• In “a rare double veto,” Russia and China put the kibosh on the first U.N. Security Council resolution that would have recognized and condemned Syrian atrocities. [FP Turtle Bay]

• Defense Secretary Panetta failed to secure Israeli-American Ilan Grapel’s release from Egypt. [AP/Haaretz]

• The deputy chief of Israel’s mission to the United States, Dan Arbell, was relieved following revelations that he had given the press sensitive information. Feels like this could have legs. [Haaretz]

• Daniel Schectman of Haifa’s Technion became the third Israeli to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [JPost]

• Politician and rabbi Hanan Porat, who helped found and popularize the settler movement at its outset and during its early years, died at 67. [NYT]

That the Fields Medal eluded Israeli mathematicians until last year is surprising, as a large proportion of Fields Medal winners are of Jewish descent. Moreover, mathematical accomplishments have often served as an index for Jewish intellectual achievement: Albert Einstein used sophisticated geometry to reformulate the basic laws of physics; Edward Witten, a 1990 Fields Medal laureate, helped build a new conceptual basis for the physics known as string theory. More recently, Grigory Perelman, a Russian, won the Fields Medal for his proof of the famous topological problem known as the Poincaré Conjecture.

Indeed, mathematics has often seemed entwined with the thread of Jewish history. Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity, corresponded with a fellow scientist, Dositheus, believed by scholars to be Jewish, while the Old Testament makes implicit reference to pi, the value of the ratio of a circle to its diameter. Jewish mathematicians flourished in Germany and elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe as liberal political reforms were instituted that allowed them to participate in academia.
Some idea of the centrality of mathematics in European Jewish cultural life can be gleaned from the fact that the Mendelssohns, the Benjamins, and the Weils all boasted prominent mathematicians, as well as composers and philosophers, in their family trees.

And Israel can trace its mathematical lineage to the era predating statehood. As though symbolically planting something of the mathematical spirit of the academic hub Göttingen in the soil of Mandate Palestine, the great number theorist Edmund Landau, visited Jerusalem before his abbreviated life of exile, speaking at the festivities celebrating the newly constituted Hebrew University. Abraham Fraenkel, the eponymous co-creator of the system of axioms commonly employed to serve as a logical foundation for mathematics, also made his way to the Hebrew University, becoming an important scholar and mentor there.

Even with early talents, Israeli mathematics has now long outgrown its formative years, having spawned several generations of homegrown researchers in the field. Fields Medal winner Lindenstrauss (who declined to be interviewed for this piece) is the son of mathematician Joram Lindenstrauss, an eminent figure in his own right. Robert J. Aumann, a colleague of Lindenstrauss’ in the mathematics department of Hebrew University, won the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics for his results in game theory. The depth of Israeli mathematics was showcased at the Congress of Mathematicians meeting in Hyderabad, India, where Israel was overrepresented among the lecturers chosen to address the gathering, a prestigious invitation in its own right.

“When you’ve been invited, you’ve really made it,” said Alex Lubotzky, a colleague of Lindenstrauss’ at the Einstein Institute of Hebrew University. “It also gives an idea of where the current leadership in mathematics is, and by that standard Israel ranks alongside traditional powerhouses such as the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany. In mathematics, Israel is a giant.”

Lubotzky attributes part of that success to Israel’s ability to retain a large number of the mathematicians who come up through its system. Notwithstanding the temptation of offers at leading institutions abroad, many of the best elect to stay in Israel. “It’s a cultural tradition,” Lubotzky said. “We learned Talmud for so many years without expecting it to be profitable. We studied because it was intellectually important.”

Lindenstrauss’ work, like that of many of the greatest mathematicians, has in part consisted of applying the results from one area, in this case the study of dynamical systems and their long-term behavior, to an apparently dissimilar branch of study, in this instance number theory, which aims to pin down various non-obvious relationships among numbers, particularly prime numbers.

