Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

Any conservative columnist writing for the mostly liberal audience of the New York Times op-ed page is bound to attract their share of controversy. But Bret Stephenss latest column, on the subject of Jewish genius, drew so much criticism that it now appears on the website with an editors note saying it was a mistake to cite a study whose co-author has a long track record of racist statements.

According to the note, Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors views, but citing the study left an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent.

Thats an interesting media controversy in its own right and a prime example of the dangers of discussing complicated science based on casual googling. But the controversy is so intense both because of growing concern about anti-Semitism and because time and again arguments about Jewish achievement seem to morph into efforts to paint blacks as inferior and efforts to help the poor as misguided.

One of the many oddities of this story is that the citation Stephens got in hot water for included factual assertions:

The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, its true. Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data, noted one 2005 paper. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.

The 2005 paper in question Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence advances a number of controversial claims, and one of its authors, the late Henry Harpending, has a long track record of advancing racist anti-black views in other contexts. Interestingly, the paper that Stephens and the Times opinion section is disavowing received a somewhat favorable write-up from the New York Times at the time from Nicholas Wade. Wade was a science correspondent for the paper who eventually left to write a book about race and IQ that geneticist David Reich characterized again in the New York Times as advancing the unfounded and irresponsible claim that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.

All that said, the fact that across all categories and nationalities over 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish is both striking and true and can be verified by sources other than a paper co-authored by a notorious racist.

Stephenss column, as written, did not dwell on the ideas advanced in Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, but he did repeatedly make specific reference to Ashkenazi Jews those descended from Jews living in the Holy Roman Empire about a thousand years ago, rather than Jews of Spanish or Middle Eastern origin which have since been changed to simply refer to Jews. The controversial paper, however, is specifically about Ashkenazim.

The paper by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending is not exactly about geniuses. It asks why Ashkenazi Jews have IQs that are higher on average than the general population. They are also clearly only interested in Ashkenazi Jews, writing: It is noteworthy that non-Ashkenazi Jews do not have high average IQ test scores, nor are they overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields.

The theory they advance about this is that compared to other medieval peoples, Ashkenazi Jews were unusually likely to be concentrated in occupations where intelligence was likely to lead to financial success. Early on, for example, they write that the Ashkenazim specialized more and more in one occupation, finance, left particularly open to them because of the Christian prohibition of usury. Later in Poland, Jews branched out from moneylending and became tax-farmers, toll-farmers, estate managers, and they ran mills and taverns.

Under premodern conditions, richer people had more surviving children than poorer people. So the unique occupational profile of the Ashkenazi community, allegedly, created a unique situation in which elevated intelligence led to elevated earnings which led to elevated reproductive success.

They then further speculate that there is a relationship between the genetic underpinnings of high intelligence and the genetic underpinnings of sphingolipid disorders Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and mucolipidosis type IV (MLIV) all of which are unusually common among Ashkenazi Jews.

As these are highly deadly diseases, you would ordinarily expect them to be bred out of a population. But if the genes that cause these illnesses are also associated with high intelligence, then under social conditions where high intelligence is intensely associated with reproductive success they might survive anyway.

This is a multi-step argument that could be questioned at virtually every turn. And notably, the fact that Jewish people have won a lot of Nobel Prizes is not the crux of this paper. Indeed, though Im not sure whether this makes Stephenss decision to cite the paper better or worse, he actually advances a very different account of why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners.

Stephenss column is titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius. While he did originally write that he believed Ashkenazi Jews are smarter on average than the average person, his thesis is that this intelligence advantage does not explain Jewish super-achievers.

Aside from perennial nature-or-nurture questions, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose, Stephens writes. One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.

Stephens instead sketches a cultural explanation for Jewish genius, arguing that there is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree and also the never-quite-comfortable status of Jews in places where they are the minority intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them. He then pivots to whats essentially a complaint about political correctness, Trumpian nationalists, and Palestinian rights activists, mixed with alarm at recent anti-Semitic assaults in the New York area.

At its best, the American university can still be a place of relentless intellectual challenge rather than ideological conformity and social groupthink. At its best, the United States can still be the country that respects, and sometimes rewards, all manner of heresies that outrage polite society and contradict established belief. At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they arent. They are representational.

The West, however, is not at its best. Its no surprise that Jew hatred has made a comeback, albeit under new guises. Anti-Zionism has taken the place of anti-Semitism as a political program directed against Jews. Globalists have taken the place of rootless cosmopolitans as the shadowy agents of economic iniquity. Jews have been murdered by white nationalists and black Hebrews. Hate crimes against Orthodox Jews have become an almost daily fact of life in New York City.

Since Stephens ends up not advancing a genetic theory of Jewish genius, its a bit unclear why he originally cited a paper that does. And its very unclear why his first draft repeatedly singled out Ashkenazi Jews, who are the subject of the genetics paper but who do not differ from other Jews in the cultural factors he mentions.

Its also worth saying that if you accept the validity of modern IQ metrics at all (read here, here, and here for more on that), then Ashkenazi Jews having moderately higher average IQs is probably a fully adequate explanation for winning so many Nobel Prizes.

People who write grants and organize scientific experiments have not been incredibly eager to organize credible studies that would definitively answer whether or not its true that Ashkenazi Jews have above-average IQs. What we have instead is a series of non-ideal studies, often undertaken by somewhat disreputable researchers who appear motivated by a larger prurient interest in race science.

Brian Ferguson, a professor in the department of anthropology and sociology at Rutgers-Newark, concluded from his view of the fragmentary evidence that, Taking all the information together, it is fair to say that most, though not all, studies give Ashkenazi descendants a higher IQ than non-Jewish whites. How much? Take your pick.

An important thing to note, however, is that small average differences can have big impacts on outliers. Many people, for example, struggle intuitively to understand why a 3- or 4-degrees Celsius increase in average global temperatures could be catastrophic given that temperatures swing by that much all the time.

The reason, as shown here, is that even a small rightward shift of a bell curve leads to a wildly disproportionate increase in the number of extreme climate events.

