This week’s winner is “JW,” who was not pleased with senior writer Liel Leibovitz’ plea that we cease commemorating 9/11. “Maybe your article should have been about why you were so angry in the first place. You might learn something about yourself, and then you can understand other people and go and make suggestions as audacious as to how an entire nation should memorialize September 11th,” JW wrote. “This is probably going to offend you; You write with the attitude of a 23-old female. I could be way off on that assumption, but I’d put money on it.”

Liel considers this “The absolute greatest comment I’ve ever received.” JW gets a copy of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body.

Forget 9/11
The Jewish Body [Nextbook Press]

This week’s winner is “Judith,” who wrote, in response to Michelle Goldberg’s fascinating column on Israel’s unusually high rates of in-vitro fertilization and general pro-natalist policies and culture—and I quote—”EWWWWWWWW.”

“Judith” will receive a copy of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body, which teaches that there is nothing EWWWWWWWW about it.

The Jewish Body [Nextbook Press]
Made in Heaven

This week’s winner, Kim Phillips, wrote on Facebook (yes, comments on Tablet Magazine’s Facebook page count, too!), in response to Marjorie Ingall’s exploration of “how old girls should be before they wear makeup”: “If it’s my daughter, 32.” LOL!

Phillips will receive a copy of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body.

Little Ladies [Tablet Magazine]

But seriously, folks: Why is poop humor funny? I asked Maxine for her opinion. “Because it goes into the toilet and it’s tasty!” she answered, cracking herself up before ricocheting away.

“Anything about privates is funny,” Maxie’s older sister, Josie, told me. “Because they’re privates!”

Her reasoning may be circular, but it’s not wrong. I consulted my favorite child-rearing expert, Kiki Schaffer, director of parenting, family, and early childhood at New York’s 14th Street Y. “When kids are spreading their wings and trying to be free, scatological humor is resonant. They understand that it’s illicit, secret, private. We’re a culture that is so uncomfortable talking about bathroom habits, and little guys pick up on that. And what a thrill it is to get a rise out of your parents, or a giggle,” she told me. Kiki’s advice: Ignore it, don’t feed the monster, and it will eventually disappear.

Child-development specialist Betsy Brown Braun, author of Just Tell Me What to Say, suggests explaining to a child, “I know you really like to say words like poopie and pee pee and tushie. Those are words that you may say with your friends who want to talk that way or when you are in your own room. Those are not words that grownups want to hear.” She also recommends using real words instead of cutesy euphemisms for body parts and processes, so kids don’t get the idea that they’re shameful. (But if they’re not shameful, why do you have to go to your room to say them?) She further suggests teaching kids other jokes, other ways to be funny.

Good advice. But as Kiki (who also runs a new moms group at the Y) points out, adults find body processes endlessly entertaining too. “When new moms get together they love talking about poop,” she says, “And it’s always, ‘Wow, I never thought a year ago I’d be discussing this so much.’ ” My father, olav hashalom, went to his grave thinking farting was the funniest thing in the universe. His self-installed Mac error sound was the Monty Python line “I fart in your general direction!” (When he was working on his laptop in my kitchen, I’d hear it over and over.) In his ethical will, he commanded my brother and me, “Belch loudly at the dinner table. It is a compliment to the chef, and a long-established Ingall tradition.” And without pee, Sarah Silverman would have no career. Without poop, Larry the Cable Guy would actually be installing cable.

Jews have a fine tradition of scatological humor. You’d think we’d be all cerebral and Woody Allen-y, but even intellectuals know that bean-blowing can be art. Which explains this joke: Mrs. Kahn, an elderly member of the shul, has a little problem with kleptomania. But she’s a nice old lady and it’s really a mitzvah not to embarrass her, so the rabbi simply keeps an eagle eye on her behavior in the sanctuary. After services one Saturday the rabbi tells Mrs. Kahn, “Shabbat Shalom” and shakes her hand, causing a candlestick that had been on a table on the bimah to fall from her sleeve. The rabbi sighs and picks it up, then pats her on the back, and a siddur falls out of her jacket. “You know, Mrs Kahn, you can borrow a book whenever you like,” says the rabbi. Mrs Kahn finally turns to go, and as she does she lets out a stupendous fart. The rabbi exclaims, “Oh, Mrs. Kahn, not the shofar!”

