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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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How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — At a family reunion in California in 2013, Felicita Trueblood discovered a portal to the past: a binder full of letters from her great-grandfather, a rabbi in Ukraine, from before World War II.
As exciting as the discovery was, the letters were illegible to her — until now, thanks to an artificial intelligence tool developed by Sergii Gurbych, a researcher in Lithuania who hungered for information about his own Jewish past. They unveiled a world of grief but also brought Trueblood solace, uncovering the truth about her great-grandfather’s death.
The letters, about 50 pages in total, had sat untouched for decades in her cousin’s house in Palm Springs. They were penned in Yiddish by Pavel Malisoff, Trueblood’s great-grandfather in Konotop, Ukraine — then in the Soviet Union — to his son, Trueblood’s great-uncle Solomon, who immigrated to the United States and changed his last name to Malis.
Between 1927 and 1934, the letters bridged two worlds — on one side, a father in Ukraine witnessing a community on the brink of destruction, and on the other, a son journeying from New York to California under the weight of the Great Depression. Malis died in 1985. For nearly a century, no one else read those pages.
At the 2013 reunion, none of the living family members could decipher their ancestor’s Yiddish letters, written in Hebrew script. Trueblood, who is now 75, felt compelled to take charge of the treasure trove. She grew up in San Diego with few traces of her Jewish past. Her mother, Malisoff’s granddaughter, became a Christian Scientist before marrying her father, a non-Jewish descendant of colonial Americans. Trueblood wanted to know who her great-grandfather was and the life he inhabited, long cut off from her family memory.
“I was raised outside the Jewish community, with no day-to-day connection,” Trueblood told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I was always fascinated.”
Trueblood soon ran into obstacles. She found only a handful of translators who could help decipher the handwritten letters, and the cost of hiring them to work through the whole stack was prohibitively high.
But 13 years after inheriting the letters, she saw a Facebook post about VILNISH, a new project in Lithuania that aims to turn handwritten and historical printed texts in Yiddish and Hebrew into digital texts that can be easily searched and translated.
Gurbych, a researcher at Vilnius University’s Center for the Study of East European Jewish History, built the AI model behind VILNISH, which launched late last year. Born in Ukraine, Gurbych studied Hebrew and Yiddish on top of electrical engineering. At Vilnius University, he focuses on developing digital approaches to analyzing archival Jewish texts.
Gurbych’s particular interest is texts written between World War I and World War II, when Jewish cultural and intellectual life flourished in Vilnius. In 1925, Vilnius became the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, which continues to preserve the Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish heritage in New York City.
Gurbych turned to a plethora of diaries, memoirs and other documents that were written by Jews in the interwar period and stored in the National Library of Lithuania. They provided the perfect material to teach a language model to recognize handwritten texts from the period. As he trains VILNISH on more and more handwriting types, it becomes a more universal tool.
Soon after Gurbych publicized the service, he began to hear from people like Trueblood, who sought to read letters left behind by their relatives.
Their urge to connect with the past was familiar to Gurbych. His own grandfather was a Jew born in 1915 in the Polish city of Łódź. During the Holocaust, he escaped the Łódź Ghetto days before its liquidation by the Nazis, when most of the 67,000 Jews who lived there were killed. Gurbych’s grandfather settled in present-day Ukraine in the Soviet Union.
Gurbych is drawn to pieces of writing that evoke the atmosphere, the tastes and smells of life for Jews in Poland before their communities were destroyed.
“I want to know more about the world where my grandfather lived,” said Gurbych. “He died in 2001, and I just feel that I didn’t speak with him about this time enough. He was a person who lived in the Soviet Union, so he was just closed, and didn’t very much like to talk about his Jewish background and about life in interwar Poland.”
Trueblood contacted Gurbych in May. Within a month, he sent her translations of all her great-grandfather’s letters. She was stunned by the vivid images of Malisoff’s life in Konotop, marked by poverty and separation. All of his 11 children were forced to relocate across the Soviet Union or immigrated to Canada and the United States.
Konotop was racked by famine during Stalin’s rapid forced collectivization of agriculture. Malisoff described “people walking half naked, hungry, with only a few coins in their pockets, without a piece of bread, without proper clothing, silently, without work and without money.” The “spiritual condition” was destroyed, he wrote, as the Sabbath, the holidays, kosher food, circumcisions and religious teaching disappeared — “as though they had never existed.”
It wasn’t just an AI language model that supplied her these windows to the past, said Trueblood. Gurbych had the knowledge of Jewish history and religious tradition to explain the terms used by her great-grandfather, a rabbi, and to point her toward the stories and texts that he referenced.
“What I got back was just beautiful, because he understands the context, the history, the biblical references,” she said.
She also made a discovery that shifted her understanding of how her great-grandfather died. Trueblood and her other living relatives knew that Malisoff had been tortured by Stalin’s regime for receiving small packages of money from family members in California. They always believed that was how he died.
But after the letters from Malisoff stopped abruptly in 1934, other letters from his wife and children revealed the truth: Malisoff had died not from torture, but from a heart attack at 74. A letter from one of his children in the Soviet Union gave Trueblood the unexpected gift of her great-grandfather’s dignified death and memorial service.
“Our old father of blessed memory has passed away, but his good and beautiful name has not died,” the letter said. “It lives on, and will continue to live for many years. The town paid him the highest honors. The entire town, old and young alike, accompanied him on his final journey, and he was given the place of highest honor in accordance with his good deeds.”
Gurbych hopes that VILNISH will retrieve such memories for many more people like Trueblood, while also helping academic researchers who face huge sets of archival documents in Yiddish and Hebrew that few people can read.
The tool also has the potential to support the descendants of Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust as they prepare materials to confirm their eligibility for repatriation or citizenship, such as synagogue records, internal rolls of Jewish communities and other historical documents.
Trueblood was struck by how many others have yet to access threads to their past, as stacks of paper like hers sit untouched in attics and libraries.
“These letters are all over the world,” she said. “There are thousands of them out there that haven’t been translated.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump heckled the leaders of Iran at the first-ever Republican midterm convention on Wednesday, while promoting the idea of renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself.
“The war will be over very shortly after the election,” Trump said in a 100-minute address. “They’re hanging out for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their nuclear bomb. But we’re not going to let that happen.”
The president expressed confidence that Iran is “going to be quitting or dropping out” of the war “right after Election Day, because they want a deal desperately.”
“We’re winning it,” Trump said, referring to the war in Iran. “We control the Hormuz Strait.”
The U.S. and Israel started the war in February 2026. Since then, Trump has repeatedly predicted victory or an imminent end to the conflict. But six months later, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted amid competing U.S. and Iranian efforts to control the vital waterway.
On Wednesday, Iran said it attacked 10 ships near the strait after the U.S. sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the largest exchange of attacks on shipping by the two sides since the war began.
“I should get something out of this — the Trump Strait,” the president continued, repeating an idea he had proposed about a week ago. “I’ll have an announcement. We’ll call it the Trump Strait, and I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that.”
Declaring that they’re probably not “too happy about anything,” Trump said that Iran “is falling apart” and described the country as “the bully of the Middle East.”
“They’re not the bully anymore,” the president continued. “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger appeared first on The Forward.
