Now that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner has been announced, let’s pause to remember the courageous, improbable and tragic story of Carl von Ossietzky, the 1936 laureate, a journalist and activist who exposed the Nazis’ clandestine rearmament of Germany and paid a terrible price for his defiance. Some years, the process of awarding the…
How does a bagel explain the physics theory that helped a British Jewish professor win a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics? More than you might think. Michael Kosterlitz, who is Jewish, shared the prestigious prize with colleagues David Thouless and Duncan Haldane for revealing unusual states of matter, leading to advances in…
British-born scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for their studies of unusual states of matter, which may open up new applications in electronics. Their discoveries, using advanced mathematics, had boosted research in condensed matter physics and raised hopes for uses in new generations…
Some book lovers see the annual circus around the Nobel Prize in literature as mostly Swedish political meshugas, often not primarily about quality of writing. Others retain optimism about the award’s potential for spreading news about worthy honorees such as Imre Kertész (2002); Joseph Brodsky (1987); Elias Canetti (1981), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978). The…
Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus, as she explained in a 2013 interview with Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there. Due to government persecution, she left Belarus from 2000 to…
The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics won by American experimental physicist Leon Lederman sold at auction for $765,002. The online auction conducted by Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions closed on Sunday evening. Lederman, 92, and his wife, Ellen, decided to sell the medal after he received a diagnosis of dementia, the Associated Press reported….
It has already started. In the obituaries for the late German novelist Günter Grass, he has been cast as “the writer who stirred Germany’s conscience,” “the conscience of Germany,” and “the conscience of his generation.” Grass looks set for canonization, but his place in German literary and political history should still be a matter of…
The Nobel Prize committee has now announced the last of its science selections for 2014, and for the first time in this new century, there are no Jews among the laureates. This fact would hardly be worth noting if not for another fact: that three laureates a year have been Jews since 2000. And if…
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