I.I. Rabi’s God

Aug. 28 2023

While J. Robert Oppenheimer was a Jew—and very aware of the fact—he received little Jewish education or exposure to religious practice. Other important Manhattan Project scientists, like Hans Bethe and Niels Bohr, had Jewish ancestors, but were raised as Christians. By contrast, the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi—whose research made possible the MRI machine, the microwave oven, and modern radar systems—stood out among his many Jewish collaborators at Los Alamos for his deeply religious upbringing. Avi Shafran writes:

Rabi was born in 1898 into an observant Orthodox Jewish family in Rymanów—what was then part of Austrian-ruled Galicia and is today part of Poland. At his circumcision, he received the name Yisrael Yitzchak. Soon thereafter, his family immigrated to the U.S., settling into a small apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side before moving to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Rabi’s parents fully maintained and cherished their Orthodox Jewish observance, and the family spoke Yiddish exclusively.

“My early upbringing, so struck by God, the maker of the world, this has stayed with me,” he mused. “The idea of God,” he added, “helps you to have a greater feeling for the mystery of modern physics.” . . . Rabi considered physics as something that “transcended religion,” but didn’t replace it. Physics, he explained, “filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God.”

Rabi never returned to the Orthodox practice of his family and his youth. And yet, at the same time, he remained somehow conjoined with it. “Nothing in the world can move me as deeply as some of these Orthodox Jewish practices,” he confided.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American Jewry, Judaism, Manhattan Project, Science and Religion

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023