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DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S.
Angie Claudio-Rodriguez was raised Catholic but felt a “deep connection” to Judaism she never understood.
Throughout her life, family members told her different things about her heritage, said Claudio-Rodriguez, 52. Some said, “We’re Irish,” others insisted, “We’re Native Americans,” and still others said, “We’re from Mexico.”
“It didn’t make sense to me,” she said.
Things came to a head on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages to Gaza.
“October 7 was a really tough time for me,” she said in an interview from her home in Lancaster, California.
That prompted her to do a DNA test, which she ordered on Dec. 29, 2023. A month later, she learned the truth.
“My mom is not Native American at all but from different parts of Mexico,” she said. “And my dad’s mom is Jewish. I had met her but she only told us that she was Catholic. … It was a shock to me. It just was really shocking. I felt like I was lied to my entire life.”
Armed with that knowledge, Claudio-Rodriguez took an 18-week introduction to Judaism class at the American Jewish University, based in Los Angeles, and then converted to Judaism. She has visited Israel twice and is now planning to make aliyah.
Claudio-Rodriguez is among a significant number of people who learned from a DNA test that they have some Jewish heritage and then decided to convert to Judaism.
Discovering hidden Jewish heritage
“There is a dramatic global interest in discovering if people have Jewish roots,” said AJU president Jay Sanderson.
In fact, interest in Judaism has increased to such an extent that Sanderson said hundreds of students from across the country are currently enrolled in AJU’s introduction to Judaism class.
Unlike synagogues, which generally offer only in-person introductory classes – available exclusively to their members – AJU is offering its classes to anyone.
“I think the biggest thing is that you have this program online and people can access it,” said Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, vice president and director of the university’s Mass Center. “A lot of people find out that they have Jewish heritage and they want to learn more.”
As a result, its current introductory course is being taken by many non-Jews. The university said it did not know how many non-Jews are enrolled, but noted that there are a total of 892 students in the current class. They are from every state except Wyoming and many countries, including Portugal, France, Lithuania, Malawi, Turkey and Norway.
In the last two years there has been increased interest in genetic testing in Spanish speaking countries in Latin America and Mexico, Sanderson said, and as a result, the university is offering its introduction to Judaism classes in Spanish as well. In addition, there are a large number of Iranians in Los Angeles and many are “also curious to know whether they are Jewish or not.”
“Just a couple of months ago a Spanish speaking community went through our program and they had stories about how their ancestors had come from Argentina, that their ancestors were forced converts and they wanted to go back to their roots,” Rabizadeh said.
“What we’re seeing here is people who are not Jewish, who are taking the DNA test, discovering that they have even 2% Jewish heritage, and deciding to convert to Judaism,” she added.
“This is a new phenomenon,” Sanderson said.
“Many of the non-Jews in the class convert,” he said, while many others “are interested but not necessarily ready to do a DNA test.”
DNA tests confirm a Jewish ‘feeling’
Across the country at New York City’s Central Synagogue, one of the country’s largest Reform communities, Rabbi Lisa Rubin said the Center for Exploring Judaism is not seeing the surge from DNA testing that California’s AJU is experiencing. Rubin said there was an increase in conversions right after Oct. 7, but no increase related to DNA testing.
Though the Jewish population is estimated at 16.5 million, there may be as many as 60 million people around the world with Jewish ancestry, according to AJU’s website.
Claudio-Rodriguez, a public school teacher, said none of the members of her family were aware of their family’s Jewish ancestry, and none plan to convert to Judaism.
She keeps kosher, attends Sabbath services weekly, wears a Star of David, is studying Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, and has eight children and a four-year-old grandson, she said. She does not know if his parents will raise her grandson as a Jew, but she’d “absolutely love it” if he has a bar mitzvah, she said.
Like Claudio-Rodriguez, Joseph Martin, 66, took a DNA test. Martin, who took the test in early 2021, said he “had always felt Jewish.”
But he was raised in an “Hispanic family, and we were very, very Catholic. My mother was a devout Catholic, going to church every Sunday. I went to Catholic schools through the eighth grade. And you know, gosh, Jewish was kind of a naughty word in the household when you’re raised as a Catholic because, after all, you know the Jews killed Jesus. Those were the kind of things that you hear, you know, as a kid growing up. … I wish my mother was alive today so that she could take her DNA test and find out that she was Jewish all this time.”
