There is No Science Without Fancy, and No Art Without Facts
Science means curiosity. It means open hearts and open minds, a passion for discovery, wherever it may lead. But it also means scrutiny. Rigorous, untainted, brutally honest inspection. And a willed surrender to evidence. What exists out there, how we got here, the limits of understanding – all are beyond our control. But science provides a powerful tool to learn what is possible. And with that knowledge to forge a better world.
Over millennia, humans have probed, explored and questioned. They have used spirits and gods and philosophy to explain what they’ve encountered and observed. And as a method was gradually developed to carefully observe and extract trusted knowledge, natural laws began to be described, facts were distinguished from fictions, and what we call science emerged.
Except that science is more than just a method of observation and deduction. It is more than a series of hypotheses guided by reason and framed in ways that can either be proved or disproved. Science, more broadly, is really a way of looking at, and acting within, our world. Rather than a mere body of information, science is a culture.
The culture of science has been central to the open society Jews sought to build as they returned to the Land of Israel after millennia. In his foundational book Altneuland, the nineteenth century founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, designated a key role for science and technology in the formation of the state he envisioned, and in their rhetoric and actions subsequent leaders followed suite. In the midst of the War of Independence, the first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, dedicated a surprising amount of time and effort to creating a Scientific Council in the nascent, war-torn country. And when independence was achieved, Israel offered Haim Weizmann, a Zionist leader who was also a world renown chemist, to become its first President. (Albert Einstein was offered to become its second, though he politely declined).
During its founding decades, Israel placed cultural importance, and significant material investment, in creating leading academic institutions and knowledge-based industries. High-tech and bio-tech gradually became the nation’s largest economic sectors, and by the time the term “Start-Up Nation” was coined in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Israeli was globally recognized as something of a high-tech miracle. Alongside applied technology, Israel led the world in scientific publications per capita in mathematics, psychology, neuroscience, physics and astronomy. It now boasts 13 Noble Prizes, of which six are in Chemistry, three in Economics, and one in Literature, as well as a Fields Medal. Science, and technology in particular, remain extolled, and idealized. But times are changing.
Unfortunately, alongside a precipitous fall in standing as measured by international assessment exams for youth, and a troubling hole approaching 40,000 professional teachers of maths, science and English, science culture for young people in Israel how grown extremely thin. A vast majority of children’s books related to science are translated and not produced by local talent, and the majority are instructional or encyclopedic, rather than creative. The number of plays and television series and movies and podcasts and music and dance shows dealing with scientific themes at national venues is miniscule. Meanwhile, dedicated science museums such as The Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, the Garden of Science Museum in Rehovot, and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv, face the double challenge of attracting new curatorial talent while catering to an increasingly less scientifically informed public.
The erosion of Israel's science culture endangers its innovative future, as well as the intellectual and spiritual health of the nation. Reviving this requires more than classroom education—it demands a vibrant cultural ecosystem that makes science engaging and accessible to all sectors of society. Investing in inclusive, experiential initiatives and nurturing creatives to produce original Hebrew- and Arabic-language works can inspire the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs, and thinkers. By cultivating both technical competence and a passion for inquiry, Israel can reinvigorate its legacy of innovation, while returning to the spiritual vision of its founders, and strengthening the unity of the nation.
At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, we have been attuned to the faltering science culture in Israel and have sought to become a player in order to make a difference. In January 2025 we announced the birth of the first national Science and Creativity Hub. The Hub offers creatives from different fields – film, literature, television, music, art, dance, digital worlds - a space and framework for thinking, critiquing, and developing cultural works of high artistic merit that deal with scientific topics in a broad sense, aimed at Israeli children from all sectors, from early childhood to adolescents. The Hub fosters a culture that makes science and technology accessible through creative means while addressing philosophical, historical, and moral aspects of science, technology, and society. By combining academic and creative mentorship, peer learning, hands-on-experience in the field, and professional networking opportunities, the Science Hub hopes to catalyze the production of original content for children from all sectors of Israeli society that nurtures scientific literacy, critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, passion and inclusion among Israel's youth—creating a vigorous and richly creative science culture ecology.
The Hub’s inaugural cohort brought together eight diverse and imaginative projects that approach science through a wide range of artistic languages and cultural contexts. These included a collaboration between a children’s author and a tracker on a book about learning to listen to nature; a comics exhibition on sustainability and environmentalism created for the Orthodox community; a dance work on the concept of gravity for children and parents; a podcast for children aged 8–12 exploring extinction and endangered species; a 35-episode television series on the evolution of technology; an art exhibition examining the mathematics of shapes in nature; a children’s book about butterflies and childhood; and a musical performance for children aged six and up that explores the science behind musical notes. After completing its first year, the hub has already had several projects attract significant institutional interest, including publishing interest in the tracking and butterfly books, interest from the Suzanne Dellal Centre in the dance work on gravity, interest from Kan 11 in the television series on the evolution of technology, and interest from both the Bloomfield Science Museum and the Weizmann Institute’s Davidson Center’s “Garden of Science” in the musical performance. We continue to work toward placing the remaining projects in appropriate cultural homes where they can reach the widest possible audience of children across Israel.
The Science and Creativity Hub rests on a simple yet ambitious premise: that science and culture are not parallel domains, but mutually sustaining forms of human inquiry and expression. By bringing together scientific thought and artistic creation, the Hub opens a space in which knowledge is not only transmitted, but interpreted, imagined, and lived. It invites creators to approach scientific questions not as instructional material, but as sources of wonder, reflection, and meaning—intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical.
Unlike educational frameworks that operate primarily within pedagogical structures, the Hub functions as an independent creative arena. Its aim is not to teach science per se, but to cultivate a cultural language through which science can be encountered as part of the human story. In doing so, it addresses a long-standing absence in Israeli cultural life: the lack of sustained, original, and imaginative works that engage children and youth with science as a formative cultural experience.
The Hub is the first professional framework in Israel devoted to the creation of original scientific-cultural works for young audiences. At its core is a growing community of artists, scientists, and educators who work together across disciplines, media, and institutions, forging new ways of thinking about how scientific knowledge enters public life. Its influence will lay, we hope, not only in the individual projects it supports, but in the broader field it helps bring into being—one in which imagination and evidence, creativity and rigor, are held in productive tension.
Through this work, the Hub seeks to contribute to a renewed science culture that is accessible, vibrant, and deeply rooted in values of curiosity, openness, and intellectual and moral responsibility. It is an effort to restore science to its place as a shared cultural resource, animated by imagination and sustained both by creativity and rigor.
As Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist and writer, so precisely put it:
“There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.”
