There’s Jeremy Ben-Ami’s A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, July), which offers the philosophy and personal story of the JStreet founder in a format that his most passionate opponents (hi, down there in the comments!) will find conveniently burns when exposed to open flame. And for those, in Israel and in America, who regard JStreet as a villainous, self-hating, anti-Israel cabal (hi, members of Knesset!), there’s even more aggravation to be found in Jack Ross’ Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism (Potomac, June), which comes complete with a blurb from John Mearsheimer and locates a precedent for lefty Jewish anti-Zionists in a mid-century Reform rabbi. And if that’s not enough, there’s also What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters (Columbia, June), which offers the single-state-solution wit and wisdom of Israeli-American filmmaker Udi Aloni, which comes with endorsements and engagements from such celebrities of academic critical theory as Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek (who it turns out probably isn’t friends, or friends-with-benefits, with Lady Gaga). How could such paradox-loving dialecticians not support Aloni, who opposes “all forms of boycott against arts,” but also, at the same time, is among the most vocal supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement?

***

It’s not that publishers want to sell books only by infuriating AIPAC devotees; they’re happy to sell to just about any constituency. In No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (Columbia, June), Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan situate the debate about a Palestinian “right of return” alongside other cases of “people displaced from their homes, regions, and countries as a result of political violence.” In this context, they argue, it becomes clear that “not only is return not the preferred solution for these minorities … but attempted return is unlikely to resolve the problem,” and, so those who really do care about the suffering of displaced minority populations should concentrate on “resolving refugee suffering in the short term rather than hiding behind eschatological promises.”

***

Zionism does raise tough questions—even the most iconic genius of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, struggled with them. As Ze’ev Rosenkranz demonstrates in Einstein Before Israel: Zionist Icon or Iconoclast? (Princeton, June), the great physicist was a card-carrying Zionist, but what with his opposition to nationalism, he didn’t always agree with the movement. In one fascinating letter to the editor of a Jaffa Arabic-language newspaper, in 1930, Einstein noted his opposition to “aggressive nationalism,” and that he could “only imagine the future of Palestine in the form of peaceful cooperation between the two peoples residing there.”

***

On a visit to Palestine in 1923, Einstein visited a kibbutz in the Galilee, where he found the colonists “extremely congenial”; it might (or might not) have been Degania Alef, the first kibbutz, which is where One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life: A Century of Crises and Reinvention (Transaction, July), starts. The collection, edited by Brandeis professor Shulamit Reinharz and Michal Palgi of the Institute for the Research on the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea, offers an overview of the achievements of kibbutzniks and suggests that despite all the challenges to the movement, a renaissance of Israeli collective farming remains possible.

***

Kibbutz life in the 1980s gets the arty comic-book treatment in the aptly cooperative Farm 54 (Ponent Mon/Fanfare, May), by the poet Galit Seliktar and her artist brother Gilad. While the excerpt in Words Without Borders focused on the protagonist’s first night in the army, in which she attends a Palestinian house demolition, most of the rest of the book concentrates on tense everyday moments of life on the farm, from afternoon family barbecues to shifts inspecting eggs.

Meanwhile, Dalkey Archive Press continues its Hebrew Literature Series, which is doing its best to make the richness of contemporary Israeli literature more accessible to those Americans who can’t read Hebrew. The two latest titles are Asaf Schurr’s Motti (Dalkey Archive, May) and Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s Heatwave and Crazy Birds (Dalkey Archive, June). The former is a self-reflectively narrated tale about a loner who takes the blame for a friend’s car accident and winds up in prison, while the latter concerns a woman’s return to the country, to inquire about the death of her father’s friend, after a quarter-century abroad. Like Farm 54, these novels demand that readers attend to them as aesthetically innovative projects, rather than as reflections of current events.

***

That’s worth emphasizing, because, as has been frequently pointed out, readers often insist on reading every Israeli novel, no matter how fictional and psychological, as a gussied-up Op-Ed essay about the political situation. Then again, there’s often good reason to view Israeli cultural products as representing national and political concerns. That’s what Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg’s anthology Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (Texas, July) does, collecting essays from Israeli and American scholars who analyze classic and recent Israeli cinema “as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities”—or, in other words, as a means through which a global audience gains insight into how Israelis understand themselves. Better that, perhaps, than the pro- and anti- propaganda that seems ever more ubiquitous, not only on the news and in the speeches of ideologues, but also on bookstore shelves.

Each Thursday, we select the most interestingly Jewish obituary from the past week. Today, it is Evelyn Einstein, 70, granddaughter of a certain Albert, who despite obvious mental gifts and allegiance to certain causes (she was arrested in 1960 for protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee), lived a liminal existence that included stints of homelessness. Being Einstein’s granddaughter turned out to produce a severe anxiety of influence, in unexpected ways: “It’s not so easy being an Einstein,” she once said. “When I was in school at Berkeley in the ’60s, I could never tell if men wanted to be with me because of me, or my name. To say, you know, ‘I had an Einstein.’” (One such man, her husband, was an anthropology professor who tried to prove the existence of Bigfoot—unsuccessfully, we can presume.)

Yet her lineage was important to her, if her battle, at the end of her life, to fight Hebrew University’s infamous marketing of Einstein’s image, is any indication. “What does a bobblehead doll have to do with a literary estate?” she asked.

Evelyn Einstein Dies at 70; Shaped by a Link to Fame [NYT]
Earlier: E=Lawsuit Squared

This week, Farag received a letter from a law firm representing Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which owns the intellectual property rights to Einstein’s estate. “Our client,” it read, “was astounded to discover that at your store—you are printing shirts and other products with the late Prof. Albert Einstein’s image. The use that you made is public and commercial use which constitutes damage to the brand and blatant damage to the rights of our client under the law.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this was all a sting; the law firm’s letter included a snapshot taken by the ostensible customer, showing Farag holding the sample T-shirt. Hebrew U., the letter continued, demanded 20,000 NIS (approximately $5,600) in compensation.

After the newspaper contacted the university, a spokesperson called the copy shop owner to apologize. The university, he said, had outsourced matters pertaining to Einstein’s intellectual property to a private company, which, in turn, hired an investigator to identify unauthorized usage. The sting was the private eye’s bright idea.

Einstein, who was instrumental in helping raise funds for the university’s founding in 1925, delivered the institution’s first scientific lecture, a talk on relativity. The rights to his intellectual property, according to some estimates, net the university approximately $1 million per year—and more, presumably, in legal action, given that, inthe last three years alone, the university has sued the Israeli cellular giant Pelephone, General Motors, and Google for using the wild-haired genius’s name or likeness without permission.

Hebrew U. Rep Resorts to Relatively Dirty Tricks To Protect Einstein’s Image [Haaretz]
Related: Relatively Speaking, a Zionist

At the time Einstein made his ascent to Mount Wilson, Pasadena was not yet 60 years old, but it was already rising to scientific prominence. From the discoveries at Mount Wilson to the experiments taking place down at the California Institute of Technology to the later development of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which specializes in unmanned space missions, Pasadena would become a crucial hub for astronomy and astrophysics in the 20th century.

Shortly before embarking on his California adventure, Einstein had published an article in the New York Times Magazine titled “Religion and Science.” In it, he explained what he called a “cosmic religious feeling,” based on a sense of sublime order in both nature and in the realm of the mind.

“I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research,” he wrote. He then described the incredible devotion and solitary labor that it takes to see a work of scientific research through to its truthful end and concluded: “A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.”

***

Growing up in Pasadena and attending a synagogue where so many congregants were employed by Caltech or JPL, I found the amiable collision of science and religion that Einstein conveys perfectly ordinary. It occurred to me only recently that Pasadena’s Jewish community derived a distinctive texture from the fact that a significant segment of it was involved in some kind of mind-blowing cosmic research. Friends’ dads, moms’ friends, next-door neighbors, weird disheveled congregants at the synagogue, and shoppers at the supermarket—everyone seemed connected somehow to outer space and the origins of the universe. The cultural references and talismans of science were woven into our experience of being Jewish.

My friend Elana once went to a Passover Seder at the home of one of her dad’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory colleagues. When it came time to serve the soup, the host lamented that the matzo balls were as hard and dense as a neutron star. “Oh no,” her guests assured her. “The matzo balls are wonderful, just as light and fluffy as planetary nebulae.”

But is there something Jewish about astronomy? It’s hard not to draw connections between a vocation that probes the heavens for clues to our origins and a tradition that so fervently demands a quest for knowledge. Jews have been claiming science in general as a characteristically Jewish discipline at least as far back as the 12th-century biblical commentary of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra. Astronomy, in particular, was a fundamental skill for early Jews setting up calendars and knowing which holidays should come when. The Jewish imagination of a universe with a point of origin and an end helped to structure the modern Western idea of linear time.

“It certainly is a Jewish thing to argue with God,” says Larry Scherr, Elana’s dad. Until last year, he was an optical engineer at JPL, where he helped make the lenses for the Mars Rovers. “Are we arguing with God when we’re trying to understand how the universe works? I don’t know.”

