By Linda Gradstein ·JTA, October 11, 2011
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Dan Shechtman remembers the day he was kicked out of a research group because of the theory that last week won him the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
“Read this book. What you say is impossible,” the group leader at the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland, where Shechtman was doing his sabbatical in 1982, told him.
“I told him, ‘I know this book, and I know I have something new,’ ” Shechtman replied.
The response, recalls Shechtman: “You are a disgrace and I want you to leave my group.”
Schechtman joined another group, but the paper he wrote was rejected and he was ridiculed by many colleagues.
“My friends were nice to me, but kind of in the way that you’re nice to the retarded kid,” Shechtman recalled with a wry smile at a news conference this week.
Nearly 30 years later, Shechtman received the Nobel Prize for his work in quasicrystals, also called Shechtmanite.
Shechtman is the 10th Israeli to win a Nobel Prize, part of a chain that stretches back to S.Y. Agnon, who won the prize for literature in 1966. Of the 840 Nobel Prizes ever awarded, some 20 percent have gone to Jews. Israel, with its population of 7.5 million, has won the same number of Nobels as India, which was founded a year before Israel and has a population of 1.15 billion.
What is it about Israel — and Jews — that wins Nobels?
“Israeli universities, like my university, the Technion, are excellent,” Shechtman said of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. “But there’s also an Israeli spirit of free thinking. Sometimes it leads to chaos because everyone has his own idea about everything, but free thinking encourages successful scientists.”
Since 2002, Israeli scientists have received six Nobels — two in economics and four in chemistry.
Some say Jews are uniquely suited to the study of science.
“For thousands of years, Jews have been brought up to question and to try to bridge the gap between existing knowledge and the prevailing reality,” Gidi Greenstein, the director of the Reut Institute think tank, told JTA. “You have the Torah and the Talmud, and then you have the reality, which keeps changing. The tension between what we know and what we experience is the secret of creativity.”
Others say there is something unique about the Israeli character.
“One of the things you need to do well in science and high tech is to think outside the box, and we as Israelis are not familiar with any boxes,” said Professor Dan Ben David, director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel. “We don’t understand lines, we don’t believe in lines and we always ask why when someone asks us to do something. That can be very aggravating, but it’s a great quality when it comes to doing research.”
Israelis also tend to be tenacious and obstinate. The saying “Right or wrong, but never in doubt,” could be a national slogan. Schechtman provides the perfect example: He was ridiculed for years but never gave up.
“Open societies that are self-critical can foster courage and an appreciation for the pursuit of truth,” said Daniel Gordis, president of the Shalem Foundation. “Israel, for all its faults, and there are many, has both intellectual openness and academic excellence.”
Others say that Israel’s overwhelming defense needs have boosted the state’s interest in science.
“An enormous amount of money has been invested here in security,” said Professor Yaron Oz, the dean of Tel Aviv University’s Exact Sciences Department. “A large number of people studied science or engineering relative to the population, and many of them studied in military related programs. It was seen as essential to Israel to develop its own weapons.”
Oz says that in many other Western countries, more students are going into fields like law or business, which are more lucrative than science. But in Israel, scientists are highly respected and salaries are competitive.
Many Israeli scientists worry that the level of Israeli students is slipping and call for more government spending on science education. In a study conducted by the Taub Center, Ben David compared the levels of science, math and reading in 25 developed countries, including Israel. Israel came in last place.
“We need excellent teachers who cannot only teach, but can be role models,” Shechtmann said. “In some countries, a teacher has prestige and a good salary. Here a teacher can’t support his family.”
At the same time, there is a trend of Israeli scientists from abroad returning to Israel to continue their research here. Oz came to Israel from Geneva 10 years ago. The latest Nobel Prize will only encourage that trend, some predicted.
“Every Israeli university has graduate students that can compete with the best students in the world,” Oz said. “You need talent and infrastructure, and I think we have both. I expect we will win many more Nobel Prizes.”
