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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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ICE Arrests Pro-Hamas Activist at Columbia University
Illustrative: Mahmoud Khalil speaks to members of media at Columbia University encampment in New York City, US, June 1, 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon via Reuters Connect
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Saturday night arrested a male alumnus of Columbia University who was a leading anti-Israel agitator on campus and an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.
ICE agents picked up Mahmoud Khalil, who recently participated in another building takeover at Barnard College, on Columbia’s campus at his university-owned apartment, his attorney, Amy Greer, told several news outlets. The agents reportedly explained that they were acting on a US State Department order to revoke his student visa and permanent resident status.
Mahmoud is a Palestinian from Syria. He completed post-graduate studies at Columbia University in December and is awaiting the formal granting of his diploma.
In a statement, the US Department of Homeland Security said ICE arrested Khalil “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
The department continued, “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting US national security.”
ICE’s arrest of the student follows an executive order by the Trump administration that calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” A major provision of the order calls for the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses. Trump has also said that foreign students who hold demonstrations in support of Hamas “will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.”
So far, Columbia University has been the administration’s main focus, as the school continues to be convulsed by pro-Hamas activists.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, Columbia remains one of the most hostile campuses for Jews employed by or enrolled in an institution of higher education. Since Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the university has produced several indelible examples of campus antisemitism, including a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself, brutal gang-assaults on Jewish students, and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
Amid these incidents, the university has struggled to contain the anti-Zionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which in late January committed an act of infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students.
In recent weeks, CUAD occupied two buildings at Barnard College, disregarding threats that doing so would lead to swift and severe disciplinary sanctions, including possible expulsion.
Following the incidents, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia as punishment for its failing to address the issue, executing an ultimatum delivered by US Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Some groups are unhappy with the administration’s policies on pro-Hamas advocacy, however, and following Khalil’s arrest, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) denounced his detainment as unconstitutional.
“The Trump administration’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil — a green card holder studying in this country legally — is targeted, retaliatory, an and extreme attack his First Amendment rights,” NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman said on Sunday in a public statement. “Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation.”
On Monday, however, US President Donald Trump defended Khalil’s arrest and said it will be the first of many.
“This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
Trump went on to argue that the presence of those who support terrorism on US soil undermines American national security interests, adding that he expects colleges and universities to cpmply with his executive order.
On Friday, Columbia University, which has been accused of refusing to impose disciplinary sanctions on pro-Hamas activists, announced that is has suspended four of its students who were identified as co-conspirators in the latest storming and occupation of a Barnard College building, which took place on Wednesday at the Milstein Center.
“These students have been suspended and restricted from campus as we swiftly work through the discipline process,” the university said in a statement. “We are a campus governed by our rules, policies, and the law. Any violations of these will not be tolerated and will have consequences.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ICE Arrests Pro-Hamas Activist at Columbia University first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Releases ‘New Day Will Rise,’ to Be Performed by Yuval Raphael in 2025 Eurovision Song Contest
Yuval Raphael in the music video for her new song “New Day Will Rise.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Israel debuted on Sunday night the full song that Yuval Raphael will perform in the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland, this May.
Israel’s Kan 11 premiered during a live broadcast the music video for “New Day Will Rise,” a powerful ballad written by singer-songwriter Keren Peles that has mostly English lyrics but with some French and Hebrew as well. Yuval, 24, lives in the Israeli city of Ra’anana — same as Noa Kirel, Israel’s representative in the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest – but lived as a child with her family in Switzerland for three years. She is fluent in Hebrew, English, and French.
Raphael sings in the chorus: “New day will rise/ Life will go on/ Everyone cries/ Don’t cry alone/ Darkness will fade/ All the pain will go by/ But we will stay / Even if you say goodbye.” The song has a Hebrew line from the biblical Song of Songs, which translates to: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”
Raphael survived the Nova music festival massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, in Re’im, Israel, after hiding from Hamas terrorists in a roadside bomb shelter. She pretended to be dead and laid under dead bodies for several hours until she was rescued. Terrorists killed 370 people and abducted 44 hostages at the site of the festival.
In the music video for “New Day Will Rise,” Raphael and a group of young people gather together to sing, dance, and enjoy each other’s company in a grassy area, which is reminiscent of what young Israelis did at the Nova music festival before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 onslaught. Red anemones, Israel’s national flower and the flower that is known for growing specifically in the southern region, are seen in the grass in the music video.
In mid-January, Raphael won the Israeli television singing competition “HaKochav Haba” (“Rising Star”), whose winner goes on to represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest.
