When Einstein Met Kafka
Jewish Contributions to the Modern World
Diego Moldes author Steven Capsuto editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Mandel Vilar Press
Published:30th Oct '25
Should be back in stock very soon
In April 1911, Prague artists, writers, and intellectuals often gathered nightly at the Café Louvre, an intellectual center where music was played and high-level discussions were held. Many of the attendees were German-speaking Jews, such as Franz Kafka and his faithful friend Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Oskar Kraus, Franz Werfel, the mathematician Georg Pick, and a new arrival to the city, thirty-two-year-old Albert Einstein. Is it possible that Kafka and Einstein met and exchanged ideas? Did they influence each other from a philosophical or deep-thinking perspective? In neither Kafka's nor Einstein’s correspondence there is not even the slightest mention of each other. But Einstein and Kafka, two icons of our modern era, serve as the starting point for this book on the enormous contributions in the fields of the empirical sciences, humanities, letters, and arts by individuals of Jewish origin in modernity. In this book, the reader will encounter numerous names in the pages that all spring from the fountainhead of these two antecedents, the Einsteinian and the Kafkian.
While Jews account for 0.2 percent of the world’s population and no more than 2.5 percent of any country except Israel, they have made some of the greatest contributions to Western Culture in diverse fields that range from physics and philosophy to music and art. One register of these contributions is the Nobel Prizes: from their first recipients in 1901, 26 percent of awardees in the Nobel’s six fields — among them, physics, physiology/medicine, and economics — have been Jews. What accounts for the extraordinary breadth of these achievements? This is a question that Diego Moldes examines in When Einstein Met Kafka.
His answers include the history of Jewish culture itself, whether religious or secular, with its emphasis on literacy, learning, and especially inquiry and questioning. Until the European Enlightenment in the 18th century, Jews did not have full citizenship and civil rights — they were barred from universities, from government, and from entire professions. The Enlightenment opened the doors!
Despite the outbreaks of violent anti-Semitism — or what Diego Moldes calls Judeophobia — and continuing discrimination in all Western countries, Jews now had legal rights, and they persevered. In a near-encyclopedic fashion, he profiles just how thousands of individual Jews, by name, made original contributions...
"Diego Moldes chronicles the key Jewish characters who shaped many of the most important areas of Jewish life, be they science, fashion, film, or literature. Both exhaustive and informative, the book is a helpful resource for those looking to study the people, writings, and thinkings of Jews who shaped Western civilization.
Moldes, who is not Jewish, describes himself as an admirer of Jewish culture. This book is just one example of his allyship; he has served as the Executive Director of the Foundacion Hispanojudia (the Hispanic-Jewish Foundation) and as President and co-founder of ONG Associacion Fania (The Fania Association) a group that combats antisemitism and supports Jewish cultural endeavors....
Before discussing individual Jewish thinkers and leaders, Moldes spends over seventy pages answering two important questions: where does antisemitism come from, and how does one define a Jew? These two sections are impressive for their breadth of sources and detail .... Since Moldes is well-read in many languages, even the most educated American readers will encounter new thinkers and names....
After these opening sections, the book turns to the Jews who shaped the modern world. Moving through topics as diverse as the inventions of glass, linguistics, computing, medicine, and sports, the book is full of thousands of names of history's most important Jews ... One can't help remark ... that the world would look very different, indeed much poorer, had these Jews not between around to invent the products, found the companies, and imagine the ideas that we often take for granted....But those looking to appreciate how our world has been shaped by the Jewish people will, after reading this book, marvel at our accomplishments and Moldes' extensive knowledge of them."--The Jewish Book Council Review, by Rabbi Mark Katz, Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid, Bloomfield, NJ and author of several books including The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
"A well-researched, engrossing overview of the Jewish legacy in the modern world. Moldes surveys Jewish contributions to society and culture in this English translation. Their influence ... reflects the sheer breadth of Jewish contributions to human development, from Einstein's groundbreaking advancements in science to Kafka's indelible mark on the arts.
The volume's opening chapters present a broad overview of Jewish history, identity, and persecution; the bulk of the book provides encyclopedic takes on individual Jews who have aided human progress. Chapters are devoted to Jewish contributions to literature, comedy, anthropology, business, computing, and architecture, with profiles of significant figures from French novelist Marcel Proust to social activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein. Global in scope, the work is careful to not only pay attention to the role of Jews in Europe and the United States, but also to the philanthropic endeavors of Brazil's Safra family, the literary legacy of Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman, and the Dannon yogurt empire, built by Isaac Carasso in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Writing not only for Jewish readers, Moldes explicitly addresses non-Jews, hoping to counter what the author believes is an uptick in global antisemitism. The book makes a convincing ... case for the wide array of positive Jewish contributions to the world. Despite Moldes' relentlessly positive assessment of the Jewish influence on modern history, he's nuanced in his treatment of contemporary politics, noting that criticism of Israel "is not necessarily anti-Semitism or even anti-Zionism." Translated from an original 2019 edition published in Spanish, this accessible volume is replete with maps, charts, and other visual elements, The prose is engaging, and the text is accompanied by a wealth of footnotes and a 21-page bibliography...."--kirkusreviews.com, September 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781942134398
Dimensions: 254mm x 177mm x 44mm
Weight: unknown
700 pages