The following memorial essay was originally published on Beyond the Bris: The Circumcision Conversation, January 22, 2016. It is reposted here with kind permission of the author, Rebecca Wald.
Dr. Mark D. Reiss (1933–2025)
Remembering a physician, Jewish ritual reformer, and elder of the genital-autonomy movement.
Dr. Mark D. Reiss, a retired physician and a formative figure in Jewish genital-autonomy advocacy, died in late 2025 in Northern California. He was 92.
Having had a long and successful career as a radiologist, Mark devoted the later decades of his life to challenging the medical and religious normalization of non-therapeutic infant circumcision, and building practical alternatives for Jewish families seeking a different path.
Mark served as Executive Vice President of Doctors Opposing Circumcision, lending professional authority and ethical seriousness to a movement that had long been marginalized. He was also on the leadership team of Bruchim, a nonprofit that supports non-circumcising families in Jewish life. Independently and within these roles, he wrote, mentored, corresponded, and spoke with parents, physicians, and clergy, helping to reframe circumcision as a matter of medical ethics and human rights rather than cultural inevitability.
Alongside this iconoclastic stance, he was also an active member of his Conservative synagogue in San Francisco.
Mark often situated his advocacy in the context of his own training. “When I was in Medical School in the 1950s,” he wrote, “we were taught that circumcision was the correct and healthy thing to do.” He later described what had been missing from that education: “we learned nothing of foreskin anatomy and function. Infant nervous systems were thought to be undeveloped and their pain was so trivialized that it was almost ignored.” His public work grew out of this reckoning—an insistence that entrenched medical norms deserved ethical re-examination.
Within Jewish life, Mark’s contributions proved especially enduring. In 2002, he created the first widely circulated list of officiants willing to conduct Jewish naming ceremonies for non-circumcising families. At the time, such information was difficult to find. Parents opting to welcome sons into Jewish life without circumcision often felt isolated, uncertain that there were others who felt similarly about the practice.
The list Mark built changed that. It connected families to clergy. It connected clergy to one another. It turned scattered private decisions into a visible, navigable landscape. Over time, this work was absorbed into larger organizational efforts, including resources later carried by Bruchim, shaping what would become an international network of alternative Jewish ritual practice.
On Beyond the Bris, a web-based project that frequently highlighted his perspective, he wrote: “A Jewish baby boy is born, and people ask ‘When is the bris?’ not even considering the alternative─ blissfully leaving the baby boy’s penis intact, in its natural and normal state.”
Mark framed this work as both ethical and deeply Jewish. He rejected the idea that circumcision defined Jewish belonging. “Circumcision is not an identity issue,” he wrote. “You do not need to be circumcised to be Jewish any more than the need to observe many other Jewish laws. The bottom line is this: if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish, period.” In making that claim, he offered families a way to disentangle covenant from the choice to circumcise.
He addressed parents directly, often as an elder speaking across generations. “…as a Jewish grandfather,” he wrote, “I want to assure young couples about to bring a child into the world, that there are other members of the Jewish ‘older’ generation… If your heart and instincts tell you to leave your son intact, listen!” For many families, that voice—medical, Jewish, paternal, reflective—carried a permission they had not heard elsewhere.
Mark’s influence rarely took the form of spectacle. It appeared in emails answered, documents shared, introductions made, lists maintained, newcomers welcomed. He excelled at building the support that allows private conscience to become a communal possibility.
His advocacy unfolded alongside a full personal life. He is also remembered as a brilliant and accomplished pianist; devoted vegetarian; Golden State Warriors fan; loving husband to his wife Joan Reinhardt Reiss, who predeceased him; father and grandfather.
Mark’s legacy lives in the organizations he strengthened, the rituals he helped reshape, and the many families who found community, language, and direction because he believed alternatives should exist—and took it upon himself to help build them. Within the history of Jewish genital-autonomy advocacy, Dr. Mark D. Reiss will be remembered as one of the figures who carried the work across generations, helping move it from isolated conviction into sustained communal presence.
In April of 2022, Bruchim honored Mark with a Life Award in recognition of his vision and accomplishments, and officially launched its Mark D. Reiss M.D. Inclusion Directory. Those wishing to support to the directory’s ongoing mission may donate here.