Living While Circumcised

The first extensive study of how living while circumcised affected the day-to-day efforts of Jewish men and women to survive the Shoah.

During the Shoah a circumcised male Jew trying to pass was always at risk. Scenes of threatened exposure, efforts to avoid such situations, and responses when they were unavoidable play significant roles in survivor testimonies and memoirs. Most studies that explore these issues focus on the readily visible or audible stereotypes of Jewishness—such as dark, curly hair; dark eyes; a curved nose; accented speech; distinctive surnames—before noting the danger posed by this corporeal feature that would eliminate virtually all doubts of Jewish identity. However, how circumcision affected the everyday choices, experiences, feelings, gender- and self-identities of Jewish men—and women— has yet to be fully explored by scholars of the Shoah.

Living While Circumcised addresses this gap by drawing on hundreds of survivor interviews, memoirs, diaries, and other written testimonies, as well as dozens of literary and cinematic works based on or adapted from survivors' accounts. Jay Geller details the wide variety of strategies individuals developed and the tactics they employed to avoid exposure during a police raid or ID check, medical examination or group shower, sex or children's games: from cross-dressing to assuming a Muslim identity, from claiming an operation for an infection to soaping one's groin, from ingenious distractions to playing against stereotype. Living While Circumcised thus documents an added dimension of Jewish resilience and resourcefulness during the Shoah.

Jay Geller is Professor of Modern Jewish Culture, emeritus, at Vanderbilt University, where he taught in the Divinity School and the Department of Jewish Studies from 1994 to 2021. He is the author of On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007), The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011), and Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018). He has published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews on aspects of the Shoah.