Thats a chart about climate change specifically, but the same logic applies broadly to all kinds of domains. A difference in average intelligence levels that is not particularly large or noteworthy could lead to a drastic difference in the share of the group that is capable of doing Nobel-level work.

Its possible to believe that IQ science is all bunk or that the studies showing an Ashkenazi IQ advantage are wrong, but if you believe those studies, they provide a fully adequate explanation for the phenomenon Stephens was investigating. Theres no need to posit a separate quality of thinking differently.

Indeed, the reason the Natural History authors brought up the Nobel Prizes in the first place is that the large number of Jewish achievement outliers is clearly true. The evidence in favor of higher average Ashkenazi intelligence, by contrast, is somewhat fragmentary and disputable so they were trying to bring the geniuses in to bolster support for their premise. Stephens appears not to have really understood the argument of the paper he was citing, though of course what got him in hot water was citing race scientists in the first place rather than mangling their statistical evidence.

Most disfavored racial or ethnic groups are stereotyped as inferior.

But as Tara Isabella-Burton has written for Vox, anti-Semitism typically casts Jews as puppet masters who are working together to manipulate world events. In part, this simply serves a necessary structural role in racist narratives. If non-whites are so inferior, why worry so much about them? The trope of a group of Jewish schemers who undermine the master race helps make the story work, and in somewhat modified form can be pressed into service as an explanation for why Israel can prevail against numerically much larger groups of Arabs.

Under the circumstances, Jews are typically not eager to hear the good news about our genes.

But beyond that, arguments about Ashkenazi intelligence that have no particular policy relevance are typically the thin edge of the wedge of an argument that ends up being about black inferiority. The Timess note says that after publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the papers authors, [Harpending] who died in 2016, promoted racist views.

Political scientist Charles Murray, for example, takes a strong interest in questions about Ashkenazi IQ. But hes better known for his work promoting the idea that spending money on education and social assistance is at best useless and at worst actively harmful because it encourages low-intelligence people to breed.

Murray also, and relatedly, believes that efforts to attribute gaps in black/white outcomes to racism are fundamentally misguided. All of this, however, is clearly wrong not as a matter of genetics but as a matter of policy analysis. There is overwhelming evidence, for example, of racial discrimination in hiring, that affirmative action admissions policies lead to better outcomes for black students, that social assistance programs genuinely help kids, that pollution has important cognitive consequences, and that generally speaking genetics-driven pessimism about improving society is mistaken.

Murray-style views of these pressing policy questions have been broadly influential in the United States. We have, for example, by far the highest relative child poverty rate in the Western world because the United States is unique among our peers in not providing cash assistance to parents of young children.

The stakes are quite high in the argument over whether outcomes for African Americans and people who grow up in poor households represent remediable matters of social justice or genetic realities that it would be counterproductive to try to solve.

The stakes in the Ashkenazi intelligence debate, by contrast, are a little bit hard to discern. The debate appears to arise primarily because people with an anti-black agenda see it as a useful entry point into race science. This provokes antipathy from progressives less because of strongly held views about occupational choice in premodern Poland than because they see where the argument is heading over the long term.

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Bret Stephenss Jewish genius NYT column cited controversial Ashkenazi IQ paper - Vox.com

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

In publishing The Secrets of Jewish Genius, an opinion piece by regular columnist Bret Stephens, The New York Times demonstrated its commitment to free speech, at least for its stable of elite writers. That commitment means tolerating even the expression of extreme opinions that lack any solid foundation in reality. The immediate outcry from readers and media commentators was overwhelming. The Times chose to ignore the critics and defend its columnist, demonstrating either its inability to recognize racism or, more likely, its complacent acceptance of a racist view of the world.

The Times could have retracted thearticle or expressed its own editorial critique of its premises. Instead, the newspaperof record rose to Stephens defense. In its now edited version, the article ispreceded by a long, tortured justification of Stephens position, assuring itsreaders that even if he appeared to be making a claim for the geneticsuperiority of Ashkenazi Jews, that that was not his intent.

Here is how The Times dismisses theobvious: An earlier version of this Bret Stephens column quoted statisticsfrom a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis ofintelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. After publication Mr. Stephens and hiseditors learned that one of the papers authors, who died in 2016, promotedracist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors views,but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically.

We can only admire what an author anda great newspaper can learn after publishing a supposedly researched article.To prove its point, The Times quotes (rather than explains) one exasperatinglymeaningless passage from the article as if it was a proof of innocence: At itsbest, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnicpluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation ofits own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that theyarent. They are representational.

Here is todays 3D definition:

Representational:

A term that has specific meaning when referring to democratic processes (electing representatives to a legislative body) or, in the graphic arts, when referring to an artists attempt at artistic realism, but which has no meaning when referring to entire groups or categories of people

How do Stephens and The Times expectus to understand the idea that Jews (specifically Ashkenazi Jews) arerepresentational? What can they, as a group, possibly represent? This begsanother question: Are Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims or the faithful ofother religions a group? This becomes especially problematic in the context ofthe melting pot that the US has long claimed to be. Its culture ofindividualism the bedrock of the consumer society theoretically separates personalidentity, including individual talent and intelligence, from group identity.Each individual becomes the autonomous agent of his or her will, rather than arepresentative of the group.

For The Times, the wordrepresentational sounds democratic and egalitarian, so rather than try tomake sense of Stephens obscure and poorly reasoned prose, the editor simplyquotes it, as if it was self-explanatory. Perhaps this is Stephens inelegant wayof repeating the truism that the melting pot is made up of numerous groups, andthe Jews, like all the other groups, are competing to be the best performers.But this fundamentally vacuous claim is belied by the title of the article thatpromises to reveal to its readers a secret that sets Jews apart, with thesuggestion that they have been predestined to be the best performers.

Stephens racist thesis couldnt be clearer to any reader who focuses on the occasional meaningful words in his text. As the seasoned journalist Jack Shafer observed in Politico, Jewish genetic superiority was the exact direction his woolly argument was headed, something easily deduced from reading the passages excised from the original column. Stephens cites approvingly some kind of vague consensus affirming that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. He then goes on to make a new, more precise claim concerning the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose. To make his case, he cites a number of heroes and one anti-hero: Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx.

