JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
One of the suspects in the attack on a Jersey City, New Jersey kosher grocery store wrote several Facebook posts demonstrating belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Anti-Defamation League revealed Tuesday. David Anderson, one of the two suspected shooters in the attack, used the alias Dawad Maccabee on Facebook from July to December 2015, according…
A supporter of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has posted anti-Semitic theories about the origins of Jews to Facebook, the Daily Caller first reported. Maher Abdel-qader, an engineer and fundraiser for Tlaib, publicly shared a video earlier this month that falsely suggests that Jews are descended from Khazars, a semi-nomadic Eurasian tribe that was destroyed in…
During my childhood in the 1960s and 70s in the USSR, the only books published about Jews were ideological works that criticized Zionism, Israel and what the Soviets considered the “national Jewish mentality.” As you might imagine, thanks to these books, many of us had a totally distorted picture of our true origins as Jews….
In a recent piece in these pages, I addressed a popular myth: that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazar pagans who converted to Judaism. Though this idea gets a lot of attention, it is fully based on bunk science. Genetics, linguistics and onomastics — the study of names — all disprove the Khazarian hypothesis. But…
In 2010 I was contacted by the chief editor of a volume called “Khazars: Myth and History,” put together by the Russian Academy of Sciences. She knew my books on Ashkenazic names, and was familiar with my ongoing study of the history of Yiddish, eventually published by Oxford University Press in 2015 as “Origins of…
For geneticists, like me, genetic testing has always been a game of trust. We can test people’s DNA to learn about their ancestries, relatives, disease predispositions and crimes. We geneticists do genetic testing after providing counseling that explores the process and outcome. In turn, we request consent to proceed. One of my common questions is,…
23andMe has backpedalled from broadcasting the discredited theory that a portion of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from an obscure tribe from the Caucasus. But that hasn’t stopped members of the “alt-right” from jumping on the news that the giant Silicon Valley genomics company had given credibility to the so-called Khazar theory, which undermines Jews’ perception…
The genomics company 23andMe has retracted a statement made on the profiles of some users with Ashkenazi heritage that they may be descended from an extinct tribe from the Caucasus known as the Khazars, inadvertently wading into a political-genetic debate with far-reaching implications for Jewish identity and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The company said in a…
100% of profits support our journalism
