There’s a cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. A couple—shlumpy, but clearly urban—are seated at a coffee table, reading a newspaper that, judging from its sheer girth, can only be the one of record. The woman looks toward her bald, bespectacled companion with what seems to be a triumphant gasp. “They found the nebbish gene,” reads the caption. Cue the mildly amused titters.

My question to this: Are you sure it’s just the one gene? Surely only some intricate combinations of chromosomal abnormality could result in the entire Nebbish spectrum of the past 40 years: the Hipster Nebbish (crumpled tweed jackets and phobic hand-wringing of early Woody Allen); the Slacker Nebbish (one of Judd Apatow’s sheepish heroes, with bong in one hand and an Xbox controller in the other); the Toxic Nebbish (see George Costanza, the most irately Jewish son of Tuscany ever committed to film). There’s the Nebbish Who Never Gets Laid, the Nebbish Who Screws Up Getting Laid, the Nebbish Who Is Inexplicably Laid by Gorgeous and Understanding Shiksa, also known as Wish Fulfillment Nebbish. (Mattel, if you’re listening, I am available to design action figures.)

Still, all varietals of Nebbish have a few noxious traits in common: fear, helplessness, and overwhelming Jewishness. The Nebbish is always Jewish, even if he’s not actually a Jew, to the point where he’s become synonymous with Jewish manhood itself, embedded, if you will, in his DNA. Which is weird, because in the first half of the 20th century, Jewish men were depicted in popular culture as plucky young strivers eager to leave behind the stultifying Old World for the sexy and welcoming embrace of the New (a la Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer) or scrappy immigrant street kids and shtarkers getting ahead by any means necessary, an image helped along by the real-life exploits of Jewish (or Jew-ish) boxers like Max Baer and Jake LaMotta, and less flatteringly, the rise of Jewish gangsters like Dutch Schultz and Louis Buchalter. As the poverty—and subsequent criminality—of the urban ghetto began to fade, a new archetype of Jewish masculinity began its ascendance. Call the representatives of this last the Kirk Douglas Jews: tough, smart, deeply moral (in Kirk’s iconoclastic way), fiercely (if not unquestioningly) patriotic, equally at home in the cockpit of a fighter plane as in the arms of a pert-nosed blonde or four. This was the Jew as hard-nosed, Hemingway-esque Man of Action of the sort recorded reverently by Norman Mailer and incisively by Saul Bellow, lampooned by Joseph Heller, libidinized—and later, eulogized—by Phillip Roth; men whose response to anti-Semites was moral outrage and/or dignified pummeling, as opposed to imagining themselves cowering across the dinner table.

Then the baby boomers grew up, and suddenly, men whose fathers had been D-Day bombardiers couldn’t figure out how to change the bulbs in the newly installed track lighting. Anti-Semitism was replaced by fretting about anti-Semitism. Anxiety about sex became the new sex (particularly when the ugly specter of AIDS provided the irresistible chance for white heterosexual males to conflate sex and hypochondria, the gift that keeps on giving); the Men of Action became Men of Feelings. (And so many feelings! And are they the right feelings? What does my therapist have to say about my feelings? Just a minute, I need to call him about how my mother is responsible for my feelings. Go ahead, start eating without me.) In the space of two generations, the emblematic symbol of Jewish manhood went from Kirk Douglas to Albert Brooks to that guy from the Apatow movies whose name I can’t remember who was in that one movie where he started dating the lesbian nanny from Sex and the City 2 and all his equally nebbishy and unattractive friends were like, “Dude, she’s so out of your league!” Wait, that’s what it was called: She’s Out of Your League.

I know this is just a New Yorker cartoon, but on behalf of Jewish womanhood, I feel it is incumbent on me to ask: How the hell did this happen? And why?

It’s almost too obvious to mention, but to make sense of the shift in Jewish masculine identity from its prewar to postwar incarnations, we’ve got to look at what happened in the interim. I’ll give you a hint: It’s depressing, it’s German, and it rhymes with “the Schmolocaust.” For the prewar generation of American Jewish men (my grandfather among them), World War II was a transformational event, a chance to unimpeachably cement their American identities by fighting for their country. Their children and grandchildren, however—the future Nebbish Generations—would view the war overwhelmingly through the lens of the Holocaust and its primacy in Jewish education, which in its single-minded focus on Auschwitz as the definitive image of the Jewish wartime experience has virtually drowned any narrative of Jewish heroism in the vast sea of Jewish helplessness. Who wants to hear Grandpa’s stories about Hawaii when you can terrify yourself with eyewitness accounts of Josef Mengele?

