JEWISH RECIPIENTS OF THE US NATIONAL MEDAL OF SCIENCE
(38% of recipients)
JINFO.ORG
"AMERICA'S NOBEL"
  • Theodore von Karman (1962)
  • Norbert Wiener (1963)
  • Solomon Lefschetz (1964)
  • Marshall Nirenberg (1964)
  • Julian Schwinger (1964)
  • Leon Lederman (1965)
  • Oscar Zariski (1965)
  • Fritz Lipmann (1966)
  • Gregory Breit (1967)
  • Paul Cohen (1967)
  • Michael Heidelberger (1967)
  • Edwin Land (1967)
  • Bernard Brodie (1968)
  • Herbert Friedman (1968)
  • Nathan Newmark (1968)
  • Eugene Wigner (1968)
  • Herbert Brown (1969)
  • William Feller 1 (1969)
  • Wolfgang Panofsky (1969)
  • Richard Brauer (1970)
  • Albert Sabin (1970)
  • Saul Winstein (1970)
  • Daniel Arnon (1973)
  • Carl Djerassi (1973)
  • Erwin Chargaff (1974)
  • Rudolf Kompfner (1974)
  • Abel Wolman (1974)
  • Manson Benedict (1975)
  • Hans Bethe 2 (1975)
  • George Dantzig (1975)
  • Paul György (1975)
  • Joseph Hirschfelder (1975)
  • Lewis Sarett 3 (1975)
  • Morris Cohen (1976)
  • Peter Goldmark (1976)
  • Samuel Goudsmit (1976)
  • Efraim Racker (1976)
  • Joseph Doob (1979)
  • Richard Feynman (1979)
  • Arthur Kornberg (1979)
  • Herman Mark 4 (1979)
  • Raymond Mindlin  (1979)
  • Simon Ramo (1979)
  • Paul Weiss (1979)
  • Victor Weisskopf (1979)
  • Philip Handler (1981)
  • Seymour Benzer (1982)
  • Mildred Cohn (1982)
  • Gilbert Stork (1982)
  • Edward Teller (1982)
  • Howard Bachrach (1983)
  • Paul Berg (1983)
  • Maurice Goldhaber (1983)
  • Herman Goldstine (1983)
  • Roald Hoffmann (1983)
  • Helmut Landsberg (1983)
  • George Low (1983)
  • Walter Munk (1983)
  • Frederick Reines (1983)
  • Bruno Rossi (1983)
  • Isadore M. Singer (1983)
  • Richard Zare (1983)
  • Solomon Buchsbaum (1986)
  • Stanley H. Cohen (1986)
  • Herman Feshbach (1986)
  • Robert Hofstadter (1986)
  • Peter Lax (1986)
  • Hans Liepmann (1986)
  • Herbert Simon 5 (1986)
  • Frank Westheimer (1986)
  • Raoul Bott 6 (1987)
  • Harry Eagle (1987)
  • Walter Elsasser (1987)
  • Michael Freedman 7 (1987)
  • Rita Levi-Montalcini (1987)
  • Max Tishler (1987)
  • Konrad Bloch (1988)
  • Michael Brown (1988)
  • Stanley N. Cohen (1988)
  • Daniel Drucker (1988)
  • Milton Friedman (1988)
  • Joseph Goldstein (1988)
  • Ralph Gomory (1988)
  • Eric Kandel (1988)
  • Joseph Keller (1988)
  • Walter Kohn (1988)
  • Jack Steinberger (1988)
  • Rosalyn Yalow (1988)
  • Richard Bernstein (1989)
  • Melvin Calvin (1989)
  • Viktor Hamburger (1989)
  • Samuel Karlin (1989)
  • Philip Leder (1989)
  • Joshua Lederberg (1989)
  • Rudolph Marcus (1989)
  • Baruj Benacerraf (1990)
  • Elkan Blout (1990)
  • Mildred Dresselhaus (1990)
  • Leonid Hurwicz (1990)
  • Daniel Koshland, Jr. (1990)
  • John McCarthy 8 (1990)
  • David Nathan (1990)
  • Ronald Breslow (1991)
  • Gertrude Elion (1991)
  • Elvin Kabat (1991)
  • Robert Kates (1991)
  • Salvador Luria (1991)
  • Paul Marks (1991)
  • Arthur Schawlow 9 (1991)
  • Steven Weinberg (1991)
  • Maxine Singer (1992)
  • Howard Temin (1992)
  • Norman Hackerman (1993)
  • Martin Kruskal (1993)
  • Daniel Nathans (1993)
  • Vera Rubin (1993)
  • Salome Waelsch (1993)
  • Thomas Eisner 10 (1994)
  • Robert K. Merton (1994)
  • Elizabeth Neufeld (1994)
  • Frank Press (1994)
  • Peter Goldreich (1995)
  • Louis Nirenberg (1995)
  • Alexander Rich (1995)
  • Norman Davidson (1996)
  • Richard Karp (1996)
  • Paul Samuelson (1996)
  • Marshall Rosenbluth (1997)
  • Martin Schwarzschild 11 (1997)
  • Robert Weinberg (1997)
  • Bruce Ames (1998)
  • John Bahcall (1998)
  • John Cahn (1998)
  • Eli Ruckenstein (1998)
  • David Baltimore (1999)
  • Felix Browder 12 (1999)
  • Ronald Coifman (1999)
  • Jared Diamond (1999)
  • Leo Kadanoff (1999)
  • Lynn Margulis (1999)
  • Stuart Rice (1999)
  • John Ross (1999)
  • Susan Solomon (1999)
  • Robert Solow (1999)
  • Gary Becker (2000)
  • Ralph Hirschmann (2000)
  • Jeremiah Ostriker (2000)
  • Marvin Cohen (2001)
  • Gabor Samorjai (2001)
  • Elias Stein (2001)
  • Harold Varmus (2001)
  • John I. Brauman (2002)
