A curated collection of Jewish thinkers, scientists, artists, builders, and changemakers, past and present, and the ideas, inventions, and movements they bring into the world.
Bronx-born cardiologist who proved drug receptors exist and uncovered the receptor family through which about half of all medicines act, from beta blockers to antihistamines. Nobel Prize 2012.
“I was fascinated by receptors and what I saw as their potential to form the basis for a whole new field of research just waiting to be explored.”
An American-born surgeon said yes to two sick children from Ethiopia. Thirty years later, his Israeli charity has given more than 8,000 children a healthy heart.
Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and Drew Weissman spent their lives on vaccines, and shared them with the world. Billions of children have grown up healthier because of it.
A tree thriving beside a leaky pipe gave an Israeli engineer an idea. Today his drip irrigation helps millions of farmers grow food with far less water.
57 inventions from 1877 to 2005: vaccines, heart devices, lasers and the building blocks of the internet. 5 were never patented, given freely to the world.
Never patented: Rosalyn Yalow (Radioimmunoassay), Jonas Salk (Injected polio vaccine), Albert Sabin (Oral polio vaccine), Andrew Viterbi (Viterbi algorithm), César Milstein (Monoclonal antibodies).
First country to grant Jews full citizenship, opening the door to modern civic life.
Four papers in one year reshape physics: special relativity, photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, E=mc².
David Ben-Gurion proclaims independence, fulfilling Herzl's vision a half-century later.
Jonas Salk refuses to patent the polio vaccine, putting public health above private fortune.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes the second woman ever confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
For mRNA discoveries that made the COVID vaccines possible, a foundation for the next generation of medicine.
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