It’s precisely this helplessness that I’ve always thought to be the most lasting terror of the Holocaust—and the cause for much of the at times hysterical derangement that surrounds its discussion—on the Jewish psyche. We’re taught to take pride in having stubbornly hung on so long when so many would have destroyed us. How does one make sense of a situation that was virtually impossible to survive?

This existential question is difficult enough for a woman to reckon with. For a man, traditionally entrusted with the physical protection of his family, it is unthinkable. Hence the Nebbish: a person who reclaims, even celebrates, this helplessness and trivializes it beyond the possibility of terror. “How in the hell,” the Nebbish seems to ask, “am I supposed to be part of an international Bolshevist-banking conspiracy to take over the world when I can’t even get my mother off my back about who I’m dating?”

Which brings us to the mother. And the dating.

It’s hardly a secret that Jewish culture has a nasty chauvinistic streak. The Jewish mother and the JAP, two of the greatest figures of fun in secular American-Jewish humor, are also indefensibly misogynistic, often with an ugly double-edge: A Jewish mother joke, for example, ridicules her self-serving martyrdom while not-so-subtly implying that a woman should properly be expected to sacrifice everything for her children, seeking no personal fulfillment outside of them; jokes about the JAP being repelled by sex quietly reinforce the idea that it would be unseemly for her to feel otherwise. When the advent of feminism and the sexual revolution—led, it should be noted, most vociferously by Jewish women—turned this conventional wisdom on its head, the nascent Nebbish Generation fought back with a technique they learned at their long-suffering mothers’ knee: deadly emotional blackmail: “So, you’re coming for my balls? I’ll just cut them off myself and save you the trouble!”

It was a brilliant move. Nothing deflates a righteous warrior like the sudden lack of a worthy adversary. Rather than engage women as equals, the Nebbish takes himself out the equation entirely. He exaggerates his bewilderment at the world to such an extent as to force the woman back into the role of de facto caretaker, while neatly absolving himself of the less savory elements of traditional masculinity, such as “making a living” or “going to war.” Women, then, are left holding the bag, buying the toilet paper, and finding themselves oddly nostalgic for the days of violent assholes like Norman Mailer, who kept his sexism right out where you could see it, on the end of his knife. The war of the sexes will be won with weapons of passive-aggression. Only the Jews could have been so smart. Besides, we’re the only ones who read New Yorker cartoons.

Philip Roth needs no introduction. Now 78, he has been awarded every major literary commendation America has to offer and is beloved by generations of readers, American Jews in particular.

But while Roth’s merit as a writer is a measure of personal taste—like all art, it makes some swoon and leaves others unmoved—his place in the American canon deserves a second look. Like most second looks, this one, too, reveals the pockmarks and blemishes that the besotted beholder might have ignored the first time around. And while Roth’s body of work is multitudinous and diverse, any discussion of his writing must begin with Portnoy’s Complaint, the book that cemented Roth’s reputation and whose lascivious ghost still haunts much of the now-elderly writer’s novels, as well as those of his young successors, the current generation of American writers.

Because Roth is fond of similes—there’s an amusing bit in Portnoy’s Complaint in which the youthful Alexander hears an elderly man say he’d slept like a log and is moved, Roth writes, by “the full force” of likening one thing to another—let us attempt to rethink him thusly: Portnoy’s Complaint, as well as most of Roth’s other novels, is like a nasty tumble down a steep slope—a throbbing rush of endorphins as it unfurls, a bit of fun for those watching from the sidelines, but, overall, little more than a mess of broken bones and long-term aches.

In keeping with the medical mindset, let us begin looking at Roth’s legacy by parsing the pseudo-clinical definition preceding the novel that catapulted him to stardom. “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he writes, is “a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.”

This quip serves as a pithy history of American letters. What, after all, was Walt Whitman if not a bard of the struggle between selfish, sexual urges and the call of society at large? What was Emily Dickinson if not a hermit cryptically communing with the culture? Or Hemingway, driven by his libido both to bedrooms and battlefields? Whether they believed in transcendence or predetermination, they shared a common, American faith in the individual and in his or her ability to emerge from the solipsistic fog that enshrouds us all and into the bright, well-lighted spaces we share with our fellow men. Put simply, while all American writers write first and foremost of the individual, the great ones are, to use a sterling phrase, large enough to contain multitudes; peek into Emerson, say, and see America in its entirety.

Do the same with Roth, and you’d be lucky to see much past New Jersey. That is because Roth’s primary preoccupation is Roth. This is most evident in Portnoy, a novel designed as a long rant on the analyst’s couch in order to permit its author the freedom to indulge in the brute vulgarities only confessions may comfortably contain. But read Roth’s subsequent novels, and you hear the same music of me: Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Mickey Sabbath—they are all facsimiles of their creator.

That alone isn’t much reason to criticize Roth, but their recurring base obsessions are. Here, for example, is Portnoy, wailing about his former wife, whom he regretfully nicknames The Monkey. “The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch,” he writes, “the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way … oh, why did I ever let her go! I can’t believe it—because she wouldn’t be Jewish? ‘The eternal note of sadness—’ ‘The turbid ebb and flow of human misery—’ ” Roth leaves that sentence unfinished, with that bit from Sophocles standing on the precipice of a new paragraph. It’s a powerful and subtle note: Having received from his lover the gift of a literary education, he turns around and realizes that by leaving her his life has acquired much in common with Greek tragedies.

You don’t have to wait more than a line, however, before Portnoy’s mind wanders south: “Only,” he writes, “is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering—something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that’s Portnoy’s slogan. That’s the sotry of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words.”

It’s a perfect embodiment of Roth’s foundational move. First, set up a lofty premise, imbued with suffering and meaning and art, a furnace of emotions, every bit as universal as the great masterworks. Then, talk about your dick.

The superabundance of cock in Roth’s work is more than a stylistic choice aiming to shock and unnerve. It transcends even the fair accusations of chauvinism frequently lobbed at Roth by feminist critics and former lovers. It is his primary state of mind. Like a true artist, he feels that turbid ebb and flow very acutely; a delicate and accurate seismograph of suffering, he registers its minute tremors. But he knows no other way to deal with the burden than unzipping his fly. Whereas Whitman, most likely a closeted homosexual, tamed his libido and taught it wonderful poetic tricks, and whereas Dickinson exerted superhuman pressure and turned hers into a diamond of sublimation, Roth ejaculates. Because he is a talented writer, frequently this is pleasurable to observe. But he is never in possession of the loom—so elegantly mastered by his contemporary, Saul Bellow—that lets a writer process his or her bales of bile into beautiful fabrics that keep us warm.

None of this would have been too bad had Roth, befitting of writers of his modest ambitions and capabilities, taken his place in the second or third row of American literary lions. Instead, his intoxicating admixture of solipsism and lust made him the patron saint of a new generation of American Jewish authors, for whom writing is a torrent of self-obsessions, hang-ups, and put-ons, mitigated by nothing more than a thin veneer of intellectualism. Sam Lipsyte, for example, is Roth’s child; the angry, cynical, and foul-mouthed protagonist of his recent novel, The Ask, would have felt a shock of recognition had he run into Portnoy or Sabbath, and naming a female character Vargina is what Roth might have done had he grown up a few decades later, under the auspicious glow of Internet porn. Even Hollywood is in Roth’s debt: The creators of the eminently successful American Pie series took a page out of Roth’s book when they had their lead character masturbate by copulating with a pie, a sweeter version of Portnoy and his liver.

Roth’s appeal isn’t hard to understand. In an age when technological platforms and cultural edicts both favor a proliferation of the personal and the profane, he is the Grand Old Man, the master whose works are now gospel for anyone too lazy or selfish or dull to embark on the sort of exploration of individualism that has historically made American letters such a rich and blooming field. Those who grew up on Roth’s novels may be forgiven for believing that art entails not Dickinson’s measured sublimation but Roth’s uninhibited masturbation and were only too thrilled to follow his suit; it is, after all, much easier and, I imagine, more satisfying to crown the penis king and abandon morality, civility, responsibility, and all the other blocks with which we build, step by painstaking step, the bastions of a worthwhile society.

