Jewish Recipients of the Kyoto Prize

JINFO.ORG

Listed below are recipients of the Kyoto Prize who were, or are, Jews (or of half-Jewish descent, as noted). The Kyoto Prize is Japan's most prestigious international award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences.

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY (33% of recipients)

Morris Cohen (1987)
John McCarthy ¹ (1988)
Amos Joel, Jr. (1989)
Sydney Brenner (1990)
Michael Szwarc (1991)
Stanley Mazor (1997)
Zhores Alferov ² (2001)
Morton Panish (2001)
Leonard Herzenberg (2006)
Richard Karp (2008)
John Cahn (2011)

BASIC SCIENCES (21% of recipients)

Noam Chomsky (1988)
Israel Gelfand (1989)
André Weil (1994)
Walter Munk (1999)
Mikhael Gromov (2002)
Simon Levin (2005)

ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY (18% of recipients)

Sir Peter Brook (1991)
Sir Karl Popper (1992)
Roy Lichtenstein (1995)
György Ligeti (2001)
William Kentridge (2010)

NOTES
1. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995, p. 23).
2. See The Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, Biographies A-I, edited by Herman Branover (Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998, p. 37). NB: This reference includes biographies of individuals who are both of Jewish and of half-Jewish parentage, but does not generally specify which is, in fact, the case. Alferov's father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, was most likely not Jewish; his mother's maiden name was Anna Rosenblum. See also biography in LENTA.RU, the second sentence of which translates as "His parents - Ivan Karpovich and Anna Vladimirovna - a Belorussian and a Jewish woman, themselves came from the small town of Chashniki in Vitebsk Oblast."