Efim Zelmanov, a Russian-American Fields Medalist who often visits Israel, invokes the image of mathematics as a tower, as one must ascend from lower floors in order to advance to more sophisticated topics. “Elon is working in an incredibly abstract and complicated area, even for mathematics,” he said. “If math is a tower, he’s on one of the top floors, and the higher you get, the harder it is to explain.”

Roy Abrams has worked as a journalist and a communications consultant specializing in healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

The Singers had been family friends since I was 10 years old, when my mother interviewed Isaac for an article in the Washington Post. He and I struck up a friendship, and subsequent invitations for tea and living-room chocolates in his apartment in Surfside in Miami Beach became one of the highlights of my Jewish education. I remember one afternoon in particular, when I brought along my Torah portion to rehearse for him and his wife, Alma. Isaac recited his own Torah portion along with mine—as if it were a Jewish opera or a call and response prayer. I remember being impressed that more than six decades after his own bar mitzvah, Isaac was able to recite every word from memory.

My mother and I regularly met Isaac at a drug store soda fountain in Surfside, for his favorite food—grits, which probably reminded him of kasha—while I had a grilled cheese and fries that he and I would share. “I think we merge with the life of the universe,” he once told me, during a conversation about life after death. “When a bubble bursts over the ocean, the water in the bubble falls back into the sea. It goes back to its source. It really does not disappear.”

Several years after Isaac has passed, I received a call from Alma—we both lived in Manhattan by then, she as a widow and me as a graduate student—asking for help. She needed someone to sort through all the clothes she still kept in their apartment at Broadway and 86th Street. As compensation, she offered to give me one of her husband’s typewriters—a gift of extraordinary meaning to an aspiring young writer who had learned so much about life at a young age from his books. What might it be like to roll Rodin’s sculpting tools in your hands, or to hold Marc Chagall’s surviving brushes over a blank canvas? Wouldn’t it be inspirational to play a few bars on Larry Adler’s favorite harmonica, or forcefully connect with a strong chord or passage on Rachmaninoff’s writing piano?

“There are three,” Alma said matter-of-factly of the typewriters. “One of them you can take with you after we’re done.”

It occurred to me that it might make more sense for her to donate them to a museum or a university library, but I knew I’d be an excellent caretaker. And admittedly, I hoped having Isaac’s typewriter in my modest apartment on West 113th Street might serve as a sort of talisman or magnet to draw some of the complicated, mysterious women he had written about so vividly in Enemies, A Love Story and The Magician of Lublin.

***

I passed through the massive gated archway on the Belnord’s south entrance and went up to her apartment. Alma came to the door slowly and didn’t smile as she greeted me. She was older than I had remembered, and her face seemed frozen in a frown of resignation and loneliness. A pang of guilt reminded me of the other reason I had volunteered for this assignment. I had walked past this enormous stone building on West 86th Street nearly every day on my way to what I still called “the 1/9” and had often seen Alma pulling a wire cart full of groceries and other sundries as I rushed to catch the subway. Had I not been habitually racing to wherever I needed to be in those days, I would have stopped to help, I reasoned.

But this Saturday would be different. I would be there for as long as Alma needed me. After an obligatory plate of prune pastry and marzipan, she explained that this was going to be a disposal operation, rather than a sorting-and-packing job or prep work for a charitable donation.

“You don’t want to save everything?” I asked, puzzled.

“I did save everything,” she replied flatly. “How much longer must I keep it?”

Several people had apparently made promises to stop by and cart off whatever she had left to various organizations, but they never arrived, and Alma had gotten tired of waiting; she wanted everything out.

“You can take whatever we don’t throw away,” she said.

She then beckoned me to follow her into a room that was already piled high with turquoise seersucker jackets, blue rubber tennis shoes, and old, worn straw hats. Ah, the straw hats with turquoise blue bands! They seemed a part of a blue-and-white uniform Isaac wore in his days of walking in the ocean breezes of Surfside. Could a man’s life be reduced to this? A stack of hats, a pile of socks, and some frayed undershirts?