Through his genealogy research Martin learned that his family is from a large Sephardic family in Guadalajara, Mexico, he said, and that “they have always been Portuguese Jews.”
“You have to recall that during the Inquisition the only way to stay in Spain and Portugal was to convert to Catholicism or leave,” he said in an interview from Lompoc, California, where he lives with his wife Neona Lotz.
“If you were discovered practicing Judaism, you were burned at the stake. In order to convert, you had to have a sponsor, and the sponsor could have been your employer. … And the employer’s last name was Santiago and you took on his name in order to convert to Catholicism. So Santiana is my family name. That’s the Jewish side of my family,” he said. “Who really knows what our Hebrew last name might have been? I’ve never been able to find that through all my research.”
Although he had dated Jewish women, Martin married someone who was Catholic. Now divorced, he went online to meet someone, he said. “The first thing I noticed in one of the profiles was that she was Jewish. I said I’ve got to meet this woman. We’ve been together for 11 years.”
When he learned four years ago that DNA results revealed he is 2% Jewish, he told his wife that he planned to convert to Judaism. She replied, “The Jewish soul always returns.”
The post DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S. appeared first on The Forward.
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The Media Takes Sides in the Iran War — and It’s Usually Sympathetic to Iran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Who could forget The Washington Post‘s foolish unforced error in 2019 when its obituary for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIS, called him an “austere religious scholar“?
Apparently, the editors at the Post forgot, because they printed an obituary for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that makes its praise for al-Baghdadi look restrained.
It portrays Khamenei as a modest man, quoting him as saying “I consider myself a common religious student without any outstanding feature or special advantage,” and provides details on his reading habits.
It even claims that Khamenei “declared [nuclear weapons] to be forbidden by Islam” and quotes him as saying he “issued a fatwa, based on Islamic teachings, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons.”
“With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor,” author of the obituary William Branigin gushes.
The New York Times
The New York Times obituary writers, Alan Cowell and Farnaz Fassihi, must have been reading from the same set of notes when they wrote that Khamenei “affected an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness, running the country from a perch above the jousting of daily politics.”
They portray Khamenei as an effective leader who “lacked his predecessor’s charisma and mystique” but “cannily exploited political instabilities in the Middle East to extend Iran’s reach.”
Like Branigin, Cowell and Fassihi claim that “nuclear arms … were banned by the ayatollah in a 2003 religious edict.”
Obituaries are handled by the news division at The Wall Street Journal. It’s hard to imagine the Editor of the Editorial Page, Paul A. Gigot, approving Sune Engel Rasmussen’s Khamenei obituary, which opens with a sentence identifying him as “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the austere cleric who ruled Iran for more than three decades and reshaped the balance of power across the Middle East.”
And while Rasmussen doesn’t call Khamenei “avuncular,” he describes him as “A pragmatist as well as an ideologue” who “endorsed diplomacy when convenient” and held a “popelike position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God.”
He even goes so far as to credit Khamenei with making “progress in some important areas” including offering “some of the best healthcare and education in the region” and “boost[ing] female literacy rates.”
Like his peers at the Post and New York Times, Rasmussen also appears to accept uncritically Khamenei’s insistence that “the program was peaceful” and mentions that he “issued a religious pronouncement asserting that Iran wouldn’t acquire nuclear arms.”
What could compel journalists to praise an avowed enemy of the US, ignore his lies, downplay his nuclear program, and overlook his slaughter of thousands of Iranians and his genocidal campaign to destroy Israel?
Khamenei the Diplomat
The Khamenei-as-diplomat portrayal in the obituaries of the three most important American newspapers revolves around Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” that rewarded Iran handsomely for doing very little and set the stage for a legal Iranian nuclear bomb.
All three obituaries misrepresent the JCPOA through both omission and commission.
First, the errors of commission.
The Washington Post states that the JCPOA “restricted Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of crippling economic sanctions.” The New York Times claims that it “restricted Iran’s right to enrich uranium in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.” And The Wall Street Journal claims that it “granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program.”
