Miriam Lipschutz Yevick was Jewish

Obviously, her name proclaims it. That’s not what I mean. Not long after I’d started reading her memoire, A Testament for Ariela, I was struck: This is the most Jewish book I’ve ever read. It took me awhile to figure out what I was responding to.

The book is very obviously by a Jewish woman who is telling about her life. Her name, “Miriam,” is obviously Jewish, and so with “Lipschutz Yevick.” The second paragraph mentions “the Nazi invasion of Belgium and Holland,” there are Yiddish phrases all over the place, a section on the Seder, a description of the family’s flight from Europe in 1940, all this is obviously Jewish. But that’s not what I was responding to.

As a contrast, consider a Woody Allen movie. Allen is self-consciously Jewish navigating his way in a world of Gentiles. He has the double-consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois first ascribed to African Americans in essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1897: “Strivings of the Negro People.” Allen is always trying to figure out what it means to be Jewish for Gentiles and what it means to be Jewish for himself.

There’s none of this double-consciousness in A Testament for Ariela. Here we have a grandmother reflecting on her life for her granddaughter. Incidentally, both are Jewish. That’s the water in which they’re swimming. To extend the metaphor, Allen is a Jewish fish swimming in a pool (he thinks is) owned by Gentile fish, some of whom, however, think it’s run by a conspiracy of Jewish fish. Yevick is a (Jewish) fish swimming in an ocean full of fish of all kinds. The Nazis, for example, are just fish. Big nasty and dangerous fish, to be sure, but just fish. It’s not their ocean, nor does it belong to any other fishes. It’s just the ocean.

This lack of double-consciousness, in turn, helps me understand something I’d found puzzling. Yevick is keenly aware of the fact that being a woman has hindered her career as a mathematician. When she got her PhD, 1947, there were very few women in the academic world. There weren’t many Jews, either. Maybe a few places, like New York’s City College, were different, and some of the larger state universities, a few in private schools, but for the most part Jews were discriminated against – see the story of one of my teachers, Earl Wasserman. But Yevick never talked about antisemitism in the academy. I couldn’t figure out why.

Now I know, or at least I think I do. She wanted to avoid (potentially crippling) double-consciousness. She wanted to speak in a single voice, strong and clear, Jewish.

I wonder if that’s why she said nothing about her work on holographic logic in the 1970s. She certainly recognized its importance, and continued to write about it for the rest of her life – see, for example, a passage in her 2003 tribute to Agnes Berger [1]. Here and there in Testament she alludes to her ideas that she had yet to develop. Though I don’t know what she was thinking about, I can imagine that she might have been thinking about developing that work further.

She must have been disappointed that it had not found much of an audience. I rather doubt that that disregard had much to do with being either a woman or Jewish. No, she was ahead of her time, which is what I had in mind with my recent article about her in 3 Quarks Daily [2]. Perhaps this disappointment was simply too painful to dwell on, or too distracting.

But she did get one word in, and in a prominent place in the book, its penultimate paragraph. She is addressing Princeton students at a protest in 1970:

You will have to know in depth the nature of a dozen disciplines: medicine, education, architecture, city planning, transportation, food production, the generation of power, pricing mechanisms, local administration, government organization. You will have to read the world both in fictional and mathematical terms: with empathy, the imaginative projection of one’s own consciousness into another human being, and with logic and rational analysis and lucidity and precision. You may come to stand above your society and epoch as one who views an immense doll house, a miniature city: in every room, in every street, in every mind the activities proceed, locally purposeful but not consciously connected to the larger scheme and often collectively random and destructive.

That’s the antepenultimate paragraph. Here’s the penultimate paragraph:

Such a global knowledge can evoke that “holographic awareness” which transcends its interpretation in the mechanical language of recurrent programs. It “holds compact in one” that global vision which continuously reinterprets reality in terms of lived experience. Thus you will assert your superior humanity and do better than the computer.

References

[1] Memoir: To Agnes Berger (1916-2002) and Our Friendship, Newsletter, Association for Women in Mathematics, Volume 33, Number 1, January-February 2003, 7-10.

[2] Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates], 3 Quarks Daily, October 9, 2023, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/10/next-year-in-jerusalem-the-brilliant-ideas-and-radiant-legacy-of-miriam-lipschutz-yevick-in-relation-to-current-ai-debates.html.