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The Jewish story behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ explained
(JTA) — Friday is not just “Barbie” release day — moviegoers are also planning to fill theaters across the United States to see Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” biopic.
Many hope it will answer a question that has long divided Americans and the country’s understanding of its history: Who exactly was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb?
Oppenheimer’s name has become “a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud,” in the words of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, whose 2005 book “American Prometheus” was adapted into Nolan’s film. But to fully understand the physicist, biographers have looked for clues in his belief system — an ethical code grounded in science and rationality, a fiery sense of justice and a lifelong ambivalence toward his own Jewish heritage.
Here’s a primer on his Jewish story, the other Jewish characters he met while developing the Manhattan Project and how the movie portrays it all.
The German Jew who was “neither German nor Jewish”
Oppenheimer was born in 1904 to German Jewish parents rapidly rising into Manhattan’s upper class. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, came from the German town of Hanau and arrived in New York as a teenager — without money or a word of English — to help relatives run a small textile import business. He worked his way up to full partner, won a reputation as a cultured fabrics trader and fell in love with Ella Friedman, a painter whose German-Jewish family had settled in Baltimore in the 1840s.
Their secular household embraced American society. The Oppenheimers never went to a synagogue or had a bar mitzvah for their son; instead, they aligned themselves with the Ethical Culture Society, an offshoot of Reform Judaism that rejected religious creed in favor of secular humanism and rationalism. Oppenheimer was sent to the Ethical Culture School in New York’s Upper West Side, where he developed an interest in universal moral tenets and a firm distance from Jewish traditions.
Although his parents were first- and second-generation German immigrants, Oppenheimer always insisted that he didn’t speak German, according to Ray Monk, the author of “Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center.” He also maintained that the “J” in “J. Robert Oppenheimer” stood for nothing at all — even though his birth certificate read “Julius Robert Oppenheimer,” indicating his father had passed on the Jewish name.
“To the outside world, he was always known as a German Jew, and he always insisted that he was neither German nor Jewish,” Monk told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But it affected his relationship with the world that that is how he was perceived.”
The real Oppenheimer shown in an undated photo. (Bettmann/Getty Images)
Oppenheimer’s academic brilliance became a flimsy shield against the antisemitism that orbited his life. He entered Harvard just as the university moved toward a quota system over concerns about the number of Jews being admitted. Nonetheless, he kept to his studies and stayed aloof from the campus controversy, according to Monk. He even tried to befriend non-Jewish students, but the prevailing antisemitism mostly doomed those efforts and left him with a predominantly Jewish friend group.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1925, he conducted research at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and completed his PhD at Göttingen University — in pre-Nazi Germany — under Max Born, a pioneer of quantum mechanics. Before he got to Cambridge, though, a Harvard professor wrote him a recommendation that captured the institutionalized prejudice in academia: “Oppenheimer is a Jew, but entirely without the usual qualifications.”
Oppenheimer returned from Europe to teach physics at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he tried to secure a position for his colleague Robert Serber and was rebuffed by his department head Raymond Birge, who said, “One Jew in the department is enough.” He did not push back on the decision, later hiring Serber to work on the Manhattan Project.
The Nazi effect
Until the 1930s, Oppenheimer was resolutely indifferent to politics. Though he studied Sanskrit along with science and read classics, novels and poetry, he took no interest in current affairs. He later explained this at his infamous 1954 hearing before the United States Atomic Energy Commission — which, at the height of the McCarthy era, would end with him losing his security clearance over past associations with communists and support for left-wing causes.
“I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country,” he said. “I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like Time or Harper’s; I had no radio, no telephone; I learned of the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 only long after the event; the first time I ever voted was in the presidential election of 1936.”
But a profound shift occurred in Oppenheimer during the mid-1930s, as he watched family, friends and great scientific minds crushed under the tides of Nazism in Germany and the economic collapse at home.
“I had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany,” he said in his testimony. “I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students… And through them, l began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives.”
In addition to rescuing family members, while teaching at Berkeley, he earmarked 3% of his salary to help Jewish scientists escape Nazi Germany. By World War II, his drive to defeat Germany would propel him to direct the Manhattan Project — the top-secret development of an American atomic bomb — at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.