That must never happen. Whether we enjoy Philip Roth’s work or not, we’d do well to reconsider what he has wrought, and make sure that we fall on the right side in the eternal struggle between the heart and the groin. That, after all, is what great writing has always helped us accomplish; the rest is little more than self-gratification.

This was a new one for Seidler-Feller, who has built a thriving practice as the go-to sex therapist for L.A.’s sizable Orthodox population. “It was stark, and it was revelatory, and it was disturbing,” she said.

A silver-haired Modern Orthodox Jew who does not wear a sheitl, or a wig, as many of her patients do, Seidler-Feller, 62, says she aspires to make a “cultural dent” in the cloistered world of Judaism’s most pious adherents. “There’s a little bit of the messianist in me,” she said in an interview from her airy office in L.A.‘s Westwood neighborhood.

To help understand this particular patient’s fears, she turned to her rabbi—who also happens to be her husband of 35 years, Chaim Seidler-Feller, the longtime head of UCLA’s Hillel. He found the passage to which the patient was referring in the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, the 19th-century abridged tome of Jewish law that is widely used as a guidepost for Orthodox Jews on matters of intimacy.

“Clearly the Shulchan Aruch preserves a point of view that is medieval about the fears that existed at that time—and up until Freud’s time—about the vagina and what its powers are,” said Seidler-Feller, the accent of her native South Africa still prominent. “But the point is that it was alive today, in this room.”

What also struck Seidler-Feller, whose work with Orthodox couples comprises about 40 percent of her clinical-psychology practice, was that the notion troubling that married patient derived from a minority rabbinic opinion. That the opinion has survived in the commentary alongside the far more permissive majority opinion written by the 3rd-century rabbi, Yochanan bar Nafcha, vexes her.

But Seidler-Feller’s clinical work can only reach so many, as she says, and several years ago, she and her husband decided to go on the road. At Jewish learning conferences such as Limmud, they unpack what Judaism has to say about sex, with Rabbi Seidler-Feller exploring the textual sources and Dr. Seidler-Feller providing the psychological context. “We want to show people that the majority opinions are permissive with respect to marital sexuality,” she said. “And not only permissive, but instructive.”

The child of a Czech Auschwitz survivor, Seidler-Feller was raised in a nonobservant home where the memories of the Holocaust were palpable; her mother had lost both of her parents, as well as her first husband, by the time she turned 18. Her mother’s tragic past, coupled with her parents’ early divorce, led Seidler-Feller to pursue a career in psychology. “When you have experiences that fracture you psychically, you can try to deal with them in many ways,” she said. “One is writing novels, and another is becoming a psychologist.” At the same time, she said, the traumatic events of her childhood led her to seek out traditional Judaism. By the time she met her husband in 1973 at Ohio State University, where she was pursuing a doctorate and he was the new Hillel rabbi, she had already traveled to Israel and immersed herself in Jewish study.

In her office, decorated with unassuming flower prints—she’d removed a Gauguin print that featured a nude figure after an ultra-Orthodox man complained—Seidler-Feller explained that about 15 years ago, she began to think of Orthodox Jews, particularly the ultra-Orthodox, as culturally underprivileged; she likened it to the digital divide.

“It makes my heart sad that, in the modern world, with all that we have available to us, the sort of information that could so enhance the quality of their lives is unavailable to them because nobody is doing the active translation that is required,” she said.

When she completed the UCLA human sexuality program in the late 1970s, the Orthodox population was far more skeptical of psychotherapy than it is today. Moreover, the field of psychotherapy was far less attuned to religious sensitivities. As a woman steeped in both traditional Judaism and modern psychotherapy, Seidler-Feller realized that she could provide the necessary cultural mediation.

Ultra-Orthodox communities—among them the Chabad-Lubavitch and Satmar Hasidic sects—provide virtually no sex education until couples are about to marry. Even that information, generally dispensed to women by a kallah teacher, who is charged with teaching brides about intimacy, can be minimal. With limited or no access to books and movies, let alone the Internet, community members have few places to turn for information on the most basic aspects of human sexuality. Real-world experience is also limited: The rules of conduct known as Shomer Negiah prohibit girls and boys from touching, while boys are taught at puberty that masturbation is a grave evil.

