Popular culture and Jewish humor are rife with circumcision jokes. Remember Mel Brooks explaining the practice to Roabin Hood and his Merry Men? Seinfeld and Shakey the Mohel? Yet serious examinations of circumcisions and brit milah and what it means today — and why non-Orthodox Jews keep up the practice — are much harder to come by. In this first of a two-part series, we talk with critics — if not outright opponents — of circumcision. The first needs no introduction: Bestselling novelist and memoirist Gary Shteyngart. His New Yorker article about his own botched circumcision as a seven-year-old sparked conversation across the Jewish world and beyond. And Max Buckler, a business strategist who has been increasingly active and vocal on the issue.