Abstract
Every year in October the winners of the Nobel Prize in various fields are announced – World Peace, Chemistry, Physics, Physiology and Medicine, and Literature, and since 1969, Economics. The winner of each prize is selected by a different committee, which recognizes a person’s or number of persons’ (or in the case of the World Peace Prize – a group’s) fundamental contribution in their respective field. What is most striking is the preponderance of Jews among the winners. Some are known worldwide: Albert Einstein for Physics (1921), Elie Wiesel for World Peace (1986), Saul Bellow for Literature (1976), and Milton Friedman for Economics (1976). They are all individuals with great accomplishments.
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Notes
- 1.
For information on Jewish recipients of the prizes noted in this and the following paragraphs, see JINFO.org (n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c, n.d.-d).
- 2.
The Bloomingdales, Saks, Neiman Marcus, Gimbels, Goldwater, and Abraham and Strauss department stores, among others, were established by German Jewish immigrants or their sons born in the US.
- 3.
- 4.
These include the data from the 1890 Billings Report on the “Vital Statistics of the Jews of the United States” and the March 1957 Current Population Survey. The 1911 Dillingham Immigration Commission Report also identified Jews as a separate ethnic group.
- 5.
In these early sources, there are no data on educational attainment or level of schooling, other than a self-reported answer as to whether the respondent was “literate.” Literacy referred to the ability to read or write, presumably in any language. There is no information on the degree of literacy. Literacy was not universal, but literacy rates were higher for native-born white men than among the foreign born from Northwestern Europe, followed by Jewish immigrants, with others from Southern and Eastern Europe having lower rates of literacy. As literacy became nearly universal over time, it was replaced by questions on years of schooling.
References
Jewish Virtual Library n.d. Vital Statistics: Jewish Population in the United States Nationally, 1654-Present, Retrieved from: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-in-the-united-states-nationally
JINFO.org. n.d.-a. Jewish Nobel Prize Winners, Retrieved from: http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html.
———. n.d.-b. Jewish Recipients of the Fields Medal in Mathematics, Retrieved from: http://www.jinfo.org/Fields_Mathematics.html.
———. n.d.-c. Jewish Recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Retrieved from: http://www.jinfo.org/Pulitzer_Fiction.html.
———. n.d.-d. Jewish Recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Retrieved from: http://www.jinfo.org/Pulitzer_Non-Fiction.html.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1979. Twenty Censuses: Population and Housing Questions, 1790–1980. Washington, DC.
———. 2002. Measuring America: The Decennial Census from 1790 to 2000, Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/measuringamerica.pdf.
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Chiswick, B.R. (2020). Introduction. In: Chiswick, B. (eds) Jews at Work. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41243-2_1
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