He was an unlikely candidate for the post. The FBI had already marked him as politically suspect for communist sympathies. He was a theoretical scientist, not an applied scientist with experience leading a laboratory. He wasn’t yet 40 years old. But Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Groves chose Oppenheimer as the Manhattan Project’s director in 1942 partly because he showed a burning sense of imperative.
“Oppenheimer said to Groves, ‘Look, the Nazis will have their own bomb project and it will be led by Heisenberg, who’s one of the leading nuclear physicists in the world. We need to move and we need to move quickly,’” said Monk.
Other prominent Jewish scientists felt compelled to join. Six of the project’s eight leaders were Jewish, along with a significant number of Jewish technicians, scientists and soldiers up and down the ranks, some of them refugees from Europe.
The Strauss feud
Although two atomic bombs ultimately dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not Germany — and Germany had already surrendered by then — Oppenheimer was hailed as a hero for his role in ending World War II.
But only nine years later, he was humiliated before the Atomic Energy Commission and stripped of his security clearance. Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the AEC, became suspicious of Oppenheimer for opposing the development of a hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer pressed for international control of nuclear weapons, believing the purpose of the atomic weapon was to end all war.
But Strauss had a different objective: U.S. supremacy over the Soviet Union.
Robert Downey Jr. portrays Lewis Strauss, who clashed with Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures)
“Oppenheimer said you’d have to be crazy to use a weapon that was 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. So his case was, ‘We can’t develop this thing,’” said Monk. “Lewis Strauss was inclined to think that the only person who would advocate the U.S. not developing a hydrogen bomb was somebody who had the interests of the Soviet Union at heart.”
Strauss also developed a personal hatred for Oppenheimer, who could be arrogant and supercilious. They came from very different Jewish backgrounds: Strauss was a committed Reform Jew with modest origins, who worked as a traveling shoe salesman instead of going to college. He identified closely with his faith and served as the president of New York’s Temple Emanu-El from 1938 to 1948.
“I think Strauss also had to navigate being Jewish in an American society that didn’t totally embrace Jews, and I think it was somewhat of a threat to him to have somebody like Oppenheimer whose approach to dealing with his Judaism was to hide it, basically,” physicist and rabbi Jack Shlachter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In the film, Strauss is portrayed as having secretly orchestrated Oppenheimer’s downfall at the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission, in part by collaborating with Hungarian-Jewish physicist Edward Teller, who agreed with Strauss on the necessity of the hydrogen bomb.
How Nolan’s film portrays the story’s several Jewish characters
Bird writes an account of Oppenheimer running into Albert Einstein, one of the most famous Jewish figures of the 20th century, shortly before the 1954 hearing. The two men were friends and colleagues at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study; Einstein joined the faculty after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, while Oppenheimer became the institute’s director in 1947.
Einstein had signed a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, written by physicist Leo Szilard, that urged the development of a fission bomb in 1939. Einstein later regretted signing it.
According to Bird, Einstein urged his friend not to go before the AEC. He said that Oppenheimer had already done his duty for America, and if the country repaid him with a witch hunt, he “should turn his back on her.”
Oppenheimer’s secretary Verna Hobson, who witnessed the conversation, said he could not be dissuaded. “He loved America,” she said, “and this love was as deep as his love of science.”
Einstein responded by calling Oppenheimer a “narr,” or “fool” in Yiddish.
The movie makes considerable hay out of Oppenheimer’s relationship with Einstein, played by Scottish actor Tom Conti. The two men have frequent run-ins both during and after the development of the bomb.
Another Jewish physicist friend and colleague, Isidor Rabi, attributed Oppenheimer’s lifelong loneliness and bouts of depression to the distance he created from other Jews — a community that might have given him some solace from his own government’s rejection.
“Isidor Rabi said that his problem was that he couldn’t identify fully as Jewish,” said Monk. “Although Rabi wasn’t religious, when he saw a group of Jews, he said, ‘These are my people.’ And Oppenheimer could never do that.”
In the film, characters repeat Oppenheimer’s insistence that the “J” stands for “nothing,” rarely interrogating him on his Judaism. He never encounters any overt antisemitism directed at him. Yet the movie’s version of Oppenheimer, played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, does not seem as tortured by his Jewish identity as Rabi said he was in real life. At several points in the film, Oppenheimer bonds with other characters in his orbit over their Judaism and expresses anger at Hitler’s treatment of German Jews.
