There is reason to have hope for the future though. Scientists have successfully used stem cell regeneration to grow vaginas and transplant them into girls born without vaginal canals. The women were able to have sex.
The Wake Forrest Institute has regenerated rabbit penises, and grafted them onto rabbits. The males were able to achieve erections and ejaculate.
This (and a lot of the rest of the discussion in this thread) seems to me to be ignoring the elephant in the room: namely, that “the practice of Judaism” in a whole lot of Jewish communities worldwide currently does not “remain strong” in the sense of following traditional customs and observing traditional prohibitions.
Certainly, halachic practice in most Orthodox communities remains consistent, but the Orthodox in the US, for example, make up only about 10% of all those who identify as Jewish. Many more US Jews are intermarried with non-Jews, and/or describe themselves as having no religious belief or non-Jewish beliefs instead of/in addition to Jewish ones (e.g., the so-called “Jubu” or Jewish-Buddhist syncretic movement), and/or reject halachic rules about permitted foods etc., and/or are assimilated to non-Jewish culture in a lot of other ways.
If you’re simply excluding these people from your definition of “Jews”, then okay, your assertion about the continued “practice of Judaism” holds true. But then you have to acknowledge that a substantial majority of people descended from twentieth-century American Jews don’t meet your definition of “Jews”.
So I think the assertion, or prediction, that IMC is always going to be crucially important to Jewish identity is kind of begging the question of what Jewish identity is, and who gets to claim it and define it.
That’s a great cartoon. But more banally, most of us have seen these facts before, and you aren’t actually telling anyone anything new. Well, it’s new to me to learn that there are men who want to shame and emotionally scar little boys who have been circumcised, in the hope that it might reduce the number of kids being circumcised in the next generation. (Upsetting the friends and relatives and getting free press isn’t worked super-well for the Westboro Baptist Church, if their goal is actually to reduce homosexuality, though. So I hope you aren’t tempted to do that.) But you haven’t presented any new information about circumcision or the damage it causes.
Perhaps the reason the only person to change their mind did so in the other direction is because the only new (to me, anyway) facts presented in this thread were presented by senoy, re infant tattoos:
And Kimstu, re less dramatic forms of FGM in Indonesia:
(and several follow-up posts.)
I’ve been thinking of what to do about the objections from the religious folk. Perhaps, from a Utilitarian point of view, it would result in better outcomes to grant a narrow religious exemption from criminal liability. I wouldn’t want any children to die from a botched, back alley circumcision.
Here’s what I would do: I would allow children unhappy with their circumcision to sue their parents and/or the person who did the cutting on the day they turn 18. I’d remove any statute of limitations on civil liability, so a child could change his mind at any point his parents are still alive and take them to court.
I’ve been thinking of this, too. I’m one of those Jews who isn’t Orthodox, and doesn’t follow most of Halachah. And yet, I hired some orthodox dude to circumcise my infant son. And I was the godmother who held my friend’s son during his circumcision.
I don’t have time to write a meaningful post now, but perhaps later tonight I’ll give it a shot.
IANAL, but I don’t understand how this would work if there’s a legal exemption permitting circumcision on religious grounds. If the circumcision was done in good faith out of sincere religious belief, and the physical procedure was competently and correctly performed, I don’t see what grounds there’d be for a lawsuit.
AFAICT, children who successfully sue their parents are suing them over things the parents clearly weren’t supposed to do in the first place: abuse, neglect, lack of financial support, and so on. But if religiously-mandated infant circumcision is legal and normal, what’s the plaintiff going to complain of, at least to the extent of persuading a jury to agree with him?
The closest analogy I can think of is something like a peanut allergy, where it would be abusive for parents to knowingly feed an allergic child peanuts even though such behavior would be legal and normal for children without such an allergy. Maybe a circumcised son could argue that he was unusually susceptible to the trauma of circumcision, although the practice would be considered legal and normal in most cases (where this religious exception applies), and therefore he is owed compensation for the harm he suffered thereby.
But how could anybody make the case that the parents should have known at the time that their infant son was or would be unusually susceptible to circumcision trauma? Family law demands (and rightly so, IMHO) a high standard of conduct from parents, but it doesn’t require them to be soothsayers. ISTM that the parents’ responding that they carried out a legal and customary religious procedure based on their sincere religious convictions without knowing, or having any way of knowing, that their son would consider himself significantly harmed by it in later life would be a sufficient defense against all such claims.
