Curated category
Jewish atheists
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds.
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes.
- Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud was born with a caul, the thin membrane that sometimes covers a newborn's head, and his mother read it as an omen of a great future.
- Franz KafkaFranz Kafka asked a friend to burn everything he had ever written. The friend was Max Brod, his literary executor, and the instruction was explicit: every…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee…
- Mátyás RákosiMátyás Rákosi ran Hungary's Communist state with a grip so total that, by the late 1940s, no meaningful opposition remained.
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the…
- Taika WaititiTaika Waititi stood at the Academy Awards podium in 2019 as the first person of Maori descent to win an Oscar in a screenplay category.
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)Walter Kaufmann arrived at Princeton University in 1947 as a young philosopher with a freshly minted Harvard doctorate, a dissertation completed in under a…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth.
- Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he…
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer was 26 years old when he published a book that told most of philosophy to sit down and be quiet. Language, Truth, and Logic, which appeared in…
- Anton RubinsteinAnton Rubinstein once told a young Josef Hofmann, "When you are as old as I am, you may do as I do. If you can." That final dare captures the man entirely.