Is the study of Jewish genetics making inroads in medicine?
It’s literally saving thousands of lives around the world. There are some forty known “Jewish diseases,” disorders that originated in single Jews and then spread throughout Jewish communities. You can inherit some genetic disorders from either a mother or father—the breast cancer mutations are examples. But many diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, result from the virulent combination of mutations carried by both. The great breakthrough in genetic disease screening happened a few decades ago, when the genetic markers for Tay-Sachs were identified and a test became available. But because Orthodox Judaism strictly prohibits abortion, as well as premarital and prenatal testing, and most of the Tay-Sachs victims and carriers were living within the Orthodox community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the Tay-Sachs scourge continued. This changed in 1983, when Rabbi Josef Ekstein, a leader of the Brooklyn Lubavitcher community and father of a four-year-old son who had died of Tay-Sachs, devised a screenin
