Shai Agnon was born on this day in 1888. To commemorate that auspicious day, we return to this story, originally published in 2013, about Israel’s only Nobel laureate for literature. Sitting in a lecture hall in the Talpiot section of Jerusalem, a group of 25 immigrants is discussing “A City and Its Fullness” (“Ir U’meloah”…
The October announcement of Austrian novelist Peter Handke as the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was greeted, by many, with confusion. Handke, apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president who oversaw the Bosnian genocide? Handke, who spoke at Milosevic’s funeral and told critics of his decision to do so to “go to…
Doris Lessing, who died on November 17, 2013 at age 94, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for her prolific writings ranging from autobiography to what she called “space fiction.” Sometimes overlooked was the lasting inspiration which Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, drew from Jews and Jewish heritage. In 1925,…
If you are one of the 3.5 billion people who use Google.com today, you’ll see a somewhat cryptic Google Doodle of a typewriter in front of two cityscapes. That’s because December 10 marks the 127th birthday of Nelly Sachs, a German-born Jewish poet and refugee to Sweden who was honored by her adoptive country with…
(JTA) — William Nordhaus, a Yale University professor with Jewish roots, will share the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics. Paul Romer, a former World Bank chief economist who is now at New York University’s Stern School of Business, also won the prize. The winners, who will split the $1.1 million award equally, were recognized for…
Leon Lederman, a physicist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on subatomic particles, died Wednesday, the Associated Press reported. He was 96. Lederman, who directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 1978 to 1989, invented the term “God particle” and wrote a book by the same name. It refers to a…
A Jewish physicist is one of three scientists awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of revolutionary laser tools, the Guardian reported. In 1986, Arthur Ashkin invented “optical tweezers,” a tractor beam-like technology that grabs viruses, bacteria and other living cells with finger-like lasers. Now, at 96, he’s the oldest person to…
Somewhere, a giddy Wes Anderson is developing a film about an elderly novelist, one of the most lauded and prolific in the world, who spends his late years waiting eagerly for each October, feeling sure that this — this! — is the year he will be given his due, and awarded the world’s most prestigious…
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