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Oppenheimer: How I learnt to stop worrying and win an Academy award
The curse of brilliance
After my morning session watching Barbie it was time for an evening watching what could only be described as the sheer stupidity of man.
The story is one of a handful of Jews, from Einstein to Oppenheimer and how they deal with the morality of their discoveries( and their fame) as the United States marches towards the Atomic bomb. All the while, Jews are being rounded up and slaughtered on the other side of the world and it is Hitler’s distrust of German Jewish scientists, leading the world in physics at that time, that hamstrings the Nazi’s efforts and allows America to pull ahead.
The recruiting and rounding up of scientists and those fleeing Nazi Germany as it expanded, is touched on several times in the movie. But I think even then it is understated and include the following to show the extent of the contribution:
In his book The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders, Ben-Ami
Shillony devoted a chapter to the Jewish scientists who played a central
role in the development of nuclear physics and later in the construction
and testing of the first atomic bomb. He correctly traced the well-known
facts that among the leading nuclear physics scientists, there was an
inordinately large number of Jews (Shillony…
