In just a few years after the war of independence, the Jewish population of what was now called Israel doubled, from 600,000 to 1.2 million. There can have been no time or place on earth where it was easier and more strongly encouraged for a Jewish person newly arrived in a country to assimilate into the local population. And yet, in spirit, Danny did not assimilate. The people to whom he gravitated were all native-born Israelis rather than fellow immigrants. But he himself did not seem Israeli. Like many Israeli boys and girls, he joined the scouts—then quit when he and Ariel decided the group was not for them. Although he’d learned Hebrew with incredible speed, he and his mother spoke French at home, often in angry tones. “It was not a happy home,” says Ginsburg. “His mother was a bitter woman. His sister got out of there as fast as she could.” Danny didn’t accept Israel’s offer of a new prepackaged identity. He accepted its offer of a place to create his own.
What that identity would be was hard to pin down, because Danny himself was so hard to pin down: He didn’t seem to wish to settle anywhere in particular. What attachments he formed felt loose and provisional. Ruth Ginsburg, who was then dating and would soon marry Danny’s close friend, said, “Danny decided very early on that he would not take responsibility. I had the feeling that there was a need within him to always rationalize his unrootedness. A person who does not need roots. To have this view of life as a series of coincidences—it happened this way but it could just as well have happened some other way. You make the best of it within these godless conditions.”
Danny’s lack of need for a place or a group to belong to was especially glaring in a land of people hungry for a place and a people. “I came in 1948 and I wanted to be like they are,” recalls Yeshu Kolodny, a professor of geology at Hebrew University, Danny’s age, whose extended family also had been wiped out in the Holocaust. “Meaning I wanted to wear sandals and shorts rolled up and learn the name of every goddamn wadi [valley] or mountain—and mainly I wanted to lose my Russian accent. I was a little bit ashamed of my story. I came to worship the heroes of my people. Danny didn’t feel that way. He looked down on this place.”
Danny was a refugee in the way that, say, Vladimir Nabokov was a refugee. A refugee who kept his distance. A refugee with airs. And a sharp eye for the locals. At the age of fifteen he took a vocational test that identified him as a psychologist. It didn’t surprise him.* He’d always sensed that he would be some sort of professor, and the questions he had about human beings were more interesting to him than any others. “My interest in psychology was as a way to do philosophy,” he said. “To understand the world by understanding why people, especially me, see it as they do. By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that’s a psychologist!”
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Most Israelis, upon finishing high school, were conscripted into the military. Identified as intellectually gifted, Danny was allowed to proceed directly to university to pursue a degree in psychology. How to do this was not obvious, as the country’s only college campus lay behind Arab lines, and its plans for a psychology department had been killed in an Arab ambush. And so, on a morning in the fall of 1951, the seventeen-year-old Danny Kahneman sat in math class, held in a Jerusalem monastery that served as one of several temporary homes for Hebrew University. Even here, Danny seemed out of place. Most of the students had just come from serving three years in the army, and a lot of them had seen combat. Danny was younger, and dressed in a jacket and tie, which struck the other students as preposterous.
For the next three years Danny essentially taught himself great swaths of his chosen field, as his teachers could not. “My statistics teacher I loved,” Danny recalled, “but she didn’t know statistics from beans. I taught myself statistics, from a book.” His professors were less an assemblage of specialists than a collection of characters, most of them European refugees, who happened to be willing to live in Israel. “Basically it was organized around charismatic teachers, people who had biographies, not just curriculum vitaes,” recalled Avishai Margalit, who would go from Hebrew University to become a philosophy professor at Stanford, among other places. “They had lived big lives.”
The most vivid was Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom Danny adored. Leibowitz had come to Palestine from Germany via Switzerland in the 1930s, with advanced degrees in medicine, chemistry, the philosophy of science and—it was rumored—a few other fields as well. Yet he’d tried and failed to get his driver’s license seven times. “You’d see him walking the streets,” recalled one former Leibowitz student, Maya Bar-Hillel. “His pants pulled up to his neck, he had these hunched shoulders and a Jay Leno chin. He’d be talking to himself and making these rhetorical gestures. But his mind attracted youth from all over the country.” Whatever Leibowitz happened to be teaching—and there seemed no subject he could not teach—he never failed to put on a show. “The course I took from him was called biochemistry, but it was basically about life,” recalled another student. “A large part of the class was devoted to explaining how stupid Ben-Gurion was.” He was referring to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. One of Leibowitz’s favorite stories was about a donkey placed equidistant from two bundles of hay. In the story the donkey can’t decide which bundle of hay is closer to him, and so dies of hunger. “Leibowitz would then say that no donkey would do this; a donkey would just go at random to one or the other and eat. It’s only when decisions are made by people that they get more complicated. And then he said, ‘What happens to a country when a donkey makes the decisions that people are supposed to make you can read every day in the paper.’ His class was always full.”
What Danny recalled of Leibowitz was typically peculiar: not so much what the man had said but the sound made by the chalk hitting the board when he wanted to make a point. It was like a gunshot.
Even at that young age, and in those circumstances, it was possible to detect a drift in Danny’s mind, by the currents it resisted. Freud was in the air but Danny didn’t want anyone lying on his couch, and he really didn’t want to lie upon anyone else’s. He’d decided to attach no particular importance to his own childhood experience, or even his memories: Why should he care about other people’s? By the early 1950s, some large number of the psychologists who insisted that the discipline be subject to the standards of science had given up the ambition to study the inner workings of the human mind. If you can’t observe what is happening in the mind, how can you even pretend to make a study of it? What was deemed worthy of scientific attention—and what could be studied scientifically—was how living creatures behaved.