Why are smart people so amused by anal acoustics? “You don’t have to be a child to love taboo subjects,” explains Harvard anthropologist Melvin Konner, author of The Jewish Body, part of the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series. “Sex, bodily functions, death, stupidity, race, and ethnicity—anything you’re not supposed to talk about in a normal way, that’s material for jokes. Freud said joking is about a release of tension; I think that’s still a valid idea. Joking allows you to express things you can’t express in other ways.”

Jack Kugelmass, professor of anthropology and director of Jewish studies at the University of Florida, elaborates. “Scatological humor is about transgression. It’s about crossing a line,” he says.

And it’s ancient. Our people’s texts are full of gross-out humor. When Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to make their god perform a miracle and they fail, Elijah responds with the snarky suggestion that they yell louder, because maybe their god is peeing. In the book of Proverbs, we learn that “a fool repeats his folly the way a dog is drawn back to eat its own vomit.” Yum.

Humor also defuses the power of what frightens us. My friend Howard Rheingold recently started a blog about his battle with rectal cancer. The blog is called Howard’s Butt, and the background image is a closeup of a statue’s tuchus with Howard’s face imposed on it. “A lot of psycho-social-sexual-mythological energy flows forth from our organ of shit,” Howard observes. So, Howard chronicled (past tense, ptui ptui ptui—his last CT scan was clear!) his treatment in graphic detail. The blog tells people who avoid friends with cancer (since another approach to bodily anxiety is avoidance) what they can and should say. Josie was fascinated by Howard’s butt pages; she instinctively got that Howard’s joking was serious business.

“Humor speaks the unspeakable,” as Kugelmass says. Transgressive giggles help us cope. They also affirm what our boundaries are. Knowing all this helps me put up with the poop talk. Besides, Konner swears my girls won’t still be chanting wiener wiener wiener under the chuppah.

I want that in writing.

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 driving us crazy, by Marjorie Ingall

Tuesday, October 20th

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Why Jewish producers kept Jewish women off stage and screen, by Liel Leibovitz

Flexing Some MuscleThe boxers and strongmen who turned the image of the Jewish nebbish on its head, by Eddy Portnoy

Hunger Pangs: Vegetarianism grew too limiting for one writer, but kashrut, at least as she interprets it, never did, by Eryn Loeb

Terms of Endearment: From the archives: In praise of ‘knish,’ ‘shmundie,’ by Elissa Strauss

Wednesday, October 21st

Heavenly Bodies: A new book probes the question of whether the Hebrew God is multiple or one, by Adam Kirsch

Bell Curve to Bell Jar: From the archives: The neverending fetishistic fascination with Jews and intelligence, by Sander L. Gilman

Her Body, Her Self: From the archives: How a poet made the transition from man to woman, by Vox Tablet

Race Relations: Freud and his theories on the inheritance of Jewishness, by Vox Tablet

Thursday, October 22nd

The Broker’s Fee: A novel excerpt examines the desperation of a family in need of a kidney, by Amy Fox

My Rose Tattoo: To honor her body, the writer visits a Tel Aviv tattoo parlor, by Jo-Ann Mort

A Cold Case: From the archives: Trying to recall the exact moment my father told me he was dying, by Marco Roth

The Things We Carry: What happens when your inheritance includes a life-threatening genetic mutation?, by Vox Tablet

Friday, October 23rd

Morbid Curiosities: A tour through a collection of Jewish funerary objects, by Jeannie Rosenfeld

The Children Are the Future: A haftorah of singing praise and raising kids, by Liel Leibovitz

Body Image: How to reconcile religious prohibitions on autopsies with the need to determine a cause of death, by Sarah Weinman

Preparing the Dead: A burial society’s life lessons, by Diana Bletter

Of course, Tablet Magazine hasn’t slacked in covering the topic. We spoke to Melvin Konner, author of Nextbook Press’s The Jewish Body, about the history of the bris and also to an Orthodox documentarian who took a critical look at the procedure and came down against it. Plus, a father wrote about his unconventional search for a significant place to lay his son’s disembodied foreskin to rest.