A 2004 survey of 380 married Orthodox women in New York and Israel conducted by a team of psychiatrists and sexual health experts found significantly higher levels of sexual dissatisfaction among that community than among the general American population. Nine percent of Orthodox women reported never experiencing an orgasm during sex, as compared with 1 percent in the general population, according to a 1999 study on sexual dysfunction in the United States. Tellingly, women who were raised observant were twice as likely to have difficulty climaxing than ba’alot teshuva, or women who were raised secular and chose Orthodoxy later in life.

One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Michelle Friedman, a psychiatrist who directs the pastoral counseling program at New York’s Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox rabbinical school, said that part of the problem is lack of education. “There tends to be a kind of wariness about sex education and sexual matters in general,” she said of the Orthodox world. “Coupled with the deep commitment to modesty, it becomes difficult to construct appropriate educational models.”

An Orthodox couple will more than likely wind up in Seidler-Feller’s office if they’re having trouble conceiving, unlike secular couples who often seek treatment because they’re not enjoying sex.

Seidler-Feller is herself still fairly conservative when it comes to sex, more Michele Bachmann than Dr. Ruth when discussing pop culture. “The more vulgar our culture becomes about sexuality, especially female sexuality, the more recessed that world becomes,” she says, speaking of the ultra-Orthodox community. “And that’s a dynamic I regret.” It also means that the need for her services isn’t going away anytime soon.

CORRECTION, June 22: Yeshivat Chovevei Torah did not grant quasi-rabbinic status to a woman. This error has been corrected.

In a way, it’s odd that San Francisco, of all places, would be the site of such a challenge to multiculturalism. Male circumcision, after all, is a hugely significant rite in both Judaism and Islam—indeed, one salutary result of San Francisco’s ballot initiative is the way it has momentarily united Jews and Muslims in their opposition. But while the removal of the foreskin has long signaled a Jewish boy’s entry into the community, for circumcision opponents, it signals the intolerable toll that custom and clan take on the individual. A complex debate about individual versus community rights hinges on that single primal cut.

That complexity, though, is often eclipsed by hysteria. Anti-circumcision activists—or “intactivists,” as they rather cringingly call themselves—are a lot like Free Mumia people. They have a point, but their self-righteous intensity does little for the credibility of their cause. They regularly compare male circumcision to the clitoridectomies performed on girls in parts of Africa. Male and female circumcision are “hands down exactly the same thing,” says Georganne Chapin, executive director of Intact America. Marilyn Milos, founder of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers, compares a boy’s dawning realization of his foreskinless state to a girl whose parents tell her that “one in eight girls is going to develop breast cancer, so we decided to cut yours off.” Kimmel insists that circumcision is on the way out, just as “stoning adulteresses to death has gone by the wayside as people become enlightened.”

There’s something at once poignant and unsettling about the amount of pain and rage men in the movement express over their own circumcisions. On one forum devoted to foreskin restoration, a man describes how, only a week earlier, the scope of his loss had hit him, waylaying him with “resentment, grief and anger” that leaves him in tears. His post was titled, “Will I ever feel complete?”

Mark Reiss, a retired physician in San Francisco who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in New York, had an epiphany about the horror of circumcision when his first grandchild was born. “When I realized what I had lost and will never get back,” he says, it was traumatic. He’s convinced that having sex with a foreskin is inconceivably exquisite. “I will have never experienced a full sexual experience,” he says. “To talk to circumcised men about the intact state and what the full blown sexual experience is like, is like talking to a blind person about seeing.”

It’s hard not to suspect that such grief is about something more than a missing foreskin. Circumcision, after all, is a potent metaphor for parental betrayal and emasculation. The anti-circumcision movement gives men a powerful explanation for the sense of loss and declining potency that usually attend aging. Milos says she most often hears from men in their 40s, who begin having trouble with sexual performance and ask, “What’s happened to my penis?” One explanation may be that they’re suffering the effects of their circumcision. Another is that they’re getting older.

Scientifically, the results of research about circumcision and sex are mixed. There have been numerous studies of men who have been circumcised as adults. In some, the majority report that sex improved afterward. In others, the majority said sex got worse. The “decrease in penile sensitivity that resulted from circumcision bordered on statistical significance,” reported a 2002 study in the Journal of Urology. But a 2005 study in Urologia Internationalis found that 38 percent of men found “[p]enile sensation improved after circumcision,” while 18 percent said it diminished, with the majority reporting no change.

