(Haaretz) — The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian. The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that…
It’s getting to the point where I can feel it in my posture. The inevitability of street harassment makes my shoulders tense up before I even leave my house. I don’t make eye contact on the street, ever, but especially with men. I wear headphones all the time anyway, but because of them, I probably…
I recently wrote an article in the Sisterhood entitled “Why I Check Both White and Jewish,” about white privilege, gentrification and my experience being marginalized as a Jew. My intention was to spark conversation amongst readers about privilege and racial identity in order to work towards dismantling racism both within the Jewish community and beyond,…
About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll. The figures highlight how segregated the United States remains in the wake of a debate on race sparked by last month’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the…
Join Caroline Rothstein on Twitter for a Tweet chat about this article tonight, Wednesday, July 31, from 7:00 to 7:30pm ET. Share your opinions with the hashtag #MyJewishID. On a recent Saturday morning, I left my Bushwick apartment in yellow galoshes and a black raincoat, my red umbrella tucked under my elbow, my yoga mat…
The complicated saga of race in this country has dozens of punctuation points. Birmingham and Selma, the summer of the freedom riders, King’s life and oratory and his awful death, Lyndon Johnson’s uttering “We shall overcome” to a joint session of Congress, rallies, marches, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act…
Are Jews genetically homogenous? Though it’s certainly been a loaded question historically, the quandary has been the domain of scientists for a number of years now, all of whom have pretty much come up with the same answer: yes. But that was before Eran Elhaik entered the picture. An Israeli molecular geneticist, Elhaik is interested,…
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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