This week’s winner is “We are all goyim,” who asked, on the occasion of my report that the staunchly Catholic Republican candidate Rick Santorum was in a Jewish fraternity in college: “Are Jews pathological narcissists? Why do you always have to search, in a maladif manner, if something is ‘jewish’? When you masturbate, do you look at yourself in the mirror or do you think to yourself?”

The answers to these questions are, respectively: “not all of them,” “because it’s my job,” and “none of your business.” But still, we appreciate the idea for a line of mirrored adult toys, none of which would presumably lead to the mess that discussions of S/santorum entail. Out of gratitude, you get a copy of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body, because beauty, certainly, is in the eye of the beholder.

Rick Santorum Was in Jewish Frat
The Jewish Body [Nextbook Press]

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

Joy Ladin’s third book of poetry, Transmigration, was published last month by Sheep Meadow Press.

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]

What do you think of the CDC’s proposal?

I have to say that in the United States, the public health argument is weak compared to the right of people to decide whether to do it or not. There is clear evidence that circumcision reduces HIV in Africa, and I think it’s a good idea to promote male circumcision in Africa, where AIDS is devastating whole countries. But in the United States, there’s not a clear and pressing public-health advantage to circumcise. And the intervention is great. It seems to change sexual pleasure; it certainly changes the appearance of the penis. People in different cultures have different aesthetic values around this. And that doesn’t seem to be considered in the cost-benefit analysis. They’re not thinking about the cultural issues and the sense of imposition that this could have for some people.

It seems like odd timing, given the uproar over health care reform. Rush Limbaugh is already saying, “Leave our penises alone, too, Obama!”

That’s where I put on my Jewish hat and start worrying that you’re going to get some nasty things said about Jewish influence on medicine. Male babies in many cultures are circumcised, including in Islam and many African cultures, but in the West it’s associated with Jews. Although I think most of the opposition to circumcision is not really in any sense anti-Semitic, there’s a fringe that thinks somehow this has been imposed on the American baby by the Jews because there are so many Jewish doctors.

Do we know why, historically speaking, Jews began circumcising their infant boys?

Wherever it comes from, it’s not unique to the Jews, and there’s no reason to believe it originated with the Jews. The Aborigines of Australia do it, the Merina of Madagascar, the Xhosa in South Africa, the Luo in Kenya, which is the tribe President Obama’s father is from. That means there’s something about the foreskin that caught people’s attention. With all the evidence now coming in from Africa, I’m starting to think people around the world might have made the connection between the foreskin and sexually transmitted infection. In many of these cultures, the rite of circumcision has something to do with fertility. Some say it makes the man more fertile, some say it makes his penis harder, many say it makes him a man.

Is Judaism unusual in connecting the circumcision ritual to a covenant with God rather than to fertility?

I’d say it is. However I’d also have to say, look at the other side of the covenant: “Your offspring will be as numerous as the stars.” The other side of the deal is fertility. And lo and behold, the Jews are still here.

So circumcision is responsible for the survival of the Jewish people?

Circumcision as a public-health measure is not responsible for the survival of the Jewish people. But circumcision as a way of making people distinctive and showing very dramatically that you care about your relationship to God might be. I’ll never forget the look on my wife’s face when my son was taken out of her arms by a mohel. There she was, standing by, watching a piece being cut out of his body and not being able to intervene to protect him. I wasn’t taking any chances and I found a guy who was a board-certified pediatrician, board-certified obstetrician, and religiously certified mohel. And when I asked him what he thought of the medical value, he said, “There isn’t any. If you’re not doing this for religious reasons, don’t do it.” But I do think all Jews should do it, whether they’re religious or not, because it’s one of the oldest and most clear and symbolically powerful definitions of Jewish identity.