We have had a remarkable festival, and came home with a nice award for New York Best Documentary.
The great foreskin debate
To snip or not to snip? That was the question facing new parent Danae Elon, who didn’t just wrestle with the controversies of circumcision — she made a documentary about it.
By Joy Press
April 30, 2009 | New parents face an endless barrage of questions: which prenatal tests, what kind of diapers, which nursery school? But one choice is irrevocable: to snip or not to snip? That is the daunting question, one freighted with intense cultural and religious meaning. And yet people often don’t give it much thought at all.
For someone like me, a nonpracticing Jew married to a non-Jewish husband, it was a confusing moment. Neither of us had been raised in a religious household, and neither had set foot in a house of worship except to attend the occasional wedding. But I felt myself tempted by the lure of ritual and tradition. Jews consider circumcision a commandment from God, practiced over thousands of years — who was I to cut my son off from that? My husband, meanwhile, considered it an antiquated ritual lacking sufficient medical justification (an opinion similar to that of the American Academy of Pediatrics). On top of that was the fear of robbing one’s child of something — nerve endings, sexual feeling — that can never be returned. It’s an issue that American couples continue to wrestle with; although the number of boys routinely circumcised in the U.S. has decreased dramatically (one study shows the rate at 57 percent, down from a 1960s circumcision rate of 90 percent), the majority of parents still opt for it.
Could so much really depend on this thin slice of foreskin? That’s what Danae Elon set out to explore in her documentary “Partly Private,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week. Elon lives in Brooklyn, but she grew up as a secular Jew in Israel with an American mother and an Israeli father, the well-known author Amos Elon. In her first documentary, “Another Road Home,” Elon went back to Jerusalem and to the West Bank looking for the Palestinian nanny who had cared for her as a child, using her own experience as a way to touch on deeply complex issues about class and Palestinian-Israeli relations. Likewise, Elon places herself at the center of “Partly Private,” making her own pregnancy into a fraught and funny investigation into circumcision.
Sitting in the filmmaker’s lounge at Tribeca, Elon looks both radiant and a little anxious. She says that she tried to avoid taking an overt pro- or anti-snipping stand in the film, preferring to survey the whole world of circumcision with an open — if amused — mind. She introduces us to a broad cast of characters, from the mohel (a Jewish specialist who performs the procedure) who keeps all of his clients’ foreskins in a jar, to the anti-circumcision activist who expresses his own penile trauma in a children’s book, to the employees of a skincare company who use discarded foreskins in their antiaging cream. “Every bottle is not a foreskin,” one of them assures the camera.
Elon also ventures further afield, visiting the Italian town that once supposedly housed Jesus’ foreskin (it was stolen) as well as a Turkish party hall called Circumcision Palace, where she films dozens of little boys (aged 6 to 9) dressed in white suits going under the knife in front of their families and friends. Finally she journeys to Hebron on the West Bank, looking for the exact spot where Abraham is said to have received the order from God, and finds instead a wasteland decimated by war and religion. As she says in the documentary, “Did he really say to Abraham, ‘Cut off the tips of your dicks?’ What if we got it all wrong?”
All of this serves as research for Elon’s own charged decision, which she has to make not once during the film but twice. When the movie opens, she is pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Philip, a French-Algerian Jew, feels the strong pull of tradition, and she ambivalently goes along with his desire. But when she gets pregnant with another boy after several years of immersion in the topic, she is forced to decide what she really believes is best for her son’s penis.
Was it always your plan to make a movie about circumcision?
I had always wanted to make a film about it. I thought about extreme rituals, things that might be anthropologically interesting and contradictory, but I could never find a story structure that made sense. So I kind of let it go, until one day I was two months pregnant with my first child and Philip came through the door. We used to live in the East Village in a railroad apartment with a bathtub that was in the kitchen. So he comes through the door, and I’m kind of in this pregnant bliss in the bath, and he says to me, “What are we gonna do about the circumcision?” with a really solemn face — knowing what I was gonna say to him. So at that moment, it clicked. That’s the film!
You come from a secular Jewish family. So was your resistance to circumcision a matter of wanting to shake off that element of religious tradition?
Well, everything in my family is political and to me, creating the mark of circumcision meant also identifying with something I had a very hard time with. So it wasn’t so much the issue of, am I harming the child or not? It’s: What kind of a mark am I giving him? As someone who was born in Israel, that took on a very deep meaning.
