The principle of keruv1 is central to the ideals and aspirations of Judaism. We frequently cite as one of our most important goals the need to bring those who are only tangentially involved in things Jewish closer to the center of Jewish life and to make Judaism more central to their lives. While the term keruv is most frequently invoked with regard to Jews, the same attitude might be of import...

A meeting was held in Germany by top Gestapo officials, including Adolph Eichmann. This meeting was attended by some of the leading Nazi physicians. They had calculated that if the inhabitants of the ghetto received no more than 800 calories of low-protein food per day, the entire population would be dead in nine months—a simple solution for the destruction of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. ...

For decades before the Nazis began the legal persecution of Jews, anti-Semites had been active in Germany. They created a climate in which genocide — or so it seems with hindsight — became possible. In 1996 an American scholar, Daniel J Goldhagen, went further. He argued that in Germany ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ had created a culture that produced ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’. The ‘comm...

Factor XI deficiencies are rare. Initially, they were described only in Ashkenazy Jews with two types of characteristic gene mutation. Now, 152 mutations have been identified, mostly in non-Jewish population. We report the case of a deficiency identified in Arabic young girl living in West Algeria; gene sequences showed a type II mutation, frequent in Ashkenazy Jews. May be it is coincidence; b...

Kagan, Richard L., and Philip D. Morgan (eds.) 2009 Atlantic Diasporas. Jews, Conversos, and Crypto Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800 Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press. 307 1 table; 2 maps; cover illustrations: top—View of a Jewish settlement; bottom— view of Paramaribo. Reproduced from John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted...

Throughout the 20th century, Jews have been greatly over-represented in western nations among intellectual elites, in the universities, and among the higher socio-economic classes. The two principal theories that have been advanced to explain this are that Jews have high intelligence and, alternatively, that they have cultural values that promote success. We review the evidence and present new ...

T HE APPARENTLY HIGH FREQUENCY of polycythemia vera among Jews has been first systematically approached by Reznikoff et al.’ and subsequently confirmed by Damon and Holub2 and by one of us.3 It seemed therefore of interest to find out whether this excessive risk is present in Jews outside the U.S.A. and among all Jewish ethnic subgroups. The following report provides an attempt to answer both q...

The relative social and genetic isolation of Jews from other communities, which was much more marked in the past than now, has led to the belief that they are unusually prone to a variety of illnesses. Until the last few decades assessments of the incidence of various diseases among them were usually based on impressions rather than planned surveys or careful analyses, and many misconceptions s...

The value of forgiveness is emphasized in many religions, but little is known about how members of distinct religious cultures differ in their views of forgiveness. We hypothesized and found that Jews would agree more than Protestants that certain offenses are unforgivable and that religious commitment would be more negatively correlated with belief in unforgivable offenses among Protestants th...