There had to be one black sheep in the brilliant family, but Stephens, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, knows that everyone recognizes that Marx was a genius. Stephens might have cited a few other family members who, in more recent times, equally rose above the crowd, achieving widespread admiration: Harvey Weinstein, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell. Most people seem to have suddenly stopped believing in the bracing originality and high-minded purpose of those personalities who wielded so much influence for so long.

Stephens then proceeds to misquote Einstein who attributed what he called an attitude (and not a moral belief) that he felt was incarnate in the Jewish people. Einstein summed it up in these words: [T]he life of the individual only has meaning insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Perhaps Stephens believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who claims to represent the Jewish people globally demonstrates this attitude incarnate in his people. Einstein, who rejected all forms of militarism, opposed the creation of the Jewish state and condemned Menachem Begins and Yitzhak Shamirs Likud party as fascist and espousing an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority, certainly wouldnt have believed it.

Its worth noting that, before The Times belatedly edited the article, Stephens referred specifically and repeatedly to Ashkenazi Jews. In the Bowdlerized version now available on The Times website, all references to the Ashkenazi have been removed. But in his text, Stephens clearly isnt referring to the Jewish religion, but to a particular ethnic group (the term used in the cited study).

Bret Stephens appeals to history to explain the superiority of the Jews: And there is the understanding, born of repeated exile, that everything that seems solid and valuable is ultimately perishable. Nearly every creative writer in Europe from the late middle ages to the Renaissance eloquently expressed the exact same sentiment (Sic transit gloria mundi). Does Stephens believe that Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare (among so many others) borrowed this from Ashkenazi culture? Its true that this traditional philosophical theme has now been lost in the pragmatic, ever more materialistic West, but does Stephens believe contemporary Jewish writers promote it?

Had he taken the historical argument seriously, Stephens might have explored a certain decline in the quality of Western culture that has provided an opportunity to some formerly marginalized groups of people to come to the fore in business, science and the arts. He might equally have looked into the specific role that Christians, who refused to dirty their hands with the sin of usury, attributed to European Jews.They counted on Jewish bankers to manage the money capitalism needed for its development. Jews thus found an increasingly influential place in the colonial and imperial power structures, but also in the arts and sciences that accompanied the expansion of the capitalist economy.

Instead of delving into the deepertrends of history, Stephens prefers to wax poetic, borrowing a metaphor fromthe Hebrew Bible and the story of Joshua at Jericho: If the greatest Jewishminds seem to have no walls, it may be because, for Jews, the walls have sooften come tumbling down. Some critics might point out that the Israelis havealso become pretty good at erecting walls.

Because of his sloppy thinking and even more imprecise writing, Stephens may simply be seeking to reinforce US President Donald Trumps recent initiative to define the Jews as a race or nationality as a means of punishing those in US universities who oppose Israels politics. Stephens tries to hedge his bets. He hesitates between claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are a superior race and affirming that the Jews globally represent a superior culture.

The link withTrumps politics may be revealing. Stephens thesis dovetails with the dominanttrend in current US political ideology, embraced by Republicans andestablishment Democrats alike: exceptionalism. If either all Americans or allJews believe they are exceptional, all their actions, however aggressive, willappear to be justified.

Over recent decades, US exceptionalism has become, in the minds of politicians as diverse as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, a dogma never to be doubted and a mantra to be endlessly repeated, even if there is some dispute as to what exceptionalism means. The secret message Stephens appears to be trying to get across is that Ashkenazi exceptionalism is the indispensable complement to American exceptionalism. The link between the two also helps explain and justify the strength of the unbreakable alliance between the US and Israel, two incredibly prosperous nations.

But there is another link between both exceptionalisms: racism or a form of elitist white supremacy (not to be confused with the populist white supremacy of David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan). Ashkenazi Jews are white. They govern Israel and orientate its culture. This means that Israel can appear to be an appendage of Europe rather than a nation of the Middle East. Jews exercise significant influence as talented and highly-motivated individuals in numerous domains within the US power structure.

In Stephens reading, Sephardic and Ethiopian Jews, with their darker skin, do not benefit from the superior IQ attributed to the Ashkenazi. In its official culture, The New York Times expresses equal sympathy to all minorities. But, like other corporate media in the US, it does tend to express a sympathy that in Orwellian terms makes a dominantly white elite in business and politics a little more equal than the minorities. One would have to be blind or at least as naive as, say, Chuck Todd not to notice that the solidarity between the US and Israeli power structures has something to do with whiteness and the traditional colonial occupation of keeping the ever-threatening darker races at bay.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devils Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this articleare the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorialpolicy.

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The Secrets of NYT Racism - Fair Observer

