After my father – a Holocaust survivor — passed away in 1991 I found an old leather valise he had brought with him from Germany. Inside were hundreds of still photographs he had taken right after liberation with a Leica IIIc. They included scenes around Germany; in particular, Lubeck, where I was born in 1949….
White House adviser Stephen Miller, a staunch advocate for stricter immigration policies, is the great-grandson of an immigrant — who failed his naturalization test the first time around. In 1932, Nison (Max) Miller applied for naturalization as an American citizen, according to an application found by Renee Stern Steinig, a former president of the Jewish…
Researchers in California have created software for turning a person’s raw DNA data into a predictive picture of their face. Using anonymous data — the kind that genetics companies like 23andMe sell to pharmaceutical companies for research purposes — scientists from Human Longevity, Inc., a private genetics lab, have made computer generated images that resemble…
Phil Mazo, a comedian based in Jersey City, NJ, was reading through the to-do list on his phone when he decided it might be time to check off one item that had been on the list for some time: Buy a take-home genome testing kit from the company 23andMe. After finding a deal on a…
It all started with my grandfather, Sidney Goldstein, and his Korean War memoir. I found it several years ago while helping clean out my grandparents’ garage. I was 26 when I read it for the first time, and he was 27 when he wrote the letters his memoir was based on. I knew he’d written…
On a Sunday morning in late November, around 250 people fill the dark brown wooden pews of the Vilna Shul in Boston. A synagogue built by Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in 1919 on Phillips Street in the central Beacon Hill neighborhood, it closed in 1985, and then reopened as a cultural center in the early…
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…
As a latecomer and a relative newbie in Jewish genealogy, I have to admit I was a little apprehensive this July as I walked into the lobby of the Hilton Salt Lake City Center where the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies was holding its 34th annual conference. This was the tribe’s gathering of the…
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