Talia Bloch
By Talia Bloch
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Culture Bakashot Makes Unlikely Comeback as Sephardic Jews Explore Traditions
(JTA) — The group of young Jewish professionals had gathered to participate in the revival of a Sephardic tradition hearkening back to the days of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Arriving at an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they greeted each other in French and settled in around a dining table laid out with snacks…
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Culture A Common Mutation Behind Parkinson’s Disease May Have Other Side-Effects
Recycling for the health of our planet is well understood. But recycling to keep our bodies going? Scientists are finding that the recycling that takes place within the body’s trillions of cells every day plays a key role in aging and disease. It is also at the center of recent findings regarding Parkinson’s Disease and…
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Culture Jewish Men in Middle of PSA Controversy
A year ago, Rabbi Jon Adland underwent genetic testing and discovered that he was positive for mutations on both BRCA1 and BRCA2 — the so-called breast cancer genes that raise the risk for breast and ovarian cancer, especially in Ashkenazi Jews, who are over 10 times more likely to have a BRCA mutation than those…
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News New Technology Identifies Genes Behind Rare Eye Disorder
One night when Daria Zawadzki was 17 years old, she drove into oncoming traffic. Although no one was hurt, the accident convinced her that ?there was something wrong.? Zawadzki had been driving for a year, yet she could hardly see at night and wondered how others navigated roads in the dark. There were other incidents,…
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Culture Could Kashrut Be Partly To Blame for Crohn’s Disease?
Here’s a question that has puzzled scientists for decades: Why is Crohn’s disease — an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) with the highest incidence among Caucasians — about two to four times more prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews than among non-Jewish whites? As some researchers continue to look for the answer in our genes, others are proposing…
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Culture Limits of The Sacred, Limits of Representation
For Allen Grossman, a poet of prodigious gifts and the most recent winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, a successful poem does not merely give voice to human experience. It is an expression of human existence itself. Although often noted for its influences from High Modernists like William Butler Yeats and Wallace…
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Culture Discovering the Newest Jewish Genetic Disease
One day, about four years ago, a young couple came to Dr. Alan Shanske’s office looking for help. They had already been to numerous doctors, but none of them was able to diagnose their 4-year-old son. The boy, Shanske recalled, was developmentally delayed, uncoordinated with poor muscle tone, had experienced breathing problems as an infant…
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Culture Enlisting Rabbis in the Push for Screening
“My wife and I were married by two rabbis, one Conservative and the other Reform, and neither of them gave us any information about Jewish genetic diseases.” So begins the story of Lawrence Sernovitz, himself now an associate rabbi at the Old York Road Temple-Beth Am in Abington, Pa. A little more than a year…
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