(Repeating, though, that IANAL and am not qualified to determine what’s a valid legal argument and what isn’t.)
I’ve been following this thread and keeping quite for a while now but I want to chime in here.
It’s because circumcision isn’t just a religious observance for the Jewish people. It’s foundational to the culture. It’s more important than keeping kosher. It’s more important than reading Torah. In many ways male circumcision is the essential element of Judaism. Asking it to stop is asking people to stop being Jewish. Not religiously, but culturally. It’s asking them to abandon who they are and who they have been for 4 millenia.
Note, though, that there’s no Constitutional guarantee of “freedom of culture”. If we’re going to make a civil-liberties argument in favor of permitting IMC, then AFAICT it has to be based on the role of the practice in the free exercise of religion, not just cultural identity.
Well, there are many Jewish practices that are nowadays considered less central to Jewish identity than they were historically. There are many children of Jewish fathers who self-identify as Jewish despite not having a Jewish mother, for example, which is also a big no-no halachically. (At least, that’s been true since the early Common Era, when rabbinic definition of Jewish identity emphasized matrilineal over patrilineal descent: another example of a supposedly immutable custom that in fact appears to have changed somewhat over history.) At least one branch of Judaism, Reform Judaism, accepts Jewish father/gentile mother descent as a legitimate form of Jewish identity.
As I said, the underlying question is how Jewish identity is defined and who gets to define it.
Underline added. As a causal ethnic Jew, I’m shocked at this. We never discussed this in the few years of Jewish religious school I was forced to attend as a child. I’m sure many of you know a whole lot more about the Jewish people then I do, but–with all respect–that seems like a more than the average amount of crazy to base a religion (or culture) on.
If I had sons, I wouldn’t have circumcised them, but I would have told them (like I told my daughters) they were “part Jewish.”
Not to nitpick, but you are using the abandonment of a relatively recent practice (matralinial decent) to contrast with circumcision which is one of the most ancient rituals in the religion. Also, matralinial decent is hugely controversial in a lot of ways and, prior to the founding of the state of Israel, was mostly meaningless.
I’m not here to argue if my position is correct. I’m just trying to explain why thinking you are going to get Jewish buy in on this ever is wrong headed.
And Judaism isn’t a religion that is analogous to Christianity. You can’t disentangle the religion from the culture.
I’m mostly an Atheist, I just happen to be Jewish. It’s who I am, not what I believe. I don’t know how to explain it. I also don’t believe you can be part Jewish anymore than you can be part New Yorker or part Californian, or part Democrat or part Red Sox fan. You are or you aren’t. But that’s a topic for another time.
As I said in the previous post, my point was mostly to point out the difficulty of actually persuading practicing Jews that giving up circumcision was ok. It IS the covenant. People are deeply attached to their cultural heritages.
I think you can be part Jewish, just as you can be part Native American. If we’re primarily talking culture, why can’t my daughters dance in Pow Wows and celebrate Hanukkah? Why can’t my imaginary sons do whatever ethnic atheist Jewish people do without being circumcised? Melting pot, etc.
I’m not disagreeing with you about convincing practicing Jews about any of this. But, as a non-practicing Jew, I doubt there would be much push back from people like me.
Well, as we’ve been discussing in this thread, it is widely held that the modern form of Jewish circumcision (entire removal of the foreskin instead of just trimming it) is actually not much older than the rule of matrilineal descent.
I’m not sure what you mean by “meaningless” in this context. AFAICT, you seem to be arguing a bit circularly: i.e., any marker of Jewish identity that a significant number of Jews at some point were willing to relinquish can’t have been fundamental to Jewish identity because otherwise they wouldn’t have relinquished it. An alternative explanation, of course, is that Jewish ideas of what was fundamental to Jewish identity changed over time.