For and Against Foreskin [NYMag]

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 Word Made Flesh (Toby, November), the third issue of an annual ”journal of Jewish literature“ edited by Bar-Ilan University literary scholar Michael P. Kramer, a range of excellent novelists and poets—Steve Stern, Alicia Ostriker, Daniel Mendelsohn, Sophie Judah, and Melvin Jules Bukiet, as well as Etgar Keret and Melvin Konner—reflect, obliquely or directly, on what it means to have a Jewish body and to represent that body in writing.

In recent decades, many American Jews have embraced an entirely different type of corporeal contortion: yoga. (As early as 1952, Norman Mailer wrote “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” but that’s really more about suburban malaise and pornography than the practice of ashtanga.) And wherever there is a booming market, a “small-format gift hardcover” suffused with hackneyed Yinglish is never far behind. Thus, Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position (Newmarket, September), by Lisa Grunberger, a yoga instructor and doctor of divinity. Told in the voice of a 72-year-old grandmother who has received a year’s worth of yoga lessons, the book caroms from shtick to casual metaphysics, and includes, of course, a loopy Yinglish glossary.

Anthropologist Tsipy Ivry offers a more substantial examination of the differences between Jewish and Asian approaches to physicality in Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (Rutgers, December). Japanese ob-gyns tend not to discuss prenatal diagnostic tests like amniocentesis with patients, for one example, while in Israel, thanks to vigorous government encouragement, such tests are so commonly performed that they unnerve fathers-to-be. (As an Israeli man put it in one of Ivry’s studies, “You come and they give you a printed form with statistics: one in 4,000 that your child can be this and one in 2,000 that your child can be that, and they tell you what the normal is. If you are slightly above the normal then start panicking.”) While Ivry grounds her work in ethnography, she draws on personal experience, too: according to her impressive C.V., not only has she published widely in her field and taught many courses, but she is also “married + 4.”

In Israel, Japan, and the rest of the world, avoiding pregnancy has most often involved Julius Fromm’s little invention, the rubber condom. A Russian Jew who studied chemistry in Berlin, Fromm patented his prophylactic in 1916 and, after World War I, he built Act Fromms into a ubiquitous brand. The Third Reich wasn’t uniformly opposed to birth control—Dagmar Herzog notes in her excellent Sex After Fascism (2005) that Nazi soldiers received 12 condoms each month from the military—but Jews profiting from it? Nein! To learn about the forced “dejudaization” of Fromm’s business, and how restitution was denied to his heirs decades after the war, consult Gotz Aly and Michael Sontheimer’s Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (Other, October).

Two of the great American Jewish novelists, both of them profound thinkers about Jewish bodies, are releasing new books this fall. Philip Roth has written the great American masturbation novel—not to mention a pretty good menstrual-blood-fetish novella and an excellent phone-sex-and-emotionally-rich-urination novel—and somehow still hasn’t received the Nobel Prize. He continues to plumb his characters’ libidinal depths in The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November), revisiting the ménage a trois (which proved so disastrous for Alex Portnoy) in this tale of a washed-up actor and his younger lover. Meanwhile, Michael Chabon, whose fiction has routinely subverted readers’ expectations about gender and sexuality, does so again, nonfictionally this time around, in Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (HarperCollins, October). In his incomparable prose, Chabon opines about modern masculinity, frets about the “fundamental brutality” of circumcising his sons, and recalls the teenage glory of spending “forty-three minutes . . . conducting a detailed and glorious survey” of a “young woman’s vagina”—and later feeling, in a echo of John Donne, like “a traveler returned from a fabled land.”

