Matthew J. Silberman

Joe Rogan just passes on any ol' lie he finds in the deepest holes of the internet, even when the lie is raw hate from beginning to end. Israel allows genetic testing. Almost all clinical tests and prenatal tests are actually covered under our national health insurance. And you absolutely can get ancestry testing in Israel. 23AndMe specifically, which Joe mentions as outlawed in Israel, ships to Israel. Go to their international website and try it before you spread this dumb, mean lie. Also FamilyTreeDNA and some others. And once you get your raw DNA information through 23AndMe and others, you can upload it to every other ancestry website for analysis. In fact, Ashkenazi Jews, including Israeli Ashkenazim, are some of the most genetically studied populations on the fucking planet, you racist dolts. (Oops, just realized I'm kinda pissed.) There are even Israeli studies by Israeli researchers of Israeli Jewish genetics. Nature has published studies using Israeli genetics databases. Here, for example: nature.com/articles/nature09… So what does Israel actually restrict, and why is it so severe about it? Two words: Parentage and obsessive privacy rules. Parentage tests are as tightly controlled as heroin. The reason is peculiar to our tradition and may be hard for outsiders to understand. In Jewish religious law, a "mamzer," someone born of the mother's adultery or from incest, lives a restricted life in some ways, including limits on who they can marry under traditional laws. And their religious status is heritable. These are ancient laws, but they matter in a basically conservative and religious society. To protect children from ever becoming saddled with this status, parentage tests require a family court order, even if both parents consent to the test. Because the child has to be protected. Rabbinical courts have often forbidden testing almost across the board, including in divorce cases. In one case I once read about, the rabbinical court quashed the father's genetic test and demanded that he adopt the child to avoid any doubt. This was to protect the child in that particular case. The court refused to release the father from responsibility for the child and refused to examine evidence into the child's actual parentage. Is this a weird cultural artifact born from a specific feature of the Jewish tradition? Yes. Feel free to make fun of it over in the secular West. I make fun of it myself over here. But inasmuch as old traditional rules are an unavoidable part of our big-family, tightly-knit society, I'll take this weirdness, and the never-ending effort to cleverly circumvent the damaging parts of the old traditions, over what's happening in your neck of the woods. Is it all an attempt to hide the 2000 years we spent in Europe? No, you dolt. What the hell is wrong with you? And then there's privacy. Pay attention to this one, because you'll wish you had some of our rules in your own country. This is the only real limit on ancestry kits. Your genetic information is totally, utterly private. Your employer and your insurance company can never discriminate against you based on your genetics. Even just attempting to get their hands on your genetic information is a felony. Labs and genetic counselors are closely regulated. In the age of AI, even just the leaking of a *relative's* genetic information can hurt your employability and your insurance premiums. And it's not some crazy fear. Ancestry kit companies are bought and sold by commercial investors all the time, and they're the owners of customers' data. A data breach of 23AndMe in 2023 put the genetic information of millions on the internet. You're telling me insurance companies didn't scoop it up? Israelis are more protected from that dystopian new reality than most of the rest of you. And importantly, the law's prohibitions are on the commercial companies, not on the customer. Giving someone your own genetic information isn't a crime. The company buying and selling it commercially within the jurisdiction of Israeli law is committing the crime. That's why the one company that's actually hampered in any meaningful way from testing Israelis is MyHeritage, which is Israeli. To bypass Israeli jurisdiction and that massive privacy regime, Israelis just order a kit from a company in Texas. So why do literally hundreds of millions of people believe the lie that Israel has a blanket restriction on genetic testing to avoid anyone ever finding out that Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe? At its core, at its most basic: because they want to create the permission structure to destroy Israel. They want to declare Israel a colonialist, imperialist interloper doomed to be felled by the noble indigenous Arab of the land. So they declare that Israel is hiding this great, terrible secret that nobody has ever hidden and nobody could ever hide -- that it doesn't actually belong here. Never mind the fact that every study of Ashkenazi Jews shows that they have origins in the Levant -- isn't it a bit odd that this argument never grapples with the millions of Israeli Jews who spent the past 1,800 years in places like Iraq and Yemen, Jews who were expelled and fled to the last man, woman and child to Israel, and who make up half of Israeli society today? You'd think if this was actually about Israeli "genetics," that would be part of this conversation. But it isn't about any kind of reality, it's a bigoted, genocidal fantasy. So the millions of Jews who don't even come from Europe magically disappear from this conversation. I don't think Joe Rogan dreams of our annihilation. I think Joe picks up garbage floating in the juices at the bottom of the internet's deepest garbage bins and launders it happily for clicks.