Hedy Lamarr: The Jewish Actress Whose Technical Wizardry Made Wi-Fi Possible

The subject of a recent documentary, the Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr was one of cinema’s first female sex symbols; her best known Hollywood role was that of the titular temptress in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah. But her greatest contribution might well have been in engineering, as co-inventor of a technique for communicating across radio frequencies. Lamarr kept her Jewish origins a secret for most of her career—even her children were surprised to learn of it. In his review of the documentary, J. Hoberman writes:

Hers was a particular sort of Jewish life. Hedwig Kiesler was the only child of wealthy Jewish parents living in Döbling, an affluent, heavily Jewish neighborhood in north-central Vienna. Her father was a bank manager; her mother a would-be concert pianist who converted to Catholicism. Hedy attended a predominantly Jewish secondary school whose students had included Sigmund Freud’s daughters. . . .

Hedy married the millionaire munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, a seller of arms to Nazi Germany despite his Jewish heritage. The wedding was Catholic; the marriage was stormy. Hedy escaped Mandl and Austria on her third attempt, a year ahead of the German Anschluss. After a brief time in London, where she attracted the attention of Louis B. Mayer, she arrived in America at twenty-two, with no English, a new last name, and a contract with MGM. . . .

Her hobby was inventing . . . and as war broke out in Europe, she sought to invent something that would help defeat the Nazis. Together with [the composer George] Antheil, the twenty-six-year-old Lamarr developed plans for a radio-controlled torpedo that by switching from one frequency to another, could elude enemy detection and jamming. (The idea for frequency-hopping came in part from Antheil’s attempt to synchronize player pianos; the knowledge of weaponry was Lamarrr’s.) . . .

Their plan for a guided torpedo reached the U.S. Navy [in 1941] and was rejected as too heavy—although the Patent Office did issue two patents on the Antheil-Lamarr “secret communication system.” The Navy acquired the patents and did nothing until, once expired around 1960, the plans became the basis for the similar “spread-spectrum” technology that would ultimately lead to wi-fi, surveillance drones, satellite communications, GPS, and many cordless phones.

Read more at Tablet

More about: History & Ideas, Hollywood, Technology, World War II

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society