This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Treatment Seen for Familial Dysautonomia
Two New York doctors have discovered a treatment that is raising hope for sufferers of one of the Jewish genetic diseases. Sylvia Anderson and Berish Rubin, both of the Laboratory for Familial Dysautonomia Research at Fordham University, announced in May that a variant of vitamin E, tocotrienols, is effective as a treatment for familial dysautonomia…
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August 15, 2003
100 YEARS AGO • When Police officer Murphy pushed Isaac Isaacs down at the corner of Forsyth and Division Streets, he probably didn’t think much of it. And when Isaacs’ nephew, David, came running up and demanded Murphy’s badge number, Murphy grabbed him and started dragging him to the precinct. David Isaacs, in Murphy’s grip,…
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Stem Cell Exports to Germany Causing Controversy in Israel
Two Israeli institutions, Haifa’s Technion Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, began exporting stem cells culled from human embryos to Germany this year, arousing a storm of controversy within both countries’ scientific and medical communities. Because stem cells have enormous medical potential, many scientists, doctors and ethicists favor the move, saying…
The Latest
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Doctor Writes ‘Epic Saga’ Of Jews in Medicine
As Frank Heynick was nearing the completion of his gigantic tome, “Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga,” he came across the name of an important doctor, George Sternberg, whom he had neglected to mention. The discovery of Sternberg did not make Heynick happy. “I got through a lot of trimming to keep it at 600…
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Colon Cancer Seen Linked to Bloom Gene
Ashkenazi Jews are two to three times more likely to develop colon cancer if they carry the gene for Bloom syndrome, according to a September 2002 study by American and Israeli researchers. Dr. Kenneth Offit, senior author of the study and chief of the clinical genetics service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York,…
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Procedure Offers Hope for Families
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, a fairly new procedure that allows embryos created outside the uterus to be screened for genetic diseases, has been embraced by some Jewish couples who carry the mutations for diseases such as Tay-Sachs. But even as the procedure, known as PGD, offers these families the hope of healthy children — and in…
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Finding Your Roots
The search for Jewish roots in Germany may be easier now, thanks to a new research center that opened last fall. The Ephraim Gustav Hoenlein Genealogy Project is designed to help Jews of Germanic descent trace their origins. It is a joint project of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and the Jewish Community of Würzburg….
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A New Treatment for Gaucher? Compound Intrigues
Researchers have developed a chemical compound that could lead to a new treatment for Gaucher disease, the most common genetic disease among Ashkenazi Jews, which causes problems including anemia, poor blood clotting, an enlarged liver and spleen, bone damage and, in the most serious cases, neurological problems. The newly discovered compound is made up of…
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Who Gets Tested for BRCA, and Why?
Many Jewish women of Ashkenazi origin face an increased risk of inherited breast and ovarian cancers, the result of mutations in two genes that became relatively common to Eastern Europeans. Women with bad copies of either gene, called BRCA1 and BRCA2, have a lifetime risk of breast cancer that approaches 85%. Their overall risk of…
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Day Schools Learn New Math During Economic Downturn
Throughout the prosperous 1990s, the Agnon School, a non-denominational Jewish day school in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood, experienced steady growth in student enrollment. In the last few years, however, with the national economic downturn, the student population has fallen by more than a quarter — from a high of 410 students enrolled in its…
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Educators Aim To Move Beyond ‘Mythic Israel’
Israel education in North America is in the dumps. That is the conclusion drawn by Israeli and American education experts interviewed in a new study on the subject: “Mapping Israel Education, An Overview of Trends and Issues in North America.” Israel study here is not its own “field,” because it sorely lacks focus and a…
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