Yet even if circumcision is not usually experienced as the life-destroying mutilation critics describe, there is something strange about the custom’s persistence, particularly among pork-eating, Sabbath-ignoring secular Jews. “Circumcision has always been a procedure in search of a justification,” says Chapin, and she’s not wrong. In the Jewish tradition, of course, the brit milah lies at the very core of God’s covenant with his people. But as Jews grew more secular, ancillary reasons for circumcision emerged. In the Victorian era, it was said to prevent masturbation, which is one reason that gentiles in both the United States and England adopted it. For modern liberals, the idea of circumcision as an impediment to onanism is, if anything, a strike against the practice, evidence that it really does impede sexual pleasure. But as early reasons for circumcision have been eclipsed, new ones have emerged, particularly the procedure’s role in protecting men against sexually transmitted diseases.

Still, the medical evidence is ambiguous enough that the American Academy of Pediatrics makes no recommendation in either direction. Reason alone does not explain circumcision’s survival. There are still vestiges of religion involved, things that don’t quite make sense in secular terms.

It’s absurd to compare male circumcision to female clitoridectomy. Yet when doctors, in an attempt to mitigate the harm of female circumcision, have proposed introducing forms of female genital cutting that are less severe than male circumcision, they’ve been attacked for capitulating to barbarism. Last year, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing doctors to perform “ritual nicks” on baby girls to satisfy their parents’ demands for circumcision, but the outcry was so great that the AAP had to withdraw the policy. If merely pricking a baby girl’s genitalia is wildly controversial, but cutting a boy’s genitalia is routine, it’s because of the very different civilization meaning we ascribe to the two acts.

And in that sense, circumcision contravenes some essential liberal values. It is evidence of a sexual double standard. It’s a painful and bloody rite whose purpose doesn’t lie in any immediate medical need. It marks a boy as a member of a group in a way that precedes his own decision-making, challenging the individualistic belief in a self-created identity.

Indeed, in the future, circumcision will likely once again become a mark of Jewish—and Muslim—difference. Non-Jews seem to be moving away from it—last year, a researcher from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2009, only 32.5 percent of newborn boys were circumcised in the hospital, down from 56 percent in 2006. In 2002, Sweden passed a law regulating circumcision, mandating, among other things, that a doctor or nurse administer anesthesia. Most Swedish doctors refuse to perform the cut, seeing it as a violation of a child’s rights, and some politicians want to ban it for children under 18. Last year, the Royal Dutch Medical Association put out a statement calling for a “powerful policy of deterrence,” arguing, “Non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors conflicts with the child’s right to autonomy and physical integrity.”

Some progressive Jews are turning their backs on it as well, embracing an alternative ceremony known as a brit shalom. Reiss runs a website that lists rabbis and cantors nationwide who will preside over the ritual, and he is about to officiate at one for the first time. “It’s happening more frequently as the generic population in the United States circumcises less,” he says. Nor is this an entirely new phenomenon. As he points out, “Jews have been rebelling against ritual circumcision for centuries. In Germany in the mid-19th century, there was a group of reform rabbis who wrote papers on it.”

As the practice falls out of favor in the secular world, the circumcision wars will probably only get more heated, because they’ll be about a minority religious custom, not an American norm. If male circumcision comes to be seen as harmful, after all, it will be hard to justify it on religious grounds alone without also justifying less-invasive variants of female genital cutting. At that point, proposals like the one in San Francisco might seem less preposterous and more, well, cutting edge.

Freudians see pistols as phallic symbols. Marines chant, “This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.” But the Hebrew language takes the connection between sex and violence to the next level, joining the two in unholy linguistic matrimony.

The noun ziyun, meaning “arming” or “provision of weapons,” is also a coarse word for sex. Other words that share the root have a similar duality: “Zayin” is a slang word for “penis” but also means weapons; “lehizdayen” literally means “to be armed,” but if you wanted to tell someone to go do something anatomically impossible, you would say, “Lech tizdayen.”