“You should try this jacket,” Alma said, attempting to drape one of his seersuckers over my shoulders. Alma seemed to want to believe that his jackets would fit like the proverbial father’s hand-me-downs but, alas, it was at least two sizes too small. The jacket, along with everything else that didn’t fit—shoes, slacks, belts, and even his undershirts—went into the trash bags unsorted, in armful after armful for the garbage truck.

As I helped gather everything for the garbage collectors I thought about happier days with Isaac and Alma in their sunny Florida living room, where he and I would ponder the meaning of the universe, Spinoza’s teachings, and ghosts. But on this lonely Saturday afternoon in the New York present, there were no philosophical discussions of metaphysical reality. Only the sad and halting “yes” or a “no” in regard to what should stay and what should go among the remnants of a man who regaled millions with stories of Old World dybbuks, malevolent spirits, and often rakish protagonists visiting their complicated, passionate mistresses.

In that room a passage from The Cafeteria, one of Isaac’s short stories, came to me:

“I have been moving around in this neighborhood for over thirty years—as long as I lived in Poland,” he had written. “I know each block, each house. There has been little building here on uptown Broadway in the last decades, and I have the illusion of having put down roots here. I have spoken in most of the synagogues. They know me in some of the stores and in the vegetarian restaurants. Women with whom I have had affairs live on the side streets. Even the pigeons know me; the moment I come out with a bag of feed, they begin to fly toward me from blocks away.”

“What would they think of him now, reduced to a pile of undershirts?” I thought, as I glanced around the room for the typewriters.

As the afternoon wore on, I wondered if the belongings of someone whose work had been translated into so many languages and whose visage had been memorialized in enormous caricature on a wall of the Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street should be better preserved—or at least acknowledged with a prayer for such things. Was there a yizkor I could say after tying up the twist-tie on each bag?

Had his spirit been present in the room that day, Isaac might’ve simply shrugged. He had told me many times in my youth that “women are the only people who take life seriously. Men know it’s a joke.” The day’s purge was the wish of his widow, who had certainly earned the right to make such decisions. Alma had supported Isaac in the early days when they were first married by working as a salesgirl at Lord & Taylor while Isaac stayed home to write. She had also stayed with him over the years despite his detachment while writing and in defiance of his other romances. “Ours is a real marriage,” I remembered him once telling my mother.

Alma interrupted my reverie: “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Sure,” I said.

***

Several hours later, I finally stumbled across the typewriters in a closet. There was an old Royal with many of its keys mashed down and its teeth all jumbled and seemingly fused together. There was a second, white plastic manual typewriter that looked like it might be a starter toy or somebody’s idea of a “portable” device back in the 1970s. And finally, there was a beige IBM Selectric that used a center-strike ball.

Noticing my lingering fascination, Alma sighed heavily and told me that the typewriters had already been promised to others and that she was sorry she could not let me have one after all. I was unable to hide a twinge of surprise.

“Really?” I asked. “Not even the mangled old Royal with its snarled keys?”

I stared at the typewriters half-expecting them to emanate shafts of light and spiritual energy, like the lost Ark of the Covenant. Without possessing one of them, how would I ever be empowered by Isaac’s mystical literary powers and be energized with whatever charisma had made him such an intriguing figure to so many people?

But the situation itself was the prize—a turn of events straight out of one of Isaac’s own short stories: A young man, a writer even, is crushed to learn that some things are forever out of reach, that promising ventures often have disappointing outcomes, and that so many journeys that should lead on to fortune take the brave and fearless down winding roads to unhappy endings. I had wanted to take possession of a mystical object that would afford temporal (and possibly libidinous) benefits by mere ownership, but, at the end of the day, I saw much more clearly how our experiences and setbacks inform truly great works of art.

“I see,” I said, trailing. “No problem.”

What else could I say to the widow who had been through so much?

