
Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision
Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon turns his camera on his own community to ask why infant male circumcision remains near-universal in America despite growing medical and ethical objections. The film interviews doctors, bioethicists, rabbis, and parents who defend the practice on religious or hygienic grounds alongside intactivists, doctors, and men who see it as unnecessary and irreversible surgery performed on someone who cannot consent. Ungar-Sargon, who is Jewish, brings the debate home by examining the ritual bris and the arguments rabbis and mohels give for it, then sets that against clinical footage and testimony about what the procedure actually involves. American circumcision rates, the anatomy of the foreskin, and the history of how the surgery became routine in US hospitals all get examined in turn. Rather than settling the argument, the film lays out the religious, medical, and personal reasoning on each side and lets the viewer see how much of the practice rests on custom rather than settled science.