In the film, I decided not to make a political statement. But when I went to Hebron, and I realized that this tradition comes from here, and [I saw] this ritual taking place in one of the most conflicted, horrible places in the world and it’s done in such a primitive, very nationalistic way — I was basically saying, you know, why is [what we are doing] different? We’re all doing this because we believe that we belong to this group. And I don’t want to belong to this group, but I do.
Whereas Philip does want to belong. He wants to feel part of this Jewish tradition.
He doesn’t come with the baggage that I have, being from Israel and having such strong reactions to the politics there. He emigrated from Algeria when he was just a month old, came to France to a very hostile environment, and his parents clearly hung on to what they brought with them from Algeria, so for him it’s not even a Jewish rite. Belonging is what it means to him. For me, my belonging is highly politicized.
I know a lot of people who have had these issues come up, but it’s usually from intermarriage. In this case, you were both Jewish, but it was two very different upbringings colliding.
This whole idea of intermarriage was also one of the major forces in my very deep enthusiasm to explore the subject: why it meant certain things to him and why it meant certain things to me. For Philip, his father had died when he was a very young boy. So it was, this is what my father would have wanted.
And on the other hand, your father called your decision to have your first son circumcised “sheer conformity.”
He did call it conformity. But you know, my father, he’s a well-known intellectual — and he would have left it up to my mother. He would not have faced this question. It’s an uncomfortable thing to question, and even the most rational and intellectual of us feel insecure as to what is the right thing to do.
Did either of you have regrets about it afterward?
Both.
Both of you did?
Yes. I think it’s a question of — there’s a certain degree of courage that you need in order to face up to who you really want to be. And I think that having circumcised our first son was the initial mistake. Because it took on so much meaning and we’d documented it and really blew it out of proportion. I was making a film, so of course we became representatives of a certain kind of argument or issue.
09.25.2009 at 7:50 PM
Do not be hard on yourselves for having circumcised your first son. The only thing clearly wrong with ritual or medical infant circumcision is the disdain for a prior injection of lidocaine, despite its having been marketed since 1950. The haredi practice of having the mohel take the bloody infant penis in his mouth must also be banned forthwith. Get real, frummies!
It appears you have one son snipped and the other not. That was the situation in my family of origin, and was a problem only because my mother did not know what to say, so said nothing about it. You trust you will find the wisdom and grace to help your boys come to terms with the difference. Maybe it will help them discover the value of mutual respect and tolerance.
Most circumcisions are indeed carried out because of “sheer conformity,” conformity to one’s wider social set, or to the expectations of one’s tribe and family of origin. And we need to examine the witting and unwitting role of sheer conformity in our lives. But let’s not be too hard on ourselves. Conformity also keeps many of us from many a moral train wreck.
Elon and Press seem insufficiently aware that routine circumcision never caught on in most Western countries. It did become popular in the English speaking countries other than Ireland. But the UK and New Zealand gave it up 1-2 generations ago, and the rate is down to 10% in Australia and Canada, and falling. In no country does the system of socialized medicine pay for routine circ. The practice persists only in the USA and in its cultural colony, South Korea.
The Algerian Jew Jacques Derrida was usettled by his 1930 bris, and meditated on it lifelong.
Your spouse is a North African Jew, yet looks very French. Appearances are deceiving.
Many continental Jews do not practice at all and have walked away from bris. A French Jewish couple who immigrated to the USA to flee Hitler, and were contented members of a Reform temple, told me that in their view, bris was an outdated custom. The notion that to leave a boy intact betrays his Jewish heritage and forces him to be a secular Jew all his life, is a mental peculiarity of Jews in English speaking countries.
A secular Jewish author, and an avowed atheist, recently told me that he did not have his sons circumcised, and that that was not at all controversial with him and their mother. But their decision dismayed their grandfather, who exclaimed “how will people know my gradnsons are Jews?” Ironically, the grandfather had strayed so far from his Jewish roots that he became the leading disciple of a Hindu mystic. There was zero evidence that anyone in the family of origin gave a fig about any Jewish ritual or tradition. But the grandfather still expected his grandsons to be snipped.