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

The Yiddish reference to the darkness before the dawn states that before it gets light, it has to be really dark. Lets hope that this is also applicable to Naama Issachar, who is serving a seven-year jail sentence in Russia for carrying 9.5 grams of cannabis in her luggage while in transit from India to Israel via Moscow.Even though she had no intention of staying in Russia and had been unaware of the severity of Russian law with regard to narcotics, she was given what many people regard as an overly severe sentence. Her conditions were worsened when she was temporarily moved to another prison where she was not permitted to receive visits from her mother and also forbidden from receiving mail. The transfer had a very detrimental effect on her, but she has now been returned to her former prison. One can only hope that this is indeed the darkness before the dawn and that when President Vladimir Putin comes to Israel later this month to participate in the international forum on antisemitism and to attend the unveiling of a monument in Jerusalem dedicated to Russian defenders during the Siege of Leningrad, that in a demonstration of both his power and his humanity, he will bring Issachar with him.The cost of building the monument was jointly funded by the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, Russian billionaire businessman Viktor Vekselberg, who has close ties with the Kremlin, the Jewish National Fund, Keren Hayesod and the Russian Jewish Congress.The siege of Leningrad took place from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, during which time hundreds of thousands of people died. THE TENTH day of the Hebrew calendar month of Tevet this year falls on January 7. A minor fast day, it commemorates the siege of Jerusalem in 425 BCE by the armies of the Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar, which eventually led to the destruction of the First Temple.In modern times the date received an added dimension in that it was designated as a memorial day for victims of the Holocaust and others whose date of death and place of burial are unknown. Memorial prayers are recited for them. Sometimes the date of death of people murdered in Nazi gas chambers from where they were transferred to Nazi crematoria is known, but because they have no graves, they are included in the Tenth of Tevet prayers for the dead.In advance of the Tenth of Tevet, the Raanana Municipality is screening the film Hidden Face, directed by Eyal Datz on the life and times of Auschwitz and Dachau survivor, the late Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam, the Klausenberger Rebbe of Sanz who lost his wife and 10 children in the Holocaust, yet retained his faith, rebuilt his life, remarried and fathered seven more children, and revived his hassidic community. One of the children of his first marriage who survived the Holocaust died soon afterward. Even then Halberstam remained unbroken in spirit. More than that, he revived the lives of others, restoring both their faith and their hope in the future.In 1976, he established the Sanz Medical Clinic, also known as the Laniado Hospital, named in memory of two Syrian Jewish brothers who moved to Switzerland and left money in their will for the construction of a hospital to be named Laniado. The medical center in Netanya started out as a maternity clinic, but quickly added other departments.Datz, who grew up in a completely secular environment in Tel Aviv, had only one common link with the Klausenberger Rebbe. One of Datzs grandmothers was a Holocaust survivor. In 2017, Datz was asked to make a documentary on the Klausenberger Rebbe with the intention of having it screened on KAN 11 on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018.The documentary, which included a lot of archival material and which cast a new light on how the ultra-Orthodox community looks at the Holocaust, proved to be so popular that it was re-screened several times and can also be seen on YouTube.Some viewers recognized family members in the archive shots, which in several instances led to them conducting their own in-depth researchThe Raanana screening on Saturday evening, January 4, at Eshkol Payis, 46 Hehayal Road, Raanana, will be followed by a discussion with Datz moderated by journalist Kobi Finkler. IN PREVIOUS years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu liked to attend the annual conference in Davos of the World Economic Forum. He was even a speaker there on one occasion. But it is highly unlikely that he will be attending this year, as the date clashes with the International Forum on Antisemitism which is bringing close to 40 world leaders to Jerusalem. Netanyahu is scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers at the forum taking place at Yad Vashem. He will also meet personally with many of the participants just as he met with world leaders in Davos in the past. STUDENTS, BOTH formal and informal of the history of Aliyah Bet, the clandestine network that facilitated the migration of Holocaust survivors from refugee camps to British-occupied Palestine, are familiar with Murray Greenfields book The Jews Secret Fleet. Greenfield who was a member of that fleet also appeared with fellow member Harold Katz in a documentary film called Waves of Freedom that was initially screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2008.Each of them had served with the US Navy during the Second World War. Greenfield spent three years with the US Merchant Marines and Katz spent three years in the Pacific.When word went out that Americans with naval experience were needed to help refugees from Europe to the Promised Land, they both signed up. The major snag was that the British would not allow the refugees to enter. They intercepted the refugee boats and sent the refugees to internment camps in Cyprus.One such boat whose passengers and crew were sent to Cyprus was the Hatikvah The Hope on which both Greenfield and Katz were crew members.Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Greenfield stayed on and became involved in numerous projects including, among others, the building of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Nayot, an import enterprise for new immigrants, the creation of a highly successful publishing house and many other ventures.Katz returned to the United States, completed his studies at Harvard and became a successful trial lawyer in Boston. He returned to Israel in the early 1970s as a new immigrant. He and Greenfield often shared memories of opening up a new future for Holocaust survivors and of the time they spent with them and Hagana agents in Cyprus.As a legal expert Katz became the head counsel to Israels Ministry of Defense, dealing with US and other governments, especially in matters requiring his American legal background. He also played a significant role in the development of the Merkava tank and was legal counsel to the ministry during the sensitive period of the Pollard affair.Katz died recently at age 98. He was a long time subscriber to The Jerusalem Post, which from time to time wrote about his Aliyah Bet exploits. He is survived by his wife, Mimi, his daughter, Judy, and her children and his grandson, Reshef. FOR A long time, Israelis of North African, African and Asian backgrounds were treated like second-class citizens and were deemed to have an inferior culture to that of the Ashkenazi elite.But all that has changed and is changing, and we now find that the North African, Asian and African cultures, including literature, music (both religious and secular) and cuisine are taking, over and that people of these backgrounds are increasingly coming into the foreground in politics, army and police ranks, academia, sport and more.Moreover, as a result of the huge diversity in Israels population mix, theres a lot of East-West hybrid culture. Nonetheless, some Ashkenazi people are developing a complex over what they perceive as being pushed to the sidelines.Its gotten to the stage where Daniel Galay, who heads Leyvik House, the Center for Yiddish Culture and the home of the Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Tel Aviv, along with the members of Forum 21, a group which he has established, and which is dedicated to fostering Ashkenazi identity and heritage, want to infuse more Ashkenazi culture into Israels overall cultural identity.They feel that Israeli society should include much more cultural pluralism, and that the various elements of the rich ethnic traditions of the Jewish people should be nurtured and joined together like a bouquet of flowers or a tossed salad, retaining their unique colors, fragrances and tastes, rather than mashed or melted into a uniform Israeli cultural puree.This will be the keynote subject at the annual Beit Leyvik conference, hosted by the City of Herzliya at its new cultural center on January 6. Scholars and musicians and artists will discuss aspects of Ashkenazi culture. Prof. Israel Bartal, the academic adviser to the conference, will deliver the keynote address, Ashkenaz as a Homeland. Prof. Raphael Walden, the president of Physicians for Human Rights (and the son-in-law of Shimon Peres), will speak about human rights in Jewish tradition, and popular ethnolinguist, Dr. Ruvik Rosenthal will provide examples of East and West in Israeli Hebrew. Prof. Ghilad Zuckermann will come from Australia to report on his research into the effect of heritage revival on well-being. There will also be other related topics on Ashkenazi culture in our day and age, and how to make it universally relevant.The cultural center is located at 168 Wingate Street, Herzliya Pituah (near the corner of Nili Street). The phone number is 09-977-8800.greerfc@gmail.com

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Grapevine January 3, 2020: The darkness before the dawn? - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

Bret Stephens. Photo: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Once narrowly defined as the belief that human beings could breed selectively to weed out disease and crime, eugenics no longer forms the basis of laws permitting the forcible sterilization of the poor. But as 2019 mercifully ends, eugenics is having a moment. Bret Stephens is only one symptom. In a piece touting the genius of Ashkenazi Jews, the New York Times columnist cited a study co-authored by the late white supremacist anthropologist, Henry Harpending, who promoted pseudoscientific ideas about the heritability of intelligence. The Times later retracted the reference, and attached an editors note to the column not the first major correction theyve attached to Stephenss work, and at this rate, not the last.