Both Roth and Chabon, like many Jewish novelists and filmmakers, have at one time or another explored the embodied nature of Jewish Orthodoxy. Take Roth’s “Eli the Fanatic” and Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: both question to what degree payes, an unchecked beard, and a black suit constitute piety. Nora Rubel notes the uptick in fictional representations of haredim since the 1980s, and focuses particularly on the work of Anne Roiphe, Naomi Ragen, Erich Segal, and Tova Mirvis in her study Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (Columbia, October).

Having a body is confusing enough, but what if someone else had the exact same one that you do? That’s the issue, more or less, that Abigail Pogrebin tackles in One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular (Doubleday, October). A former television producer and a daughter of Letty Cottin Pogrebin—not to mention the force behind Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk about Being Jewish—Pogrebin also happens to have an identical twin sister, a New York Times reporter. Gathering twins’ stories and memories, and studying up on the science behind their relationships, Pogrebin offers insights into a strange, familiar phenomenon.

And what about folks without bodies? Hope Edelman found herself perturbed when her three-year-old daughter, Maya, suddenly acquired a bossy imaginary friend, Dodo, who’d command Maya to hit her mother or to starve herself. Edelman respects Jewish traditions, while her Israeli husband has New Age-y tendencies; why not travel to Belize, then, to consult a shaman about exorcising Dodo? Edelman relates their adventures with Maya among the Maya in The Possibility of Everything: A Memoir (Ballantine, October).

Under protest, the unpersuaded soul enters the sperm, is carried to the womb, and spends nine months happily studying the world and God’s ways. But then the time arrives for the soul to be born, which it has no desire to do, so an angel comes along, puts out the light of the womb, flicks the baby in the face, and ushers it crying into the world, divine knowledge erased. The Rabbis, masters of paradox—or at least great fathomers of paradoxical human nature—add a coda to this story, which is that on the day of death the same angel comes back to the soul, now happily adapted to its body, and tells the soul it’s time to go. And the person weeps and does not want to leave.

Jews are familiarly called “People of the Book,” but it is always worth remembering that the name was not their own—it was supplied by Islam. Jews are as much the people of the body as of the book, weeping when it is suggested, as it so often is, that it is time to go. Finding a way to fall in love with embodied existence in a way that allows the lure of heaven to grow dim. God tells the soul in the story above that the world, having been made specifically for human beings, is better than the divine holding-pen it inhabited before birth. And by the end of the Midrash, the soul is no longer doing the talking; a human being is a braid of body and spirit that Jews have seldom been much interested in unknitting.

Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body, written for the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters Series, grapples with the paradoxes of how a people with a disembodied God navigate the physical world, how they have viewed their own bodies, and how others have seen them. Though Konner, a medical doctor and an anthropologist, published his book a year ago, his anatomical history of the Jewish people provides a springboard for a great many discussions, from sexuality and circumcision to Jewish genetic differences.

Konner’s book has provided the inspiration for a week of public programs, and for a week of articles, essays, podcasts, videos, and discussions devoted to the Jewish body. Today inaugurates Nextbook Press’s Jewish Body Festival—see the calendar of events here—and also marks debut of Tablet Magazine’s weeklong Jewish body special section. For the next five days, Tablet will devote itself to the body, beginning today with birth. Tomorrow will focus on what might be called the feeding of the body—sex and food—the day after on transcending the body, through meditation, mysticism ,and prayer. That will be followed by a look at the body as it falters, through illness and age, and finally at death and resurrection.

