31 Jul
2012 July-August, Israel

Natan Sharansky: Act III, Scene I

Soviet Jewry’s leading man has had a career of many acts: dissident, politician and now, head of Israel’s Jewish Agency. Through them all, he has held on to his belief in peoplehood, an idea he thinks can cure what ails the Jewish world. It is a cold night in Washington, DC, and Natan Sharansky is doing what he has done for years, speaking to a group of American Jews, this time participants in a Reform movement conference. He is sick—his eyes are bloodshot and he looks paler than usual—but the crowd listens attentively as he touches upon subjects ranging from Russian Jewry to Jewish unity, arms gesticulating wildly. He rambles—he rarely uses notes—and although his English is fluent, it can be difficult to follow because of his thick Russian accent. No matter that he seems tired,...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues

The Secret Life of Jewish Genes

The question of who is a Jew has become a knot of complexities. I once heard Benjamin Netanyahu say in jest at a lunch at The New York Times—I think he was Israel’s UN ambassador at the time—that the Cabinet had thrown up its hands over the issue: “We have decided to adopt Sartre’s definition instead—anyone whom anyone else thinks is a Jew, is a Jew,” he said. The crux of the issue is whether Jewishness is just a religious and cultural trait or whether it also has a biological basis. To undermine disastrous ideas about eugenics and racial purity, Jewish intellectuals from Franz Boas to Ashley Montagu have derided the idea of race. But just as they had succeeded in persuading social scientists to embrace the unlikely idea that race is a mere social construct, advances...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Arts & Culture, Issues, Talk of the Table

The New Gene Cuisine

In Genesis, Jacob asks his father-in-law, Laban, to compensate him for 14 years of unpaid labor. His request is strange: all the speckled and spotted goats and all the dark sheep from Laban’s flock—the least desirable animals. Jacob then peels back the bark of tree branches, making stripes, and places these rods in the animals’ water troughs. According to the story, the sight of the rods make the animals mate, and soon, Jacob’s flock is more robust than Laban’s. Jacob may not have known it, but genes were behind this success: By selectively mating the animals, he brought out genes that would produce desirable traits. This tale is the first time Jews weighed in on the issue of genetic manipulation, but millennia later, the issue is still a topic of debate. Today, the discussion focuses not...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues, Jewish World

Genia Brin’s Double Parkinson’s Mutation

Eugenia Brin was 48 when she first noticed that her left leg was dragging. It took two years for doctors finally to diagnose her with early onset Parkinson’s disease, because she didn’t have tremors or other easily identifiable symptoms. The diminutive Brin, trained as an applied mathematician in the Soviet Union and then working as a meteorological analyst at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, knew there was no cure for the degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, which affects about one in every 250 people over 40 and more than one in 100 in people over 65. All she could do was work with her physicians to find the right combination of drugs and dosages to help relieve the symptoms—at least temporarily. In 2008, she was tested through 23andMe, a start-up launched by...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues, Jewish Word

Jewish Word | The God Gene

Finding Faith in DNA Why do some people believe in God, while others don’t? Is it a person’s choice, the result of upbringing or simply divine will? Theologians have grappled with this question for centuries, but over the last few years, scientists have jumped into the age-old debate to offer an entirely new explanation: genes. One of the most attention-grabbing efforts to link spirituality and genetics was put forth by geneticist Dean Hamer in his 2004 book, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes. According to Hamer’s hypothesis, spirituality is a “biological mechanism” that is imprinted on our DNA. “We have a genetic predisposition for spiritual belief that is expressed in response to, and shaped by, personal experience and the cultural environment,” writes Hamer, who years earlier claimed to find the genetic basis of male...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues

Irin Carmon: The Woman Congress Could Not Intimidate

“Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” Phyllis Schlafly told assembled students at The Citadel military academy in April. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.” This was April 2012—not, say, 1972, a more likely year to hear the late New York City congresswoman being used as feminism’s chief bogeywoman. As another Jewish feminist, Rebecca Traister, pointed out in The Washington Post, many in Schlafly’s student audience probably had only the faintest idea who she was talking about. That’s a shame, because Abzug, who died in 1998, is worth remembering in this election season. She flouted, unapologetically and in public, everything a woman was supposed to be. These days, between the enduring paucity of women in elected office, this year’s battles over reproductive rights and...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Israel, Issues

Eetta Prince-Gibson: Israel’s No-Win African Refugee Situation

In late May, protestors rioted against the tens of thousands of African migrant workers and asylum seekers living in south Tel Aviv. They attacked passersby, smashed cars and vandalized shops. Within two weeks, the government began a brutal campaign to deport refugees from South Sudan. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, orchestrating the expulsion, was widely quoted to have declared that Israel “belongs to the white man.” Soon, he promised, he will expel all the Africans in order to ensure “the Jewish character of the Jewish state.” With tiresome predictability, liberal pundits have taken up the usual refrain in response to such rhetoric, arguing that we, the people who experienced the Holocaust, should behave more morally, should remember what it means to be a refugee, should know where racism leads. The Internet is humming with references to pogroms, Kristallnacht...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Israel, Issues

Clifford D. May: Khamenei’s Sacred Word: Destroy Israel

There’s nothing wrong with negotiating with your enemies. There is something wrong if you don’t know that those sitting across the table from you are your enemies. Too many Americans, Europeans and even Israelis still don’t grasp that Iran’s rulers—not average Iranians, but those who wield power—believe it is their sacred obligation to destroy us. This is not some misunderstanding that can be resolved through outreach, diplomacy, engagement and “confidence-building measures.” It is at the core of their ideology and theology. We know this because they tell us, clearly and repeatedly. More Americans should understand this—and keep it in mind as the debate goes forward. Recently, representatives of the United States, the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany—collectively known as the P5+1—have been negotiating with representatives of Iran’s government. These talks...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Israel, Issues

Naomi Ragen: Has Israel Lost Control Over the Iranian Situation?

On the sleepy afternoon of March 21, 2012, alarm sirens went off all over Jerusalem, sending me and my racing heart lunging toward our air raid shelter. Squeezed in among my neighbors, bags of old clothes and various bicycles, I found my mind wandering back to elementary school at the Hebrew Institute of Long Island. “Get down beneath your desks and cover your heads with your hands,” Mrs. Ganeles instructed us. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I remember thinking even back then: This is ludicrous. Nothing is going to save us from that great white mushroom cloud. Being a Jew in Israel as Iran’s self-proclaimed genocidal regime methodically prepares its annihilation fantasy makes me feel like the lobster in the “How to cook a lobster” recipe: “First put the lobster into a large pot...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues, Jewish World

From the Managing Editor

I was nervous when I answered the phone call from Bennett Greenspan, president and CEO of the genetic testing company Family Tree DNA. As part of this special issue dedicated to genes and religion, a few of us at Moment swabbed our cheeks and sent off our DNA samples to ascertain our family origins. I already felt secure in my historical roots, a lineage that places me as a ninth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov with Rashi and King David as ancestors. But still, I didn’t know what to expect, or what this testing would tell me specifically about my family tree. Going over the results with Greenspan, I learned that our opinion editor Amy Schwartz’s ancestral line is one of the oldest, thought to go back about 60,000 years and originating in Africa before...

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