By the time he had reached the fourth grade, Josh\’s dystonia caused his right hand to involuntarily clench into a fist so tight that he could only open it by force. His feet turned inward, requiring him to wear braces. The symptoms had forced Josh to quit his baseball and basketball teams after six years of playing, leaving him depressed and angry.
After David Rudolph sprained his ankle during a basketball game, his father noticed that the second-grader couldn\’t seem to keep his left heel flat on the ground. The problem persisted, sidelining David from his position as catcher on his Little League team, and preventing him from progressing beyond his blue belt in karate.
Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran is publishing in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science a paper that not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about.
The group in question is Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection.
The mere mention of eugenics, which refers to a movement to improve humankind by controlling genetic factors through mating, is enough to ring bells that many Jews would rather not hear 60 years after the Allied defeat of the Nazis.
In Parshat Naso, we are introduced to the rituals concerning the sotah, a wife who is suspected of adultery.
If you do a LexisNexis search for the screenwriter-director Paul Haggis and his new film, \”Crash,\” you\’ll come up with a surprising number of hits for newspapers in Canada.\n\nIt turns out Haggis was born in London, Ontario. He came to Los Angeles in 1977, started writing for television, then in 2001 switched to movies. His screenplay for \”Million Dollar Baby\” won a much-deserved Oscar, and \”Crash,\” his directorial debut, has been an early summer sleeper hit.
No disrespect to our mothers, but courtship rituals have changed since they were dating. So forget all their antiquated rules.
Jewish students are currently subjected to an unprecedented assault on their identity as Jews. And we, the Jewish faculty on campus, have let those students down. We have failed to equip them with effective tools to fight back this assault.
We can reverse this trend.
Both of these men have made important contributions to the U.S.-Israel relationship — Weissman, an expert on Iran, and Rosen, a principal architect of the U.S.-Israel strategic cooperative relationship for more than 20 years.
After the war, Tibor Reis was caught helping Jews escape to Austria, and was put into a Russian prison for three years. Although he was tortured, he never revealed the names of those working with him.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.