by Laura Levitt
In Why aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (University of California Press, $39.95), Shaye Cohen offers an academic study of the historical debates around circumcision and the meaning of this ritual for the Jewish people. He offers a powerful argument for seeing the question of why women are not circumcised (it’s not because a female lacks a penis) as a part of the historical polemics between Christians and Jews.