As I walked east along Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard toward Central Park, it occurred to me that I would have to seek out experiences to generate my own stories, buy my own seersucker jacket—one that fit—and be on the lookout for the mysterious women living along the side streets. I reflected also that, in any event, Isaac had actually composed many of his best fables and universal allegories while sitting on a couch, writing longhand in pencil.

Reed Martin is the author of The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn’t Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film and a former business case writer in the Global Research Group at Harvard Business School.

The Nobel Committee’s official biography of Singer, who won the literature prize in 1978, sums up this view perfectly: He wrote about “the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition.” One commenter recommending Singer’s stories in a web forum puts the basic idea more naively: “If I could have chosen a grandfather, I would have chosen this man for the stories alone.”

Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that Singer, far from being gentle and grandfatherly, was as shockingly modern a writer as Dostoevsky. He is a chronicler of spiritual disintegration, exploring the devastating effects of appetite and passion—even of thought itself—on souls unprotected by faith. When devils appear in his work—as in the great story “The Gentleman From Cracow”—they are not quaint folk-devils, but figures of genuine, terrifying evil. And in his post-Holocaust ghost stories, like “A Wedding in Brownsville” and “The Cafeteria,” he seems to transcend parable, as if only the literally incredible—a party full of murdered Jews who don’t know they are dead, the appearance of Hitler in a Broadway café—could be adequate to the unbelievable truth.

The Magician of Lublin may not exactly be “a lost classic,” as the cover of the new paperback claims—it went through several editions in the 1960s and 1970s and was even made into a movie in 1979, starring Alan Arkin. But its republication is still very welcome, because the novel is one of the clearest examples of the ways this urban, intellectual, 20th-century writer makes use of the materials of the Jewish past. Take the title, which sounds like it could be a Hasidic folk tale about a wonder-working rabbi. In fact, Yasha Mazur, the title character, is a magician in the sense that Harry Houdini was a magician; he is an acrobat, contortionist, and escape artist, who performs at theaters around Poland while he dreams of making it big in Western Europe. Another way of putting it is that he is an impostor, using sleight-of-hand to show people the kinds of miracles they so desperately want to believe in.

In this way, Singer makes clear, the magician is a stand-in for the novelist, whose powers of imagination are also a kind of secular enchantment. And Yasha serves Singer in much the same way that Moses Herzog served Saul Bellow in Herzog, a novel published a few years later: as a surrogate self, a way of turning his own experiences and reveries into fiction. Certainly the plot of The Magician of Lublin is one that must have resonated personally for Singer, since it is substantially the same as those of Enemies: A Love Story and Shadows on the Hudson: A man suffers a spiritual crisis as he juggles love affairs with three different women.

When we first meet Yasha, he is at home with his wife, the pious Esther, who “wore the customary kerchief and kept a kosher kitchen; she observed the Sabbath and all the laws.” But, crucially, she is unable to have children, and Singer makes much of the fact that Yasha has never assumed a father’s stake in the community. He remains a kind of overgrown child himself, only dropping in on Esther for a few days between performing tours. And once he is back on the road, his assistant Magda, a Polish Gentile, doubles as a common-law wife—so much so that her mother treats Yasha as practically a son-in-law.

As the novel opens, however, we learn that this comfortable quasi-bigamy has been upset by Yasha’s love for a new woman, Emilia, a professor’s widow who lives a precariously genteel life in Warsaw. It is clear, in the way of a fairy tale, that each of these women also represents a fate: If Esther is Jewish tradition and Magda is artistic bohemia, Emilia represents bourgeois striving. Unlike Yasha’s other lovers, she will not sleep with him until they are married, and she will not marry him unless he converts to Catholicism, takes her away to Italy, and works toward becoming famous and respectable.

The plot, which unfolds over a few days, is driven by Yasha’s uncertainty about which woman, and which life, he wants. There is also the further complication that, to make Emilia’s dreams come true, he will need to get his hands on a large sum of money. For the most part, the book consists simply of Yasha’s restless roaming through the city as he tries to make up his mind. This gives Singer the chance to imagine the Polish capital in the 1870s, in the process of transforming itself into a metropolis:

In Warsaw, wooden sidewalks were ripped up, interior plumbing installed, rails for horse trolleys laid, tall buildings erected, as well as entire courtyards and markets. The theaters offered a new season of drama, comedy, operas, and concerts. … The bookstores featured newly published novels, as well as scientific works, encyclopedias, lexicons, and dictionaries.

