More in ‘Melvin Konner’

It’s like living with two tiny Shalom Auslanders. My children crack each other up by yelling “diarrhea!” at inopportune moments. They inform me, somberly, that “people think it’s gross, but it’s really great on toast,” before dissolving in a puddle (hmm, maybe that was an unfortunate metaphor) of giggles. They are madly in love with ...

Monday, October 19th
Braiding Flesh and Spirit: Kicking off a weeklong examination of the Jewish body, by Jonathan Rosen
On the Bookshelf: New books on bodies visible and invisible, by Josh Lambert
Stumped: From the archives: A new father finds that the bris ends but the foreskin lingers, by Peter Hyman
Bottled Guilt: How the debate over breastfeeding is ...

It seems New York magazine got the memo about Jewish Body Week—it features a full rundown on circumcision in the new issue. An article on the “shift away from circumcision” as a standard practice for American baby boys credits the change to activists as well as some more provocative factors: “As more U.S. women have ...

During Jewish Body Week, no one should forget that one of the things Jews have persistently done with their bodies, much to their loving mothers’ dismay, is to hunch over texts, wearing out their eyes while squinting to make out tiny typefaces. In other words, Jews read with their bodies, too. In Maggid: Jewish Bodies: ...

The Rabbis tell a Midrash about the soul before birth, forced to inhabit the sperm brought by an angel before God on the day of conception. The soul, which has been basking in God’s glory, has no desire to enter what it calls an “impure sperm,” but God consolingly tells the soul that the world ...

In the YouTube trailer for a new play running at a small theater in New York, an unseen interviewer asks people in a park whether they’ve heard of “the soap myth.” Most of them look befuddled, but some eventually realize that the question refers to the belief that the Nazis made soap from human corpses. But the last interviewee, a yarmulke-wearing old man with a pinched, angry face, is different.

• Cleverly named they’re not, but there are at least 18 still-operating Jewish-run business in Atlantic City that are over 50 years old, including Nathan Levin Furs, Mel’s Furniture, and Fischer Shoes. [Jewish Times of South Jersey]
• Israelis and Palestinians have managed to agree on something: supporting the Dead Sea as a candidate for the ...

As summer gets underway, the beach beckons, clothes come off, and we think about our bodies. This trailer (by the folks behind Tablet’s God & Co. series) for Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body shows what happens when that body is clad not in a bikini but in clay.

Melvin Konner
Circumcision, laws governing intercourse, eugenics, big noses, fleshy lips—all of these figure somewhere into notions of Jews and their physical selves. In the new book The Jewish Body, out now from Schocken and Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters Series, anthropologist and physician Melvin Konner explores some of these ideas.
He spoke with Nextbook about physical stereotypes of ...