On Monday in Stockholm, the Royal Academy of Sciences will present the Nobel Prize in chemistry to Bronx-reared Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, and the Nobel in economics to Queens-raised Alvin Roth. Lefkowitz, a graduate of the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, and Roth, soon to depart the faculty of Harvard for Stanford, are the 39th and 40th graduates of New York City public high schools to win a Nobel Prize.

Thirty-five of these graduates are Jewish, and two other Jewish laureates were educated in Manhattan private schools: physics winner Murray Gell-Mann, a graduate of Columbia Grammar High School, and economics laureate Robert Aumann, who studied at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School. (Aumann later immigrated to Israel and became a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)

Among these Jewish laureates educated in New York City — who account for nearly 4.5 percent of all 835 individuals to win a Nobel Prize — the overwhelming majority are the children or grandchildren of Eastern European Jews who came to American between 1881 and 1924, during the Great Migration. Isidor Isaac Rabi, the physics Nobelist in 1944, is one of thousands from this historic exodus who made gigantic contributions to America in many fields.

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Growing up on Manhattan's heavily Jewish Lower East Side and in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Rabi graduated from Brooklyn's Manual Training High School in 1916, nearly two decades after Irving Langmuir, a non-Jewish Nobel laureate in chemistry, graduated from the same high school. Barbara McClintock (medicine), Russell Hulse (physics), Frank Wilczek (physics) and Paul Greengard (medicine) are the four other non-Jewish Nobel laureates educated in New York City public schools.

After earning earlier degrees from Cornell and Columbia, Rabi received a doctorate from Columbia and taught at the world-renowned university between 1927 and 1988. An incredible 21 Nobel laureates studied at Columbia and/or taught there. This remarkable clustering resulted from the refusal of other leading universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, to accept more than a small Jewish presence until the 1960s.

Indeed, of the 37 Jewish Nobelists from New York City, 10 received bachelor's degrees from Columbia, nine from City College and five from Cornell. Only four graduated from Harvard, and Princeton and Yale produced just one each. A comprehensive account of this history is provided in Jerome Karabel's "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton."

Rabi also supervised the Columbia doctoral dissertations of six other physics laureates who graduated from a city public high school: Julian Schwinger, Leon Lederman, Martin Perl, Arno Penzias, Leon Cooper and Melvin Schwartz. When he died in 1988, the New York Times' obituary included this remarkable statement from Rabi, the scientific adviser to several American presidents:

"It's a miracle that a sickly child from a Lower East Side poverty-stricken family moved in one generation to where I did. Had we stayed in Europe, I probably would have been a tailor."

Jewish New Yorkers succeeded despite the refusal of Harvard, Princeton and Yale to accept more than a small Jewish presence until the 1960s

Of New York City's Jewish laureates, 32 were born in America between 1915 and 1937, and many were among the 550,000 Jewish Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II.

Others performed crucial scientific research on the homefront. At Los Alamos, Dr. Roy Glauber, another of Bronx Science's eight Nobel laureates (seven in physics), worked with Richard Feynman, the future Nobel physics laureate and a graduate of Far Rockaway High School in Queens, on the atomic bomb.

Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian head of the Manhattan Project during the war, was born to an affluent German-Jewish family in New York City in 1904, and attended the private Ethical Culture/Fieldston School. Oppenheimer, who never won the Nobel, is one of the few German-Jewish New Yorkers who became a world-renowned scientist.

But many German-Jewish New Yorkers were prominent in other fields, including business, law, government and Jewish communal service. By contrast, beginning in the last decades of the 19th century and continuing until Hitler's rise to power, Jews in Germany were amply represented among the country's scientific elite, including more than a dozen science Nobel laureates such as Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrlich.

Baruj Benacerraf, a Nobel laureate in medicine, wasn't educated in New York City public schools, but his incredible life journey brought him to New York City as a 20-year-old. Born in Venezuela in 1920 to a Sephardic Jewish family from