maddogdrivethru.net

'Who is a Jew?' can now be answered by genetic testing

>
By Jeremy Sharon
October 3, 2017 09:42
The mass immigration of Jews from the FSU to Israel was seen as a welcome blessing, but many have experienced difficulties proving their Jewish identity.

(Continued)
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politi ... ses-506584

If I converted to judaism my genes would change !!! ???

Why Do American Jews Idealize Soviet Communism?

Perpetuating the romance of the Bolshevik regime, whose ‘good intentions’ cannot mask the horrors imposed in its name
By Ruth R. Wisse
October 22, 2017 • 10:00 PM


[In] this country there was a time when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist Party. If you were not somewhere within the party’s wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition. In either case, it was the Communist Party that ultimately determined what you were to think about and in what terms.

This was written not in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites, but in New York in 1947 by Robert Warshow in Commentary magazine about the American culture of the previous decade. While slightly hyperbolic (the Southern Agrarians, the American Scholar, etc.?) it faithfully describes American Jewish culture of the time, emphatically including its Yiddish branch.
(Continued)
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... -207043669

United States
My Life on a Socialist Kibbutz in Brooklyn, and What I Learned There

Looking back on an American and Jewish experiment in communal living
By Tal Beery

....

We were a group of six leaders—three men and three women—from Hashomer Hatzair (“The Young Guard”), a 100-year-old Socialist-Zionist youth movement that was a major ideological engine and training organization behind Israel’s founding Kibbutz movement. This network of independent agrarian socialist communities was scattered throughout Israel’s arid and remote countryside and believed itself to be the vanguard of a worldwide socialist revolution. But precipitated by decades of sneaky bank loans and vicious attacks from the right, much of the Kibbutz movement more or less collapsed in the 1990s, right alongside the Soviet Union and the Oslo Accord. Everywhere you heard the cynics and capitalists rejoice.

...
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... -207043669

Tablet
Europe
Why Did Russian Jews Support the Bolshevik Revolution?

100 years ago today the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd
By Michael Stanislawski
October 24, 2017 • 9:30 PM

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd on Oct. 25, 1917, the vast majority of Russia’s Jews opposed that takeover. Five years later, when the USSR was created at the end of a treacherously bloody civil war, the situation was reversed—not, as the Hebrew cliché has it, out of the love of Mordecai, but out of hatred of Haman.

It is difficult to paint a precise picture of the political views of Russian Jews at the time of the Revolution for the simple reason that we have relatively little precise information on the subject: From 1905 to 1917 the Jews voted in elections for the four parliaments (called Dumas) that were created in response to the 1905 Revolution. None of these elections were based on universal suffrage, first and foremost because women could not vote, and so we have no firm data whatsoever on the views of half of the Jewish population. Moreover, the franchise was more and more restricted as the years went by, and so the number of Jews voting for and being elected to the Duma went down, rather than up, during the 12 years of the parliaments’ existence. Twice in 1917, the Jews voted again, this time with female suffrage, but we still lack data on a very significant chunk of the Jewish population.

From the voting data we do have it is possible to conclude several crucial points: First, the Bolsheviks had very little support among the Jewish population, possibly the lowest amount of any of the multiple parties vying for support “on the Jewish street.” And this was despite the fact that many of the Bolsheviks’ most important leaders were Jews—though Jews who viewed their Jewishness as an incidental artifact of their birth, with no meaning for them either religiously (as they were atheists) or nationally (as they regarded themselves as internationalists). Most famously, when Leon Trotsky was asked what his nationality was, he replied “socialist.” More Jews, though hardly a great number, supported the Mensheviks, the less radically Marxist half of the Russian Social Democratic Party, headed by a Jew, Julius Martov, who opposed Lenin’s stance on violent revolution but shared the Bolsheviks’ anti-nationalist stance. Far more Jews, though still a relatively small percentage of the population, supported the Bund—the Jewish socialist party whose stance on socialism was all but identical to the Mensheviks, but slowly adopted an idiosyncratic form of Jewish nationalism based on national cultural autonomy for the Jews of the Empire and dedication to Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish people.

Thus, in toto, the Jewish population broadly rejected socialism in any guise, Jewish or not, as the solution to the problems of the Jews in Russia.

(Continued)
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... -207043669

The 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew a centuries-old regime of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire.[1] The success of the Soviet Union in dealing with this previous legacy of antisemitism, as well as the extent that the Soviet government fought against this prejudice, is a topic of some debate. Although officially forbidden as a form of ethnic and racial chauvinism, antisemitism came to be commonly used as an instrument for personal conflicts in the Soviet Union, starting from conflict between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky (who was Jewish) and continuing through numerous conspiracy theories spread by official Stalinist propaganda. Antisemitism in the Soviet Union reached new heights after 1948 during the campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan", in which numerous Yiddish-writing poets, writers, painters and sculptors were killed or arrested.[2][3] This culminated in the so-called Doctors' plot, in which a group of doctors (some of whom were Jewish) had allegedly conspired to murder Stalin.[4]

The Stalinist antisemitic campaign ultimately culminated in the Doctors' plot in 1953. According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors' plot was "clearly aimed at the total liquidation of Jewish cultural life."[3] Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in "Jewish world conspiracy".[27]

The Doctors' plot (Russian: дело врачей [delo vrachey, "doctors' case"], врачи-вредители [vrachi-vreditely, "doctors-saboteurs"], or врачи-убийцы [vrachi-ubiytsy "doctors-killers"]) was an episode of antisemitism in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's regime. In 1952–53, a group of prominent Moscow doctors (predominantly Jews) were accused of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leaders.[1] This was later accompanied by publications of anti-Semitic character in the media, which talked about the threats of Zionism and condemned people with Jewish names. Many doctors, officials and others, both Jews and non-Jews, were promptly dismissed from their jobs and arrested. A few weeks after the death of Stalin, the new Soviet leadership stated a lack of evidence and the case was dropped. Soon after, the case was declared to have been fabricated.

Mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material present in cellular bodies called mitochondria, is inherited exclusively from a person’s mother, and therefore genetic markers in this DNA can be traced back many generations to determine a person’s maternal ancestors with a high degree of certainty.

According to the rabbi, experts in Jewish genealogy and history have determined that fully 40% of all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from just four Jewish women who left the Middle East over 1,000 years ago and settled in Europe.

According to the scientific report commissioned by Eretz Hemdah for its ruling, there is a certainty of at least 90% and up to 99% that someone bearing specific genetic markers in their mitochondrial DNA is descended from one of these women.

The report was authored by Prof. Karl Skorecki, a prominent geneticist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, and Dr. Shai Tzur, a fellow geneticist from Rambam.

Carmel insists the genetic test cannot be used to revoke someone’s Jewish status – even if they were found not to have the relevant genetic markers – since only 40% of Ashkenazi Jews have them, and someone without them likely comes from the other 60% of the extended Ashkenazi Jewish family. He also avers that there is “no such thing as a Jewish gene,” explaining that the mitochondrial genetic test simply determines ancestry, not Jewishness.

But for the immigrants who belong to the 40% of Ashkenazi Jews descended from the four women, the test could be a breakthrough in their efforts to prove their Jewish status if they lack other forms of conventional proof, such as Soviet-era documentation and witnesses.