To speak about the Jewish body is to speak about religion—questions of the soul live inside questions of the body. It is to speak about history—how things have changed in the way Jews have seen themselves—created in the image of God or in need, as a Jewish doctor concluded in the 19th century, of a nose job. Or perhaps both. It is also to speak about how Jews have been seen by others, a subject that leads inevitably to a discussion of anti-Semitism, since the “otherness” of the Jewish body has been a staple of modern racist notions of the Jewish people—not merely noses but hands and feet and hips. It is to speak about nationalism, for a land is like a body: it takes up space, exhibits aggression and appetites and stirs up deep excitement and discomfort. In short, it is to speak about everything.

It’s a hair-raising story, but the man on the bench isn’t a real Holocaust survivor, and the man behind the camera is Jeff Cohen, a playwright whose new show, The Soap Myth, opened last week. The play is based on the story of a survivor named Morris Spitzer. In his later years, Spitzer, who died in 2005, campaigned tirelessly to convince the academic establishment and the public at large that the Nazis did indeed make soap out of their Jewish victims—an idea now largely discredited by serious Holocaust scholars. But at the heart of his saga, and of Cohen’s play, is much more than the veracity of a particularly gruesome Holocaust story; what’s at stake here is the way we choose to see the past, a struggle between a dispassionate approach relying on facts and figures and another, much more subjective one that holds survivors’ testimonies to be unarguably true and ultimately sacred. As fewer and fewer survivors remain alive to tell their stories, this debate takes on a special urgency. How we choose to remember, scholars and survivors alike now realize, may very well determine what we choose to remember.

The Soap Myth tells the story of a young reporter for a progressive Jewish publication who’s assigned to write a story about Milton Saltzman, an elderly survivor on a one-man mission to get the “soap myth” reclassified as fact. Brandishing a photograph of soap bars being buried in a Jewish funeral after the war, he harangues everyone from leading Holocaust scholars to a thinly-veiled version of sexpert Rabbi Shmuley Boteach; by the time pink-cheeked journalist Annie Blumberg enters the scene, everyone else has lost patience, but Blumberg gives him a hearing. In the end, she is so moved by his dogged persistence that, in a lengthy final monologue, she renounces her own claim to journalistic fact-weighing. “Did the Nazis manufacture soap from the fat they removed from the corpses of murdered Jews?” she asks. “I don’t know. But I do know that we owe it to Milton and his brethren to believe them. Even in the face of a lack of evidence.”

In real life as in the play, the notion that Nazis made soap from humans was accepted by scholars for several decades after the Holocaust, based largely upon the testimony of three witnesses at the Nuremberg trials and photographs like Saltzman’s. It seems clear that the people who participated in funerals for bars of soap believed that they contained human material, but whether they were correct or whether the Nazis had concocted the soap stories as a way to further terrorize their captives is less so.

“I don’t see why anyone would doubt that the Nazis may have experimented with the soap thing, but they didn’t do it on a large scale, and it was far more widespread and persistent as a rumor than any facts that may have justified it,” said Melvin Konner, who discusses the Nazis’ use of human flesh in his recently released book The Jewish Body (Nextbook Press). Another scholar who has written extensively on matters concerning the Jewish body, Sander Gilman, wrote in an email to Tablet that the soap claims bring to the fore an enduring question about “the underlying intent of the Shoah and the Nazis”: were the Holocaust’s perpetrators “functionalists” determined to get the maximum economic gain from their victims (which, he notes, “provides a rationale for the ‘Nazi soap’ image”) or were their motives purely ideological? But for Gilman, the question of Nazi motivations is purely hypothetical in this case, since “the processing of human fat into soap during the war, as far as all documentation goes, never actually happened.”

Because of this skepticism, institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem do not include exhibits on soap, despite Spitzer’s best efforts. An article about Spitzer in Moment magazine, an independent Jewish glossy, quoted Aaron Breitbart, a researcher at the Wiesenthal Center, who said that “the leading scholars of the Holocaust are of the opinion that the Nazis did not make soap. It was a cruel rumor at the camps.” Indeed, according to historian Michael Berenbaum—whom Cohen disapprovingly quotes in his YouTube video—not since the early 1980s have historians accepted these rumors as true. DNA tests have proved inconclusive, some of the Nuremberg testimonies are believed to have been coerced, and the extensive paper trail the Nazis left about so many other atrocities is, in this instance, nowhere to be found. “No responsible historian I know has made the claim that soap was made of human flesh because they’ve seen the same evidence I have,” Berenbaum said.

