Free Republic

SNIP Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations? The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3...

After a public uproar, The New York Times has revised a column by Bret Stephens that cited an academic paper co-authored by an anthropologist who has been branded a white nationalist. An editor’s note, appended to the column headlined “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” says a reference to the 2005 study was removed and that Stephens did not know the author “promoted racist views. “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically,” the note said. “The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens...

‘Bottleneck’ dates back 600 to 800 years, genome analysis shows; researcher says among population ‘everyone is a 30th cousin. Illustrative photo of Ashkenazi Jews, taken from Nurit Ben Sheetri's 'The Redheads' exhibit at Dizengoff Center (courtesy Nurit Ben Sheetrit) A new study concludes that all Ashkenazi Jews can trace their ancestry to a “bottleneck” of just 350 individuals, dating back to between 600 and 800 years ago. The study, published in the Nature Communications journal Tuesday, was authored by Shai Carmi, a computer science professor at Columbia University, and more than 20 medical researchers from Yale, Columbia, Yeshiva University’s Albert...

LAST RESORTS Everything literally changed in my life in one brief moment," said Stephen R. Neiley III. "There's nothing anyone can do about it. Nobody knows why." Ten years ago, he was perfectly healthy, with a successful career and a family, when suddenly, for the first time in his life, he had a seizure. It was the beginning of a long and relentless illness, an intractable form of epilepsy that led him to give up his career, contributed to the demise of his marriage and left him, at 51, living on a farm in northwestern Pennsylvania with his parents. Mr....

MINNEAPOLIS - Dr. Mindy Rauch thought she was humoring her brother at a family gathering last Father's Day when she agreed to examine his 6-month-old daughter, Hannah. The baby's stomach worried him: it felt taut, and too big. Dr. Rauch, a pediatrician, thought her brother was just another nervous first-time father. "Oh, look at this belly," she said playfully, feeling the baby's middle. A moment later she turned to her husband, who is also a pediatrician, and said, "You have to feel this." Hannah's liver and spleen were enormously enlarged. It was a sign of serious illness: possibly a tumor,...