Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study has long been a center of intellectual Yiddishkeit. In 1930, American Jewish educator Abraham Flexner convinced department store magnate Louis Bamberger to donate five million dollars to build the Institute, and it soon acquired the mission of saving Europe’s Jewish thinkers from the Nazi menace. Flexner invited Albert Einstein…
Albert Einstein may have died in 1955, but his brain is still around — very small pieces of it, that is. For the first time ever, the public can now view 46 slivers of Einstein’s brain on display in a special exhibition at the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library, which is run by the…
James Franck, a Jewish scientist who was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was a co-winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics, is honored by The University of Chicago’s James Franck Institute and by the James Franck German-Israel Binational Program, hosted at five leading Israeli technical schools. Yet nothing commemorates the work Franck did inside…
Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore at Einstein’s Berlin home, 1926. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute. One was a Bengali polymath and Nobel laureate with white flowing beard and piercing eyes. The other was the world famous scientist, with frizzy hair and unkempt appearance. When Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein met in New York, it…
The fascination with the 20th century’s unsurpassed brain, Albert Einstein, and starriest sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe, inspired Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 film “Insignificance” and a 2005 optical illusion made at MIT still available on the internet, in which an image of Einstein turns into Marilyn if you back away from the computer screen. Although they never…
The Library of Congress [has launched][1] an online “National Jukebox” of some 10,000 historical recordings. The New York Times profiles guitarist Gary Lucas on the occasion of his new CD, “The Ordeal of Civility.” Argentine artist Marta Minujine has built a 25-meter Tower of Babel out of 30,000 books. A student remembers Yeshiva University economics…
The German-born Jewish physicist Wolfgang Panofsky confounds the general rule about offspring of geniuses being disappointments. Son of the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang was not just an accomplished scientist who made contributions to the Manhattan Project, but was also a delightfully witty man, as proven by a new paperback edition of his charming…
Beatnik William Burroughs’s dreams, English art critic John Ruskin’s chess moves, and Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour would seem to have little in common. All three, however, are chronicled in a remarkable exhibit at The Morgan Library and Museum on personal diaries. Long before there were blogs, people actually wrote their jottings in notebooks. The exhibition…
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