Israeli citizen and Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman yesterday became the first Israeli to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Nobel Committee chose to honor Kahneman for his unique achievement in applying psychological theories to economic principles. Kahneman becomes the fifth Israeli Nobel Laureate since the founding of the state. The others were Shmuel Yosef Agnon (literature), and Prime Ministers Begin, Rabin and Peres (peace).
At least two other Israelis (David Grossman and Amos Oz) hoped that they might also be chosen for the Nobel Prize today, but in the end it was Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz, who was picked to receive the Literature Prize. He was recognized for his writing that "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." Kertesz, who spent a year as a teenager in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, wrote several books about Holocaust-related themes. "For him," the Prize-awarding Swedish Academy declared about Kertesz, "Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience."
At least two other Israelis (David Grossman and Amos Oz) hoped that they might also be chosen for the Nobel Prize today, but in the end it was Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz, who was picked to receive the Literature Prize. He was recognized for his writing that "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." Kertesz, who spent a year as a teenager in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, wrote several books about Holocaust-related themes. "For him," the Prize-awarding Swedish Academy declared about Kertesz, "Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience."