The Jewish Body( Series - Jewish Encounters )

From a well-known doctor and anthropologist, a history of the Jewish people from bris to burial, from "muscle Jews" to nose jobs.
From birth to death, Melvin Konner takes the measure of the "Jewish body," stopping along the way to contemplate sex, circumcision, menstruation, and even those most elusive and controversial of microscopic markers--Jewish genes. But Konner, a distinguished anthropologist as well as a medical doctor, has written a far more ambitious book than a mere examination of the human body seen through the prism of Jewish culture. He looks as well at the views of Jewish physiology held by non-Jews and the way those views seeped into Jewish thought. He describes in detail the origins of the first nose job, and he writes about the Nazi ideology that saw Jews literally as a public health menace on par with rats or germs. A work of grand historical and philosophical sweep, he writes about the subtle relationship between the Jewish conception of the body and the Jewish conception of a bodiless God, about the relationship between a land--Israel--and the bodily sense not merely of individuals but of a people. And he writes about the revival of a concept of physical strength that helped generate, and that followed in the wake of, the creation of a Jewish homeland. With deep insight and great originality, Konner has written nothing less than an anatomical history of the Jewish people.