Jewish Contributions and Those Who Made Them There are 6.5 billion people in the world and 13 million Jews.We make up 0.25% of the world. That’s one quarter of one percent! Tiny, tiny, tiny.Yet, despite our small number, despite oppression and anti-Semitism, we make up about 23% of all Nobel Prize winners, including 2005’s recipient for the Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Aumann. 

The statistics are impressive, even astonishing. Behind the numbers are human beings with families, communities, values, and political and social realities in which they lived. 

Rosalyn Yalow was the first woman born in the U.S. to get the Nobel Prize in a scientific field. She received the prize in 1976 for her discovery of an application of nuclear physics in clinical medicine, and developed a system in which endless varieties of hormones, viruses, and chemicals could be measured. 

Yalow was born in the South Bronx to working-class parents who were uneducated immigrants from Eastern Europe. They insisted on education for both her and her brother. Her father insisted, even in an era of gender inequality, that girls could do whatever boys could do. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the tuition-free Hunter College, with a degree in chemistry and physics, she was turned down from the graduate programs to which she applied: "As a Jew and woman, you will never get job in the field," she was told. She began secretarial work at Columbia University, and, as an employee, took night classes there, eventually earning her Ph.D. in chemistry. 

Commenting on women in science at the Nobel Prize ceremonies, Yalow emphasized the Jewish value of taking action: 

"We cannot expect in the immediate future that all women who will seek it will achieve [equal opportunity]. But if women are to start moving toward that goal,we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us;we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed, and we must feel a personal responsibility to ease the path for those who come after us. The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half its people if we are to solve the many problems that beset us. 

Rita Levi-Montalcini won the 1986 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. She was born in northwestern Italy. Against her family’s wishes, and the norms of the greater culture, she went to medical school after only limited education in her childhood. 

Italy’s fascist government banned Jews from university positions and from practicing medicine. Levi-Montalcini moved to Belgium. However, the Nazi invasion sent her back to Italy. She hid in the countryside, and then joined the urban underground. Hiding forced her to think hard about her ethnic identity and the incomprehensible conduct of her fellow Italians. 

She escaped to the U.S.where she collaborated with Jewish refugee Viktor Hamburger, who protected her from the usual academic marginalization of women. She shared the Nobel Prize with collaborator Stanley Cohen, with whom she hypothesized, and then proved, the existence of the nerve growth factor (NGF), establishing "that there is a physical connection between a sound mind and a sound body." 
 

• Jewish history, with all its flaws, has maintained a record of justice and compassion unsurpassed in human history. Let’s look at a few examples: 
• Even though Jews made up only 5% of the white population in South Africa, they comprised 50% of its white anti-apartheid activists for justice. 
• The Israeli Knesset was the only parliament to consider air strikes against Serbs during ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Jews donated 30% of the non-governmental humanitarian aid to Bosnian Muslims during the Serbian oppression. 
• Israel was the first country to take in the Cambodian "boat people" stranded at sea by nationlessness. 
• Gay and lesbian Palestinians flee to Israel to seek refuge from anti-gay violence in their home communities. And, the Jerusalem Open House — an Israeli organization that works on behalf of gays and lesbians — has a "Palestinian Outreach Coordinator" to make its services available to gay and lesbian Christian and Muslim Palestinians who otherwise have no support, and, in fact, are at great risk of violence if their homosexuality is discovered. 
• Israel has human rights organizations dedicated to the human rights of its own minority populations as well as on behalf of Palestinians — with whom they have been at war since the creation of the state. (Rabbis for Human Rights, B’tzelem "In God’s Image", and Association for Civil Rights in Israel are a few examples.) 
• The Israeli airlifts of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel were the only occasions in human history of black Africans being taken, en masse, out of Africa for freedom in a white country.