On a wall in the Holocoust Museum in Wahington, DC, there is a statement that 10 of the 29 German Nobel Prize winners were German Jews. That is 30% of the prizes went to the less than 1% of the German population made by the German Jews
It is ironic that the Jews that gave, except Openheimer, the nuclear weapons to the USA came from Europe running away from the Germans. The Germans could have had the bomb before the Americans with the help of Jewish scientists.
It would be interesting to review the background (up to the date they acquired their prize) of each and every single Jewish Nobel prize winner and find out their commonalities and their differences (“traits”)!
Similarly for all the Jewish nominees.
What seems to be the main theory, hypothesis or claim here is that Jews are smarter than most other populations. Doesn’t this go back to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest and natural selection? In the case of the Jews humans appear to have played key roles in genocidal selection in so many parts of the world. Can we call that natural selection? I guess that depends on your point of view. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, was certainly a key factor, as were Eichmann, Hitler, et al during the Holocaust of World War II. How can I omit Stalin, whose body count exponentially exceeded that of the Nazis? Yet we Jews survived. The survivor is always the winner, which is another way of stating that Darwin was right, and the fittest survive.
So here we are in the 21st century facing more challenges and winning more Nobel prizes (in spite of the anti-Semitic mindset of some Norwegian politicians) in the face of a majority of enemies who are determined to “wipe us off the face of the map.” .” This too shall pass and we’ll still be here. Maybe that is the biggest prize of all awarded by a better judge,
I am surprised that no one mentions the outstanding Biblical revelations about Israel and what had made them so unique:
• Deut. 8:17-20 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today. If you ever forget the LORD your God and follow other gods [for example, yourselves] and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed. Like the nations the LORD destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the LORD your God.
Israel has been blessed and cursed by the hand of their God, but still remains somnambulant. However, in the end, their God will open their eyes and rescue them (Zech. 12:10)
Reading this happy-end story is real fan.
Surely, where was a research team mentioned located in?
An Australian Masters Course student, your respondent had formulated a new approach to a project comparison, an economic tool used broadly to the decision-making. It was impossible to publish a work nowhere in spite the highest mark providing UK-leading-economics-journal letter. A year since- LUCK, LUCK in the age of the Internet!-a paper was accepted to, presented at and published in the Proceedings of the Math World Congress in Germany (already reunited).
As found accidentally much later, a second-line by-formula delivered with paper calculations looked very alike to a key element of that time Nobel Prize-awarded work.
In 1993, a student’s assignment presenting ideas of a global climate change as a natural process which should not be FOUGHT but people have to ADAPT TO, was rejected with only explanation “poor English”, and Master’s Thesis was reviewed and recalled also a part of this thesis was already published in papers of the international scientific conference.
Further articles arisen from this course work had attracted warm comments in Internet professional sites more recently.
These post-Copenhagen days the UN is seeking environmental professionals “familiar with adaptation to a climate change”.Well, your reader is neither economist, Nobel Laureate nor even a steadily deployed ordinary engineer in a world broadcasting itself as an individual opportunities paradise.
So, was Israel good for Dan Shechtman or Dan Shechtman-for the Nobel Prize Committee?
Michael Kerjman
STOP PRESS! Hold on one second, it just hit me: are you THE Prof. Richard Landes for real? The immensely erudite glorious genius who on top of all his oeuvre coined the term ‘Pallywood’? Then hats off to you. Thanks for honoring this blog with your presence. I’ll make an exception for you: YOU are perfect. I worship you 😉
PS: are any of your books on Kindle?