A group of physicists at Los Alamos in an undated photo, from left to right: Sir William Penney, Bea Langer, Emil Konopinski and Lawrence Langer. (Corbis via Getty Images)
The film’s Oppenheimer also claims to read German well, including the ability to read Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” in its original language. It’s part of the character’s lifelong fascination with languages, which also informs his famous utterance of the Bhagavad Gita quote, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
The only language the film’s Oppenheimer seems to have no interest in learning is Yiddish — a fact that Rabi (played by Jewish actor David Krumholtz) ribs him about at their first meeting in prewar Germany, when Rabi tries to bond with Oppenheimer over feeling like their kind isn’t welcome.
In the movie, Oppenheimer is also shown welcoming multiple Jewish refugee physicists to the Manhattan Project facility. Teller, played by Jewish actor Benny Safdie, is one of them, even though he becomes a key adversary.
As for Strauss’ character, played by Robert Downey Jr., he proudly mentions his key Jewish resume point early on in the film.
“I’m the president of Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan,” he exclaims.
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The post The Jewish story behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ explained appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Dirty Jew, This Is What You Deserve’: Elderly French Jewish Woman Assaulted in Paris Suburb
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
An 88-year-old woman was assaulted outside Paris by two assailants who pushed her to the ground, kicked her, and called her “a dirty Jew” as tensions over surging antisemitism continue to boil in France.
The attack occurred last week, and the woman filed a complaint to local police on Monday, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro. Law enforcement is investigating the attack, which occurred in Val-d’Oise, just north of Paris.
The elderly woman recounted that she was on her way to a medical appointment when two assailants attacked her from behind. They punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
According to the complaint, the elderly woman was wearing a Star of David necklace, allowing the attackers to identify her as Jewish. “I think they saw my necklace; otherwise they would not have known,” she said.
The 88-year-old victim suffered a broken tooth, back and wrist pain, as well as mental anguish including nightmares.
Israeli opposition lawmaker Sharren Haskel reportedly said on Thursday that the victim was her grandmother and described the attackers as two “Arab thugs.”
“She tried to hide it from my family because she was embarrassed and ashamed, but she couldn’t,” Haskel told JNS. “It could have ended far worse. Today, she went to the hospital to be examined as part of her filing a complaint with the police.”
In a post on X/Twitter, Haskel wrote that she has “no hope in the French authorities, arguing that the government “allows blood libels to be spread against Israel, and as a result, the Jewish community suffers from violence, rape, murder.”
Haskel called on the Israeli government to “lead the fight against the explosion of antisemitism,” adding that Jewish communities around the world are “inseparable” from Israel.
“I call upon the Diaspora Jews like my grandmother to come to their national, cultural and historical home,” she concluded.
The attack in Val-d’Oise came amid a spike in antisemitism to record levels across France.
In an especially egregious attack that has garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a Paris suburb on June 15, according to the French authorities. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack.
The three alleged attackers were arrested by French police two days after the rape. Two of them were indicted for gang rape, death threats, antisemitic violence, attempted extortion, and invasion of privacy. The third boy was charged as a witness.
After the attack, French President Emmanuel Macron “denounced the scourge of antisemitism” overtaking French society and spoke of the need to combat hatred of Jews in schools.
The incident sparked national outrage as massive protests against antisemitism erupted in France.
The French Jewish representative body Crif condemned the two recent attacks, noting Jews have not been spared from violence even if they are children or elderly.
“This despicable act highlights the reality of antisemitism in France, where victims aged 12 to 88 are attacked daily because of their Jewish identity,” Crif tweeted.
France has experienced a record surge of antisemitism in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.
Last month, an Israeli family visiting Paris was denied service at a hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports
In April, a Jewish woman was beaten and raped in a suburb of Paris as “vengeance for Palestine.”
The post ‘Dirty Jew, This Is What You Deserve’: Elderly French Jewish Woman Assaulted in Paris Suburb first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Jews Shouldn’t Give Up on America
Supporters of Israel gather in solidarity with Israel and protest against antisemitism, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas, during a rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Nov. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
In recent weeks, a growing chorus of prominent pro-Israel advocates have been urging Jewish Americans to leave the US and immigrate to Israel. Since the October 7 massacre, a surge in antisemitic attacks — coupled with shocking scenes of packed protests in US cities calling for violence against Jews — has heralded a discussion on the fate of Jewish Americans, and whether the era of prosperity and safety under which Jews have flourished has come to an end.
