Alice Collins Plebuch, raised in a proud Irish Catholic family, sent away for a “just-for-fun DNA test” — but the results changed her life. She found out that somewhere in her family, she had Jewish roots. Plebuch told the Washington Post about her surprising journey of self-discovery in a recent story. Plebuch, now 69, was…
It was among the oddest asides in an exceedingly odd interview by the New York Times with the president of the United States. When presidential granddaughter Arabella Kushner burst into the meeting, Trump paused to show off the photogenic little girl. Like any doting grandfather, he took the opportunity to boast about Arabella’s intelligence, prompting…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A strand of DNA is a lot like computer software; it’s the blueprint for the complex computations that cells perform, and like a coding error in a computer program, a single mutation—either a deletion, insertion, or duplication—to the strand can cause cells to malfunction. But DNA doesn’t…
Do you think that Israelis are the descendants of the biblical Israelites? It’s a simple but provocative prompt — one which the videographer and man-on-the street interviewer Corey Gil-Shuster recently put to half a dozen Israelis. Gil-Shuster, the man behind the “Ask Project,” interviewed an anti-Zionist Hasid, a woman from a West Bank settlement and…
Not long ago, having a baby was a fairly straightforward venture. When a couple decided to have a child, they’d ditch the birth control pills and dim the lights. But with no plastic wand with twin purple lines to offer instant at-home confirmation, there was no easy way to gauge success. The first home pregnancy…
When Joselin Linder’s father William died of a sudden and debilitating mystery disease in his late 40s, she didn’t realize that it was the marker of a deadly gene that was stalking her family. Twenty years on, she, her sister and her cousins live under the shadow of a gene variant that seems to have…
23andMe, the genetic testing service co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, has won landmark approval to administer tests for risk of developing 10 hereditary illnesses. In a new ruling, the Food and Drug Administration reversed its 2013 decision to deny the company approval. Included among the conditions it screens are Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, celiac disease and…
As Sarah and her husband were checking off last-minute wedding preparations and appointments, they got a suggestion from their rabbi. He asked them if they’d been genetically tested for diseases common among Ashkenazi Jews. The couple, both Ashkenazim, took the rabbi’s advice and headed to their local JCC for a blood test. They figured it…
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