The Story of Sergey Brin

I'm curious as to whether Sergey has been a target of anti-Semitism since he left the Soviet Union. "I've experienced it," he tells me. "Usually it is fairly subtle. People harp on all media companies being run by Jewish executives, with the implication of a conspiracy." As an example, he cites the entry about him in Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that famously accepts submissions and edits from anyone. "The Wikipedia page about me will be subtly edited in an anti-Semitic way," he says.

He doesn't elaborate, so I later take a look myself. Wikipedia retains the old versions of each of its pages and in that archive I find a number of occasions where people have added, moved, or deleted references to Sergey's Jewishness. Most seem harmless or ambiguous, but one jumps out. Several months ago, someone anonymously deleted a long-standing reference to the reason his parents had left Russia: "anti-Semitism."

"I think I'm fortunate that it doesn't really affect me personally," Sergey says of anti-Semitism. "But there are hints of it all around. That's why I think it is worth noting."

Several years ago, Sergey and Larry visited a high school for gifted math students near Tel Aviv. When they came onto the stage of the darkened auditorium, the audience roared, as if they were rock stars. Every student there, many of them immigrants like Sergey from the former Soviet Union, knew of Google.

Larry took the podium first, urging the students to maintain a "healthy disregard for the impossible," a favorite Google phrase. When it was Sergey's turn to speak, he began, to the crowd's delight, with a few words in Russian, which he still speaks at home with his parents.

"I have standard Russian-Jewish parents," he then continued in English. "My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top ten places in a math competition throughout all Israel."

The students applauded their achievement and the recognition from Sergey, unaware that he was setting up a joke. "What I have to say," he continued, "is in the words of my father: ‘What about the other three?'"

The students laughed. They knew where he was coming from. That Sergey has parlayed his talents and skills into unimaginable business success doesn't mean those "standard Russian-Jewish parents" are ready to let him off the academic hook. Genia still believes that "everybody in their right mind" ought to have a doctorate, and she and Michael are not joking when they tell me that they would like to see Sergey return to Stanford and finish what he started.

This article was first published at Moment Magazine, a Patheos Partner, and is reprinted with permission.

Mark Malseed is the coauthor (with David Vise) of The Google Story, a national bestseller now out in paperback and being translated in two dozen languages worldwide, including Hebrew and Russian. He writes on politics, technology, and travel, and was the researcher for journalist Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack and Bush at War