The well-intentioned efforts of those telegraphing the dangers associated with staying in America represent a justified concern, steeped in public scenes and statistics confirming the cultural, political, and academic corrosion infecting American institutions.
While encouraging a return to our ancestral homeland will remain a cornerstone of the Jewish American project, particularly in Modern Orthodox communities, approaching aliyah through the prism of fleeing antisemitism in America rather than fulfilling the ultimate mitzvah of living in the Holy Land discounts the importance of having a robust Diaspora, and dismisses the established idea that upholding western civilization rests on preserving US exceptionalism.
Eric Cohen, Executive Director of the Tikvah Fund, addressed some of these sentiments in an interview last month. Indeed, Cohen correctly notes, “As goes America, so goes the West and arguably the world,” and further cites that US Jews hold a unique role in restoring America to its place as protector of Western interests and values.
Historically, Jewish Americans, both individually and collectively, have been crucial to advancing US support for Israel, and explaining to Americans why a democratic Israel benefits the United States. More than 75 years after the US officially recognized Israel, stories surrounding US Jewish businessman Eddie Jacobson talking to his old friend, President Harry Truman, and having him agree to meet Chaim Weizmann upon the Zionist leader’s visit to America, was the beginning of this bond.
Last month, mobilization efforts in New York’s 16th Congressional District helped unseat, albeit belatedly, antisemitic Squad Rep. Jamaal Bowman — both for his assault on Israel, Jews, and many other values antithetical to those of his constituents. Another radical progressive, Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO), may soon find a similar fate in her primary race next month, as polls show the lawmaker trailing the more moderate Democrat, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell.
In both cases, Jewish voters helped lead grassroots campaigns and devoted critical resources to assist in centering the far-left lurch of the Democratic Party. Last fall’s slaughter in Israel and domestic developments here in the US have reawakened a segment of the Jewish population who are looking more seriously at the positions of politicians, with many concluding that the anti-Jewish animus that they have long tied only to the far-right is wedded to outdated assumptions.
At the same time, blue-state metropolises such as New York and Los Angeles have become epicenters where steady drumbeats of pro-Hamas sympathizers chanting for the destruction of Israel — and violence against Jews — are prompting some US Jews to make their home in other parts of the country.
Prescriptive approaches to conserving America’s future may entail retooling Jewish sensibilities to meet existing challenges. That areas where Jews face the most significant threats from the political left are primarily governed by elected officials who resist punishing antisemitic perpetrators suggests that the US Jewish center of gravity could soon shift from left-wing bastions such as Brooklyn to more conservative neighborhoods like Boca Raton.
Moreover, a strong America stands to benefit the security of the entire free world — including in Israel, and for Jews in other parts of the Diaspora.
Maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge is rooted in the US retaining its strategic footprint in the region and assisting Israel in deterring its detractors. A diminished US security posture that rejects Israel may also compel the countries in the region to form alliances with unsavory actors, such as China and Russia. Jewish Americans have a responsibility to revive America out of its decline and abet in stemming the inevitable terror such descent spreads to Jews in Israel.
My daughter, who graduated high school in June, recently remarked that should the US become uninhabitable for Jews, America ceases being America. Defending US exceptionalism is inextricably linked to preserving the security of our allies across the globe, including Israel. Jewish Americans must assert their energies and unite in repelling the destructive ideologies that seek to destroy the foundational Judeo-Christian tenets upon which our country was founded. Perpetuating a narrative that embraces America’s irreparable doom ignores the country’s indispensable role as a bulwark for liberty that stretches beyond our borders and demotes much of the good that remains at the core of the American spirit.
Irit Tratt is an American and pro-Israel advocate residing in New York. Follow her on X @Irit_Tratt.
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Columbia University Jewish Alumni Say Administrators Are ‘Main Culprit’ of Campus Antisemitism
The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Reuters Connect
Columbia University’s Jewish Alumni Association blasted school officials as the “main culprit” of antisemitism on campus after newly released text messages showed administrators sneering at testimonies of anti-Jewish discrimination.
