Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders (class of 1959) and my late father, Barney Schulte (class of 1932), both graduated from Brooklyn’s James Madison High School. Press accounts about Sanders and Madison have overlooked the fact that it was a nationally ranked academic and athletic high school between its founding in 1927 and the 1960s.
Four Nobel laureates were Madison graduates: Stanley Cohen (class of 1939, medicine), Robert Solow (class of 1940, economics), Gary Becker (class of 1948, economics), and Martin Perl (class of 1941, physics).
Other distinguished Madison Jewish graduates include Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), former senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), Marvin Miller, the first president of Major League Baseball’s players union, singer-songwriter Carole King (born Klein), sports and entertainment entrepreneur Sonny Werblin, and Sandra Feldman, the former head of the American Federation of Teachers.
Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a graduate of Wingate High School (class of 1958), is a third Brooklynite currently serving in the U.S. Senate alongside Sanders and Schumer.
Madison’s four Nobel laureates matches Manhattan’s Stuyvesant HS for second place among American high schools in producing winners of this prestigious international prize. Ranking first with eight laureates is my alma mater, Bronx High School of Science. Unlike Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech, which can draw their student bodies from the five boroughs, Madison has always been a neighborhood high school.
As of 2016, the Nobel contingent from New York City public high schools stands at 42 (37 of them Jews). Thirty-one of the laureates won in the three natural-science categories – physics (14), medicine (12) and chemistry (5).
In total, 11 Jewish-American laureates graduated from a Brooklyn public high school. The seven from schools other than Madison are Jerome Karle, Paul Berg, and Arthur Kornberg (Abraham Lincoln HS); Arno Penzias and George Wald (Brooklyn Tech); Isidor Isaac Rabi (Manual Training); and Eric Kandel (Erasmus Hall).
Dr. Kandel, the Nobel Laureate in medicine in 2000, has written eloquently in a Nobel autobiography about his family’s escaping from Nazi Austria after Kristallnacht in November 1938 when he was nine years old, and arriving in Brooklyn in April 1939:
My last year in Vienna…fostered the profound sense of gratitude I came to feel for the life I have led in the United States…[As] the Yeshivah of Flatbush…did not as yet have a high school[,] I went instead to Erasmus Hall High School, a local public high school in Brooklyn that was then academically very strong…. I applied to Harvard College and was one of two students out of my class of about 1,400 to be admitted, both of us on scholarships!… Even though I was thrilled by my good fortune, I was apprehensive about leaving Erasmus, convinced that I would never again feel the sheer joy I had experienced there.
In fact, when Dr. Kandel was a student in 1940s, Erasmus was one of the finest academic high schools in the country, as is demonstrated by its fourth-place position –behind Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Forest Hills HS in Queens – in producing semifinalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the nation’s venerable research competition for high school seniors.
Former New York Times reporter Joseph Berger’s 1993 book The Young Scientists: America’s Future and the Winning of the Westinghouse documents that 11 of the top 15 producers of semifinalists between 1942 and 1990 were New York City public high schools, and three other Brooklyn schools – Midwood, Brooklyn Tech, and Lincoln – ranked in this elite grouping. (For the last 18 years the contest has been sponsored by Intel.)
Like the Kandel family, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn and his wife, Chaya Mushka, escaped from Nazi-occupied and Vichy-controlled France, arriving in Crown Heights in June 1941. The future Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe also felt immensely grateful to his new homeland, and he used his electrical engineering training to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. (His father-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, had been rescued by the American government from Nazi-occupied Warsaw and arrived in New York City in March 1940.)
