Tag Archives: Israel

Jew of the Week: Daniel Kahneman

In Memory of a Nobel Prize-Winning Researcher

Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) was born in Tel-Aviv to Lithuanian Jews who made aliyah from France. His uncle, Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, was the head of the famed Ponevezh Yeshiva. Kahneman spent much of his youth in Paris—including during the Holocaust years under the Vichy regime—before returning to Israel in 1948. He studied psychology and mathematics at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, and later became a psychologist for the IDF, where he developed the standard recruitment interview. Kahneman then moved to the United States to study at UC Berkeley, and earned a Ph.D in psychology in 1961. He returned to Jerusalem to teach at Hebrew University, and was also a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and at Harvard. He researched a variety of fascinating subjects in cognitive psychology, including attention, judgement, memory, biases, happiness, and decision-making. His key conclusion was that people are actually not rational decision-makers, and tend to make counterproductive choices based on biases and preconceived notions. His classic 1998 paper on the “focusing illusion” demonstrates how people tend to overestimate a single factor when predicting happiness. For instance, although studies showed that people across America had relatively the same levels of happiness, people would believe Californians are happier because they overestimated the effects of nice weather. Kahneman is perhaps most famous for his work in integrating psychology with economics, or “behavioural economics”, earning him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Over the course of his career, Kahneman also taught at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and the University of British Columbia. He wrote several bestselling books and was awarded numerous prizes and honorary degrees. Sadly, Kahneman passed away last week. He has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

Words of the Week

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
– Marie Curie

From the Archives: In Memory of Joe Liberman

Jew of the Week: Mikhael Mirilashvili

Pediatrician, Oligarch, Philanthropist

Mikhael Mirilashvili with a glass of air-generated water from one of his Watergen machines

Mikhael Mirilashvili (b. 1960) was born to a Jewish family in Kulashi, Georgia. He moved to St. Petersburg at 17 to study mathematics, then switched to medicine and became a pediatrician. As many new opportunities opened up with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mirilashvili went into business. He started with real estate, then expanded to retail stores, banking, television, oil and gas, and casinos. He owned six casinos in St. Petersburg alone, and his Viking bank is among the city’s most popular. Mirilashvili was a cofounder of Russian social media app Vkontakte, which he sold in 2013 for $1.12 billion. In 2000, his father was kidnapped by a group of criminals posing as police officers. Two weeks after his father’s release, the kidnappers were all found dead. Mirilashvili was arrested for ordering the hit on his father’s captors, and spent eight years in prison. Upon his release in 2009, he moved to Israel and has since invested a great deal in the country, including in Israel’s new offshore gas fields. He is a generous philanthropist, donating millions to ZAKA (of which he was chairman), Keren haYesod, Yad Vashem, the IDF, the World Jewish Congress, the Russian Jewish Congress (of which he is the vice-president), the Torah and Chessed Center for Georgian Jews, as well as Migdal Ohr, an organization started by beloved rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman (known as “the disco rabbi”) to help struggling Israeli youths. Mirilashvili’s funding has allowed Migdal Ohr to support, educate, and care for over 17,000 impoverished and disadvantaged Israeli kids and teens. Mirilashvili also co-founded and owns Watergen, an Israeli start-up that transforms air into clean drinking water, extracted and filtered from humidity. Watergen machines are now found in over one hundred water-starved regions of the world. In previous years, Mirilashvili donated seven such machines to the Gaza Strip, each providing over 2000 litres a day of clean water, powered by solar cells. The machines are still operating in the Gaza Strip amidst the war, providing essential water to Palestinians. Watergen machines are also operating in Ukraine, though Mirilashvili has been falsely accused by the Ukrainians of supporting the Russian invasion. He has dispelled these myths, and reminds people that he was imprisoned for years in a Russian jail, survived several Russian assassination attempts, and has sold off nearly all of his Russian-based businesses. Meanwhile, Mirilashvili established the Israeli-Emirati Water Research Institute in Abu Dhabi (together with Tel Aviv University), and the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Food Security at Ben-Gurion University in honour of his father. Over the years, he has donated millions more to synagogues, hospitals, and Jewish schools, for medical equipment, Torah scrolls, and ambulances, as well as a special fleet of firetrucks to combat forest fires in Israel.