…besides the fact that saying that Jewish Nobels come from money is like saying life on earth comes from meteorites: how did it all start originally? Jewish money and Jewish Nobels both have a common source: smarts! What could be open to discussion then is how much of it is genes and how much is simply from the privilege of growing up in Jewish households of any economic level, where the tender brains and incipient common sense of children weren’t raped for the purpose of getting them to accept the absurdity that a human can be God (as in Christian ones), or that one human’s life (PBUH) could have been Perfect and beyond any criticism at all (as in Muslim ones), both cases after which the traumatized child would grow quite unfussy about telling facts from fiction, his entire curiosity function damaged enough to stop being functional. It is not often enough remarked that Jews were the only subsection of humanity to grow up free from the belief that any human could be godly or perfect (and I skipped Animists, Hindu deities, Oriental ancestor-worship and the like, you get the point). Ghettos were, rather more than large prisons, bubbles of free-thinking preserving human intelligence in the midst of a brutish world.
the world likes to call evil good and good evil…as it is written..but G-d said in Genesis 12:3 HE would bless those who blessed Israel and ciurse the ones who did not, even the ones who have no opinion of for or against HER is cursed.. and as G-d said how the Jews would bless the world.. I think the list is way to long of what they have done for all of us,,it is the G-d of Abraham first off,,,and then you can start the list, cars, Macey’s , JC Pennys, trains, planes, weapons, foods, science, shops ,colleges, cells, phones and on and on,,I think how much more they would have blessed the whole world had they not killed so many..I can hardly believe anyone would stand with the enemy and G-d’s warnings are in plane site…He says He is coming to destroy all HIS enemies and the enemies of Israel…He means it…the blind are refusing the truth so HE sent a lie and they are believing it..how sad..G-d bless Israel forever…Time is all but up and Israel will stand forever…Shalom
the idea that the wave of jewish intellectuals from the lower middle class who came into their own just before and after the WWII got where they got because their parents had money is ludicrous, and reflects badly on your sense of empirical reality. i hope you’re more fact-based in your chemistry than in your sociology.
as for gradstein’s article, i’d like to add a point. self-criticism – a jewish virtue that some take to pathological extremes – means digesting unpleasant facts. it makes reality testing a lot easier.
Not sure what your point is or whether you’re aware that Fritz Haber was Jewish, as were 75% of German science Nobel prize laureates in the 1930s (with Jews just 1% of Germany’s population) while Germans were starting to fall for the nonsense that Jews were inferior to Germans, when the obvious conclusion, for a ‘logical’ racist, if that could exist, would have been the exact opposite. The glaring obvious fact is that Jews are smarter, except for a handful of Leftards, and there’s no point tiptoeing around that fact and it’s totally fine to stereotype Jews as smart folks, as long as nobody gets hurt.
I’m a chemist, and I don’t see anything particularly “Israeli” or “Jewish” about quasicrystals. Fritz Haber won the Nobel prize in 1918 for synthesizing ammonia. He was also in charge of Germany’s chemical weapons. The Germans have taken the lion’s share of Nobels in Chemistry. Does that make them somehow akin to the Israelis? How about those Nobel Peace Prizes going to Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat? Jews are disproportionately represented at prestige universities, which is where Nobels in the sciences come from. Their parents send them there, because their parents have money. In my non-Jewish family, none of us were supported through college by our parents. We simply didn’t have the bucks — I finally got my Masters’ degree at the age of 57, after a lifetime of mostly menial jobs. Do you want to stereotype Jews as “Nobel material”? That sounds a lot like stereotyping them as urban nerds with lots of dough. I don’t think Jews like that stereotype.
That said, Three cheers for quasicryatals! Everyone should have some! Maybe we can use them to get rid of our national debt.
Excellent article. Perseverance is key, forging ahead when everyone else is saying “It’s impossible,” or “You can’t do that.” That dogged determination certainly seems to be an Israeli trait.
However, one point set my bovine excrement meter a-quivering – that Taub Center study claiming that Israel placed last in science, math and reading compared to 25 developed countries. Given the high-IQ of Jews in general, coupled with the Jewish cultural emphasis on education as a primary value, I believe one would have to cherry-pick the comparative statistics very carefully to arrive at any resultant placing Israel dead last in all three categories. Many studies are crafted with an underlying agenda, e.g., molding a negative outcome to spur more funding for X or to raise social alarm; I suspect it’s likely that this study suffers from such outcome-manipulative bias.