The Iraqi Elections Are Bad News for Iran
The fact that they took place is itself a cause for celebration.
October 19, 2021
A Jewish Writer Blames Circumcision for His Pain, When He Should Be Blaming the Soviet Union
Gary Shteyngart’s tendentious attack on brit milah.
The novelist Gary Shteyngart recently published a lengthy article in the New Yorker detailing the suffering he has gone through after a botched circumcision performed when he was seven years old. Born to a Jewish family in the USSR, Shteyngart did not received a brit milah (ritual circumcision) at the traditional age of eight days, meaning that the procedure would have been much more painful than normal even if it had been conducted properly. Not content merely to discuss his own experience, he launched a broader attack on the practice, at a time when an “intactivist” movement is growing in strength, and some European countries are considering bans on circumcision. The rabbi and mohel Hayim Leiter notes that the essay makes numerous inaccurate or misleading claims:
October 19, 2021
Left-Wing Anti-Semitism Is No Worse Than the Right-Wing Variety, but It Is More Likely to Go Unnoticed
Beware bleeding hearts who have no heart for bleeding Jews.
A Jewish Writer Blames Circumcision for His Pain, When He Should Be Blaming the Soviet Union
Gary Shteyngart’s tendentious attack on brit milah.
The Jewish Small Businessman Who Inspired Colin Powell to Go to College
And taught him some Yiddish.
How One of Charles Dickens’s Jewish Readers Set Him Straight about Anti-Semitism
A lesson for Sally Rooney from a children’s book.