(JTA)-— It’s been a busy couple of weeks for breast cancer. Of course, breast cancer is always busy, exerting its sneaky destruction through abnormal cell growth. But now it’s October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the scary fact is everywhere again: One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during her lifetime….
Rochelle Shoretz, a longtime advocate for women with cancer, died Sunday from complications of breast cancer. She was 42. Shoretz was the founder of Sharsheret, a national organization for young Jewish women facing breast and ovarian cancer. Shoretz established the non-profit in 2001, after her own diagnosis at the age of 28. The organization sought…
A new initiative offering subsidized screening for cancer-causing mutations in Ashkenazi Jews — including those with no family history of cancer — appears to be splitting cancer specialists. The BRCA community study, sponsored by the Program for Jewish Genetic Health, began accepting applicants in January from Ashkenazi women and men age 25 and older. Led…
Illustration by Lior Zaltzman Dozens of Torontonians have gathered to nosh on latkes and blintzes at a downtown café’s weekly Yiddish cabaret. Tables are squeezed close together, and as the performance winds down, my college roommate and I start chatting with our neighbors. The two women and their pre-teen daughters are out celebrating the girls’…
The Susan G. Komen organization apologized for holding its Race for the Cure in Houston on Yom Kippur. Komen’s executive director, Ariana Higgins, told the Houston Chronicle that the foundation has learned its lesson following an outcry from the Jewish community. The foundation received “considerable community feedback,” according to the newspaper. In its unsigned letter…
All women of Ashkenazi descent should be screened from age 30 for the BRCA gene mutation that causes breast cancer, an Israeli study recommends. The study, by a research team headed by Ephrat Levy-Lahad of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, was published Friday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United…
“I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer,” said actress Angelina Jolie last May when she announced that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy. Describing her pervasive family history of breast and ovarian cancer in a New York Times op-ed, Jolie said that she had…
As a newlywed in the 1970s, I watched my vibrant, stylish maternal grandmother go from trim to gaunt. She and my grandfather had raced their family out of Vienna the day Hitler marched in. But now she was diagnosed with an ovarian tumor the size of an orange, too late for treatment to save her…
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