The novelist Gary Shteyngart recently published a lengthy article in the New Yorker detailing the suffering he has gone through after a botched circumcision performed when he was seven years old. Born to a Jewish family in the USSR, Shteyngart did not received a brit milah (ritual circumcision) at the traditional age of eight days, meaning that the procedure would have been much more painful than normal even if it had been conducted properly. Not content merely to discuss his own experience, he launched a broader attack on the practice, at a time when an “intactivist” movement is growing in strength, and some European countries are considering bans on circumcision. The rabbi and mohel Hayim Leiter notes that the essay makes numerous inaccurate or misleading claims:

When it comes to the issue of how many children actually die from circumcision, Shteyngart’s numbers may be a bit skewed. On a statistical level, . . . there are studies reporting that there are two deaths in every million boys circumcised per year; there are also studies which report zero deaths in 100,000 boys circumcised per year.

But on a practical level, the numbers seem much clearer. . . . I have spent my career mining the news for stories about brit milah. In my entire career, there has never been a single story of an infant’s death due to circumcision. If a baby had died from the procedure, it would certainly have made headlines.

Shteyngart also makes the claim that circumcision has a very high rate of complications, but the data only reflect that point when the procedure is done later in life. The rate of procedure-related complications during and after circumcision in the neonate is approximately 2 to 6 per 1,000. This rate increases twentyfold for boys who are circumcised between one and nine years of age, and tenfold for those circumcised after ten years of age. An important fact to note here is that the complications this study speaks of could be as minimal as excess bleeding, which is easily remedied with no long-lasting effects.

No one wants Gary Shteyngart to suffer another moment. And, in truth, I commend him for sharing his experience so candidly. But his grievances are not with brit milah itself, but rather with the Soviet government. His struggles most likely resulted from his family’s inability to circumcise him at eight days when the recovery is quickest and easiest. I am sure that is no consolation to him, but his experience should not be taken as evidence that neonatal circumcision is a dangerous procedure that regularly leads to lifelong complications.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.