Her Mother Wants a Piece of Him

I can't believe he's even considering this. DOESN'T LIKE PAIN wrote in to Dear Abby:

My girlfriend is Jewish; I am not.

You need to define what that means. Is she religiously Jewish (observant), and if so, which branch? Or is she Jewish mostly because she was born to a Jewish mother?

Her mother recently found out that I am not circumcised.

And how did she find that out? She knows you're not Jewish, right?

She has been putting pressure on me to get "snipped."

But not convert? She doesn't get a say. Tell her to keep her hands off of your penis. Uh, unless you're having too much fun. Tell her while you're eating shrimp wrapped in bacon, which I was actually served at a reception after a bar mitzvah. By the way, does she keep kosher?

I am not sure what I should do.

If you're afraid of catching HIV, then maybe you should get circumcised. Otherwise, don't. If your girlfriend wants a boyfriend or husband who has a mushroom rather than an anteater, then she can find one.

One of my girlfriends came from a Jewish family that wasn't religious at all. They had some culturally Jewish activities, though, and my girlfriend had become more religious while in college. She still wasn't very religious – she didn't keep kosher, attended church with me more than she ever went to Jewish services, but did observe some holidays. There are a lot of Jewish traditions I like, but I was not about to give up my belief in a certain Jewish carpenter being my risen Lord and Savior, even though I certainly wasn't living out that belief when it came to sex. That was our central impasse. She believed she could marry me, but I didn't think she'd end up being happy and I didn't think I could marry her. I guess I was kind of hoping she'd change, which was stupid on my part.

Her parents were good to me, but I heard second-hand that her mother really wanted her to marry a Jewish man. That is understandable. I was circumcised, and her parents knew that their daughter knew first-hand, so to speak, whether I was or wasn't. so that was never a topic. But I never did get an answer out of my girlfriend or her mother why they maintained someone couldn't be a Jew and believe in Jesus. I mean, Jesus was/is a Jew and so were so many of the founding disciples. Did they suddenly stop being Jewish?