr. Thomas Farley said that direct oral-genital suction, known as metzitzah b’peh, should not be performed during Jewish ritual circumcision, and announced that several hospitals, including those serving the haredi Orthodox Jewish community, have…
Two Jewish infants in New Jersey were recently infected with — but survived — a herpes virus attributed to their ritual circumcisers’ use of an oral suctioning technique that is said to have caused the death of an infant in New York in September. Dr. Margaret Fisher, chair of pediatrics at Monmouth Medical Center, told…
The debate over circumcision has spread to Colorado, where two lawmakers are seeking to reinstate Medicaid funding for the procedure after it was cut last year. The proposal, which is snaking its way through the state legislature, has sparked a broader conversation about circumcision in Colorado and beyond, with Jews on both sides of the…
When hundreds of thousands of immigrants flocked to Israel from the Former Soviet Union, they never dreamed that their absorption process could prove a missing link in a massive plan to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. At the height of the wave of arrivals in the 1990s, Israeli doctors came face to face with a huge…
The Shmooze can think of at least one guy who won’t be performing a bris anytime soon. John Patterson, a doctor at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., is in court this week, facing a lawsuit for amputating a penis during what was intended to be a circumcision. He’s being sued by Phillip Seaton, who’s already…
The recent ballot initiative to ban circumcision in San Francisco, which was recently dropped, ignited a hair-raising and soul-searching debate on the topic between Jews and non-Jews, and Jews and Jews alike. For some of us at the Sisterhood, one of the more confounding elements of brit milah conversation was whether we should endorse a…
The Sisterhood, of course, isn’t the only place where “Jewish women converse.” The blog also co-produces with Lilith magazine a Women’s Roundtable podcast. And Forward editor Jane Eisner co-hosts with Rachel Sklar The Salon, a Jewish Channel television show that brings together Jewish women with a wide range of perspectives. On the latest Women’s Roundtable,…
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