More in ‘genetics’

There is now a scientific basis for the time-honored principle that Jews can play Italians and Italians can play Jews. The largest-ever genetic analysis of the Jewish people revealed that Jews in disparate parts of the world have genetic commonalities, and also close DNA similarities to the Bedouin, the Druze, the Palestinians … and the ...

An Indian geneticist is conducting serious scholarship over whether the ethnic group that makes up the Taliban descends from the ancient Israeli tribe of Ephraim—serious enough that Israel has given him a generous scholarship to study the matter further with Israeli scientists in Haifa. Under the theory, the Pashtun people, who live in eastern and ...

This article was originally published on June 12, 2007.
In April 2007, Charles Murray made the claim that Jews “are smarter” than everyone else. It wasn’t his first time doing so. In 1994, Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, the book in which they first presented their argument about the intellectual superiority ...

A team of scientist is undertaking an ambitious project, tracing Jewish genes in order to map the travels of Jews around the world throughout history, the Jerusalem Post reports. They’re doing it in part by collecting DNA samples from volunteers whose parents and grandparents all share the same ethnic background. Eventually, it will yield profiles ...

It’s an old argument: are Jews are a religious group, an ethnic group with a religious component, a self-determined community, or is there some more essential racial component to being Jewish? The Daily Beast reports on new evidence confirming an genetically based, inborn Jewish je ne sais quoi—and notes that the genetic marker is turning ...

Five years ago, Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen learned that she had inherited a genetic mutation—one which disproportionately affects women of Ashkenazi descent—that put her at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer. A decade earlier, her mother, who carried the same mutation, had died of breast cancer.
Armed with this knowledge, Gessen was forced to make ...