Haim Watzman It’s not the headline that’s remarkable, it’s the picture. The website of the great science journal that I occasionally do news pieces for, Nature, has a headline today that is already somewhat ho-hum. Jews Worldwide Share Genetic Ties! We’ve seen this before, in reports of studies of mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited only [...]

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Haim Watzman According to disturbing report in the latest issue of the British scientific journal Nature, a team of geneticists based at pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has discovered that a strange set of markers shared by 90 percent of all Jews indicates widespread intermarriage with the Amalekite nation in the Middle Bronze Age. The [...]

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Oops. It didn’t work. Labeling him a Muslim, labeling him a crazy black man, saying he’ll be bad for Israel. Apparently, those scare tactics stirred up exactly that minority of American Jews who don’t vote Democratic anyway. Well, we all have relatives we don’t understand. The rest know how to translate “In every generation, a [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The premise of the Great Schlep was that young Jews of Obama should visit their grandparents in Florida to make sure they vote in a manner befitting members of the tribe. Behind that premise were several more suppositions: that Florida is in play, that rightwing hatemail labeling Obama as a Muslim and anti-Israel [...]

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Haim Watzman They evinced no concern for the cleanliness of the area they lived in.… [T]he streets [were] filthy and stank to the skies.…They were considered to be swindlers, prone to lying. “An Arab never speaks the truth, except by mistake,” said policemen who served in the area. That’s a description of London’s Jewish neighborhood, [...]

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Ilana was eyeing a silk-print wrap-around skirt as a present for a friend when a retirement-age Jewish mom with an eastern accent started up a conversation with me. When you wear a kipah, everyone assumes you are Israeli. We spent this morning at the summer arts fair in Crested Butte, Colorado, a town of 1,600 [...]

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