Jewish Recipients of the Kyoto Prize

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Listed below are recipients of the Kyoto Prize who were, or are, Jewish (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 (28% 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)
Robert Langer (2014)

BASIC SCIENCES (21% of recipients)

Noam Chomsky (1988)
Israel Gelfand (1989)
André Weil (1994)
Walter Munk (1999)
Mikhael Gromov ³ (2002)
Simon Levin (2005)
Edward Witten (2014)
Elliott Lieb (2023)

ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY (21% of recipients)

Sir Peter Brook (1991)
Sir Karl Popper (1992)
Roy Lichtenstein (1995)
György Ligeti (2001)
William Kentridge (2010)
Martha Nussbaum⁴ (2016)
Richard Taruskin (2017)
Ariane Mnouchkine ⁵ (2019)

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."
3. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century, by Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2009, p.108).
4. Convert to Judaism.
5. Daughter of French film producer Alexandre Mnouchkine and a non-Jewish mother. Mnouchkine's paternal grandparents, Alexandre and Bronislawa Mnouchkine, were both deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on 17 December 1943, where they were both murdered.