While in the audience of a May 31 alumni event, Columbia University Associate Deans Josef Sorett, Susan Chang-Kim, Matthew Patashnick, and Cristen Kromm exchanged text messages mocking and dismissing concerns of Jewish students. The messages, which called Jewish students “privileged” and “difficult to listen to,” have intensified discussions over whether the Ivy League campus has become a hotbed of antisemitism.
The newly released batch of text messages, which were publicized by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, incensed the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association. The organization stated that the university needs a “cultural shift” to create a safe environment for Jewish students.
“The further this unfortunate saga unfolds, the more it is clear that antisemitism runs deeper at Columbia than protests and encampments. When faculty talk, students listen,” the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association wrote in a statement.
“We know that administrators and professors are the primary culprits of Jewish students feeling threatened at Morningside Heights [the location of the school’s New York City campus] and that reality will not change until those responsible for this crisis are held accountable,” the alumni continued. “Columbia’s epidemic of antisemitism requires a cultural shift to fix it, one that involves honest conversations around how this crisis came to be, who perpetuated it, and what needs to change to ensure that the events of last spring are not repeated in the fall semester.”
On June 12, the Washington Free Beacon first reported that Columbia administrators belittled Jewish students and alumni in a group chat. The report set off a firestorm of outrage, resulting in the House Education and Workforce Committee demanding Columbia administrators hand over the entirety of the message exchanges. On Tuesday, the committee released the full chat log to the public.
While listening to the panel of Jewish alumni and students speak, Chang-Kim stated that their testimonies were “difficult to listen to” but that she was “trying to be open minded to understand but the doors are closing.” Chang-Kim referred to one speaker as a “problem!!!” for “painting [Columbia] students as dangerous.”
The deans then disparaged a testimony from Brian Cohen, head of Columbia Hillel. Cohen stated that many Jewish students at Columbia felt safer spending time in the Kraft Center for Jewish Life than their own dorms following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, after which antisemitism on college campuses spiked to unprecedented levels.
Patashnick stated that Cohen was “taking full advantage of the moment” and that he saw the “huge fundraising potential” in the midst of the controversy over campus antisemitism. Signaling her agreement, Kromm gave Patasnick’s text a like and responded, “You named it.” Pataschnick continued, saying that Cohen was “laying the case to case to expand physical space!” and “[Jewish students] will have their own dorm soon.”
Columbia University offers residential living arrangements for African American, Latino, and LGBT+, students, according to its official website. The university has also offered special graduation ceremonies for various racial and sexual minority groups.
Chang-Kim continued, dismissing Jewish students as “privileged.” Kromm agreed, expressing concern over the well-being of Jewish students who do not support Israel.
“Comes from such a place of privilege … hard to hear the woe is me, we need to huddle at the Kraft center. Huh??” Chang-Kim wrote.
“Yup. Blind to the idea that non-Israel supporting Jews have no place to come together,” Kromm wrote.
The Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life is a hub for Jewish students on Columbia’s campus. Its namesake, Robert Kraft, ceased his financial support for Columbia University in April, citing “virulent hate” against the Jewish community on campus.
Kromm continued, stating that Jewish students have more “support” than other groups at Columbia, despite widely reported antisemitic incidents rocking the campus since Oct. 7.
“If only every identity group had these resources and support,” Kromm said, adding that Jewish students need to “share resources!!!”
Kromm fired off a pair of vomit emojis as speakers described an op-ed published by Columbia campus rabbi Yonah Hain lamenting the growing support for Hamas on campus.
Chang-Kim then wrote, “I’m going to throw up.” The timestamp on these texts align with the testimony of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who shared how her own daughter was “hiding in plain sight” on Columbia’s campus following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
“Amazing what $$$$ can do,” Kromm wrote in response.
Columbia University has become a poster child for antisemitism in higher education following the Oct. 7 slaughters by Hamas in southern Israel. Jewish students and alumni have expressed outrage, accusing the administration of showing cold indifference to antisemitic incidents on campus. Anti-Israel activists have disrupted Columbia’s classes and held unsanctioned protests on campus. Several Columbia student groups have outright banned “Zionist” students, a mandate that would exclude the vast majority of Jewish people.
In April, activists commandeered a central portion of Columbia’s campus and erected a “Gaza solidarity encampment.” The encampment featured signs which explicitly endorsed Hamas and called for the eradication of Israel. Several ultra-rich Columbia alumni pulled back their donations to the university in response to the growing and palpable anti-Israel sentiment on campus.
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