The scholars may have reached a consensus—but that’s because the scholars, Cohen, the playwright, argued in an interview, have been cowed by Holocaust deniers who eagerly exploit ambiguities in the historical record. While historians used to consider survivor testimony—whether collected at the Nuremberg trials or coming from an isolated source like Spitzer—ample enough evidence to add a claim to the historical record, Cohen went on, they are now afraid to make controversial claims lest deniers use them to say that the Shoah itself never happened. Asked whether he thought it was possible that historians’ standards had simply grown more stringent over time, he said, “If evidentiary standards change such that they can’t find the evidence for ovens at Auschwitz, do we say the ovens didn’t exist?”

Cohen’s critique points to an underlying question for scholars and educators: how should survivor testimony be treated in relation to other kinds of evidence? One school of thought holds that survivor testimony can offer a truth beyond the second-hand accounts of historians. Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, for instance, argues that when we study the Holocaust, “no true knowledge pre-exists the process of transmission”—in other words, it is testimony itself that creates historical truth. But there has also been a backlash against this idea. Literature professors Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman argue in a 2004 paper that the dominant mode of Holocaust historiography today privileges “memory over history, experience over event.” Vaunted works like Shoah and exhibits at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, they write, elevate unedited survivor testimony over research-based scholarship in an attempt to make the Holocaust more accessible, but risk obscuring the facts in the process.

Taken to its extreme, Gross and Hoffman go on to argue, a refusal to question survivor testimony can engender willful departures from the truth like those perpetrated by Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of the fraudulent Holocaust memoir Fragments. Wilkomirski, a Swiss gentile with the given name Bruno Grosjean, fooled editors, critics, and readers into believing he was a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. When questioned about inconsistencies in his story, Grosjean said that trauma had rendered him unable to organize his past in a logical way, but to his supporters it almost didn’t matter; it was as though whatever Grosjean said was true simply by virtue of a survivor having said it. Similar discomfort around questioning testimony was engendered by more recent fabricated Holocaust memoirs like Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence.

The tension between eyewitness testimony and dispassionate research is at the heart of The Soap Myth. Cohen, whose previous work includes adaptations of Chekhov and a play about his father’s tennis buddies, said that he became interested in the topic after Spitzer approached him outside a Manhattan theater with the issue of Moment magazine that included the article about him. Though the article (which is not available online) was extremely sympathetic to Spitzer, it ultimately did little to help his crusade. Cohen never saw Spitzer again—in fact, he found out that Spitzer had died only by way of a death notice in a Bronx newspaper. But he remained fascinated by the story—the question, as he put it in an interview with Tablet, of “how one survives surviving,” as well as the politics of Holocaust scholarship—and eventually dramatized it.

Cohen’s conclusion, as expressed in an interview and implied in his play, puts him at the far end of the testimonial side of the spectrum. “Do [scholars] believe the evil side of the anti-Semitism or believe the victims who lived through it?” he asked. “Historians need to choose a side.” The play ends at a similar impasse, when Blumberg cannot convince Saltzman to record his memories for the Holocaust Memorial Museum archives. For Saltzman, as for the scholars, truth is an all-or-nothing proposition—he doesn’t want his testimony accepted as his truth, but as the truth. Blumberg comes to share his position in her final speech, dismissing scholarly objections to the soap myth as “sophistry.” Cohen’s and his characters’ refusal to compromise amounts to no less than an indictment of the standards that undergird the writing of history.

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 Jews, the importance of purity rituals, and the rise of muscle Jewry.”