Red Buttons, in his classic Roast Routine, “Never Had A Dinner,” quotes Mrs. Einstein: “Oh, shut up, Albert. What do YOU know?”

Not much, apparently.

How else to explain the following:

There are, perhaps, thirteen to fifteen million Jews in a world of six billion people. Jews are so few in number that in a room of 1,000 people representing the world’s population, only two would be Jewish. A comparable sample from the United States would count only twenty-two Jews among 1,000 representative Americans.

In the sciences, Jews have won 22 percent of all the Nobel Prizes ever awarded - 29 percent of the prizes since 1950, after the Holocaust destroyed a third of their numbers. Given their small population, Jews should have earned only one of the 502 Nobels awarded for physics, chemistry, medicine and physiology.

They have won 123. The Fields Medal, awarded to the world’s brightest mathematicians under age 40, is the honor John Nash, of the book and movie A Beautiful Mind had hoped to win. Instead, he took a Nobel Prize in economics as a consolation prize. One-fourth of the Fields Medals winners are Jews.

Encyclopedia Britannica provides its list of “Great Inventions.” Of the 267 individual inventors, more than 13 were Jews, including Zoll (the defibrillator and the pacemaker), Land (instant photography), Gabor (holography), and Ginsburg (videotape). Jews are represented on the list 22 times more than one would expect based on their population.

They are disproportionately counted in most of the arts. Since their respective dates of inception, America’s leading symphony orchestras have been led by Jewish conductors one-third of the time. They have created nearly two-thirds of Broadway’s longest running musicals. Probably one-fourth of the greatest photographers of all time have been Jews, as have 10 percent of the world’s great master architects. Of movie directors who earned Oscars, 38 percent were Jews. In broad artistic recognition, nearly 30 percent of the Kennedy Center honors and 13 percent of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards have gone to them.

As “People of the Book,” the sobriquet Mohammed used to describe them, it is perhaps not surprising Jews have earned 11 percent of the Nobel prizes for literature and 20 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction. Their outpouring of books, screenplays, and newspaper and magazine articles is prodigious.

In education, it is difficult to name an academic discipline in which they have not played a leading role. Certainly Jews have been seminal thinkers in philosophy (Spinoza, Maimonides, Marx), deconstruction (Derrida), economics (Marx, Ricardo, Friedman, Samuelson, Becker, Kuznets), physics (Einstein, Bohr, Gell-Mann, Feynman, Szilard), mathematics (Von Neumann, Mandelbrot, Fefferman, Zelmanov, Erdos), chemistry (Heeger, Kohn, Kroto, Olah), linguistics (Chomsky), paleontology (Gould), medicine (Flexner, Chain, Goldstein and Brown, Salk, Sabin, Prusiner), law (Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Tribe, Dershowitz), anthropology (Boas), psychiatry and psychology (Freud, Adler, Erikson, Fromm, Rapaport, Maslow), sociology (McClelland, Riesman, Glazer, Lipset), and many other fields. Their research and teaching helped shape entire disciplines. They head three of the eight Ivy League schools (down from four several years ago), and Jewish students are 21 percent of all Ivy League students. Any review of the lists of faculty of most schools will evidence a disproportionate number of Jewish teachers. They are, for example, roughly 30 percent of the faculty of the Harvard, Stanford, and Yale law schools.

In politics, they are 11 percent of the United States Senate and 6 percent of the House of Representatives. They were 42 percent of the 100 largest political donors to the 2000 election cycle, and since 1917, when Judge Louis Brandeis was appointed, 17 percent of Supreme Court justices have been Jews. They now hold two of the nine positions.

As economists they are gifted. They have earned 38 percent of all Nobel Prizes for economics and 67 percent of the John Clarke Bates Medals for promising economists under age 40. They were instrumental in the creation of the Federal Reserve System and have headed it for twenty-five of the last thirty-five years.

No better than other human groups? Nothing chosen about them?

Al…I’m afraid your wife was right.

By Steve Levine on May 13, 2008

Vince — we’re in dangerous territory here.

The stats I cited certainly do describe an extraordinary performance by Jews across a wide range of activities over a sustained period of time — a performance far beyond what would be expected, given their meager numbers.

I realize it might be a provocative statement, but by that measure, they have performed better than other groups.

I agree that such performance is not the result of the favoritism of a patriarchal God. No beneficent being would have visited the horrors on the Jews that have befallen them through the ages.

But if, by genetics, you mean the historical emphasis in the Jewish culture on learning, education and achievement, I’d agree that that is behind their superior performance.

By Steve Levine on May 13, 2008