Oppenheimer: The Movie and the Subject, From a Long Line of Oppenheimers

 Nadene Goldfoot                                       

             US Physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, PhD (1904-1967)

The movie, Oppenheimer is opening this weekend with Matt Damon. Good Morning American on abc was advertising it this morning.  If you were alive during WWII, that name will be familiar to you.  Younger people might not know about Oppenheimer, but he had something to do with the Atomic Bomb, so he had a lot to do with the USA winning in the war.  Oppenheimer will release in theatres on July 21. The film is about J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist remembered as one of the fathers of the atom bomb.

Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, along with Christopher Nolan and others at Oppenheimer premiere in Paris.(AFP)

• Amid the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, Universal Pictures has extended its support and cancelled the upcoming red carpet at the US premiere of Oppenheimer. As per a report, the Christopher Nolan film will, however, be screened. (Also Read | Internet reacts as Florence Pugh saves Emily Blunt from wardrobe malfunction at Oppenheimer premiere)

Robert J. Oppenheimer belonged to a family of Oppenheimers who were distinguished, one of many from a family of intellects. He was a professor of physics at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology from 1929 to 1947, and directed atomic energy research and the manufacture of the atom bomb during World War II.  (genealogy below)

On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. The aerial bombings together killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.                                

Oppenheimer was probed in a controversial four-week hearing in 1954.

In 1947 to 1966, he was director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.  Oppenheimer served as chairman of the general advisory committee of the US atomic energy commission until 1954 when he was suspended following allegations of leftwing associations.  

The hearing resulted in Oppenheimer's Q clearance being revoked. This marked the end of his formal relationship with the government of the United States, and generated considerable controversy regarding whether the treatment of Oppenheimer was fair, or whether it was an expression of anti-Communist McCarthyism.  Was anti-Semitism even considered back then as it is now?  I wonder.  

Doubts about Oppenheimer's loyalty dated back to the 1930s, when he was a member of numerous Communist front organizations, and was associated with Communist Party USA members, including his wife and his brother. These associations were known to Army Counterintelligence at the time he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1942, and chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the AEC in 1947. In this capacity Oppenheimer became involved in bureaucratic conflict between the Army and Air Force over the types of nuclear weapons the country required, technical conflict between the scientists over the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb, and personal conflict with AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss.  

If the writers think this Oppenheimer's life is a great story plot, look at his ancestors.  

Robert is part of such a well-known family.  It goes back to Samuel Oppenheim/Oppenheimer (1630-1703) philanthropist and Court Jew, the 1st Jew to settle in Vienna after the 1670 expulsion of Jews.  He was Leopold I's agent and financier, helping to finance his wars with the Turks and the War of the Spanish succession.  then in 1697, he was accused of conspiring to murder his rival, Samson Wertheimer and was imprisoned until vindicated. Samson and Samuel were nephew and uncle.   Oppenheimer liberally supported the poor, Jewish scholars, and Judah Hasid's movement to settle in Palestine. I share genes with both Wertheimer and Oppenheimer. 

  Leopold I, a Spaniard,  Holy Roman Emperor  9 June 1640 – 5 May 1705) was Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia. He censored books.  The second son of Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, by his first wife, Maria Anna of Spain, Leopold became heir apparent in 1654 after the death of his elder brother Ferdinand IV. Elected in 1658, Leopold ruled the Holy Roman Empire until his death in 1705, becoming the second longest-ruling Habsburg emperor (46 years and 9 months). He was both a composer and considerable patron of music.

David Oppenheim/Oppenheimer (1664-1736) Nephew of Samuel, Rabbi and bibliophile, born in Worms, Germany and served as rabbi in Prague.  He built up a library of very expensive hand written books, but because of the censorship in Prague, kept them in Hanover.  780 handwritten and 5,421 printed books from his collection were bought by the Bodleian Library of Oxford in 1829, serving as the basis of its Hebrew section.  Oxford still has the Hebrew section.  "The Bodleian Library holds perhaps the best collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world, alongside an extraordinarily rich collection of early Hebrew and Yiddish printed books. All fields of traditional Hebrew scholarship are represented in the collection.

