Alexander Imich, 111 years and 91 days old (as of this post), is now the oldest man on earth.
The Jewish New Yorker was born in Poland in 1903.
He earned a PhD in chemistry before WWII and then spent two years during the Holocaust in a Russian labor camp near the White Sea.
After the war, he emigrated to the U.S. with his wife and moved to Manhattan in 1965.
Imich spent his career as a chemist trying to prove that the neshama (soul) remains after the physical body dies. In 1992, he published a book about that thesis.
He thinks his longevity has to do with a combination of eating well, not drinking, being very active and not having children.
Imich has lived to see an astounding number of major world events:
-The first manned flight
-WWI and WWII (and the Holocaust)
-The sinking of the Titanic
-The addition of five states to the US
-Prohibition
-Women's suffrage
-The invention of Penicillin
-The Great Depression
-The first man on the moon
-The entire Cold War
-The birth of radio, television and the internet
