Still from Cut
While still the norm in the United States, circumcision is an increasingly controversial topic, the subject of fervid debate among anxious parents-to-be (and an everlasting source for gags on sitcoms). To Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, who spent his childhood in a Modern Orthodox household in Brookline, Massachusetts, and his teens in Israel, circumcision was just ...

Maxim Biller often expresses an acute dissatisfaction with his country. “Why, Adonai, am I different? Because I don’t want to be German?” Biller, one of Germany’s most popular essayists and fiction writers, wrote in 2001. He has threatened to move to Israel; he wonders if life “would have been more fun” as an American. Yet ...

On a blustery evening not long ago, Levi Okunov arrived at a Lower East Side basement apartment that could best be described as a Hasidic crash pad. A young man in wrinkled pants and a lopsided yarmulke was passed out on a dark couch. Another young man stared at a laptop computer, the speakers blaring ...

I met Laura Jacobs a few years ago when she was my writing student at Sarah Lawrence. I knew right away that she’d be great in class. She was funny, a straightforward yet sensitive speaker, and possessed the kind of flexible and empathic instincts that help a workshop run smoothly. One thing puzzled me: In ...

When I was growing up in the early 1970s, there was my nose—and then there was me hidden behind it. Similar to Wilhelm Fliess—Sigmund Freud’s one-time friend who specialized in “nosology,” the idea that one’s nose was intimately tied to one’s sexuality—I believed that my prominent nose reflected the unshapeliness of my soul. Even though ...

Right now, there are two strangers in my house. One is napping on the sofa bed; the other is in the shower—she just came in from having a cigarette. When she told me she was stepping out for a smoke, I was briefly, mildly shocked: I mean, this girl is 21 weeks pregnant. But just ...

As Jennifer Traig prepared for her bat mitzvah, she also began to worry about keeping kosher. This California girl, the product of a mixed marriage, wasn’t just finding religion: She was developing scrupulosity, a version of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in which individuals fixate on moral questions and religious practice. Perplexed, Traig became her own guide, ...