Word: bernstein
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Explaining the rise of anti-Semitism which has caused such a drop in the last 10 to 15 years, Bernstein-like others familiar with Soviet academic-cites a general rise in discrimination as well as the rise of a number of virulent anti-Semitic mathematicians into key positions within the important Soviet Academy of Sciences. One, for example, has been quoted in a report by Nathanson as saying. "Jewish mathematical is bad mathematics...
...Bernstein himself happened to be one of the luckier of the Jewish mathematicians. Coming into the field in the 1960s, before official discrimination against Jews had reached its current feverish pitch, he was able to complete graduate studies, receiving the equivalent of a Ph.D. in 1972 from Moscow State University. The highest degree possible, the Doctor of Sciences, would have proved next-to-impossible to achieve, recalls Bernstein, but he did manage to land a job with a research group at the university, studying mathematical methods in biology...
...wasn't so hurt by this anti-Semitism as compared to my friends," says Bernstein looking back. "I was settled. I didn't have the opportunity for a doctorate, but that was somehow OK." However, Bernstein ominously adds, "Were I five years younger, the situation for me would have been much different," and he remembers a variety of horror stories of friends who were not able to defend theses or gain positions because of their Judaism...
Despite official ostracism (he was not part of the math department, per se). Bernstein was able to gain a reputation-especially in the West-as one of the top young Soviet pure mathematicians. As Harvard Math Department Chairman David B. Mumford relates it, Bernstein was a student of a Russian mathematicians named I.M. Gelfand, who runs a series of weekly seminars world famous in advanced math circles. Bernstein, like Gelfand's other students, developed a broad facility that ranges "over almost the whole of mathematics," according to Mumford. That breadth-the likes of which is seldom seen in the West...
Harvard had been keeping an eye on this bright young scholar, and when he emerged from Russia in 1981, the decision to offer him tenure was an easy one, says Mumford. But for Bernstein, the decision to leave his country was not quite so simple...