The error here is that Iran’s “restrictions” were largely self-imposed and self-policed. Unlike Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” approach to negotiations, Obama naively agreed to Iranian “self-inspections” of sensitive military sites.
In terms of omission, none of the three obituaries acknowledges the fact that had the US not withdrawn from the JCPOA and reinstated the “maximum pressure” sanctions, Iran’s nuclear program would be mostly legal by now due to the JCPOA’s sunset clauses.
Trump the Villain
Each obituary frames the US withdrawal from the JCPOA as evidence of Trump’s belligerence.
The New York Times is the most direct of the three with the claim that Khamenei’s “mistrust was validated three years later, however, when Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement, restoring sanctions and piling on new ones.”
The Wall Street Journal puts the sense of validation in Khamanei’s mouth: “After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.”
But The Washington Post actually provides cover for Khamenei’s rush for nuclear breakout capacity and crossing the 90% enrichment threshold, with the claim that after Trump voided Obama’s agreement, “In retaliation, Iran began disregarding some provisions of the nuclear deal.”
In fact, Khamenei had been breaking the JCPOA from the very start. None of the three obituaries reminds its readers of that fact.
The obituaries also subtly attempt to downplay Khamenei’s desire for nuclear weapons, believing, it seems, his lie that the Islamic Republic is only interested in nuclear energy.
None asks why Iran denied IAEA inspectors access to the nuclear enrichment facilities it built deep underground or why a peaceful nuclear energy program would need underground facilities. None mentions that nuclear energy requires uranium enrichment of about 5% whereas Iran has admitted to having 460 kg of uranium at 60% enrichment.
Khamenei’s obituaries come as no surprise to anyone who follows media bias and understands how journalists increasingly side with America’s enemies in general and our Islamist enemies in particular.
While claims that journalists are the enemies of the American people are hyperbolic, the Khamenei obituaries show that many of them are not the enemies of our enemies. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal have demonstrated that they are not interested in portraying the world’s number one supporter of terrorism, a man who has killed thousands of his own countrymen and women and threatened to wipe America off the map, as the villain that he was, preferring instead to humanize him.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
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Australia’s Largest Arts Festival to Open With Wave of Anti-Israel Artists, Led by Controversial Creative Director
A view of Sydney, Australia. Photo: Reuters/David Gray.
The 25th edition of the Sydney Biennale, Australia’s largest arts festival, opens to the public on Saturday and will feature a slew of artists with anti-Israel views similar to those expressed by the festival’s artistic director, Emirati princess and curator Hoor Al-Qasimi.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney, which will take place from March 14-June 14 across multiple venues, receives taxpayer funding and support from the federal government of Australia, the state government of New South Wales, and the City of Sydney. However, several of the festival’s other partners and sponsors may be problematic for supporters of Israel.
Qatar Museums and Rubaiya Qatar, a new nationwide contemporary art quadrennial that will debut in November 2026, are the festival’s “major strategic” sponsors, according to the event’s website. Qatar has a long history of aligning itself with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, providing a home for the senior leaders of both organizations.
Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are both internationally designated terrorist organizations. In the US, Hamas has carried the label for years, and the Trump administration has, in recent months, proscribed branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and the Middle East.
The festival’s “major partners” include the global property developer Arada, co-founded by Al-Qasimi’s brother-in-law, Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi. When the partnership was announced in November 2025, it caused significant concern among the Jewish community. Another partner of the festival, the Barjeel Art Foundation, is controlled by the princess’s family.
“There were grave concerns that the appointment of Hoor Al Qasimi would result in one of our flagship cultural institutions becoming a tool of ideology and exclusion,” Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said last year, as cited by The Australian Financial Review. “The announcement that Al Qasimi’s family is now financially sponsoring the festival increases those concerns significantly, given that the family has a record of villainizing Israelis and calling for their boycott. The immense creative and financial power the family now exerts over the festival is alarming and risks undermining the spirit of the festival.”
Al Qasimi is the daughter of the ruler of Sharjah, one of seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates. She is also the founder, president, and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, an independent public arts organization in the UAE. She has a history of making anti-Israel comments and declaring “Free Palestine.”
