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Hereditary cancers aren’t just a women’s problem. Jewish men need to take precautions too.
Bill Harris, a veteran Los Angeles photojournalist, didn’t think much of it when one morning in 2012 he woke up and found a tiny blood spot on the T-shirt he’d slept in. The next morning, he found blood in the same place on his chest — and went straight to his computer.
“Online, I could find only three things that would cause a man’s nipple to discharge blood: being an avid runner, which I wasn’t; having a subtropical fungus, which I didn’t; and breast cancer,” he said. “That was a pretty big shock.”
Harris, then just a few weeks shy of his 61st birthday, immediately called his doctor, who ordered a mammogram and ultrasound. They confirmed a cancerous growth in his right breast. Ten days later, a biopsy came back positive. The next month Harris got a right mastectomy, followed by the removal of his left breast half a year later.
“I walked into a woman’s imaging center and had to get into a pink paper robe,” he recalled. “All the women in the waiting room were staring at me.”
Like many other Ashkenazi men, Harris never had considered that he might have been born with a harmful mutation of the BRCA gene, which elevates the risk not only of breast cancer, but also of melanoma and prostate, ovarian and pancreatic cancer.
“Hundreds of other mutations in the BRCA gene are just as dangerous, but they’re not specific to Ashkenazim,” said Dr. Robert Sidlow, director of the Male BRCA Genetic Risk Program at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. About 1 in 40 Ashkenazi Jews (those of Eastern European descent) carries the harmful mutation, compared to about 1 in 400 in the general population.
“The vast majority of patients I see are relatives of women who have breast or ovarian cancer and then get tested,” he said. Of BRCA mutation carriers, Sidlow added, “Most men are pretty happy to enroll in some kind of surveillance program once they get over the initial shock.”
Sidlow is on the Men’s Leadership Council at Sharsheret, the national Jewish nonprofit organization that educates the community about cancer risks and supports those with breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
Elana Silber, CEO of Sharsheret (Hebrew for “chain”), says it’s crucial that men with a family history of cancer undergo genetic counseling screening for BRCA and other hereditary cancer mutations.
Genetic testing is possible via a standard blood or saliva sample.
While Sharsheret is primarily considered a women’s organization, it has been using November — nicknamed Movember for its focus on men’s health — for an awareness campaign focused on Jewish men’s cancer risks.
“This is not only a women’s issue,” Silber said. “Family history is so important. When a man shares his family history with his doctor, he may not realize that he should mention that his mother had breast cancer or that his sister had ovarian cancer, as these are not generally ‘men’s diseases.’ They are not aware that these cancers could mean that they themselves are at increased risk for cancer and that they can pass on these mutations to the next generation – their daughters and their sons.”
If someone discovers he (or she) is a carrier of one of the genetic mutations with elevated cancer risks — not just BRCA but also such mutations as ATM, TP53, CHEK2, and PALB2 — there are various precautions they can take for themselves and their children. They can monitor their own health more closely, they can get encourage their children to test to see if they are carriers and, for any future children, take steps to prevent the mutated genes from being passed down.
For example, couples can conceive via in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and then test the embryos before implantation to ensure that only those unaffected by the genetic mutation are implanted.
While most women are aware of the risks of breast cancer, men generally are not — even though the disease strikes 2,500 men in the U.S. every year and kills about 500 of them, according to Sidlow. About 1-2% of men with the BRCA1 mutation and 6-7% of men with the BRCA2 mutation will develop cancer by age 80.
“This is why we recommend periodic mammograms starting at about age 50 for men who carry a BRCA2 mutation,” Sidlow said. “We like to educate these men on how to check their chests once a month and have a clinician do a breast checkup on them once a year.”
Since the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations also make prostate cancer more likely, men with either mutation should get PSA (prostate-specific antigen) levels in their blood tested annually beginning at age 40, rather than 50, the age at which screening generally begins, Sidlow said.
Sharsheret has been promoting the importance of learning one’s family history, genetic counseling and screening among both men and women. The 20-year-old organization also runs various peer support networks, offers financial assistance to cancer patients, provides mental health counseling and guidance to patients, caregivers, and their friends, and seeks to educate the broader Jewish community about cancer risks and support.
Peggy Cottrell, a certified genetic counselor at Sharsheret, said men in general are more reluctant to get regular checkups than women.
Ashkenazi Jewish men are at elevated risk not just of breast and prostate cancer but also of pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is particularly difficult because it’s tough to detect early enough and hard to treat. The five-year survival rate is only 11%. About 2% of BRCA1 carriers and 4% of BRCA2 carriers will develop pancreatic cancer, Sidlow estimated.
“Usually by the time pancreas cancer is clinically detected it has already spread microscopically to the liver,” Sidlow said. “But pancreas cancer is potentially curable if caught when the tumor is extremely small.”
Even among those with elevated risks, certain behaviors can improve one’s odds, such as avoiding obesity, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.
Harris, the California photojournalist, is still fighting at age 71. While he overcame breast cancer 10 years ago, last year he was diagnosed with ampullary cancer, a rare disease related to his BRCA2 status that was discovered thanks to his participation in a UCLA study. Surgeons have removed his gall bladder, half his pancreas and part of his small intestine, and he has had to endure eight rounds of chemotherapy.
“I’m still working through the aftereffects of the chemo. I have to eat smaller quantities than before and take enzymes to supplement my digestive processes,” Harris said.
Meanwhile, his 37-year-old son discovered that he, too, carries the BRCA2 mutation, and he had a double prophylactic mastectomy and reconstruction at age 30 — just to be on the safe side.
“If there’s any history of breast, ovarian or prostate cancer in your family, get tested genetically so that you’re informed,” Harris advised. “Diagnoses happen way too late for men, and the danger is too big.”
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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