Only Stephens knows for certain how he came to cite a white supremacist in his work. One increasingly plausible theory suggests that he spends approximately three seconds on Google to research his articles. Looking up a studys co-authors might have tacked on an extra minute or so to his workload, an intolerable effort. But no matter how it happened, the cumulative effect of Stephenss argument, and his citation of Harpending, evoked the debunked ideas of the eugenics movement.

For his trouble, Stephens can only blame himself, or perhaps his editor. The general thrust of his piece arguing that one ethnic group is uniquely accomplished in comparison to others, and advancing a reason for it clearly merited extra caution, though the columnist and his editor apparently disagreed. Older comments about Palestinians also weaken his claim to any benefit of the doubt. He once called anti-Semitism a disease of the Arab mind, and separately compared Palestinians to a four-million-year-old mosquito in ideological amber. The idea that the Arab mind is prone to any specific pathology is not as distantly removed from the ideas of men like Henry Harpending as Stephens would surely like us all to think.

Nevertheless, Stephens has his defenders, and they dont all work for the Times. Claire Lehmann, the founding editor of the reflexively contrarian Quillette magazine, first defended Harpending himself:

Lehmann was, of course, completely wrong. Harpending believed that white Europeans had bred for superior traits, like high intelligence and improved work ethic. As for everyone else? Ive never seen anyone with a hobby in Africa. Theyre different, he said at a 2009 conference on preserving Western civilization. Harpending was as close to a textbook definition of white supremacist as a person can probably get. Though Lehmann later admitted that Harpending did promote racist views, a beat short of calling the anthropologist a racist or white supremacist, she also doubled down on her defense of Stephens. Liberals are the real eugenicists, shes implied over and over, an argument first devised by the anti-abortion movement some decades ago.

Meanwhile, at Quillette, Lehmann provides a space for authors to explore questions of genetic diversity, as she called it in one pro-Stephens tweet. Others have called it scientific racism: a descendant of eugenic ideas first popularized in the early 20th century. As Donna Minkowitz previously noted in a piece for The Nation, Quillette regularly publishes writers associated with the Human Biodiversity Movement, a glossy new name for old beliefs: namely, that some behavior patterns are inborn, and are specific to certain ethnic groups. Early eugenicists would recognize the gist. The magazine has also published, and defended, Noah Carl, a British academic who lost a Cambridge University fellowship over credible accusations that he has links to far-right groups and holds eugenic views.

Quillette hardly shoulders responsibility for keeping eugenic ideas alive on its own, but its a useful and prominent example both of the evolution of eugenics over time, and the persistence of its basic tenets. Nobody totes around calipers these days; the era of fitter family contests at county fairs is over. After much struggle, people with disabilities achieved rights in the U.S. thatwould have shocked the eugenicists of the 20th century. But we never stopped sorting people into categories healthy or high risk, superpredator or safe and the quest to justify these labels continues. Though its obscured, often, by a more pervasive if nebulous form of social Darwinism, eugenics has always periodically reemerged as the purest version of itself. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, to name one key example, gave it new life in 1994, when they published The Bell Curve and asserted to the world that scientifically, certain races just happen to be more intelligent than others. Recently, eugenics seems to spend even more time in the open, perpetuated by President Trump and his obsessions with the right genes and the criminality of immigrants.

But scientific racism is not the only way that eugenics manifests itself in the dying light of the decade. Advances in gene editing and gene therapy promise new treatments for life-threatening illnesses, but they also introduce ethical concerns that once only inhabited the realm of science fiction. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Harvard geneticist George Church described his plans for a dating app that would allow users to screen potential partners based on their DNA, all to reduce rates of hereditary illness. Sure, parents could use in vitro fertilization to select healthy embryos, but as Church puts it, why let things get that far? If you do it after you have already fallen in love, its mostly bad news by that point. A quarter of kids will be diseased, he told the MIT Technology Review. (In the interest of full transparency, if my parents had accepted the recommendations of an app similar to the one proposed by Church, I would not have been born. I have a hereditary condition that damages my red blood cells.)

Church is keen to stress that his app cant be eugenicist because it isnt coercive. Once perfected, people could freely use it or not. But innovation doesnt happen in isolation, untainted by social and political concerns or by history. The eugenic principle is, that the fit only shall live. This does not mean that the unfit must die, but that only the fit shall be born, announced one pamphlet, The Eugenic Marriage, in 1914, a sentiment still audible over a century later.Coercion, too, is still with us, even if it no longer takes the form of forcible sterilization: The American health-care system pressures families in ways that Church thinks his app would not. Its costly to birth any children at all, let alone children with disabilities, a fact that disadvantages families without means. Churchs ideas dont subvert that coercive pressure; instead, they work neatly within it.

The year that ends at midnight doesnt offer much reason for optimism. Neither, for that matter, does the decade to which it belongs. Born in the wake of a serious recession, marked by uninterrupted war overseas, worsening income inequality, and eventually the resurgence of open white nationalism, the decade that ends today suggests pivotal political battles wait in the years to come. The fight to consign eugenic ideas to the footnotes of history will be one of them.

This post has been updated for clarification.

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Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics? - New York Magazine

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

Gabi Ashkenazi

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Blue and White leader MK Gabi Ashkenazi spoke Saturday night about the events which led to the dissolve of Israel's 22nd Knesset earlier this month.

