It may look like Jared Rosenthal is cruising around New York City in an oversized ice cream truck, but the 45-year-old entrepreneur is selling a commodity far more precious than a frozen treat: He’s offering DNA tests to confirm paternity and other biological connections to anyone willing to shell out $350 for the information. With…
I’ve been biting my nails ever since I’ve had a full set of baby teeth. Sometimes I twirl my hair, tap my foot or overanalyze everyday situations. For me, Woody Allen’s neurotic existential musings or Larry David’s socially awkward malaise come as assurance I’m in good company. They validate anxiety as a fact of life….
The Holocaust altered Eva Kor’s body forever in a way that she still doesn’t fully understand. When she was ten years old, Kor and her twin sister, Miriam — along with 1,500 other sets of twins — were test subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who used fraternal and identical twins at Auschwitz…
Molveine Karan raised her arms steadily above her head, tapped her foot lightly against the floor as she moved her leg, and tilted her neck back and forth. “If you don’t do it, you stiffen up like a board,” the 98-year-old said. Karan was demonstrating her morning routine, which includes an hour of stretching and…
Yosef Yabarkan was a six-year-old boy in 1999 when he left his village in Ethiopia with his parents and nine sisters. Like tens of thousands of Jews before them, they made the 1,600-mile trek north to Israel. The family left behind a thatched hut surrounded by farm animals in the Tigray region near the Eritrean…
Mindy Indy sits in her apartment, head bent over a large piece of sketch paper, carefully outlining a young boy’s glasses with her ink pen. She’s already penciled out the scene — two teens sitting on a porch, as the boy tries in earnest to explain the symptoms he experiences from familial dysautonomia, a Jewish…
(JTA) — A fundraising campaign started quietly by two first graders two years ago to help find a cure for a rare genetic disease just passed the $1 million mark, with donations streaming in from all 50 states and 60 countries across the globe. The million-dollar achievement has been celebrated as the perfect feel-good story,…
(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…
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