A new initiative offering subsidized screening for cancer-causing mutations in Ashkenazi Jews — including those with no family history of cancer — appears to be splitting cancer specialists. The BRCA community study, sponsored by the Program for Jewish Genetic Health, began accepting applicants in January from Ashkenazi women and men age 25 and older. Led…
Just by coincidence, forty-eight hours after President Barack Obama announced a coming détente with Cuba, I was in Havana. And talking to a kosher butcher, of all people. Yes, Havana has a kosher butcher, which sounds like the punch-line of a joke. There are, after all, only 1,500 Jews left in all of Cuba, the…
France’s national watchdog on broadcasters reprimanded a journalist who asked a politician whether the country’s prime minister was “under Jewish influence.” The Superior Audiovisual Council, or CSA, criticized Jean-Jacques Bourdin, a presenter for the BFMTV television station and the RMC radio broadcaster, over an interview he conducted last month with ex-French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas,…
It is widely believed, particularly outside Argentina, that special prosecutor Alberto Nisman died because he was about to expose a criminal pact between President Cristina Kirchner and the Iranian government to cover up the latter’s responsibility in the 1994 bombing of Buenos Aires’s Jewish community center. According to this riveting version of events, powerful forces…
(JTA) — The yellowing document is crumbling and fading, but the smooth signature on its cover is as legible as it is chilling: Rudolf Hess, the Nazi who served as a Hitler deputy from 1933 to 1941. The signature, which adorns a 70-year-old leniency plea for top Nazi Hermann Goering during the postwar Nuremberg trials,…
In 1964, 600 Jewish men and women journeyed South to help register voters, most of them carrying memories of relatives lost to the Holocaust. Two of them lost their lives. At a gathering of nearly 200 people in Selma’s Congregation Mishkan Israel on Sunday, the brother of Andrew Goodman recalled that it took the death…
The Seesaw is a new kind of advice column in which a broad range of columnists will address the real life issues faced by interfaith couples and families. Read the discussion and vote below for what you think is the best response to this particular quandary. You can email your own questions, which will remain…
With the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the news again, as President Obama proposed protecting much of the oil-rich land as wilderness, I am reminded of the summer I spent a few years back leading a sea kayaking trip through the Refuge. It was an experience of transformation I will never forget and will most…
(JTA) — In this rendition of the Passover story, the Children of Israel do not play ice hockey or drink kosher l’Pesach maple syrup. But the first-ever Canadian Haggadah does have a distinctly Canuck vibe. For one thing the Canadian Haggadah Canadienne is in three languages – English, French and Hebrew. And instead of the…
The Jewish social service charity FEGS dumped increasingly large sums into a for-profit subsidiary in the years prior to its mysterious downfall in January, the Forward has learned. The AllSector Technology Group, a for-profit corporation owned by FEGS, was meant to earn money for FEGS. Instead, in 2011, FEGS began paying out massive sums to…
A mainstream Jewish community that fractured in the run-up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress is now reuniting for a frantic attempt to derail the nuclear deal the Obama administration is negotiating with Iran. In the weeks prior to the Israeli leader’s address, Netanyahu’s arrangement with Congress’s GOP leadership to assail President Obama’s…
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