The Jewish state is viewed widely as a world technology leader, but Israel’s prowess is at risk due to its government politicizing science, and if it continues on that path, it risks dire and widespread consequences.
That’s according to Joel Mokyr, professor of arts and sciences, and professor of economics and history, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., as well as professorial fellow in economics at Tel Aviv University. An Israeli-American born to Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands, he was part of a team that shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Mokyr told JNS earlier this year at the Israeli-American Council’s national summit in Hollywood, Fla., where he was a conference speaker, that Israel and the United States are doing “fine” in science and technology when it comes to the “pure ingenuity, originality, imaginativeness—all those things that make for innovation.”
“We have a great future in front of us,” the 79-year-old said.
But a partisan political atmosphere in scientific funding and research threatens that optimism with an exodus of top-tier talent, according to the scholar.
The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported in late 2025 that about a quarter of Israelis with mathematics doctorates live abroad, and a Tel Aviv University study, released about the same time, suggested that some 90,000 Israelis left the country between January 2023 and September 2024, including hundreds of those with doctorates and medical degrees and thousands of engineers. (It wasn’t clear from the latter study what percent emigrated before Oct. 7.)
In Israel, there’s a “direct intervention of governments in the way academe is run and the kind of decisions that are being made,” Mokyr told JNS. “This is filtered down to things that the government just shouldn’t do, with direct political interventions in pure academic decisions.”
‘Third- or fourth-rate academics’
Mokyr cited Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch’s decision to disqualify the sociologist Eva Illouz from Israel Prize consideration over a 2021 petition she signed asking the International Criminal Court, a stand-alone body in The Hague distinct from the United Nations and to which the Jewish state is not a party, to investigate whether Israel committed war crimes in Gaza.
“In and of itself, this is a fairly minor event. Who really cares if she gets the prize or not?” Mokyr told JNS. “But the fact that the government bothers with these things, and that there is now legislation before the Knesset that allows universities to dismiss tenured faculty for basically political statements that the government may not like, really is a bad sign.”
JNS sought comment from the Israeli education minister and Diaspora ministers. The latter referred JNS back to the former.
Israel risks going down the path of the former Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin’s “sycophants rose to major leading positions in the academic world simply because they kissed up to Stalin, even though they were third- or fourth-rate academics or even charlatans,” Mokyr told JNS.
The Jewish state is particularly vulnerable to the “brain drain” phenomenon due to its size and opportunities for its best and brightest to go elsewhere, according to the Nobel laureate.
“What happens is you can get into some kind of cascading system, in which the very best people leave, because they get offers from Caltech and MIT and Princeton,” he said, of California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
“Then the next best people realize the overall quality has gone down, because the best people have left,” Mokyr told JNS. “Slowly, the system can unravel. It is well known in other historical examples that if you start losing your best people, you may never recover.”
“Once you start losing your best people, you’re not just losing them. You’re losing the graduate student that these people would have trained and the graduate student that their students would have trained,” he added. “This is incredibly persistent.”
Fluid statistics
Yael Katsman, vice president of public relations and communication at Nefesh B’Nefesh, told JNS that brain drain statistics have not been “concretized.”
Nefesh doesn’t generally help Israelis return home, but it created several programs to help fill growing needs in certain sectors by encouraging immigration to Israel from professionals in those fields.
“I know people with different agendas that talk about a ‘brain drain,’” Katsman told JNS. “When you talk to people in actual fields and heads of hospitals, I’m not so sure that they necessarily would look at the situation as that.”
Nearly two years ago, Nefesh and the Jewish state’s health and aliyah ministries created an international medical aliyah program, which brings physicians from around the world to Israel, which is expected to face a shortage in the coming years. Nefesh has also long run a program for North American medical professionals, which helps expedite licensure for immigrants.
Katsman told JNS that the main reason for the shortage of doctors is not brain drain but that many of the doctors from the former Soviet Union, who immigrated during a 1990s influx, are retiring.
The Israeli Health Ministry also sought to “clean up” a problem whereby Israelis were going to Eastern Europe to attend medical schools, which were giving what the ministry saw as a “subpar” education, and then returning to the Jewish state. Those licenses are no longer accredited in Israel, which has also fed into a shortage.
Rivka Carmi, a former president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who is the founding president of the Israeli Medical Association’s Israel Academy of Science, is executive board chair at ScienceAbroad, an Israeli nonprofit that “harnesses the power of senior Israeli scientists living abroad.”
There is an effort to bring U.S. talent, including Jewish doctors and medical students, to Israel, she told JNS.
“We want to give inspiration to people that might think about moving to Israel and wanting to explore the possibilities over there,” Carmi said.
More like China
Mokyr drew parallels between Israel and the United States. In the latter, he said, there is a “growing hostility of the administration to international mobility, foreign students and foreign faculty.”
He noted that U.S. President Donald Trump appointed himself chair of the Kennedy Center in Washington and that the administration has directed national museums on matters of exhibitions and archives. (The Trump administration has said that the Kennedy Center and many other cultural institutions have been mismanaged and partisan.)
“That is not what the government should do. Their role, believe it or not, is to write the checks and then shut up,” Mokyr told JNS. “You really don’t want politicians who are catering to a certain audience. What music should be playing. What plays should be put up by theaters. All those things should be decided by the demand and supply in the market for ideas.”
It’s particularly troubling, according to the professor, when governments interfere in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“Both the U.S. and Israel are becoming increasingly like China, which is technologically sophisticated and scientifically making progress, but there is no freedom in the market for ideas,” he told JNS. “You cannot say anything you want in China, because there will be repercussions if you say something the government doesn’t like.”
“I find that extremely worrisome,” he said.