Like I said, IANAL. But I am not persuaded, and haven’t heard any lawyer try to argue, that a freedom-of-religion argument on constitutional grounds wouldn’t need to involve, y’know, the actual exercise of religion. How would that even work? “Your Honor, I request a legal exemption so I can circumcise my non-consenting infant son.” “On what grounds?” “My culture says I have to because my people are commanded by God to circumcise their sons.” “So it is your sincere religious conviction that God requires you to circumcise your son?” “Oh hell no, I’m an atheist, that divine-commandment stuff is all just Bronze Age tribal bullshit.” “Oh.” :dubious:
Kimstu you are placing arguments into my post that I didn’t make. I made no claim to arguing for or against circumcision wrt freedom of religion. I’m only addressing the notion that Jews will willingly give it up, which they won’t. Stuff that is foundational to identity runs deep.
I’m happy to talk about all the rest of it including why no one needed to prove their Judaism before the founding of Israel (because who the hell would pretend to be a jew is why) but it all seems to be a digression.
Procrustus, I agree, there probably won’t be pushback from people like you. But there will be more pushback than I think you would expect. The half Jewish thing bugs for different reasons. But no one says you can’t exist in more than one culture at a time. I am a Jew, I am from Los Angeles, I am a Dodgers Baseball fan. All these exist simultaneously. None are half. I don’t have a partial identity.
One last point on the importance of all this.
In order to convert, if you are a man, and you are already circumsiced, you have to get cut again anyway. It’s that important.
Sure, but I think you may be exaggerating the historical unanimity of Jewish opinion on this issue. After all, during the Hellenistic period there was fairly widespread Jewish resistance to circumcision, although of course there was also an opposed school of thought that condemned such heterodoxy, and ultimately prevailed. There have also been controversies on the issue within Judaism more recently. As the Jewish Encyclopedia notes:
No, and I don’t think I said that you did. But elsewhere in this thread we’ve discussed the question of IMC as a freedom-of-religion issue, which is why I brought up the constitutionality argument. And when you pointed out that Judaism doesn’t really separate religion from culture, I wondered what implications that would have for the constitutionality question.
Okay… maybe a civil tort doesn’t make sense. But how about this requirement: Circumcision Reversal Insurance.
With the possibility of true foreskin regeneration on the horizon, some children are going to want their foreskins back. It certainly doesn’t seem fair to me that the child should have to pay out of his own pocket to restore a body part his parents had cut off. You multiply the cost of the surgery by the probability that the child will want it reversed later. If it’s $10,000 and a 10 percent chance, that means an insurance policy would cost a little bit more than $1,000.
You have an amygdala too. Freud and Ayn Rand tried to stand outside the human race and explain and bemoan lesser beings’ irrationalities. They’re not good role models.
I changed my mind because I did a little research and learned that FGC isn’t something evil men do to oppress women; women who’ve been through it themselves do it to their daughters and granddaughters, and the men largely stay out of it. I think clitoridectomy, excision, and infibulation sound stark raving outrageous, but what’s far worse is our marching into Sub-Saharan Africa like the British in Things Fall Apart and crushing people’s barbaric customs because that’s the white man’s burden. Besides, we’ve already tried it. We helped civilize Africa with colonialism; we helped civilize the American Indians by destroying their languages and cultures; we helped civilize the Australian Aborigines by taking away their children—I think it’s time to stop coercive helping and leave these poor people alone.
Fair enough.
When my daughter was in pre-school, one of her classmates was an African girl whose family sometimes took her back to Africa. And one day I wondered if she might be from one of the cultures that practice FGM. (Her family came from the general part of Africa where it’s common) And I wondered whether they might do that to her.
Then I thought about the girl, who also was somewhat autistic, and obviously had loving parents, and I realized that whether or not they decided to cut her genitals was going to make a lot less difference to her life than an awful lot of other stuff, such as how they dealt with her autism.
Hmmm. But if we’re going to require parents to insure against the possibility that a decision they make for their minor child will later by determined by said child to have been harmful, why restrict that requirement to infant circumcision? Suppose, to take puzzlegal’s example of language acquisition, an adult child decides they were unfairly deprived by not being taught Spanish or Chinese in their youth. Why shouldn’t the parents have to have insurance to cover the costs of remedial language training in that contingency?
(I’m trying to decide if I can make a case for having endured a disadvantaged childhood on the grounds that I never got taken to Disney World. Not once.)