New York Jewish Week via JTA — “This country broke my penis, but it couldn’t break my spirit.”

So says Jewish writer Gary Shteyngart in “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong,” a new documentary from The New Yorker about the botched circumcision Shteyngart received as a seven-year-old Russian immigrant to the United States.

Told with humor, sensitivity and pain, the 20-minute film — shot almost entirely in black and white — is directed by Dana Ben-Ari, a documentarian whose previous film was “Breastmilk,” which The Cut describes as a “gloriously graphic breastfeeding documentary.”

“The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong” explores Shteyngart’s early years in the United States, as well as his relationship to his body, which, as a child, is “just something I really hated,” he says in the film. The documentary is inspired by Shteyngart’s 2021 New Yorker essay about the same unfortunate event. The widely discussed essay was embraced in “intactivist” circles opposed to circumcision, and denounced by some Jews who felt Shteyngart had denigrated a Jewish ritual normally performed on infants, not seven-year-olds.

In the film, over a montage of photos depicting his New York City childhood — including one of him at a typewriter — Shteyngart narrates how his botched circumcision came to be. He describes arriving at a primarily Russian neighborhood in Queens, where his father was convinced by a local Chabadnik to circumcize his son in a physical manifestation of Jewish belonging.

“It was not just being accepted by the religion, but it was also........

© The Times of Israel