Jewish eugenicists -- From the fine Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

"'Do not have children if they won't be healthy!'"
A shocking new study reveals how key figures in the pre-state Zionist establishment (i.e., Israel before it became an independent country) proposed castrating the mentally ill, sterilizing the poor and doing everything possible to ensure reproduction only among the `best of people.'

Why is this supposed to be shocking? You'd have to be a stooge for all the politically correct propaganda to think that no Jews were ever interested in eugenics. Eugenics was highly popular among leftists and centrists at the time, including many Jews. John Glad, former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the chief translator of The Black Book on the German Slaughter of Jews (Holocaust Library,1980), wrote in the Jewish Press: "In the Weimar Republic, many Jewish socialists actively campaigned for eugenics, using the Socialist newspaper Vorwarts as their chief tribune. Max Levien, head of the first Munich Soviet, and Julius Moses, a member of the German Socialist Party, believed strongly in eugenics. A partial list of prominent German-Jewish eugenicists would include the geneticists Richard Goldschmidt, Heinrich Poll, and Curt Stern, the statistician Wilhelm Weinberg (coauthor of the Hardy-Weinberg Law), the mathematician Felix Bernstein, and the physicians Alfred Blaschko, Benno Chajes, Magnus Hirschfeld, Georg Lowenstein, Max Marcuse, Max Hirsch, and Albert Moll... The most prominent American eugenicist of Jewish extraction was the Nobel Prize laureate Herman Muller."

Muller moved to the Soviet Union and tried to convince Stalin to implement a eugenics program. Stalin, however, backed nurture over nature, putting the quack Lysenko in charge of Soviet biology and sending many Darwinian geneticists to the Gulag. Surprisingly, Muller got out of Russia alive.

In any case, eugenics was definitely not the tail wagging the Nazi dog. Glad writes: "I performed a random search of 100 books dealing with German history during the Weimar and Nazi periods and which contained subject indexes; 96 of them do not show any mention of eugenics, and the mentions in the four that do are cursory. Clearly eugenics was not the ideological driving force behind National Socialism, but rather an afterthought."

Nor is eugenics foreign to the Jewish tradition. Nomi Stone writes: "Jewish writings contain references to genetics and eugenics as far back as the Bible and Talmud. In Jewish law, it is prohibited to "marry a woman from a family of epileptics or lepers lest the illness be transmitted to future generations." Further, eugenics has staged a successful comeback among Orthodox Jews due to Tay-Sachs disease. Stone writes:
"Tay-Sachs is an autosomal recessive disorder: if both parents are carriers of the defective gene, there is a twenty-five percent chance that the child will have the disease, and a fifty percent chance that the child will be a carrier of the gene. The confluence of these factors is quite rare, however, as the carrier rate in the population at large is 1/250. However, the disease is comparatively rampant in the Ashkenazi Jewish population; 1/27 Jews in the United States carries the gene."...

"Rabbi Joseph Eckstein pioneered an entirely new approach to Tay-Sachs disease in 1985, in light of the fact that he found all the available options either unappealing or irreconcilable with halachic (Jewish) law. His solution: to eliminate the gene from the Jewish population entirely. [No, this program only redistributes the genes so fewer people get two, while slightly more would have one -- assuming that carriers of one gene marry people with no genes.] Eckstein is the founder of an international genetic testing program called Dor Yeshorim, the "generation of the righteous." In the program, Orthodox Jewish high school students are given blood tests to determine if they have the Tay-Sachs gene. Instead of receiving direct results as to their carrier status, each person is given a six-digit identification number. Couples can call a hotline, if both are carriers, they will be deemed "incompatible." Individuals are not told they are carriers directly to avoid any possibility of stigmatization or discrimination. If the information were released, carriers could potentially become unmarriageable within the community.

During 1993, 8000 couples were tested, and eighty-seven couples who were previously considering marriage decided against it as they were at risk for having a child with the disease. The program then, aims to eradicate the disease through the venue of choice of mate."

The alternative is typically "is an amniocentesis several months into the pregnancy and then an abortion if the fetus has Tay-Sachs disease." Is that more moral?

Another alternative for couples who are carriers is artificial insemination. Stone writes, "This choice seems incongruous with the Jewish identity, and the very intimate link felt between the blood line/gene map and one’s ancestors and descendants."

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