When she was the artistic director of Japan’s Aichi Triennale in 2025, she said, “I didn’t imagine we would be witnessing a genocide live-streamed through our phones … this ongoing violence that can no longer be ignored … we all live under the same sky and none of us are free until all of us are free.” She also talked about “ongoing ethnic cleansing, and genocides.”
In October 2023, shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, she signed an open letter that voiced support for “Palestinian liberation.” The same open letter called for an end to Israel’s “human rights violations and war crimes” and “escalating genocide” in the “occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.” It further talked about “oppression,” “occupation,” and the “collective punishment of Gaza civilians,” but made no mention of the deadly rampage on Oct. 7 in which Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnaped 251 hostages.
Al Qasimi father also reportedly once said that “the Zionist presence in Palestine is a cancerous growth within the heart of the Arab nation.” Sheikha Jawaher Bint Mohammed Al Qasimi additionally “criticized the UAE’s cooperation with Israel in the education field,” according to The Middle East Monitor.
The Australian Financial Review reported that several donors and sponsors withdrew their support from the 2026 Sydney Biennale in response to Al Qasimi’s appointment. Al Qasimi’s decision to pick mostly pro-Palestinian artists for the Sydney Biennale also prompted the Carla Zampatti Foundation to withdraw funding for the festival, according to The Australian. In January 2026, Sydney Biennale ambassador Bhenji Ra cut ties with the festival after she faced criticism from the Jewish community over social media posts, including one message she shared that said, “Genocidal death cults do not have the right to exist.”
THE ARTISTS
The theme for this year’s Sydney Biennale is “Rememory,” a term adopted from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel Beloved to describe “how we become subjects and storytellers of our collective present through events of the past.”
Out of the 83 artists and collections from 37 countries being featured in the 25th Sydney Biennale, more than half are Arab and Muslim and no Israeli artists are included the lineup. The only Jewish talent participating is New York-based Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who has publicly made anti-Israel comments. In 2017, Rakowitz described his art as a form of “sumud,” an Arabic term meaning resilience, to “not allow Zionism to loot everything from the imagination, to keep alive the reality of what the Middle East was like before.”
French-Lebanese artist, DJ, and embroiderer Nasri Sayegh is also featured in this year’s Biennale, and he previously posted on social media that “Jewish supremacy is a disease.”
Richard Bell, an Australian artist showcasing his work in the festival, posted content on social media that has accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza and been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an Instagram Story on Wednesday, he shared a video from Middle East Eye of an economics professor accusing Israel and the United States of a “mass murder of civilians” in Iran, and indiscriminately “carpet bombing Tehran.”
In August 2025, Bell shared a message on Instagram that said in part, “colonial societies target children because they want to take away the future … it is happening in Gaza, where children are being starved to death.” He previously created a large painting in the shape and colors of the Palestinian flag and the piece was titled “From the River to the Sea,” a slogan that is widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel and for it to be replaced with “Palestine.”
Aysenur Kara is an “emerging Turkish artist” featured in this year’s Sydney Biennale who “aims to use her material conceptions to platform those facing genocide in Gaza right now,” according to a description provided on the festival’s website. The festival additionally said that another one of its presenters, Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah, uses his work “to articulate the very real situation of occupation experienced by Palestinians.”
A series of photographs by Iranian photographer Hoda Afsha being featured in the Sydney Biennale depicts indigenous children who had been in the juvenile justice system and was inspired by the fate of children during the “genocide in Palestine.” In late October 2023 – the same month as the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel – the award-winning Melbourne-based photographer posted on Instagram that she wants “Zionists out of our cultural spaces.”
Palestinian-Australian artist Feras Shaheen will put on the dance performance “Blocked Duwar” at the Campbelltown Arts Centre as part of the 2026 Sydney Biennale. In September 2025, the Tasmanian-based artist compared Jewish businessmen to Nazis in a social media post. He uploaded a photo that said, “Treat your local Zionist like you treat your local Nazi: Equality.” The message was featured over images of neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, and Jewish arts philanthropist John Gandel and former Biennale donor and board member Morry Schwartz.
