Robert Oppenheimer’s Embrace of Israel

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.