My own family has been largely unburdened by any scientific ability or inclination, but my parents’ jobs were intertwined with the science community, and their affiliated institutions formed the major landmarks of my childhood. My dad is on the faculty at Caltech, teaching music and conducting the joint Occidental-Caltech orchestra. My brother and I spent summers splashing in the Caltech pool and spring evenings roaming the path that winds its way through the school. During the intermissions from my dad’s concerts at Ramo Auditorium, we looked for frogs among the lily-pads in the concrete-enclosed ponds that dot the campus. My first real job was at the Athenaeum, Caltech’s fancy faculty club, where I waitressed for a few weeks before being erased from the roster after dropping trays of champagne glasses at two weddings in a row.

My mom worked for many years as the assistant to the director of the Carnegie Institution, which founded the Mount Wilson Observatories in the San Gabriel Mountains. One day she brought home a chunk of glass that was leftover from a lens cut for Carnegie’s new giant telescope in Chile. Believing this irregular, yellowing block blessed me with special astronomical capabilities, I took two semesters of astronomy in college. I barely passed both times.

The prominence of science in our community somehow led, in my education, to a looser, more open sort of theology, since nobody would bother trying to square the Bible with the natural world. I remember being told very little as a small child about how to think about God, except that he was everywhere. At around the same age, I was told that the universe was infinite, a similarly baffling and seemingly mystical notion. The two ideas bound themselves together in my mind, and the phrase “ruler of the universe” that appeared in our Shabbat prayers, conjured up for me imagery of clockwork and constellations glowing bright in an endless field of black.

It only occurred to me when I was a teenager to ask my dad why he believed in God. It was the miracle of music, he said, of Mozart and Mahler, which he felt no arrangement of neurons could explain. (This actually fit very well with the one anthropomorphic image of God I had formed as a child: It was Eugene Ormandy, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as rendered on the psychedelic back-cover of a record of Peter and the Wolf narrated by David Bowie.)

Pasadena might not seem at first glance like a hospitable place for a Jewish community. Founded by a cadre of Indiana Presbyterians seeking sunshine cures for their ailments, the city once used restrictive covenants to keep Jews from buying houses in its better neighborhoods. Although Pasadena is now about as diverse as the rest of Los Angeles, it has retained a popular reputation as a WASP-y, old-money enclave through generations of Rose Queens and Junior League dances. Robert Millikan, the visionary founding president of Caltech, once boasted that the region surrounding his school was the “westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization.” Yet Millikan packed his faculty with top-shelf Jews, drawing in such Semitic talent as Theodore von Karman, Paul Epstein, and Einstein.

The intellectuals Caltech drew from across the country and across the globe helped make the city a far more cosmopolitan place. “I think Pasadena would be an insufferable little town without Caltech and JPL,” says Judy Goodstein, who ran the Caltech archives from 1968 until 2009. “It would be parochial, insular, a couple of country clubs, and nothing much to write home about.”

By the 1920s, Pasadena had become known as “the western clearing house for eastern genius.” This migration pattern continued into my childhood, as all the scientists I knew, indeed nearly all the local Jews of my parents’ generation, came to California from the east. Their paths took them through Cornell, MIT, and sometimes Los Alamos before depositing them at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. For dads like my dad, which is to say, bearded, Jewish dads, those mountains seem to have inspired an irresistible compulsion to slap sandals over their socks and set out along dusty sage- and pine-scented trails.

“That ridge of mountains up there has a big effect,” says Marshall Cohen, a retired Caltech radio astronomer. “It’s a sense of the west—an openness.”

Cohen lives around the corner from my parents. He grew up in New Jersey and Baltimore and started doing radio astronomy at Cornell in the 1950s. He joined Caltech’s faculty in 1968 and spent most of his career studying the radio waves of galaxies and galactic nucleii in deep space. He’s a member of my parents’ synagogue who describes his ties to Judaism as entirely cultural. He finds religious faith irrelevant and perplexing when scientific fact is in itself so marvelous.

“Intellectually, there’s an easy way to look at the universe, which is using methods of science, and you get this grand, astounding picture,” he says. “But if you look at it through religion, you get a very narrow, pinched view, which doesn’t make any sense.

“One of the most interesting things is that there’s this fabulous universe, which is so enormously big and so complex, but people can understand it. We’re part of the universe, but we are able to contemplate and grasp the size of the universe, the essence, the scale, the workings, the laws. And I don’t think that religion has much to do with that.”