As he goes from apartment to tavern to synagogue, Yasha also keeps up a frenetic internal debate. Like Bellow, his contemporary and sometime translator, Singer makes a middle-aged man’s joyless womanizing a symptom of a deeper spiritual crisis. In the first few pages, he contrasts Esther’s piety with her husband’s skepticism: “Yasha spent his Sabbath talking and smoking cigarettes among musicians. To the earnest moralists who attempted to get him to mend his ways, he would always answer: ‘When were you in heaven, and what did God look like?’ ” It is a mocking question, but also, as the book unfolds, a deadly serious one. For it becomes clear that Yasha’s lusts are the product of boredom and despair: “Like a drunkard who drowns his sorrow in alcohol, he thought. He could never understand how people managed to live in one place and spend their entire lives with one woman without becoming melancholy. He, Yasha, was forever at the point of depression.”

But if Yasha is unable to commit to Esther, or to his ancestors’ beliefs and way of living, he is unequally unable to commit to Emilia and break with his inherited conscience. He changes his mind about God and Judaism literally from one page to the next. When he stumbles into a prayerhouse and puts on tefillin for the first time since adolescence, he is filled with a sudden sense of God’s presence: “Yes, that there were other worlds, Yasha had always felt. He could almost see them. I must be a Jew! he said to himself. A Jew like all the others!” So ends chapter six; as chapter seven begins, he starts to wonder, “Why all the excitement? What proof is there that a God exists who hears your prayers? There are innumerable religions in the world, and each contradicts the other.”

Yasha’s ambivalence finally takes a concrete toll. In a rush of manic self-confidence, he decides to break into a miser’s apartment, where he knows there is a fortune hidden. But whether it is a sign from heaven or the revenge of his superego, all his dexterity deserts him. Not only does he fail to get the money, he breaks his leg jumping from the second-story balcony. The last part of the novel is colored by Yasha’s increasing pain, and his reckless refusal to get the leg treated—as if he is half-consciously willing himself to die, as the only possible escape from his quandary. “His fingers had become white and shrunken, the tips shriveled like those of a mortally ill person, or of a corpse. It was as if his heart were being crushed by a giant fist,” Singer writes.

As it turns out, the novel has a different ending in store for Yasha. His sins will be punished by death, but not his own; and the guilt of this culminating tragedy will drive him into an act of penitence that recalls both the legends of the Baal Shem Tov and the stories of Kafka. The dark power of The Magician of Lublin is nowhere clearer than in its concluding message—that, for a modern man, to return to God may require a decision as violent and frightening as any crime.

But it is also true that the excitement of the Oslo peace agreements culminated in the second intifada, and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza brought thousands of Hamas missiles directed at southern Israel. Maybe then the problem is not that Israelis don’t want peace, but that the context into which they have been forced is fatally flawed. So, why do Western diplomats and policymakers keep pursuing the same formulas even though the evidence of failure is plain?

For answers I went to visit Robert Aumann, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for economics whose work in game theory, or interactive decision theory, is a formal analysis of repeated games. “Repeated games model long-term interaction and account for phenomena such as altruism, cooperation, trust, loyalty, revenge,” Aumann said in his Nobel lecture, “War and Peace.” If anyone could explain the repeated failure of the Middle East peace process, I thought, it is a Nobel laureate who actually lives in the region and who has experienced the results of diplomatic failure in his daily life.

“I want peace,” Aumann told me in his office at the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University, where he has taught since 1956, after obtaining his doctorate from MIT. “I am not a proponent of greater Israel. I’m for the two-state solution, or something like that. But what we are doing does not promote that.”

