When consumer DNA testing company 23andMe announced on March 23 that it had filed for bankruptcy, I wasn’t alarmed — at first.

If someone wanted to know that I have a mutation for polycystic liver disease, or that I have more Neanderthal DNA than most folks, so be it. I’d never paid attention to the ancestry part of the picture. A pie chart of one color, depicting 100% Ashkenazi heritage, isn’t as interesting as a chart from someone who is, say, 10% Native American, 50% Nigerian, 30% Scottish, and a sprinkling of other ethnicities, like a multicolor fabric of entwined history.

Haunting Parallels

But could those boring, one-color ancestry pie charts become a label, like yellow stars once were for being Jewish? That’s a growing concern as haunting parallels to 1930s Germany emerge here in the U.S. The alternate realities of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and the TV series The Man In the High Castle, have become the stuff of nightmares.

Where do the pie charts come from? Algorithms deduce dozens of sites of origin by following families that go back at least five generations staying in the same place, and comparing their DNA data to people in other geographic regions.

But I didn’t need a pie chart to tell me I was Ashkenazi.

I knew the story of how my grandmother Sarah had escaped a pogrom in Russia, on the brink of adolescence, to come to the United States in 1905. She was lucky. A few years later, she escaped the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire because she had a cold that Saturday morning and stayed home.

I think of being Ashkenazi as a cultural identity, not so much a sequence of DNA bases. I have curly hair, Ashkenazi facial features, love comedy and music, and appreciate stuffed derma and knishes.