Well, ok, maybe "know" is too strong a term. Nash taught in the economics department at Princeton, where I got my PhD. He joined it back when the heart of the department was a group of Hungarian Jewish super-economists who had escaped and joined Princeton with Einstein. By the time I was a grad student in the 1970s, Nash was already a Chamishite Martian.

Princeton back then still had its share of anti-Semitism. There were aristocratic "eating clubs" (Princeton did not have frats) into which Jews were not admitted. Princeton had only a small fraction of the numbers of Jewish students at comparable Yale and Harvard despite being even closer geographically to the Jewish population centers. An Israeli woman I knew was asked by a preppie why her nose was so normal looking. There were other manifestations of Princetonism. An undergraduate student working as a receptionist made fun of me when I mentioned my own father had not gone to college, but the student later had the misfortune of falling into a principles class I taught. Another student threatened to sic his state-senator dad on me if I did not give him a B.

John Nash at the time was already a nut and spent his days sitting in the lobby of the campus library smoking a smelly see-gar, and all the staff were afraid to yell at him, because he was psycho and had a Nobel Prize, a combination of traits later repeated with Shimon Peres. I guess the only sentence I actually really ever said to him was Yo Asshole Put out the Damn Cigar. (Translation: In Native Philadelphian, YO means My Rebbe will pardon me but...)

Now I mention all of this because of the revelation in the often-reliable Drudge Report, see below, about Nash’s anti-Semitism, a subject that Opie of Mayberry left out of his film romanticizing Nash:

DRUDGE REPORT TUE MARCH 05, 2002 13:51:09 ET

OSCAR VOTERS PAUSE OVER ’BEAUTIFUL MIND’; NASH ’JEW BASHING’ LEFT OUT OF FILM

When Academy voters factor in how the famous mathematician is an anti-Semite, will the Oscar votes add up for UNIVERSALDREAMWORKS at the end of the night?

**Exclusive**

LOS ANGELES -- Producers of the Oscar nominated film A BEAUTIFUL MIND quietly left out all references to John Nash’s anti-Semitic views, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

But in recent days, as final voting for OSCAR approaches, some Academy members are discovering shocking Jew-bashing passages found in the book on which the movie is based!

"Why am I voting for this Jew hater?" a veteran Academy member said earlier this week before voting. "I am a Jew! I feel sick to my stomach."

MORE

Jew Bashing scenes found in the book "A Beautiful Mind: The Life of the Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash" have been completely scrubbed from the film, directed by Ron Howard and staring Russell Crowe -- even though actor Crowe’s picture is featured on the paperback of the biography.

"The root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned (life history) are Jews," John Nash wrote in a letter in 1967. [Noted on page 326 of BEAUTIFUL MIND.]

Author Sylvia Nasar’s repeated references to Nash’s feeling towards Jews were deliberately left off the screen.

"We didn’t want to go there," a production source said. "This is a love story."

OSCAR Ballots must be received by March 19, and the race is on to stop the spread of the damning Nash quotes, which may thwart the film’s chances. [MIND received 8 nominations, including Best Picture, Director and Actor.]

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who won best adapted screenplay from the WGA last week, and is a Jew himself, left out Nash’s direct opposition to the Jewish state of Israel.

Writes Nasar: "Before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, [Nash] explained, he was a left-wing Palestinian Arab refugee, a member of the PLO, and a refugee making a "g indent" in Israel’s border, petitioning Arab nations to protect him from ’falling under the power of the Israeli state.’"

Later when Nash became paranoid and embraced all sorts of strange delusions, he wrote "letters to Newman and others addressed ’Jewboy’. He became obsessed with the state of Israel and talked about ’Krypto-Zionist conspiracies.’"

Producers who also wiped out Nash’s homosexual past for the film were cognizant that the chances of winning Oscar gold would be lessened if their film’s protagonist was a basher of a religion that is disproportionately represented in the Academy voting pool.

Director Ron Howard and Co. apparently opted to create a composite schizophrenic whose illness would not offend the voting public.