Einstein's Jewish World

Nearly thirty percent of Nobel Prize recipients have been Jews. Yet Jews comprise less than a tenth of one percent of the world's population. What accounts for the disproportionate representation of Jews at the highest levels of scholarship and the professions? This lecture on Einstein and his contemporaries focuses on the history and sociology of twentieth century physics. Why were so many leading physicists, particularly nuclear physicists, Jewish? What was their education and cultural inheritance? What particular qualities enabled them to extend and transform the frontiers of knowledge in their field? And what was the nature of their own Jewish identities during WWII?

Speaker: Bruce Thompson, Ph.D. Associate Director, Center for Jewish Studies, U.C. Santa Cruz

Bruce Thompson is a graduate of Princeton with a Ph.D. in History from Stanford. He has been teaching courses in Modern European history and Jewish Intellectual and Cultural history since 1991. He was recently the 1st recipient of the John Dizikes Teaching Award in Humanities at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Free and open to the public.