“I want peace,” he said, pausing for effect, “not peace now.”

The 79-year-old German-born Israeli still speaks English with a New York accent—he graduated from City College in 1950—and it is a little strange to hear him ask his assistant for help translating Hebrew words into English every now and again. This is a small office for a Nobel laureate, but it befits the modesty of a man who lost a son in one of Israel’s wars and a wife to cancer.

Aumann stood and walked me over to his chalkboard, where he showed me a quote from a fellow Nobel winner’s acceptance speech in Stockholm: “The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it.” “That’s Barack Obama,” Aumann said, nodding appreciatively. “Smart kid.” Aumann then commented on the talk about Obama being unfriendly to Israel, calling the idea only marginally true. “There’s always a lot of pressure on us coming from Washington, for the last 50 years,” he said.

Aumann, who wears a long white beard and a kippa, is an observant Jew whose skepticism regarding the peace process has put him on the right side of Israel’s political spectrum and made him controversial in academic circles—for using his scientific research to support his politics. Of course, the other way to see it is that Aumann’s politics are shaped by the facts his research makes plain.

Aumann’s analysis of repeated games explains how cultures build systems that allow them to function reasonably smoothly. The problem is when one player does not understand the sort of game being played. For instance, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli peace process, Aumann believes that the problem isn’t that the Israelis and Arabs don’t want peace, but rather that the Israelis and their U.S. patron believe they are playing a one-time game whereas the Arabs see themselves as playing a repeated game. Jerusalem and Washington are in a hurry to conclude negotiations immediately, whereas the Arabs are willing to wait it out and keep playing the same game. The result is that Israel’s concessions, or the desire to have peace now, have brought no peace.

What Aumann is getting at is what he called in his Nobel lecture “one of those paradoxical upside-down insights of game theory.” Of course, poker players are familiar with the principle: Don’t show your hand with chips still on the table. “For repetition to engender co-operation, the players must not be too eager for immediate results,” Aumann said in his lecture. “The present, the now, must not be important. If you want peace now, you may well never get peace. But if you have time—if you can wait—that changes the whole picture; then you may get peace now.”

In Aumann’s view, the post-Oslo period shows that Israel’s behavior leaves it at a serious disadvantage in a repeated game. “In games that repeat over time,” Aumann wrote in an article called “The Blackmailers’ Paradox,” “a strategic balance that is neutral paradoxically causes a cooperation between the opposing sides.” Aumann offered the example of two men forced to split $100,000. Person A assumes that they will split it evenly and is astonished when Person B explains that he will not accept anything less than $90,000. Afraid that he will leave empty-handed, A relents and takes one-tenth of the money. In this situation, A acted as if this were a one-time game, but had he understood it as a repeated game and refused the split so that both he and B walked away empty-handed, he would have shown for future reference that he was every bit as determined as B. This in turn would make B more willing to compromise. “Likewise,” Aumann wrote, “Israel must act with patience and with long-term vision, even at the cost of not coming to any present agreement and continuing the state of belligerence, in order to improve its position in future negotiations.”

Game theory, Aumman explained to me, “has to be borne out by history and historical evidence.” One might add that it is also borne out by other human experiences, like commerce. In the Middle Eastern souk, as the Arab novelist Abdul Rahman Munif once observed, showing your interest in an item immediately triples the merchant’s price. And yet, as Aumann explained to me, “Middle Easterners are no different than anyone else in the world. Game theory is based on the idea that people react to their incentives, and you should be aware that the other party reacts to its own incentives. The other side does not always agree with you or share the same goals.”

