Ashkenazim and Sefardim share many genes

New York Times

Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives.

That is the conclusion of two new genetic surveys, the first to use genome-wide scanning devices to compare many Jewish communities around the world.

A major surprise from both surveys is the genetic closeness of the two Jewish communities of Europe, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Ashkenazim thrived in Northern and Eastern Europe until their devastation by the Hitler regime, and now live mostly in the United States and Israel. The Sephardim were exiled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 and moved to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and the Netherlands.

The two genome surveys extend earlier studies based just on the Y chromosome, the genetic element carried by all men. They refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.[...]

Rav Sternbuch Preparing for Moshiach

Rabbi Meisels research on fish worms

This material was presented at the recent OU meeting
Rabbi Meisels Fish worms research

Rav Belsky's Tshuva on fish worms

Rav Belskys Teshuva About Worms in Fish

Mental price of internet & cell phones

New York Times

When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing.[...]

Reuters crops out knives from "peace activists"

Little Green Footballs

Another Cropped Reuters Photo Deletes Another Knife - And a Pool of Blood
One picture cropped to remove a knife might be explained as incompetence or a simple mistake. But now we have two pictures from the “peace activists” that were cropped by someone at Reuters to remove knives in the hands of the activists, as they attempted to take soldiers hostage. More...

Did Reuters Crop a Photo to Remove a Peace Activist's Weapon?
That’s a very interesting way to crop the photo. Most people would consider that knife an important part of the context. There was a huge controversy over whether the activists were armed. Cropping out a knife, in a picture showing a soldier who’s apparently been stabbed, seems like a very odd editorial decision. Unless someone was trying to hide it. More...

Chasam Sofer & Self-Estem Problems

This attempt to understand Rashi is the earliest mention of problems caused by self-esteem that I have found. It is a quote ascribed to him by one of his students and published in Toras Moshe by his grandson. The relevant phrase is "If a person values himself more than he really is or the opposite, in the eyes of other people people he will be valued less then he actually is"

Egypt to strip men married to Israelis of citizenship

Yahoo News hat tip to RaP

A Cairo court on Saturday upheld a ruling to strip Egyptian men married to Israeli women of their citizenship in a case that has highlighted national sentiment towards Israel.

Judge Mohammed al-Husseini, sitting on the Supreme Administrative Court, said the interior ministry must ask the cabinet to take the necessary steps to strip Egyptian men married to Israeli women, and their children, of their citizenship.

The court said that each case should be considered separately, in a ruling that cannot be appealed.

The ruling reflects Egyptian sentiment towards Israel, more than 30 years after Egypt signed an unpopular peace deal with the Jewish state.[...]

Chasam Sofer - First reference to self-esteem problem?

Toras Moshe (Bamidbar 13:33)

Tom Kaplan - Billionaire backer of Eternal Jewish Family

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Wall Street Journal

Gold is setting records again, boosting the holdings of central banks, Armageddon worrywarts, and ordinary people who own gold bars, coins and jewelry.

But few individuals stand to benefit as much as low-profile billionaire Thomas Kaplan. A New York-born commodities magnate who earned a doctorate in British colonial history at Oxford, Mr. Kaplan oversees an empire devoted largely to gold.[...] Mr. Kaplan is also president of the board of directors at New York's 92nd Street Y, a prominent cultural organization that is a magnet for New York's elite. And he is a benefactor of Eternal Jewish Family, a group dedicated to uniform rules governing conversions to Judaism whose leader resigned last year amid an alleged sex scandal. [...]

Krauthammer: Those troublesome Jews

Washington Post

The world is outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual U.N. suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.

But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel -- a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded ("quarantined") Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.[...]

Flotilla Choir presents: We Con the World

hat tip to RaP. Warning there are a few moments of kol isha so just be prepared. All the words are given as subtitles so you can just turn off the sound

Lithuania 'rewriting Holocaust history'

CNN

Abuse - Fingerprint option unused by yeshivot

Jewish Star

Of nearly 400 Jewish schools in New York State, only one, North Shore Hebrew Academy High School, uses a state law that allows private schools to check fingerprints to weed out potentially abusive faculty and staff. Elliot Pasik, an attorney and president of the Jewish Board of Advocates for Children, who championed the law through Albany, filed a freedom of information request and is very upset about what he discovered. [...]