The Jewish brain

Add French physicist Serge Haroche and New Yorker chemist Robert Lefkowitz to the list of Jewish Nobel laureates. Just don’t ask us to explain what the two, who won this year’s prizes in physics and chemistry, respectively — did to merit it. Plus, a hat tip goes to Piotr Pazinski, editor of the Polish Jewish monthly Midrasz, for winning an EU prize for literature for his 2010 novel “Pensjonat” (“Boarding House”), which deals with Holocaust memory. 

Babs bash in Brooklyn

It’s hard to believe that Barbra Streisand, one of the entertainers most synonymous with Brooklyn, has never actually performed in her native borough. But 51 years after launching her career, Babs finally has come home for two concerts aptly titled “Back to Brooklyn.” The performances are being held at the Barclays Center, the newly built arena recently inaugurated by rapper and fellow Brooklynite Jay-Z – and, starting Oct. 19, the new home of the NBA’s Nets. “Brooklyn to me means the Loew’s Kings, Erasmus, the yeshiva I went to, the Dodgers, Prospect Park, great Chinese food,” Streisand said. “I’m so glad I came from Brooklyn — it’s down to earth. I guess you can come home again.”

Andras Kerenyi strikes back

It takes more than a kick to the stomach and some obscenities to scare Andras Kerenyi, president of a Budapest synagogue, into submission. Attacked by two men in their 20s while on the street in his native Budapest last Friday, Kerenyi, 62, followed his attackers while using his cell phone to call police. Officers arrested the two men in an apartment 32 minutes after the assault. But the arrests did not go down smoothly in Hungary’s ultranationalist media. The news edition of Szent Korona Radio — an online, far-right station — characterized the attack as a “response to general Jewish terrorism.”

Larry Greenfield: ‘Make me a match’

Larry Greenfield is a rich man, but it doesn’t seem to have helped the 47-year-old securities trader find his soulmate. The Jewish multimillionaire from New York kvetched to the New York Post about spending $65,000 on six matchmakers over 12 years only to come up empty after 250 dates. Is it so hard to find a “beautiful, thin, smart, Jewish” woman with a “a sense of humor and from New York — but not an ‘alpha,’ ” as Greenfield describes his ideal match? Or is it that Greenfield is the problem, as one of Greenfield’s recent dates suggested.

Perry Brickman’s long memory

Talk about a root canal. Sixty years after Perry Brickman was thrown out of Emory University’s dental school simply for being Jewish, the retired oral surgeon from Atlanta went back to the school on Wednesday to receive an official apology. University President James Wagner offered a public mea culpa to Brickman and other Jewish students who faced anti-Semitism at the school between 1948 and 1961. The apology was in part due to Brickman’s research about Emory’s dark legacy, which he detailed in the documentary film “From Silence to Recognition: Confronting Discrimination in Emory’s Dental School History.”