This fecundity of meanings spawned some technology humor in 2006, just before the Microsoft Zune, a personal media player, came to Israel. At the time, some were asking whether the name really translates all that well into Hebrew. “We have yet to find an answer to the question of how to pronounce this word—Zoon, Zona [meaning “prostitute”], or perhaps Ziyun?” a technology reviewer wrote on Ynet. “Before they accuse us of ruining the youth, maybe it’s better if we stay on the safe side and call it Zion.”

But perhaps the form of the word ziyun that best lays bare the variety of interpretations is “mezuyan.” Talk about a “ma’avak [struggle] mezuyan”—as in Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statement that while failed talks with Israel may spark a third Intifada, he opposes any “armed struggle”—and no one will doubt that you’re referring to weapons. But mention “dor [generation] mezuyan” and the picture gets more complicated: You could be referring to the Hebrew title of Generation Kill, HBO’s seven-part miniseries about U.S. Marines in the first 40 days of the Iraq war; or you might be uttering the equivalent of a certain four-letter word, as in the best-known line of Israeli pop star Aviv Geffen’s chart-topping 1993 song “Ahshav Me’unan” (It’s Cloudy Now): “Anahnu dor mezuyan”—“We’re a fucked-up generation.”

As American feminists and others highlight the violent attitude toward women they say is evident in pornography, hip-hop, and the movies, Israel remains one step ahead in making the link explicit. Perhaps, as Freud might have speculated, it is the ubiquity of phallic symbol-toting soldiers that allows for the linguistic limbs of sex and violence to lie intertwined, and undisturbed, in the Hebrew language.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: Settle Down
Breaking Free
After Shabbat
Haredization
‘Filipinit’
On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

This is the story of a mystery that began ten years ago, when I drove up to the San Fernando Valley home of a new waxer I was trying out. Right there, in the garden in front of her house, was a small white sign that made me gasp: “Shmundie Central.” Shmundie, as you likely don’t know, is a Yiddish slang term for vagina, and it was a word that—until that point—I had never seen or heard outside of my own house.

One of Yiddish’s great legacies in American culture is, of course, the plethora of crackerjack terms it has provided for male genitalia. Most Jews, and even many non-Jews, are familiar with more than one: shmuck, shlong, and putz are the most widely used, but I bet a number of my friends could expand that list to half a dozen if they tried.

But female genitalia achieved no such preeminence. In fact, female body parts hardly retained a presence at all—which I learned when I decided, about a year ago, that it was time to take on a professional investigation. In my house, in addition to “shmundie,” there was also “knish” and “peergeh”—all innocent terms, neither clinical nor vulgar, an easy-going entry point into all matters relating to, as others call them, “my privates.”

I started asking scholars, native speakers, writers, and fellow yentas, but nobody had much to say on the subject. The most reassuring answer I received was “interesting question,” from a prominent academic who focuses on Yiddish culture and Women’s Studies. One referred to a pithy lesson on sexual education in Henry Roth’s 1934 masterpiece, Call it Sleep, given by a disabled girl in a clothes closet to the main character David.

“From de knish.”

“—Knish?”

“Between de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa’s god de petzel.”

This was hardly much to go on. And, troublingly, more than half of the people I asked actually belittled the very question. (In the words of one discussion group responder: “One can make a living out of this?”) Even my own sister, after years of lovingly insulting one another as “knish-face” and answering the phone “Shmundie Central” (the inspiration, of course, being that beautician in the Valley), expressed her doubts about the value of this inquiry. Eventually, one member of a Yiddish discussion group gave me a decent list from his Stutchkoff’s Yiddish Thesaurus, but then added: “I do wonder how many of these words are actually known to anybody today.”

For me, these terms were crucial. Ours is not the most organized of families, historically or in the present: We have no family trees, no formal reunions, and are indifferent to losing contact with relatives who go a bit adrift. We belonged to a synagogue but didn’t really pay attention during services, and observed all the big holidays, though mostly just by cooking. I was left with a clear Jewish identity, but it was our Yiddish, brought over from Romania, that provided the real sense of authenticity. We never learned it in a formal sense, but there were at least 50 phrases in constant rotation. For a family that possesses only a couple of paternal heirlooms—a kiddish cup and a tallis—these phrases were happy reminders that we came from somewhere. Indeed, they are my matrilineal heritage.