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. Cancel culture and the silencing of unpopular views often feels like a distinctly modern phenomenon. But as King Solomon so presciently wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” In fact, our own highly polarized society is placid and peaceful in comparison to the cultural climate of 16th century Europe, when the Protestant Reformation tore apart the religious and political order of Catholic Europe. Religious debates fueled massacres, beheadings and dismemberments of both Protestants and Catholics, with the Jews too often caught in between.  Amidst all the gore, ecclesiastical authorities in Rome and throughout the Catholic world concluded: books are dangerous.

Joseph ben Issachar Susskind Oppenheimer (1698-1738) was a financier appointed by Carl Alexander of Wurttemberg as his finance minister in 1732.  He endeavored to consolidate the duchy's finances and free its ruler from dependence on grants from the estates.  His "modern" financial methods aroused much opposition and after the death of the duke in 1737, he was accused of embezzling state finances and was hanged at Stuttgart, nominally for having sexual relations with Christian women.  He refused to save his life by accepting baptism.  His career is the subject of many books, including the novel Jew Suss by Lion Feuchtwanger.  This was definitely a murder in the name of anti-Semitism.  

An interesting Oppenheimer of the 1800s was Franz Oppenheimer, MD, PhD (1864-1943) a German economist and sociologist.  Originally a physician, his work confronted him with social problems and he became a sociologist. 

He created a theory of liberal socialism in contrast to Marxist socialism, fusing agrarian reform and agricultural cooperation.  His fight was directed chiefly against landed property, and he participated in several experiments to implement his theories.  

He was associated with the Zionist movement, and the Merhavyah cooperative settlement was founded in Palestine in 1911 according to his theories.  

In 1919, Oppenheimer was appointed professor at Frankfort.  

After the Nazi advent to power, he settled in the USA.  

                                               

Our Robert J. Oppenheimer:  J. (Julius) Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. His parents, Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant, and Ella Friedman,born in New York City,  an artist, were of Jewish descent but did not observe the religious traditions. He studied at the Ethical Culture Society School, whose physics laboratory has since been named for him, and entered Harvard in 1922, intending to become a chemist, but soon switching to physics. He graduated summa cum laude in 1925 and went to England to conduct research at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, working under J.J. Thomson.

   Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), also a physicist, born in Ulm, Germany, professor at Zurich and Prague.  In 1914 he was professor of physics at Berlin Univ, earlier a professor at Zurich and Prague. In 1921 had won the Nobel Prize.  for his quantum theory.   In 1933, at age 54,  the rise of Nazism, Einstein moved to USA.  He was offered the presidency of Israel after Weizmann died in 1952 but turned it down. He was interested in Israel's scientific institutions, though, especially the Hebrew Univ. of which he was a trustee and to which he donated the manuscripts of his theory of relativity.                                              

  Max Born (1882-1970) Physicist, dismissed from his post at Gottingen by the Nazis in 1933 at age 51 because he was Jewish.  He moved to England, returning to Germany after 1945.  He was an authority on the quantum theory, atomic structure, the dynamics of matter, and relativity, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954.  Born also did not identify himself with Judaism.  These were two very scientifically minded but so reformed,  assimilated, Hellenistic Jews who had buried their identification with their past.  

In 1926, Oppenheimer went to the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born, obtaining his Ph.D. at the age of 22. There, he published many important contributions to the then newly developed quantum theory, most notably a famous paper on the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules. In 1927, he returned to Harvard to study mathematical physics and as a National Research Council Fellow, and in early 1928, he studied at the California Institute of Technology. He accepted an assistant professorship in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and maintained a joint appointment with California Institute of Technology. In the ensuing 13 years, he "commuted" between the two universities, and many of his associates and students commuted with him. 

He died February 18, 1967 in Princeton, New Jersey at the young age of 63.  Oppenheimer retired from the Institute in 1966 and died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967.

Resource:

https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2017/07/connecting-to-wertheimer-and.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOQA26UBRE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#:~:text=On%206%20and%209%20August,weapons%20in%20an%20armed%20conflict.

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia: Robert J. Oppenheimer

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/biographies/oppenheimer.html