"We turned over every stone in order to examine the possibility of not holding new elections," Ashkenazi told Israel's "Meet the Press" program. He blamed Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the fact that negotiations between the two parties failed to progress.

"The year 2019 is lost, and it's not our fault," he claimed. "The moment Netanyahu chose immunity, he brought down unity. You can't join that kind of government."

"The suggestion was that he would take a break and deal with his trials. We asked him, not the negotiating teams - will you compromise on immunity? He filled his mouth with water. From the moment he chose that, he did not want unity. Netanyahu wants a government of 61 MKs, an extremist right-wing government with extremist and messianic elements.

"In the coming elections, we will demand the public make a decision. From our perspective, there are no boycotts and no bans. Anyone who believes in a Jewish and democratic state is our partner."

It is not clear if Netanyahu will request parliamentary immunity to shield him from being tried in court. However, the Blue and White party has often accused him of holding on to his "immunity bloc" - a group of 55 MKs who signed an agreement to stick together and remain loyal to Netanyahu, out of a desire to prevent the creation of a left-wing government and an understanding that their voters wished them to remain with the right-wing bloc.

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MK Gabi Ashkenazi: 'The year 2019 is lost, and it's not our fault' - Arutz Sheva

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

In 2016, Tiffany Herron asked her husband, Michael, for a DNA test for Christmas.

"I wanted science to tell me what I was. I wanted evidence I wasn't dropped off by aliens," says the now-48-year-old creative writing graduate student at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.

Herron was born in Hawaii and adopted as an infant. Her adoptive parents are blond and fair-skinned, but Herron has dark hair and an olive complexion. Growing up, she remembers frequently being asked, "What are you?" especially as a teenager after her family relocated to South Carolina.

Her early medical records didn't help answer that question. Herron's birth certificate says she is Samoan, but other records call her French-Polynesian and Spanish.

"It was just amazing that everybody had such a different twist on what I am. If I was in a good mood I'd tell people I was Samoan when they asked. If I was in a bad mood I'd say, 'I'm a woman. What are you?'" Herron says.

Despite being raised in a loving family, Herron says she couldn't shake the feeling of aloneness.

"I felt like nothing was holding me here, like I had no blood connection to anyone else in the world. I wanted to take [the DNA test] to know what I was ethnically, but more so, I wanted to know if I had any relatives."

That Christmas, Herron's husband bought her a test from Ancestry.com.

In 2000, Family Tree DNA became the first company to offer at-home genetic ancestry testing kits. Today, the market comprises more than 30 companies. Different brands can provide different genetic insights. Some may focus on ethnicity, while others focus on medical predispositions and inherited health risks.

Ancestry.com is considered the leading brand for those who want to find relatives.

In early 2017, eight weeks after submitting her saliva sample, Herron received her DNA results.

"I have always been something 'other' my whole life, but now I can scientifically say I'm Samoan," she reports.

More importantly, she could now register on Ancestry.com's website and search for any relatives who had also taken the test.

Within minutes, she found her second cousin on her mother's side, a woman named Leta Roche who lived in New Zealand. Herron and Roche began to talk through Facebook Messenger, and Roche shared with her the names of more relatives. Joe Schwenke, for example, Herron's uncle and her biological mother's youngest brother.

Through Schwenke, Herron learned that her mother, Clara Loa, had died in 2006.

"I didn't really know her," Schwenke told Herron. As children, he and his seven siblings had all been sent to live with different relatives when their mother, Herron's grandmother, passed away. Schwenke had ended up in Australia. Loa had stayed in Hawaii.

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The more Herron learned, the more questions she had. So she wrote to the Hawaiian hospital where she was born and asked for her medical file. Among its pages, she found a copy of her parents' divorce decree dated the year of her birth. The document did not include her father's name, but it did include the names of her mother's two other children: Alex and Gene Briski, Herron's half-brothers.

She searched their names on Facebook and found a profile for Gene Briski a man who looked just like her and was living in Alpharetta, Georgia, two hours from Chattanooga. She sent him a timid message which began, "I don't want to bother you, but..."

Shortly thereafter, Briski added her to a group message. He introduced her to Alex and two more half-siblings, Lisa Ino and Cain Kamano.

"We have another sister," Briski wrote to the group.

While the five share the same mother, they all have different fathers, with the exception of Alex and Gene. Just as their mother and her siblings had been scattered throughout the world, Herron's brothers and sisters had grown up "knowing of each other but not really knowing each other," she says.

In 2019, after two years of emails and phone calls, the siblings planned a trip to Hawaii together. On their second night, they got together to discuss their expectations related to these newfound connections.

"We made the choice to be a family," says Herron. "It was the strangest thing. I felt automatically connected to them, like we were good friends and just hadn't seen each other in a long time, like they were people I had always known."

In 2019, a Pew Research Center survey found that one in seven American adults say they have taken a direct-to-consumer DNA test. Among their reasons, 87% say it was to learn more about where they came from.

Sometimes that can be a double-edged sword.

Sandy Muncy, 60, grew up in Jefferson City, Tennessee, two hours northeast of Chattanooga.

In early 2019, while researching her family tree, Muncy ordered a DNA test from Ancestry.com. She had always been told that her great-great-great-grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, and she wanted to learn how much of that blood she shared.

Her results showed no connection to Native American ancestry. However, they did show a close DNA match with the son of Muncy's longtime friend Mary Miller, whose name has been changed for this story.

Miller's family had grown up a quarter-mile from Muncy's childhood home. Amid rumors of an affair between Muncy's father and Miller's mother, Muncy says she always suspected that Miller might be her half-sister.

"She didn't look like me or my sister, but I always thought she looked just like this old photo of my grandmother," Muncy says.

Miller, however, 20 years younger than Muncy, had not suspected it. When Miller learned of the match, she called Muncy.

"What do you think this means?" she asked.

"Well, I think it means we're sisters," Muncy told her.

Their parents had passed on by the time the women received the results. "We never knew how much they actually knew," Muncy says. "It was life-changing for [Miller]. But I mostly just felt betrayed for my mom."

Genetic surprises though rarely so personal are somewhat common.