To take another example, consider World War II. Aumann remembered his family fleeing Frankfurt in 1938 when his father understood what was on the horizon. “It was Chamberlain who brought war, not Hitler,” Aumann said. If both Chamberlain and Hitler wanted peace, the difference was that Hitler’s vision of Germany at peace included it possessing large chunks of Central Europe. “Hitler was furious when the British declared war,” Aumann said. “And he was right to be. Chamberlain had sent the wrong message.” If Chamberlain had wanted peace he would not have indicated with the Munich Agreement that Hitler was free to have the rest of Czechoslovakia as well as the Sudetenland. That the British eventually drew the line with the invasion of Poland and decided to make war went against the rules of the game as Hitler and Chamberlain had played it up to then. For another example in the Israeli context, Aumann told me to consider the Second Lebanon war. “Nasrallah said, had he known how the Israelis were going to react, he never would’ve started it,” Aumann said. In Nasrallah’s eyes, the withdrawal from Gaza had given him free rein to act with impunity, and it was Israel that had stepped outside of the rules of the game.

“The way to make peace is to make your intentions clear,” Aumann told me. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza brought not only the second Lebanon war but also the bombardment of southern Israel and most recently the Mavi Marmara incident. To explain what was wrong with the Gaza withdrawal, Aumann drew on an unusual source for a scientist, the Bible, quoting Jeremiah 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”

God’s people, according to Aumann’s interpretation of the passage, have done two stupid things—not only did they abandon God but they also worshipped broken idols. “It’s one thing to do something unconscionably bad,” Aumann said. For him, an expulsion that uprooted thousands of people who have yet to get their lives back in order was “unquestionably immoral.” “If it brings the peace,” Aumann said, “if the ends justify the means, that’s one thing, but this doesn’t even achieve the means. It was morally wrong and strategically stupid. The expulsion from Gaza is unprecedented. Jews have been expelled throughout history, but we own the dubious distinction of being the first people to have expelled ourselves. Never before had this happened, and it led to disaster. Our standing in the world was not improved. We didn’t get sympathy. We get sympathy when we act decisively—after Entebbe, Osirak, a lot of sympathy came after the Six Day war.”

When policymakers and analysts use the same sort of examples to draw the same historical conclusions, they’re dismissed as right-wing ideologues, and Aumann has endured the same treatment. The Nobel committee nonetheless realized he’d hit on a truth that explains a fundamental aspect of who we are as political beings—or who we are when we are most human, sitting across the table from our neighbors trying to figure out how to live together. The paradox is that there can be no co-existence if one person isn’t willing to negotiate as hard as the other. The appeaser will always be swallowed up and simply cease to exist. It is stubbornness rather than the willingness to make immediate concessions that brings about successful negotiations. In other words, if you want peace, prepare for war.

While Jews, who are only around 0.2 percent of the world population, have won a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences, Muslims, who are one quarter of the world population, have won only a handful, even by the most generous accounts. And while relative to its size, Israel’s tiny academia has been the world’s leading Nobel power over the past decade, Arab universities have yet to produce their first Nobel laureate.

Shavit challenges what he calls a “conventional explanation” for the imbalance—“Jewish genius,” itself a controversial conception—asserting that this x-factor can be broken down into a combination of Jews’ traditional commitment to education, and their concentration in “modern” societies that foster openness to the “greater world” and scientific exploration. “Remove one part of this equation—heritage or modernity—and the ‘Jewish genius’ vanishes,” says Shavit. In fact, he fears that as secular Jews move farther from their heritage and observant Jews becoming increasingly cloistered, the well of Nobel Prize-winning Jews will dry up.

As for Muslims, Shavit blames “a monopoly of the spiritual and the metaphysical” over the rational and scientific in many Arab nations. “Science can only flourish in a culture that does not recognize any taboos and constantly doubts creeds of all sorts,” he says. Meanwhile, “Contemporary leading Arab universities produce books and essays that depict Darwin, Freud, Marx and other brilliant modern minds as part of a Jewish conspiracy to bring about the downfall of humanity.” As a result of this intellectual isolation, he suggests, “the first Muslim affiliated with a Middle Eastern university to win a Nobel Prize will be an Arab-Israeli.”

Muslims, Jews and the Nobel Prize [JPost]

Herta Müller Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature [NYT]

Amos Oz Tops Betting for Nobel Literature Prize [Monsters and Critics]