Our conversation was edited for length and clarity. I just tried to balance that a little bit, and I thought that their Jewishness was one way to see that there’s some nuance in the relationship.” The common narrative that I think I have heard in town puts Oppenheimer at 100 and Strauss at zero. When I asked Shlachter what drew him to the story of Oppenheimer and Strauss, he told me, “At this later stage of my life, I realized that things are not black and white. Lewis Strauss died in 1974 at age 77 his funeral was held at New York’s Congregation Emanu-El, where he had been president from 1938 to 1948.

“A hero of American science, lived out his life a broken man and died in 1967 at the age of 62,” The New York Times wrote last December, after the secretary of energy nullified the 1954 decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Shlachter is also a rabbi, ordained in 1995, who leads HaMakom, a congregation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as the Los Alamos Jewish Center. Shlachter is in a unique position to explore the Jewish backstory of Oppenheimer: A physicist, he worked for more than 30 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the New Mexico complex where Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb. Shlachter has researched how Oppenheimer’s assimilated Jewish background and Strauss’ strong attachment to Jewish affairs set them up for conflict as men who represented two very different reactions to the pressures of acculturation and prejudice in the mid-20th century. But according to amateur historian Jack Shlachter, the two represented opposites in another important way: as Jews. The clash between the scientist and the bureaucrat was a matter of personalities, politics and the hydrogen bomb (Strauss supported it, Oppenheimer was opposed). as a lesser known real-life character, Lewis Strauss (pronounced “Straws”), the chairman of the AEC and one of Oppenheimer’s chief inquisitors. But it will also feature Robert Downey Jr. Less than a decade later, he was a pariah, after the United States Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance following allegations about his left-leaning politics at the height of the anti-communist McCarthy era.Ĭhristopher Nolan’s biopic, “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theaters on July 21, will star Irish actor Cillian Murphy as the famous scientist.

Robert Oppenheimer was a national hero, hailed as the “father of the atomic bomb” and the man who ended World War II.

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