“Jewish Awakening” Causes Global Shortage of Tefillin and Mezuzahs

Three Approaches to the Arab-Israeli Conflict from This Week’s Torah Parasha

Support the #KidnappedFromIsrael Campaign

Words of the Week

The Arab refugee problem was caused by a war of aggression, launched by the Arab States against Israel in 1947 and 1948. Let there be no mistake: If there had been no war against Israel, with its consequent harvest of bloodshed, misery, panic and flight, there would be no problem of Arab refugees today.
– Abba Eban

Jew of the Week: Yair Stern

Israel’s Freedom Fighter

Avraham Yair Stern (1907-1942) was born to a Russian-Jewish family in what is today Poland. The family fled during World War I, and Stern ended up living in a small village in Siberia. At 18, he made aliyah on his own to the Holy Land. Stern joined the Haganah defense organization and took up studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1932, he joined the more right-wing Irgun and trained to become an officer. Stern was also a passionate writer and poet. His lyrics were credited with inspiring and strengthening countless Jewish pioneers in Israel. The Hebrew University was so impressed that they sent him to Italy for doctoral studies. Meanwhile, he travelled around Eastern Europe to convince more Jews to make aliyah and join the Zionist movement. Stern quickly recognized the British as oppressors and foreign colonialists, and argued that as the indigenous people of the land Jews had to do whatever it took to reclaim their ancestral home. When the British released the infamous 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration (allowing only 75,000 Jews to enter over five years), Stern concluded that negotiations and diplomacy with the British was no longer possible, and armed resistance was necessary. At the outbreak of World War II, Stern was actually part of a training program with the Polish Army to train 40,000 Jews to liberate Israel from the British! The Nazi invasion of Poland put an end to that program. Stern eventually broke away from the Irgun and formed Lohamei Herut Israel, “Freedom Fighters of Israel”, abbreviated Lehi, in 1940. Some Lehi members sought to recruit local Arabs in their struggle against the British oppressor. But Stern, having lived through the terrible 1929 Hebron massacre and Arab riots (in which over 130 Jews were slaughtered and hundreds more injured and raped), foresaw that the Arabs would never share the land with the Jews in the long-term. Stern went on to organize attacks on British positions and assassinations of British authorities. His group was commonly referred to as “the Stern Gang”. Stern was shot to death by a British policeman in early 1942. Nonetheless, the Stern Gang continued its activities, and even assassinated the antisemitic Lord Moyne, the highest-ranking British official in the Middle East. These events finally convinced the British to abandon the Holy Land for good, allowing the State of Israel to be proclaimed. Immediately after, the new government of Israel disbanded Lehi. In January of 1949, they granted amnesty to past Lehi members, including future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Though he was only 34 years old when he was killed, Yair Stern is credited with playing an instrumental role in the formation of the State of Israel.

Should Jews Celebrate Halloween?

Orthodox Mother of 10 Worked for 12 Hours to Save Partygoers

Why Are Israeli Soldiers Snapping Up Tzitzit?

Bedouin Bus Driver Saves 30 Israelis

Pro-Palestinian Protestors Ignore History and Pay the Price

Thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Israelis Enlist in IDF

Piers Morgan Interviews ‘Son of Hamas’

Words of the Week

The current Palestinian political economy, influenced far too greatly by the BDS and anti-normalization campaigns, amounts to a corrupt, unsustainable, terror-supporting regime that is disinterested in the economic well-being of its own people and the development of a new state.
– Khaled Abu Toameh, Arab journalist and filmmaker