Anne Braly, a Chattanooga-based freelance writer, is among the 27% of test-takers who say they were surprised by their ancestors' ethnic or racial backgrounds. Thirty-eight percent say they were surprised by their countries of origin.

In 2018, after taking a DNA test through Ancestry.com, Braly, 61, learned she has Jewish ancestry.

"I didn't even know there was Jewish DNA," says Braly, who comes from a long line of practicing Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians.

But, she learned, Jewish populations from northern and eastern Europe, known as Ashkenazi Jews, are unique in that they are both a religious and an ethnic group.

The Ashkenazi Jews, Ancestry.com writes on its website, are believed to have settled near eastern Europe during the 11th and 12th centuries, after facing persecution in the west. Since Jews have historically married within their faith, for hundreds of years the Ashkenazi group remained genetically isolated.

Gene pool isolation is the basis of all genetic ancestry testing. Millennia ago, when groups of people began to spread out, they often became regionally isolated from other groups. Eventually, this resulted in each group having its own distinct genetic makeup.

"It's about discovery," says Braly, who was inspired to take the test after inheriting all her family's records, a plastic tub filled with letters, diaries and notes dating back to the 1800s.

The desire to preserve one's history is age-old, and where written records fall short, modern tools like Ancestry.com help dig deeper to find roots, to retrace an ancestor's footsteps which may lead to surprising places.

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Chattanooga locals share the unexpected and sometimes unsettling results of their ancestry DNA tests - Chattanooga Times Free Press

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

Photo Credit: CLKER

{Originally posted to the JNS website}

Anyone who has, as I have, spent his professional life covering the Jewish world as a journalist is not likely to spend much time wondering why Jews are so smart. I dont think that genius is the best word to describe those in the organized Jewish world or how most Jews interact with that world, let alone defend their interests. From my perspective, Jews are both collectively and individually just as likely to believe in all sorts of idiotic notions as the members of any other ethnic or religious group.

And yet, there is the scoreboard some of us like to point to with that disproportionately high number of Nobel Prizes (Jews have won more than 20 percent of all Nobels that have been awarded) and the incontrovertible fact that, despite their tiny numbers, Jews have risen to the top of just about every conceivable field of endeavor except those from which they were excluded.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens noted, we inevitably are confronted with the following question: How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the worlds population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?

But as Stephens soon discovered, in todays woke world in which any discussion about the achievements of any group, but especially the Jews, is forbidden, to even ask such a question is to call down upon oneself an avalanche of abuse.

The starting point for his rumination on the subject was a new book titled Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 by British Jewish historian and critic Norman Lebrecht. The book focuses on the way exceptional Jewish thinkers impacted how science, politics, philosophy, literature and music are viewed. Without them, the history of the 20th century and the world we live in today would be unimaginable.

The Jewish genius these extraordinary people demonstrated was in rethinking existing paradigms and coming up with original concepts. That was true when Jewish monotheism came into conflict with the pagan world, as it was when Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud re-ordered the understanding of both the universe and our minds.

None of the theories that have been put forward to answer Stephenss questionand which discuss the impact of persecution or the way Jewish faith and culture places such high value on education and critical thinkingare definitive. Such discussions are also prone to simplifications not rooted in science. Stephens disdained such explanations, while also correctly noting that the special nature of Jewish achievements has also made this minority a target for hatred from bigots of every religious and ideological variety.

Yet the columnists citation of a 2005 academic study that attempted to probe why Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ for which there are reliable data was enough to subject him to charges of supporting eugenics and being a racist.

The ostensible reason for this dubious outrage was that one of the three authors of the study proposed theories about the reasons for the advancement of human civilization that have been embraced by white supremacists. That caused editors at the Times to issue a correction apologizing for mentioning the study, even though he had not endorsed its findings or the authors views. The editors note went on to say that his column had left an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior, an assertion that is not backed up by a fair reading of the piece.

In doing so, the Times held a conservative (albeit one who is opposed to President Donald Trump) and the sole defender of Israel among its regular columnists to a standard it does not apply to its writers, who validate the liberal biases of its readership with pieces that regularly offend logic and even endorse anti-Semitic BDS schemes.

What is especially interesting about this controversy is that any discussion of Jewish achievements makes a lot of people (including many Jews) deeply uncomfortable. The only conclusion to be drawn from this debate is that the only acceptable approach is dont go there, so as to avoid offending the sensibilities of those who believe that saying some people have done extraordinary things is an insult to everyone else. Indeed, many Jews fear that any mention of their achievements will be used to justify anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or vile racist concepts about others supposed inferiority.

No one other than those who, like the late paleontologist Stephen Gould, think there is no such thing as a measurable IQ disputes the fact that Ashkenazi Jews have a high average, let alone that Jews as a whole have overachieved out of proportion to their small population. Yet the Twitterspheres explosion of vituperation directed at Stephens for going there speaks volumes about the way woke culture and the fear of offending others stifles intellectual discussions.

Even more important is that the particular sensitivity about the discussion of Jewish achievements helps us understand why the virus of anti-Semitism is so persistent and successful at grafting itself on to every new ideology or intellectual fashion that comes along.

The Jews are a people that can be joined and not a race. And not every Jew is smart, let alone dripping with genius.

Still, for some there is something profoundly unsettling about the realization that the Jews have not only refused to allow themselves to be erased from the planet (as many of their enemies have plotted), but that they have also done so while doing remarkable things that changed the world for the better. However this came to be, its not a function of so-called white privilege or something the Jews should be forced to ignore or deny, or for which they should be ashamed.

Rather than calling out as racists those who recognize the reality of a certain genius that Jewish civilization has produced, it is those who find this notion insufferable who should be asked what it is about the reality of Jewish success that makes them so angry.

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Why Talking about 'Jewish Genius' is Controversial - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

More than 1,300 people attended a concert at the Master Theater in Brighton Beach, N.Y., on Dec. 26 hosted by the Russian-speaking division of the new Zionist Organization of America coalition slate running in the 2020 World Zionist Congress (WZC) elections, which will take place from Jan. 21 to March 11.

The concert helped raise awareness that leaders of the Russian-Jewish community have joined the ZOA coalition slate in the upcoming WZC election, and that the coalition is fighting to strengthen and defend Israel and the Jewish people.

