(JTA) — Prominent scholars of Jewish demography dismissed the findings of a newly published genetic study suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews originate from converts to Judaism in what today is Turkey. Titled “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz,” the by the University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and…
I am related to author and Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs. In fact, I am his first cousin twice removed’s wife’s nephew’s wife’s first cousin’s wife’s brother wife’s second cousin’s wife’s uncle’s wife’s second great nephew. As he says, we’re practically brothers. The reason I know this is because Jacobs is in the midst of creating…
(Haaretz) — Where did the Jews originate? For Bennett Greenspan, the founder and president of Family Tree DNA, there’s little doubt, and it can all be proven with a swab of cheek cells. The overwhelming majority of Jews living today should be able to trace their roots back to the Middle East with a little…
Traces of DNA of Brooklyn real estate developer Menachem Stark was found in a van seized by police in the investigation of his kidnapping and murder. The discovery was reported late Tuesday by Newsday, citing an unnamed law enforcement source familiar with the case. The 2002 van with Pennsylvania plates was confiscated by New York…
An email popped up in Hershel Richman’s inbox. “Your new personalized risk report is now available through the CPMC web portal!” the email cheerfully informed him. Its contents were tactfully vague: some talk of “genetic counselors” and a medicine collaborative. But this wasn’t some credit report spam, or a Nigerian phishing scam. No, Richman, a…
For three days in April, about 70 families whose lives have been upended by Tay-Sachs disease gathered in San Diego for the annual National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases conference. The event — which attracted families caring for children with Tay-Sachs, as well as those who have lost loved ones to the degenerative disease that claims…
Catherine Afarian calls herself a “love child of the ‘70s.” Her mother discovered that she was pregnant after she had broken off a relationship of less than a year. Afarian has never met her biological father, but her mother always said he came from a big Italian family, and Afarian got a kick out of…
The persistent debate over the “racial” origins of the Jewish people makes a mockery of scholarship, trivializes history and perpetuates conceptions of identity that have been misused to justify everything from violent repression to affirmative action. It is hardly surprising that Johns Hopkins’s Eran Elhaik “stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy,” as the Forward…
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