“Throughout the season of ‘Rising Star,’ I chose songs solely from a place of emotion, as soon as I felt a twinge in my stomach,” Raphael told Kan 11. “When I heard this song [‘New Day Will Rise’], I had a twinge in my stomach and said – ‘This is your song.’” She also commented on the song’s connection to her surviving the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.
“One of the most exciting things that has happened to me in my life is the very extreme transition from the most terrible event of my life on Oct. 7, to such a great and empowering moment – representing my country at Eurovision. The feeling of personal victory is immense,” she said.
The lyrics and the video for “New Day Will Rise” has been approved by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the Eurovision Song Contest. Last year, Israel’s original song submission, “October Rain,” was rejected by the EBU for being too political since it referenced the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Kan ultimately rewrote the song and titled it “Hurricane.” It was performed in the Eurovision by Eden Golan, who finished fifth place in the competition.
Israel has been competing in the Eurovision since 1973 and won four times — in 1978 with Izhar Cohen’s “A-Ba-Ni-Bi,” 1979 with Milk and Honey’s “Hallelujah,” 1998 with Dana International’s “Diva,” and most recently 2018 with Netta Barzilai’s “Toy.”
Raphael will compete in the second semifinal of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest on May 15 and, if she advances, will compete in the grand final on May 18.
Watch the music video for “New Day Will Rise” below.
The post Israel Releases ‘New Day Will Rise,’ to Be Performed by Yuval Raphael in 2025 Eurovision Song Contest first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Two Men Face US Trial Over Iran-Backed Plot to Kill Dissident
Rafat Amirov appears in court charged with murder-for-hire and money laundering for his role in the thwarted Tehran-backed assassination attempt of a journalist and activist, who is a US citizen, during his arraignment hearing before Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave at a courtroom in New York, US, Jan. 27, 2023 in this courtroom sketch. Photo: REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg
Two men accused of being members of a Russian organized crime group will face trial in the United States on Monday over what prosecutors call an unsuccessful Tehran-backed attempt to kill an Iranian dissident living in New York.
Federal prosecutors say Iran‘s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a US-designated terrorist organization, in 2021 hired Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, members of a “Russian mob” sub-group, to kill an Iranian American journalist and activist who has spoken out against the Iranian government’s treatment of women.
Amirov, 45, and Omarov, 40, have pleaded not guilty to murder for hire and attempted murder in aid of racketeering.
Omarov’s lawyer, Elena Fast, said in a statement, “Mr. Omarov is presumed innocent.” Amirov’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment. In court papers, lawyers for both men have said it was “inaccurate” to refer to them as members of the Russian mob.
Prosecutors have not named the target of the alleged plot, who they have said in court papers is expected to testify at the trial.
Masih Alinejad, a journalist who left Iran in 2009, has told Reuters she was the target of both the alleged murder plot and a previous alleged attempt by Iranian intelligence officers to kidnap her and take her to Iran.
Alinejad has brought attention to women in Iran protesting laws requiring head coverings, as well as accounts of Iranians killed in demonstrations in 2019.
“I am very excited to join the public trial as a witness to testify against those who were hired by the Islamic Republic to kill me,” Alinejad said in an interview on Friday. “It’s like I’ve been given a second life.”
The trial, before US District Judge Colleen McMahon, kicks off with jury selection on Monday in Manhattan federal court.
The charges were part of a broader push by the Justice Department during former President Joe Biden’s administration to crack down on transnational repression, or efforts by US adversaries like Iran and China to silence dissidents on American soil.
The two-week trial could provide a window into alleged ties between Iran‘s government and criminal organizations prosecutors say it hires to do its “dirty work.”
A representative of Iran‘s UN mission did not respond to a request for comment on the trial of Amirov and Omarov.
US prosecutors in 2021 brought charges against four Iranian intelligence officers over the alleged kidnapping plot. They are at large, and Tehran has called the allegations baseless.
The alleged murder plot came to light in 2022, when Khalid Mehdiyev – an alleged co-conspirator of Amirov and Omarov – was arrested outside Alinejad’s New York home with an AK-47 rifle.
Prosecutors say a Revolutionary Guard brigadier general named Ruhollah Bazghandi began monitoring Alinejad in July 2021. They say Bazghandi later hired Amirov, an alleged Russian mob leader living in Iran at the time, to kill her. Omarov and Mehdiyev are also part of the mob, prosecutors said.
Bazghandi was also charged but is not in US custody.
Mehdiyev, 26, pleaded not guilty to murder-for-hire charges in February 2023, but the status of his case is unclear. Prison records show he was released from US custody on May 19, 2023.
Neither a Justice Department spokesperson nor a lawyer for Mehdiyev responded to requests for comment.
The post Two Men Face US Trial Over Iran-Backed Plot to Kill Dissident first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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