Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s film about the career of the titular physicist, won seven Oscars Sunday night, bringing the man who played a leading role in the Manhattan Project back into the public conversation. Born to a Jewish family in New York City in 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer had little in the way of religious education and through his life expressed little sense of Jewish identity. Yet Meyer Weisgal, a longtime aide to Chaim Weizmann and later the president of Israel’s prestigious Weizmann Institute of Science, stated in 1967 that the recently deceased Oppenheimer would have been put in charge of the institution were it not for his unexpected death that same year.
Martin Kramer tries to verify this claim, and reports on two trips Oppenheimer made to Israel in 1958 and 1965. I won’t spoil Kramer’s conclusion, but I will share this quote from a speech the physicist gave during his first visit:
I can say that the whole world sees in Israel a symbol, and not just a symbol of courage, and not just a symbol of dedication, but of faith and confidence in man’s reason, and a confidence in man’s future, and in the confidence in man, and of hope. These are all now largely and sadly missing in those vast parts of the world which not so long ago were their very cradle.
Oppenheimer, Kramer explains, expressed his admiration for the Jewish state on other occasions as well:
Israeli society, he told his New York audience a few months later, was “forced by danger, by hardship, by hostile neighbors, to an intense, continued common effort.” As a result, “one finds a health of spirit, a human health, now grown rare in the great lands of Europe and America, which will serve not only to bring dedicated men and dedication to Israel, but to lead us to refresh and renew the ancient sources of our own strength and health.”
Read more on Sandbox: https://martinkramer.org/2024/03/11/oppenheimers-very-late-bar-mitzvah/