The Jewish People make up just .2% of world population. How does a People that makes up virtually zero percent of humanity have such a huge impact on our world?

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Episode Transcript:
Mark Twain wrote, "If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but 1% of the human race. Properly, the Jew ought hardly be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers."
This 1% is a gross exaggeration. The Jewish people today actually make up way less than a percent. We make up 0.2% of the world's population. Now, math was never my strong point, but if we're going to round 0.2 to the closest number, that's zero. The Jewish people make up just 0% of world population. Now, how does a people who make up just 0% have such a huge impact on the world? As Mark Twain wrote, "The Jew ought hardly be heard of," and yet we cannot escape the fact that the Jewish people have contributed so much to our world. I'm Menachem Lehrfield, and this is Zero Percent, a podcast where we explore the enormous impact a tiny people has made that enhances and affects all of our lives on a daily basis.
We will explore ancient wisdom for modern living. As the second president of the United States, John Adams, said, "I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing nations." Whether you love the Jewish people or you hate them, it is very difficult to deny the impact that the Jewish people have had on the world, that the Jewish people have had on civilizing nations. I believe that we have access to the longest-running case study on success.
Now, as a Jew, I'm so uncomfortable with the topic of Jewish success, and I know many others are as well. Whenever someone begins talking about how successful the Jewish people are, it naturally makes us uncomfortable, but it's hard to deny the numbers. No matter what your definition of success is, the Jew is over-represented. Perhaps the best benchmark of success is the Nobel Prize. It was established by the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel in 1895. Nobel was most well-known for the discovery of dynamite. And at the end of his life, in his will he bequeathed all of his assets to be used to establish five prizes, which we now know as the Nobel Prize.
And they'd go to individuals in recognition of cultural or scientific advances in six categories, literature, chemistry, economics, physics, world peace, and medicine. Between 1901 and 2020, last year, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to more than 900 individuals and organizations. Now, how many of those recipients would you expect to be Jewish? Being that the Jewish people make up just 0.2% of world population, we would expect 1.8 Nobel Prize laureates to be Jewish. That would be the proportionate number based on population. In fact, 208 Jewish people have won Nobel Prizes. 208 is an over-representation of more than 11,500%.
That's huge, but it's not just in Nobel Prizes that we see such over-representation. Look at practically every arena that can be measured. Can you imagine the scientific world without the contributions of Einstein to modern physics or Freud to psychoanalysis or Asimov to robotics? The scientific world would be a completely different place. And let's say you're going to look at finance and economics as your benchmark of success. It's interesting to note that according to Forbes, Jews make up 22% of the world's top 50 billionaires, 33% of the world's top 15 billionaires, and 28% of the top 25, not to mention finance household names like Goldman Sachs, Rothschild, Warburg, Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, Wells Fargo.
What would the world of technology look like without Intel's Andrew Grove and Leslie Vadasz, or Google without Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or Oracle's Larry Ellison, or Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Dell's Michael Dell, Qualcomm's Irwin Jacobs, Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg? And what about medicine? There's an old Jewish joke where a Jewish person is finally elected president of the United States, and he calls up his mother and says, "Mom, I'm the president of the United States. Are you going to come to the inauguration?" And she says, "Well, I've got nothing to wear." So he says, "Ma, I'm going to be the president. I'll get you a dressmaker. She'll make you a beautiful dress. Don't worry about that."
And she says, "Well, I only eat kosher." He says, "Ma, I'm the president. I'll get you a kosher meal." She says, "Well, how am I going to get there?" He says, "Mom, I'll send Air Force One to pick you up. Just come to the inauguration." So she comes, and she ends up at the inauguration and she's standing there on the reviewing stand, and on her left are all the Supreme Court justices, and on the right is the president's cabinet. And the ceremony begins, and her son, the new president, raises his hand as he's about to be sworn into office, and his mother nudges the person next to her and says, "You see that guy with his hand up? His brother is a doctor."
You may be familiar with the stereotype of the nice Jewish doctor, but it comes from somewhere. Throughout the world, consistently on lists of top doctors, you will find Jewish names. And that's not to mention the enormous Jewish contributions to medical research and pharmacology, including the invention of Prozac, Valium, the synthetic fertilizer, radiation, chemotherapy, the artificial kidney dialysis machine, the defibrillator, the cardiac pacemaker, laser technology, not to be confused with Jewish space lasers, the invention of blood transfusions and penicillin, the mammogram, the pill, vaccines against the deadly polio and hepatitis B and measles, not to mention the vaccinating needle itself.
And we can't forget about the enormous impact that Dr. Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, has had in developing the world's first safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. And Dr. Bourla is the son of Holocaust survivors. Today, Israel is on the forefront of medical innovation. Israel is the home to Teva, the world's largest generic pharmaceutical company. Israel is number one in the world for medical device patents per capita. The medical technology that's coming out of Israel is the stuff of science fiction. I don't know if you saw the ReWalk, which was featured years ago in the hit show Glee, but it's basically a bionic robotic exoskeleton which allows paraplegics the ability to walk and even run.
Runners in London and Tel Aviv have actually completed marathons with the ReWalk. Here are paraplegics that thought they would never walk again, and they're running marathons thanks to Israeli technology. The PillCam, which allows doctors to see the inside of the digestive track without any invasive procedures or colonoscopies or anything. You just swallow a pill and they can see the inside of your body. Or this thing called Bio Weld, which is used now instead of stitches or glue, which uses cold plasma, and within minutes, it seals the wound and disinfects it with almost no scarring and no recovery time.
And have you seen this thing called Bio-Retina? It's a technology that restores vision to people blinded by retinal disease. It's basically this tiny implantable device that's inserted into the retina in a 30 minute outpatient procedure, and it turns into an artificial retina that melds to the neurons in the eye. And it charges itself with this pair of glasses that it comes with. And if somebody is blind or visually impaired and that's not an option, there's another Israeli technology called OrCam, which is a camera that magnetically attaches to the side of a pair of glasses. You can barely even see it, and it reads text displayed on any surface, and it can also identify objects or specific faces or amounts of currency or anything that somebody who's visually impaired or blind would need to see.
So it has this discreet earpiece which will basically, through audio, tell you everything that you would be seeing with your eyes. So blind people can interact with their world without the need of somebody else. It really gives them a sense of independence. There are so many successful cancer treatments coming out of Israel, and we can spend hours discussing the impact the Jewish people have had in the world of medicine. But let's say you want something a little lighter. Maybe entertainment is your benchmark of success. Well, if it is, six of the eight biggest Hollywood studios were founded by Jews. And still today, the rolling credits of almost every single movie can be confused for a Hebrew school roll call. It's just Jew after Jew after Jew.

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