***

The history of scientific discovery in Pasadena is intimately bound to its topography. Along the Western edge of the city runs the Arroyo Seco, a dry riverbed valley that stretches from downtown Los Angeles up into the San Gabriel Mountains. The most prominent structure in the Arroyo, the reason most people have heard of Pasadena at all, is the Rose Bowl. But two miles north along the Arroyo, the kingdom of the jocks gives way to a palace of science, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now a branch of NASA managed by Caltech, JPL got its start when a few Caltech grad students and affiliated amateurs, including black-magic occultist Jack Parsons, began blowing up rockets at Devil’s Gate in the north end of the canyon under the guidance of aeronautics professor Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian who came to Pasadena in the 1920s to find opportunities that had been closed to Jews at the University of Aachen in Germany.

Continue reading: ‘neutronium balls’ and the Hubble Constant. Or view as a single page.

This is not the first time Einstein has met political resistance. In 1905, then working at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Einstein proposed that time and space formed a four-dimensional continuum with an absolute value for the speed of light, and he worked out the essential consequences of this very simple picture: special relativity. Ten years later, working in Zurich but also in Berlin, he incorporated the effects of masses and developed the theory of general relativity. The reaction in the scientific community was both a burst of experimental activity testing these theories’ predictions and a backlash of skepticism and confusion. Special relativity describes how observers moving steadily with respect to one another see measurements of space and time in the other’s frame. General relativity extended special relativity to include the possibilities of accelerating observers and predicted what happens around nearby masses. Together, the theories thoroughly upended accepted notions of space and time, and they remained controversial enough that when Einstein was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity.

Some objections to relativity—the special and general theories are joined with this one word—were honest ones, part of the cooperative enterprise of science. The worldview that had become habitual was that the natural world was propagated on an ether, a kind of invisible loom on which the universe’s tapestry could be woven—God’s very “firmament” of Genesis 1:6-8, according to Conservapedia. Special relativity eliminated the ether. General relativity was first of all technically hard to understand, and secondly the changes it made to the predictions of the prevailing theory of gravitation—credited to Isaac Newton and dating to 1666—were only very fine ones, and small predicted effects are hard to test for. Moreover, general relativity was philosophically a radical departure from Newton’s description of gravity; Einstein’s general relativity shows that space-time is curved in the presence of masses. It was no wonder that even many physicists were honestly discomfited by relativity.

But other objections to Einstein’s ideas were not honest. Some German scientists, still harboring nationalist resentments from World War I and its aftermath (such as over English becoming the leading scientific language), found Einstein’s Jewish background, as well as his outspoken opposition to war, to be more offensive than his science. Einstein was called a “plagiarist”; his theory was called a “hoax.” And as Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Einstein, in 1921, a Munich party functionary named Adolf Hitler echoed a prevailing sentiment when he wrote disparagingly in a newspaper, “Science, once our greatest pride, is today being taught by Hebrews.”

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, opportunistic anti-Semitic physicists, including Nobel Prize winners such as Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, assailed Einstein. Lenard and Stark were not pure ideologues, at least in the earlier parts of their careers. Both made substantial Nobel-worthy discoveries in classical physics. But whether out of spite, bigotry, professional jealousy, or ignorance, Lenard publicly attacked Einstein, perhaps most famously during a 1920 meeting of the Deutscher Naturforscher-Gesellschaft, a typical scientific congress, when he said Einstein lacked common sense. (Einstein is said to have replied, “May I point out to my colleague Lenard that common sense is something very relative,” a wise-ass remark that wouldn’t have endeared him to anyone.) Privately, Lenard scribbled furious, hateful, and uncomprehending margin notes on Einstein’s 1905 article in the academic journal Z. fur Physik that established special relativity and among other things declared the now-famous equivalence of energy and mass. But this was hardly just a personal disagreement.

Under National Socialism, Lenard and Stark’s very visible attempts to discredit Einstein’s ideas on relativity were concurrent with the development of an ideologically driven Aryan version of science known as Deutsche-Physik, which adhered more closely to the classical model. Hitler himself was the symbolic leader, and said to be the premier scientist, of his nation’s physics, which was aligning with other areas of intellectual life in the prewar period in its opposition to all things non-Aryan. Deutsche-Physik represented the now unpleasantly familiar idea of a brutish political mechanism rejecting uncomfortable if well-founded science.