And so, I soldiered on and, eventually, the fog began to lift. Yiddishist Eddy Portnoy explained that certain cultures favor male-centric slang words and insults, while others are more female-centric. France and Mexico tend to linguistically play around with lady parts, while both Yiddish speakers and Americans are bit more phallic—a fact that shed some light on why America fell in love with shmuck and putz. But it still didn’t satisfactorily explain what happened to their female counterparts.

The first real breakthrough came from Michael Wex, the author of Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu. In the latter, he explains that, traditionally, Yiddish speakers were quite modest—using the phrase “dortn,” or “there,” to describe women’s private parts. Yes there were clinical terms for vagina, but the more playful words, the likes of which I had grown up around, were seldom used. OK, I thought, this makes sense in the shtetl, but what about in the early 20th century, among unionists and communists and suffragettes? They couldn’t have been afraid. Or even my great-grandmother Ella, my namesake, who would travel solo to the Catskills to visit her lover. She couldn’t have been fearful.

According to Michael Wex, they all were. “The progressives were no less prudish,” he told me. For years, I had attributed my own brassiness to my frank Yiddish foremothers. They were prudes?

Not necessarily. “It’s our projection of what we think they were, and our investment in this idea that they were too holy to go to the bathroom, have sex or tell dirty jokes that creates false impression,” wrote Alyssa Quint, a professor of Jewish literature at Princeton, in an email. She doesn’t buy speculation that “people who spoke Yiddish were too modest to say vagina.”

****

I could avoid it no longer. I finally called my maternal grandmother Esther, Ella’s daughter. I realize most readers will think she should have been my first phone call, but you’ve got to realize: These were not the kind of conversations she and I ever had. It wasn’t that she was prude, this was hardly the case, but rather that making her think critically always seemed like it would spoil the fun. So I forged ahead, and asked her if we could talk about the Yiddish vagina.

“What do you want to know about that for?” she asked.

“Just curious, Nanny. I wonder where these terms came from.”

“All right,” she said, with what seemed like a verbal shrug. Then silence.

“Did your mom use them?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, where did they come from?”

“She would, but once in awhile. But only about us children.” (She is one of five sisters.)

“So she was shy about it?”

“Oh, yeah. My mother wouldn’t really talk like this. Not about herself. Just sometimes with us girls.”

“So where did you learn them from?”

“Well my mother, and the other girls in the neighborhood.”

“But you used them with my mom, right? That is how she learned them?”

“Oh, sure.”

“But you weren’t embarrassed?”

“No, what the hell do I care?”

So perhaps my grandmother was a mini-revolutionary, undoing decades of modesty by making these the go-to terms in her house for female parts. Or, possibly more likely, they weren’t really as modest as we imagine, but like so much of the language, these words were lost to time. Fortunately my grandmother, and later my mother, knew a good thing when they saw one, filling my childhood with knishes and shmundies and peergeh, and even finding that faithful waxer in the valley who understood the sentimental and linguistic value of these terms. And while my sister may not understand why I care about the provenance of these words, she at least can see the genuine value of “shmundie”—how, like no other phrase, it binds us to our tangled diasporic past, creating an immediate sorority that I hope for my female children and grandchildren to take part in.

****

From Stutchkoff’s Yiddish Thesaurus:

Vagina -[*nekeyve] *beys-kibl, *oyse mokem, shandfleysh, * erve – *boser

erve, *mokem haturpe, shpil, +yene *mayse, zakh, +boye, +shmonde, +pirge, kote; [kl] ripke, sakhme, salepnitse; kutnitse [*beheyme]; trakht, mutertrakht, muterlayb, heybmuter, geboyr-muter, geber-muter, uterus; froyen-oder, muter-oder, klitor; dos ort, muter-kukhn, platsente; *bsule-haytl, *bsulim; sheyd, mutersheyd, vagine; eyfirer, eyerfirer, ey-durkhfirer, eyer-kanal; eyershtok, /180D ovarye; mutershtok; eyerzek, poliklen, eyer-lager; [*b"kh] eyerleyg-aparat,

eyerleyg-rerlekh. (My new favorite is di mayse, or “the story.”)

Elissa Strauss lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the American Prospect, the Village Voice and the New York Daily News.

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