Photo: Screenshot
Schwartz responded to Shaheen’s social media post in an open letter last year to Kate Mills, chairman of the Biennale of Sydney. “I’m sure you’ll agree with me that a line has been crossed,” Schwartz wrote. “To equate John Gandel and me with Nazis is shocking. The Biennale will not survive this if you don’t act immediately.”
The offensive social media post has not been taken down by Shaheen.
Schwartz told The Australian Financial Review Magazine he had withdrawn his support for the Sydney Biennale, worried that its artistic director might turn the event into a “hate-Israel jamboree.”
Jewish leaders were given the opportunity to preview the Biennale of Sydney but declined the offer after being frustrated that the festival’s senior figures took no action against “objectionable” social media posts by artists included in the event, The Daily Telegraph reported this week.
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Iran Before the Revolution — and the Future Now Being Fought Over
FILE PHOTO: Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, visits Hezbollah’s office in Tehran, Iran, October 1, 2024. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
The conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel arrived only weeks after the Iranian regime violently suppressed nationwide protests in January, when security forces reportedly killed thousands of demonstrators in one of the largest crackdowns since the Islamic Revolution.
For much of the 20th century, Iran stood as one of Washington’s most important partners in the Middle East. The relationship began to take shape during the early decades of the century and expanded significantly during the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. When Reza Shah Pahlavi came to power in 1925, Iran faced deep internal fragmentation and persistent foreign interference. His government sought to consolidate authority and build the foundations of a modern state. A national army replaced tribal forces, national institutions expanded, and the central government extended its presence across the country.
Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, succeeded him in 1941 and ruled for roughly four decades. During this period, Iran developed close strategic ties with the United States and other Western powers.
During the Second World War, the country served as a critical supply corridor for Allied aid to the Soviet Union, a route known as the Persian Corridor. After the war, this same geography continued to define the country’s importance. Sharing a border with the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War positioned Iran as a key barrier to communist expansion in the Middle East.
By the 1970s, Iran had become one of the region’s strongest military powers and a central pillar of the Western security architecture.
In 1973, Iranian forces intervened in Oman to help defeat the Marxist-backed Dhofar rebellion, preventing the establishment of a Soviet-aligned foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. Actions such as these reinforced Iran’s role as a stabilizing partner within the Western alliance system.
That geopolitical alignment ended abruptly with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The overthrow of the monarchy and the rise of Ruhollah Khomeini transformed Iran’s political system and its place in the world. The new Islamic Republic rejected the Western orientation of the Shah’s government and instead defined itself in opposition to the United States and its regional allies.
Beginning with the hostage crisis that followed the revolution, relations between Tehran and Washington entered a prolonged period of confrontation.
Over the following decades, Iran positioned itself as the ideological center of a revolutionary political movement that challenged the Western presence in the Middle East. Iranian leaders frequently framed the country’s role as one of resistance to American and Israeli influence, while expanding political and military relationships with armed movements across the region.
The consequences of the revolution have shaped Middle Eastern politics for almost half a century.
Iran’s leadership has repeatedly been accused by Western governments of supporting militant groups and projecting influence across regional conflicts. But the events of 2026 may represent the most serious disruption to the Islamic Republic’s political order in decades.
In the days following the strike that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, Iranian state authorities announced that Mojtaba Khamenei, the late supreme leader’s son, had been chosen as the country’s new supreme leader, marking one of the most consequential leadership transitions in the history of the Islamic Republic. A hereditary-style transfer of power within a system that has long presented itself as a revolutionary republic could deepen internal tensions at a moment when the state is already confronting war abroad and dissatisfaction at home.
If the current conflict weakens the revolutionary political system established in 1979, the geopolitical orientation of Iran could once again become a central question for the region. Such a shift could reshape regional alliances and potentially reduce one of the most enduring sources of instability in the region.
History rarely moves in straight lines. Political orders that appear permanent can unravel quickly when internal unrest and external pressure collide. Nearly half a century ago, the Iranian Revolution transformed one of America’s closest regional partners into a revolutionary adversary.
The situation now unfolding across Iran raises the possibility that the geopolitical legacy of that revolution may once again be entering a period of profound uncertainty.
Ali Karamifard is a PhD student in Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His research and writing focus on political systems, institutional change, and contemporary developments in the Middle East.