The WZC is the Parliament of the Jewish People, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897.

Currently, the full WZC meets in Jerusalem once every five years to make key funding and policy decisions for Israels national organizations, affecting the future of Israel and Jews throughout the world. The 38th WZC will meet in October.

The WZC has 525 delegates worldwide, including 152 delegates from the United States, elected from various competing slates.

The ZOA and the Russian Jewish Federation were at the first WZC in 1897. And all three entities presented the case for the Jewish state at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which led to the establishment of the mandate system confirming the Jewish peoples rights to closely settle and re-establish the Jewish state.

Having more than 20 prominent leaders of the Russian Jewish community join the ZOA coalition feels like a homecoming, said ZOA national president Mort Klein in a statement. Russian Jews are smart and hardworking, great Zionists and proud and courageous Jews. Together, we can make a real difference for our people and homeland.

The coalition includes the following 27 organizations: ZOA; Aharai USA; Aish HaTorah; Americans Against Antisemitism; Americans for a Safe Israel; American Friends of Ateret Cohanim; American Friends of Likud; Americans for Peace and Tolerance; Beit Juhuro Gorsky Kavkazi Center; Chovevei Zion; Eretz Israel Movement; Hasbara Fellowships; I-Lead; JCC Watch; Make Israel Great Russian Jewish Coalition for a Strong Israel; The Lawfare Project; National Conference on Jewish Affairs; NORPAC; One Israel Fund; Save the West; Students Supporting Israel; Torah from Sinai; United Mashadi Jewish Community of America; U.S. Russian Jews Stand With Israel; World Likud; Young Jewish Conservatives; and Z Street.

It includes Russian, Persian, Syrian, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardi, Beta Israel (Ethiopian), Israeli, Ukrainian, Bukharian, Gorsky-Kavkazy and other American-Jewish communities.

The ZOA coalition has been endorsed by Israeli officials, including Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, Justice Minister Amir Ohana, Minister of Aliyah and Integration Yoav Galant, Minister of Culture and Sport Miri Regev and Likud member Gideon Saar.

The post Russian-speaking division of ZOA holds concert to raise awareness of State of Israel appeared first on JNS.org.

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Russian-speaking division of ZOA holds concert to raise awareness of State of Israel - Cleveland Jewish News

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

Recent advances in medical treatment have given hope to some patients fighting the cancer, which is known for its grim survival rates. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) says he is "clear eyed" about the prognosis, though. I have decided to do what I know to do and do what I have always done: I am going to fight it and keep fighting for the beloved community, Lewis said. We still have many bridges to cross.

The Associated Press:Congressman John Lewis Says Cancer Is His Latest BattleAs a civil rights activist at 25, John Lewis was beaten so badly his skull was fractured and the TV images from an Alabama bridge in the 1960s forced a nation's awakening to racial discrimination. As a congressman today at 79, Lewis is facing a foe like none before: advanced pancreatic cancer. The veteran Democrat congressman from Georgia has fought many struggles in his lifetime. Yet, he said, I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now," announcing Sunday in Washington that the cancer was detected earlier this month and confirmed in a diagnosis. (12/29)

The New York Times:John Lewis, Congressman And Civil Rights Icon, Has Pancreatic CancerSurvival rates for pancreatic cancer are grim, and Mr. Lewis said his cancer was Stage 4, the most advanced. Mr. Lewis said that while he was cleareyed about the prognosis, doctors had told him that advances in medical treatment would help give him a fighting chance. I have decided to do what I know to do and do what I have always done: I am going to fight it and keep fighting for the beloved community, Mr. Lewis said. We still have many bridges to cross. (Cochrane, 12/29)

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:What Is Pancreatic Cancer, Diagnosed In John Lewis, Alex Trebek?According to the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO),about 56,770 adults were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019. The incidence rate is 25% higher in black people than white people. Ashkenazi Jews also are at higher risk for pancreatic cancer, said Abushahin. Aside from individuals with genetic and hereditary considerations, individuals with a history of smoking and individuals who are overweight have a heightened risk of pancreatic cancer, according to the NCI. (Bote, 12/30)

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Civil Rights Icon Rep. John Lewis Announces Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis. Here's What That Means. - Kaiser Health News

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Posted By admin on January 3, 2020

However the Jews are good rationalization obscures greater than it illuminates. Other than the perennial nature-or-nurture query of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have increased I.Q.s, theres the tougher query of why that intelligence was so usually matched by such bracing originality and high-minded objective. One can apply a prodigious mind within the service of prosaic issues formulating a struggle plan, for example, or setting up a ship. One also can apply brilliance within the service of a mistake or against the law, like managing a deliberate economic system or robbing a financial institution.

However because the story of the Lithuanian rabbi suggests, Jewish genius operates otherwise. Its vulnerable to query the premise and rethink the idea; to ask why (or why not?) as usually as how; to see the absurd within the mundane and the chic within the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews may need a marginal benefit over their gentile friends on the subject of pondering higher. The place their benefit extra usually lies is in pondering totally different.

The place do these habits of thoughts come from?

Theres a non secular custom that, not like some others, asks the believer not solely to watch and obey but in addition to debate and disagree. Theres the never-quite-comfortable standing of Jews in locations the place theyre the minority intimately conversant in the customs of the nation whereas sustaining a crucial distance from them. Theres a ethical perception, incarnate within the Jewish folks in line with Einstein, that the lifetime of the person solely has worth [insofar] because it aids in making the life of each dwelling factor nobler and extra stunning.

And theres the understanding, born of repeated exile, that every little thing that appears strong and priceless is finally perishable, whereas every little thing thats intangible information most of all is doubtlessly eternal.

We had been effectively off, however that was all we obtained out, the late financier Felix Rohatyn recalled of his narrow escape, with a few hidden gold coins, from the Nazis as a child in World War II. Ever since, Ive had the feeling that the only permanent wealth is what you carry around in your head. If the greatest Jewish minds seem to have no walls, it may be because, for Jews, the walls have so often come tumbling down.

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Opinion | The Secrets of Jewish Genius - The Union Journal

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