I wonder if there isn’t some kind of imprinting mechanism going on. What we see don’t see in childhood becomes something we find unsettling on some deep, dare I say it, Freudian level. Hence my admiration for American
intactivist mothers. They are defending something they never saw while growing up, something that they have never made love to. The only foreskins, if any, they have seen in the flesh is that of their own sons.
We honestly do not know what difference the foreskin or its absence makes for sexual pleasure. That fact is part of a broader fact: the rising awareness and sophistication about human sexuality that began with the writings of Havelock Ellis and Alfred Kinsey has taught us more about women than about men. I often sense that the masculine experience of sex is taken for granted. A general principle in social science and history is that it is very difficult to be truly objective about one’s own tribe. The evident corollary is that the sexual role of the pink bits circumcision discards will have to be discovered and explored by women sexologists. I am confident that women scholars will do just that over the course of this new century.
03.29.2010 at 11:46 PM
True, accepting circumcision may reflect a mere desire to ‘belong’, but on the other hand, rejecting it indicates rejection of judaism sensu lato. One simply cannot be Jewish without accepting the notion that flesh and material in general are not ours.
03.30.2010 at 4:27 AM
I do not agree that an intact Jew is an oxymoron. To be Jewish and intact is to be Jewish and reject one of the many commandments in the Torah. Few Jews respect all 630 Torah commandments. Starting with the 40-50% of self-identified Jews who decline to join a congregation. I trust you will also grant that many Jews are atheists and agnostics, as are gentiles of similar education.
If a Jew denies God OR denies there is such a thing as a Chosen People OR denies the Covenant, then he should not circumcise his sons. But he and his sons retain the right to call themselves members of a human community, the Jews.
Again, the notion that all Jews are circumcised holds mainly in the English speaking world and in Israel before 1975. Many European and Latin American secular Jewish families no longer circumcise. Large numbers of citizens from the former USSR who emigrated to Israel are intact. Since 1990 or so, a few secular Jewish families in Israel have ceased circumcising. Jewish families who cease circumcising almost never put that fact in the public domain, as is their right.
08.03.2010 at 4:47 AM
If you read “The Book of J”, the original history of the Jewish people, you will find no circumcision covenant in it. It was added hundreds of years after Abraham’s death. There should be no guilt or shame or blame in not obeying a non-covenant. The editors who added circumcision to the Abraham story also sexed up and violenced up the rape of Dinah story. It was undoubtedly a good way to mark a tribe… or slaves. Now that we wear clothes, tho, maybe we ought to cut off an ear instead?
08.03.2010 at 5:24 AM
That the Jews chose to put the cattle brand denoting Jewishness on the most private part of the male body (not just the penis but the tip of the penis) is, in my view, very revealing of its true purpose. It is the part of the body that is easiest to conceal if you wish to conceal it. So if it’s dangerous to be a Jew and Jews are marked, that mark is the least risky one to have.
But that mark is much harder to conceal from one person: his spouse. I submit that the real purpose of circ is to make intermarriage more difficult as follows. First, it makes it harder for a Jewish woman to marry a non-Jew. If the groom claims to be Jewish but isn’t, he will be found out on the wedding night. If he admits to not being Jewish and she goes ahead and marries him, she will be reminded of her betrayal of her people every time she does foreplay on him. If a Jewish young man wants to slip away and melt into the general run of humanity, his wedding night will be very awkward. For a Jewish man to explain to his gentile fiance that his organ will not work like what she expects, would be a conversation awkward in the extreme. It’s much simpler to marry a nice Jewish girl who expects a bald penis.
My tentative conclusion is that Jewish parents who don’t mind if a son marries out of the faith, should not circumcise him.
08.19.2010 at 7:58 AM
It astounds me that this has to be said, but the voluntary ritual or surgical mutilation of a child’s genitals is never the right thing to do. It’s difficult to see it as anything other than child sexual abuse. The reasons given for circumcising baby boys are grasping and minimal: expected poor hygiene later in life, prevention of HIV that can be easily prevented other ways, prevention of very rare disease, membership in a group that can only be verified by checking out each other’s penises, some deity told some long-dead guy to do it. Even if you think these reasons are right, the child is not yours, and neither is his body. As a human being, he — and he alone — has the right to decide what gets voluntarily mutilated on his own body. He should certainly be old enough to have had the opportunity to have sex as it is, before deciding whether he wants to cut the most sensitive third of the skin off his penis. It’s really as simple as that. It’s not yours.