J. Robert Oppenheimer
He directed Los Alamos and built the first atomic bomb
From 1911 he was schooled at Felix Adler's Ethical Culture School. He did not deny his origin, and he knew exclusion on account of it—at Harvard and at Göttingen. And there is a detail more exact than generalities: in 1934 he pledged three per cent of his salary, about a hundred dollars a year, for two years running, to help German physicists get out.
No state persecuted him as a Jew—he was broken as a political security risk: in 1954 a hearing stripped him of his clearance, and the decision was vacated only in 2022.
Two corrections. The "J." in his name: the birth certificate reads Julius Robert, and the claim that the letter stood for nothing is his own later gloss. And "now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" was not spoken aloud at the test: it is his own recollection, given in 1949 and 1965.
Sources
Scholarship
- Wikipedia, “J. Robert Oppenheimer”; the 2022 vacatur — the Ethical Culture School; the three per cent of salary in 1934
Basis: documents and evidence.