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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Annual Guide to Jewish Genetic Diseases
The Forward presents this section to provide information on some of the more serious Jewish genetic diseases. There are about 20 “Ashkenazic diseases,” not counting the higher rates of at least four cancer-related genes. The diseases are more prevalent in the Eastern European Jewish population because of centuries of endogamy, literally, “marrying within.” ———– FAMILIAL…
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LOTS Sufferers Combat Ignorance as Well as Symptoms
When people find out Shirley Webb has late onset Tay-Sachs disease (LOTS), their reactions have ranged from “But you’re older than 5 years old!” to “Why are you alive?” Once, at work, someone saw her pull away from her desk in her wheelchair and exclaimed, “I didn’t know you were crippled!” At 66, Webb, a…
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Drug Trial Brings Hope to Late Onset Tay-Sachs Patients
Doctors are experimenting with an oral medication known as Zavesca as a possible treatment for late onset Tay-Sachs (LOTS) disease, it was reported at a conference in Philadelphia last month. New York University School of Medicine and Cleveland University Hospital both launched trials using the drug, whose chemical name is OGT918 or miglustat, on 15…
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How a Mother Overcame a Malady
Kathryn Goldstein* of Monroe, N.Y., has no medical background, but this proud Orthodox mother of 11 has become an expert on one Jewish genetic disease. Three of her children were diagnosed with the genetic disorder, congenital hyperinsulinism. In 1978, after a healthy full-term pregnancy, Kathryn gave birth to Amanda, her seventh child. Two hours after…
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Usher Gene Discovered
Scientists have pinpointed the gene mutation responsible for most cases of Usher syndrome type 1 in Ashkenazi Jews. The syndrome is a genetic disorder that causes deafness from birth and progressive blindness beginning before age 10. The discovery, first reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in April, will allow doctors to more easily…
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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…
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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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