  • Richard Garwin (2002)
  • Evelyn Witkin (2002)
  • Edward Witten (2002)
  • John Prausnitz (2003)
  • Solomon Snyder (2003)
  • Charles Yanofsky (2003)
  • Kenneth Arrow (2004)
  • Stephen Lippard (2004)
  • Ralph Alpher (2005)
  • Bradley Efron (2005)
  • Tobin Marks (2005)
  • Hyman Bass (2006)
  • Daniel Kleppner (2006)
  • Robert Langer (2006)
  • Lubert Stryer (2006)
  • Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (2007)
  • Leonard Kleinrock (2007)
  • Robert Lefkowitz (2007)
  • Andrew Viterbi (2007)
  • Berni Alder (2008)
  • Michael Posner (2008)
  • Yakir Aharonov (2009)
  • Esther Conwell (2009)
  • Mortimer Mishkin (2009)
  • Stanley Prusiner (2009)
  • Amnon Yariv (2009)
  • Jacqueline Barton (2010)
  • Allen Bard (2011)
  • Sidney Drell (2011)
  • Solomon Golomb (2011)
  • Barry Mazur (2011)
  • Lucy Shapiro (2011)
  • Bruce Alberts (2012)
  • Robert Axelrod (2012)
  • May Berenbaum (2012)
  • Alexandre Chorin (2012)
  • Judith Klinman (2012)
  • Jerrold Meinwald (2012)
  • Burton Richter (2012)
  • Stanley Falkow (2013)
  • Simon Levin (2013)
  • Barry Barish (2023)
  • Eve Marder (2023)
  • Myriam Sarachik (2023)
  • Sheldon Weinbaum (2023)
NOTES
1. Jewish father.  In his book Indiscrete Thoughts (Birkhäuser, Boston, 1997, pp. 7-8), Gian-Carlo Rota states that William Feller's real name "was neither William nor Feller...He was named Willibold by his Catholic mother in Croatia...his original last name was a Slavic tongue twister, which he changed while still a student."  Actually, his name was always "Vilim (William or Willy) Feller."  According to a Croatian language article by Stella Fatović-Ferenčić and Jasenka Ferber-Bogdan, Feller's father was born Eugen Viktor Feller in Lemberg, Poland in 1871; see "Ljekarnik Eugen Viktor Feller" (MEDICUS, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1997, pp. 277-283).  According to a letter contained in the papers of the mathematician Louis Mordell, William Feller "lost his post in Kiel due to a father of non-Aryan descent."  See: http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0275%2FMordell%2F23.4.  The mathematician A.A. Fraenkel, who was Feller's mentor at Kiel, states in his memoirs (Lebenskreise: Aus den Erinnerungen eines jüdischen Mathematikers, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1967, pp. 154-155) that Feller was dismissed from his position there in 1933 due to "'nichtarischen' Ursprung" ("non-Aryan" origins).  In the 1933 Nazi purge of the German civil service, "non-Aryan" virtually always meant Jewish.  (Rota makes similarly misleading statements about Ralph Gomory on p. 18 of Indiscrete Thoughts.) 
2. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
3. Jewish father, poet and naturalist Lew Sarett (born Lewis Saretsky), non-Jewish mother.
4. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.  See, e.g., the last paragraph of the section entitled "I.G. FARBENINDUSTRIE"  at http://www.jfkmontreal.com/john_lennon/cache/hmark/napedu.pdf.
5. Jewish father,  mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life by Herbert A. Simon (BasicBooks, New York,NY, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262).
6. Jewish mother and step-father, non-Jewish father.  See Raoul Bott: Collected Papers, Vol. 1  (Birkhäuser, Boston, 1994, pp. 11-12).
7. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
8. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.  See Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995, p. 23).
9. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother. See section entitled "Background and Education, Toronto" in 1996 interview with Suzanne B. Riess.
10. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/03/tom-eisner-father-chemical-ecology-dies-81.
11. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
12. Jewish mother (née Raissa Berkmann), non-Jewish father.  See Earl Browder, by James Ryan (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1997, p. 29).

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