122 years ago, less than a few hours, the Nobel Prize ceremony was held for the first time, in the name and bank account of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, which was his will. The first ceremony was held on the fifth anniversary of his death, and since then, each year, the awards have been awarded to individuals who have made outstanding achievements in five fields: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace.
As you know, our small country, which has existed for fewer years than the prize itself, has already gained prominence in the number of its citizens who have won the prize. In our 75 years of independence, 13 Israelis have been given the title of "Nobel Prize Laureate". We used Forefront, Perplexity, and ChatGPT to tell us a little about the many awards that made their way from Sweden to Israel.
Literature – S.Y. Agnon (1966)
The writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon was the first Israeli to win the prize, for what has been defined as his pioneering literary study of Jewish life and traditions in the Diaspora. As anyone who went to high school in Israel knows, he not only explored Jewish life, but did so while playing the languages of the Bible and the Sages. He shared the prize with the poet Nelly Sachs, who was Jewish and whose work dealt mainly with the Holocaust but was not Israeli. It is interesting to note that both died in early 1970, three months apart, 3 years after receiving the prize.
Shalom – Menachem Begin (1978), Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (1994)
Three Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded to Israeli leaders who have made efforts to end our wars with our neighbors – although all prizes were awarded before formal resolution of the conflicts in question. The prize to Begin, which he shared with Anwar Sadat, was given even before the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, while the prize for Rabin and Peres (in collaboration with murderer Yasser Arafat) was indeed given after the signing of the Oslo Accords, but before it brought about any change in the situation here (and as we know today, in the end it only made our situation worse).
Economics – Daniel Kahneman (2002), Israel Auman (2005), Joshua Angrist (2021)
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Prize in Economics for his work in the study of our decision-making processes, in collaboration with Vernon Smith; Israel Aumann was honored along with Thomas Schelling, both for their research in game theory; And in 2021, American-Israeli Joshua (Joshua) Angrist, along with David Card and Guido Imbens, won an award for contributions to the analysis of causal relations.
Chemistry – Avraham Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover (2004), Ada Yonath (2009), Dan Shechtman (2011), Arie Verschel and Michael Levitt (2013)
The field in which Israelis stand out most is chemistry, with no less than six Nobel laureates: Hershko and Ciechanover shared the prize with Irwin Rose, after discovering together a key process in the breakdown of proteins in the cell; Yonath won the prize for her research in the field of ribosome structure, which contributed to the improvement of drug creation processes; Verschel and Levitt, together with Martin Karplus, won the prize for developing computer models of complex chemical systems.
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