48 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
will laugh”); and that henceforth he will
be called Abraham. There’s only one
small catch: “Every male among you
shall be circumcised.”
Perhaps the best-known proponent
of circumcision is Maimonides, the me-
dieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher
and Torah scholar who lived within the
Islamic communities of Egypt and Mo-
rocco. “The bodily injury caused to that
organ is exactly that which is desired,”
Maimonides wrote. “There is no doubt
that circumcision weakens the power
of sexual excitement, and sometimes
lessens the natural enjoyment.” A friend
from Jewish day school, David J. Fine,
who is now himself a rabbi, recently
quipped, “Maimonides didn’t have too
much sex. He worked very long hours.”
The reduction of sexual excitement
remained a theme in Jewish commen-
tary on circumcision, but it also took
on a strange self-effacing aspect. Some
Jewish scholars thought that uncircum-
cised men would prove too irresistible
for Jewish women, and that men with-
out a foreskin would not be led into
constant temptation. “It is hard for a
woman with whom an uncircumcised
man has had sexual intercourse to sep-
arate from him,” Maimonides wrote,
praising the circumcised Abraham for
his chastity. In a comprehensive vol-
ume on the subject, “Why Aren’t Jew-
ish Women Circumcised?,” the Har-
vard professor Shaye J. D. Cohen quotes
a medieval rabbi, Isaac ben Yedaiah, at
length in a section titled “Envy of the
Gentile Foreskin”:
A man foreskinned in the flesh desires to
lie with a beautiful-looking woman.... She
too will court the man who is foreskinned in
the flesh and lie against his breast with great
passion, for he thrusts inside her a long time
because of the foreskin, which is a barrier against
ejaculation in intercourse. Thus she feels plea-
sure and reaches an orgasm first. When a fore-
skinned man sleeps with her and then resolves
to return to his home, she brazenly grasps him,
holding on to his genitals, and says to him,
“Come back, make love to me.”
Therefore, circumcision denies plea-
sure to both women and men. And, ac-
cording to this logic, Cohen explains,
“the woman will become sexually frus-
trated and will lose interest in sex, al-
lowing the man to devote his spiritual
and physical energies to the contempla-
tion of God and other noble pursuits”—
among them the study of the Torah.
European Christians considered Jews
effeminate owing to their circumcisions,
deeming them a studious, unathletic,
hemorrhoidal people unable to gallop
through Palestine bedecked in armor
and spearing unbelievers. In fact, the Is-
raelites almost certainly inherited the
custom from the Egyptians, who, ac-
cording to the British scholar Rebecca
Steinfeld, saw the procedure as a mas-
culine test of strength. The oldest ref-
erence, she observes, is found in an Egyp-
tian tomb, built around 2400 B.C. Two
young noblemen are shown having their
genitals cut by temple priests. An in-
scription reads “Hold him and do not
allow him to faint.”
The tradition has continued in the
Middle East to the present day. In Is-
rael, circumcision fever truly broke the
thermometer in the nineteen-nineties,
as waves of Jews arrived from the de-
tritus of the former Soviet Union. Ac-
cording to Haaretz, doctors competed
to see how many immigrants they could
circumcise in a day, while, not to be out-
done, one of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox
burial societies managed to circumcise
the corpses of recent arrivals who had
died in the Holy Land.
Alex Moshkin, a comparative-liter-
ature professor at Koç University, in Is-
tanbul, moved to Israel from Stavropol,
in southern Russia. “Many fathers them-
selves did not do the procedure,” Mosh-
kin told me. “They kind of pushed their
kids to do it. The older people were,
like, ‘I don’t think I need this.’”
The newly arrived immigrants were
also pressured by ultra-religious Jews
and by Israeli society in general. As
Moshkin observed, “These rabbis—
many of whom didn’t speak the lan-
guage of the immigrants—often spoke
on religious matters or the need to
shed one’s Russian skin in favor of a
new Israeli identity and a new Israeli
name.” The immigrants felt that they
needed to change, he said, “in order to
belong to the Israeli collective.” The
motivation of families in America was
not altogether different. We all wanted
to belong.T
he hair knot around my skin bridge
could not be prized loose using
tweezers, and any attempts to dislodge
it with my fingers only tightened it
around the string of superfluous skin.My wife’s research led to one remedy:
Nair. For days, we applied the hair-
removal lotion with calligraphic preci-
sion. The knotted hair appeared smaller
in diameter, but it remained wrapped
around the bridge. In fact, it was now
digging into the skin, releasing what
looked like a stream of pus. I noticed
this during my long swims, especially
while doing the breaststroke; not pain,
exactly, but a sharp ping of discomfort
as the underside of the penis came into
contact with my swim trunks.
Several days later, I sought medical
attention in a neighboring village. Be-
cause of the pandemic, a pleasant
middle-aged woman was performing
triage outside the doors of the urgent-
care facility. When I tried to explain
my predicament to her, she said, “Oh,
honey, it must hurt so bad to have an
ingrown hair in your Gentile region.”
If only that region had stayed Gentile.
The local urgent-care doctor tried his
hand with some forceps but was clearly
not an expert at removing tiny hairs
wrapped around extraneous pieces of
penile skin. I would have to go to the
city to seek a specialist.
My primary-care doctor recom-
mended a urologist on the Upper East
Side. Like many of the urologists I
would subsequently meet, he was mid-
dle-aged, Jewish, and possessed of an
easy humor. Let’s call him Dr. Fun-
nyman. In fact, the first thing I no-
ticed when I went to see him was a
Jewish-humor anthology on his desk.
He asked me if I was famous, and I
did my customary blush and said no,
I certainly didn’t think of myself that
way. “You’re not Dr. Shteynshlyuger,
the urologist?” he asked. When I in-
formed him that I was Gary Shteyn-
gart, the novelist, he told me he had
never heard of me but loved the work
of Michael Chabon.
Dr. Funnyman took out a pair of
forceps and in a matter of seconds had
cut the hair tourniquet from the skin
bridge. “I’m amazing!” he said. I was
overcome with gratitude and relief. I
took a photo of the offending hair to
memorialize my liberation. Dr. Fun-
nyman told me that the skin bridge
had been strangled by the hair to such
an extent that it would probably soon
separate into two pieces hanging off
the penis. If this happened, I could