No one really likes to think about getting circumcised, but undergoing the procedure twice? No thank you. Yet some parents in the Haifa area are doing just that after news broke that a mohel botched hundreds of circumcisions and failed to comply with Jewish Law. When a group of senior rabbis from Haifa attended a…
Can a woman perform a bris? Jewish scholars, even the most Orthodox among them, answer with a tentative “why not?” for there is no halachic prohibition against mohelot, or female mohels. While Jewish law states that it’s preferable for a Jewish male to perform the brit milah, or ritual circumcision, if one is present, it…
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…
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