VIDEO: More on Jewish genetics—we are family!

From The Forward in NYC:

One Big, Happy Family
Litvaks and Galitzianers, Lay Down Your Arms;
Science Finds Unity in the Jewish Gene Pool

Histororically [sic] speaking, Jews have hardly been strangers to the art of drawing sharp distinctions among themselves. But according to a mounting body of scientific evidence, Jews — genetically speaking, at least — may have more in common than anyone previously suspected.

A year ago, Michael Seldin, a geneticist at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, and his research team made a remarkable discovery: Studying how Europeans grouped genetically, they found that Ashkenazic Jews formed their own distinct subgroup. Northern and Southern Europeans fell into two clearly separable genetic cohorts, and although the Ashkenazic Jews had more in common with the Southern Europeans, they formed a recognizable, relatively homogenous group of their own.

This finding was particularly striking, as the place of origin for an individual Ashkenazic Jew’s grandparents turned out to be completely irrelevant. “There is no correspondence to the grandparental country of origin,” Seldin remarked: “We see differences in other European populations when, for example, someone says she has four grandparents from Italy versus someone who says he has three grandparents from Italy and one from Germany. But for Ashkenazic Jews, it doesn’t matter if their grandparents are from England or Hungary or Russia or Italy. The only thing that matters is that they’re Ashkenazic Jewish.

Read the full article here.

Or you could watch this video about your Ashkenazi landsman, ‘Duvid Crockett, King of Delancey Street’  by Yinglish superstar Mickey Katz.  He actually mentions ‘Litvaks and Galitzianers,’ and rhymes them with ‘wild Indianers!’

—Dennis Wilen