About Mada (magazine)

Mada (magazine)

Mada, whose name is the Hebrew word for "Science," was a Hebrew popular-science magazine published in Rehovot by the publishing arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Its full title was "Mada: A Scientific Newspaper for All." It appeared for some thirty-five years, from 1956 until 1991, and academic surveys of science communication in Israel describe it as the most successful of the country's attempts to publish a printed science magazine for adults. Written largely by members of the academic staff of Israel's universities and edited by leading scientists, it was the central Israeli science-magazine project of the academic scientific community, aimed at the general Hebrew-reading public at a time when few other channels carried science to lay readers in Hebrew.

Publication by the Weizmann Institute

Mada was issued by Mosad Weizmann le-Pirsumim be-Madaei ha-Teva u-va-Technologia, the Weizmann foundation for publications in the natural sciences and technology, attached to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. It appeared as a bimonthly, with a double issue published on occasion. The journal ran to thirty-five volumes over its life. Its subject matter was principally engineering, the exact sciences and the natural sciences, and it carried regular sections devoted to science and technology news and to reviews of books in those fields.

Editors and editorial board

The journal's first editors were Professors Shlomo Hestrin and Ephraim Katchalski, later Ephraim Katzir, who went on to become President of Israel. After them, Dr Miriam Balaban edited the journal. From volume seven, in 1962, until volume thirty-three, the editor-in-chief was Kafai Pines, and in volumes thirty-four and thirty-five the editor-in-chief was Yachin Una. The scientific editor of the journal was Professor Nathan Sharon of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and it is in association with Sharon that academic surveys remember the magazine: the ANU Press history of science communication in Israel calls it "Nathan Sharon's Mada," published six or twelve times a year, with many senior science professors contributing. The editorial council included prominent professors such as Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Isaiah Leibowitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and David Abir of the Technion. Many of the articles were written by members of the academic staff of Israel's universities.

Nathan Sharon

Nathan Sharon (1925-2011) was an Israeli biochemist at the Weizmann Institute, which he joined in 1954 in the Department of Biophysics headed by Ephraim Katzir, becoming a professor in 1968 and later head of the department. He was a leading figure in the research of carbohydrates and glycoproteins for more than fifty years and a founder of the field of glycobiology; he received the Weizmann Prize in 1978 and the Israel Prize in biochemistry in 1994, and was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1992. Alongside his laboratory work he was one of Israel's most active popularisers of science, serving as editor of the "World of Science" broadcasts on Israel Radio, as science and technology editor of the Haaretz newspaper, and as scientific editor of Mada, a combination that made the magazine part of a wider personal project of bringing science to the Hebrew public.

Content and character

Mada addressed the general reader rather than the specialist. Its articles covered engineering, physics, chemistry, biology and the other exact and natural sciences, written by researchers for lay readers in Hebrew, and its standing sections kept readers informed of science and technology news and guided them to new books. A contemporary Maariv article of 17 August 1966 by Avraham Peleg, titled "A Bridge of Paper," described the enterprise in terms of the bridge it built between the scientists and the public. An archive of articles from Mada was later made available through the Snunit educational database, preserving part of its contents for teachers and students after the journal itself had ceased to appear.

Place in Israeli science communication

Surveys of science communication in Israel set Mada at the head of a small and fragile tradition. In the 1950s and 1960s, the survey notes, encyclopedias played an important role in communicating science to the Hebrew reader, and most popular science books published in Israel were translations of English bestsellers; there were very few popular science Hebrew titles during the first decades of the state. Against that background, a Hebrew science journal published continuously by the country's leading research institute, with senior professors as contributors, was an exceptional institution. The survey's judgment is explicit: over the years there were several attempts to publish printed science magazines for adults, and the most successful was Mada.

Successors and the tradition it founded

The tradition Mada established continued through people as much as through titles. Zvi Atzmon, a neurobiologist and poet born in 1948, was a former editor of Mada and of the teenagers' magazine Ladaat before becoming science editor of Galileo, the popular-science magazine founded in 1993 that was Israel's most successful popular-science magazine during the 1990s and continued until 2016. Educational magazines for children and teenagers formed the other branch of the same culture: The Young Technician from 1945 to 1965, Ladaat for teenagers from 1970 to 1991, the environmental children's magazine Pashosh from 1976 to 2004, and others. Mada's own run ended in 1991, the same year Ladaat closed, closing the era in which the Weizmann Institute's journal had anchored Hebrew popular science.

The print media context

Mada's disappearance in 1991 preceded the deeper print crisis that later shaped Israeli science publishing. The ANU survey records that Galileo ceased publication in 2016 as a result of the print media crisis, that the quarterly Odyssey was another victim of the same crisis, ending in 2015, and that Scientific American Israel moved online after its 2002-2017 print run, while new media, from the Hayadan website founded in 1997 to podcasts, blogs and YouTube, became a major force in science communication in Israel. Read against that later history, Mada's thirty-five years stand out: no later Hebrew science magazine for adults matched its combination of institutional backing, academic authorship and longevity.

Legacy

Mada was published in past decades from Rehovot, in Israel's Central District, and it is remembered in the reference literature simply and completely: a popular-science journal issued by the Weizmann Institute of Science, which no longer appears. Its thirty-five volumes documented Israeli and world science for the Hebrew reader across the second half of the twentieth century, from the young state's years, when the journal's first editors included a future president of Israel, to 1991. As the central science-magazine project of Israel's academic community and the most successful adult science magazine in the country's history, it remains the starting point for any account of how science was communicated to the Israeli public in print.

The journal in volumes

The bare chronology of Mada conveys its weight. It began in 1956 and reached thirty-five volumes before it ended in 1991, appearing every two months, sometimes in double issues that combined two numbers in one binding. Its editorship passed in an unbroken line from professors of the founding generation, Shlomo Hestrin and Ephraim Katchalski, through Dr Miriam Balaban, to Kafai Pines, who held the editor-in-chief's chair from the seventh volume in 1962 to the thirty-third, and finally to Yachin Una for the last two volumes, with Nathan Sharon as scientific editor and a council that joined the Hebrew University and the Technion to the Weizmann Institute. A cover of the journal from 1967 survives in the reference record as the emblem of its first decade. Few popular-science journals anywhere have kept one title, one publisher and one language for thirty-five consecutive years; in Hebrew, none of its successors did.

Part of the journal's contents also survived it in digital form. A database of articles from Mada was maintained on the Snunit educational network, the Hebrew educational portal, allowing teachers and pupils to search and read the Weizmann Institute journal's articles long after the last volume appeared in 1991. Together with the 1966 Maariv description of the journal as a bridge of paper between scientists and public, the archive records how Mada was understood in its own time and preserved after it: not as a professional journal for researchers, but as the Hebrew public's own science magazine.