Subject Guide: Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates

Leo Baeck Medal for Neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel

On November 17, 2015 neuroscientist Eric Kandel accepted the Leo Baeck Medal at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Dr. Kandel is a neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the physiological basis of memory. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 9 in 1938.

Dr. Eric Kandel on opportunism among Austrian academics – Voices from the 1938Projekt

Dr. Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. His family left Austria after the country was annexed by Germany in March 1938 and settled in Brooklyn. He attended Harvard University and NYU medical school. In 2000, he won the Nobel prize in medicine for his work on the physiology of memory. In this video, he discusses how the dismissal of Jewish academics was a boon to opportunistic non-Jews in the medical faculty at the University of Vienna. https://www.1938projekt.org

This is a segment of the larger Voices from the 1938Projekt video. Additional videos of Dr. Kandel from the 1938Projekt:

Dr. Eric Kandel remembers Kristallnacht

Dr. Eric Kandel on his mother's foresight

Dr. Eric Kandel on losing a friend to antisemitism

Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence

As an orphaned survivor and witness to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) became a torchbearer for victims and survivors of the Holocaust at a time when the world preferred to forget. How did this frail, soft-spoken man from a small village in the Carpathians become such an influential presence on the world stage? Drawing from Wiesel’s writings and interviews with his family, close friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger’s new book, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, presents Wiesel as both a revered Nobel laureate and a man of complex psychological texture and contradictions. Join YIVO for a discussion of this new book featuring Berger in conversation with Samuel Norich.

This program streamed live on Apr 17, 2023. 

31. Jahrestagung des Ordens Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaft und Künste. (AR 4250 C)

This clippings collection contains material concerning Bernard Katz and Hans Adolf Krebs.

Juedische Nobelpreistraeger (AR 4603) [Collection has been digitized and is available online.]

This clippings collection contains two German newspaper clippings about German Jewish Nobel Prize recipients. 

Fritz Reiche Collection (AR 25185) [Collection has been digitized and is available online.]

Fritz Reiche was a German theoretical physicist who immigrated to the U.S. in 1941, as one of the last Jewish physicists to leave Germany under the Nazi government. This collection contains a letter from Max Born and photos of Reiche with other scientists, including Albert Einstein. 

Reis Rosenberg Family Collection (AR 25319) [Collection has been digitized and is available online.]

The correspondence consists mainly of letters concerning the emigration efforts of Alfred Reis and relative of his on his wife's family's side, Bernhard Buchwald. This correspondence includes letters signed by James Franck and Albert Einstein.

Bernhard Witkop Collection (AR 6424) [Collection has been digitized and is available online.]

The documents in this collection describe the personal and professional life of Bernhard Witkop, an American chemist of international repute. There is also biographical information about the life of the scientists within the articles as well, particularly on Paul Ehrlich, but also some material concerning Richard Willstätter. 

German Nobel prizewinners; German contributions in the fields of science, letters and international understanding, illustrated by examples of Nobel prize awards for peace, literature, medicine, physics and chemistry / Edited by Armin Hermann. Inter Nationes, 1978.

The laureates : Jewish winners of the Nobel prize / by Tina Levitan. Twayne Publishers, 1960.

Nobel, the man and his prizes / by The Nobel Foundation. Amsterdam New York Elsevier Pub. Co. [sole distributor for the U.S.: American Elsevier Pub. Co., New York] 1962.

Albert Einstein; four commemorative lectures / by Loyd S. Swenson, C. P. Snow, Howard Stein, and Ilya Prigogine. Austin University of Texas Humanities Research Center 1979