That new science came to be known in Nazi Germany as “Jewish Physics,” in opposition to Deutsche-Physik.  “Bad” Einsteinian ideas, and those having to do with the thoroughly revolutionary science of quantum physics, comprised a threat to the absolutism of an established order. Special relativity did away with the ether, and thereby long careers dedicated to its study. General relativity, for its part, was non-intuitive: There was no way to directly visualize through human experience the curvature of space-time. As with many paradigm shifts, scientists of the old guard turned on other scientists rather than refuting the new science, lacking the tools to do so. Relativity was deemed too “theoretical,” too mathematical, too abstract. And though relativity had nothing to do with moral relativism, it still seemed to hint at a rejection of absolute certainty, and therefore order.

Einstein, already a controversial and convulsive figure by virtue of his outspoken pacifism and the revolutionary nature of his ideas, became the figurehead of “Jewish Physics.” Jewish physicists, who for a very long time had had to fight the anti-Semitic policies of some German universities, along with many of the German physicists who defended Einstein’s work, suffered slander, lost their academic posts, or went into exile. These included the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was neither Jewish nor politically active. In 1937, Stark publicly called Heisenberg a “White Jew”: In Nazi Germany this would have had serious negative consequences had Heisenberg not also had a remote personal connection to Heinrich Himmler.

***

At least part of the current hostility to relativity seems to stem from abuse of Einstein’s ideas outside of physics. The most noteworthy of these—directly cited in Conservapedia—is an article written by Laurence H. Tribe, the influential Harvard constitutional lawyer who argued for the losing side in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and later served as judicial adviser to the presidential campaign of his former student Barack Obama. Tribe’s 1989 essay, titled “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers can Learn from Modern Physics,” makes vague analogies based on a misunderstanding of Einstein’s ideas and those of quantum physics to discuss constitutional law. Tribe sees, for example, an equivalent to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in the way “the very act of judging alters the context and relationships being judged.” It may have been the fashion in academia in the late 1980s to find social and cultural relevance in scientific thought—and judging may indeed have an effect on society—but courtroom law has nothing to do with ideas about the physical world. (It was in 1992, in fact, that Noam Chomsky called the postmodern idea of science as a cultural construct—“the entire idea of ‘white male science’ ”—reminiscent of “Jewish Physics.”)

That Tribe’s description of what the American right now calls an “activist judge” was so egregious a misappropriation of an essential aspect of quantum physics was not what troubled those who now question relativity. Tribe’s conflation of Einstein’s relativity with moral relativism was for them, instead, evidence of something deeper. Tribe had published his essay in the Harvard Law Review and had acknowledged, among others, then-27-year-old Barack Obama for his “analytic and research assistance.” A few months later, Obama would become the first African-American president of the Review, and Tribe and Obama would continue to be closely linked. Last February, Tribe was appointed by Obama to his unusual position—one created just for him—at the Department of Justice. As Conservapedia puts it in its entry for “Theory of relativity,” under the subheading “Political aspects of relativity”:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of “curvature of space” to promote a broad legal right to abortion.

As the Conservapedia version goes, Einstein is at the root of a Great Liberal Conspiracy. His work is not science but a foundation for radicalism; relativity is not a scientific theory but the advance guard for an all-out assault on the edifice of fundamental conservatism and, by extension, on absolute authority.

There is no overt or direct anti-Semitism in Conservapedia’s articles on relativity. There are instead a list of 30 “counterexamples to relativity” that purport to discredit Einstein’s theories. The list comprises outright falsehoods, miscalculations, deep misunderstandings of relativity and of the nature of science, and irrelevancies, such as biblical events. For example, Jesus violated special relativity’s proscription against speeds faster than light when he turned water into wine in Galilee (John 4:46).

***

What makes a theory in physical science? For a set of ideas to be “scientific,” they must have testable consequences. The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus was likely the first, roughly 2,500 years ago, to lay out the idea that all observed events have discoverable causes. It’s an idea that—because it wrests authority from man and hands it to nature—has not always been politically acceptable. But Western civilization has used it for some 500 years to bring humanity a very long way in a short space of time. When a set of physical ideas sets up a framework that has quantitatively testable consequences for a range of phenomena—and those tests bear up—then this framework in science is called a theory.

The word has little to do with the detective who when he finds a dead man in a closed room announces a theory for how the crime was committed. “Only a theory,” is a dismissive phrase, one often heard in ignorant refutations of evolution, geology, modern medicine, and global warming. But the word is high praise in physical science, where it indicates depth of meaning and breadth of application.

In science, a theory is not a closed system, perfectly insular and complete. The degree and care with which a theory has been tested (and shown to hold up) bolsters its credibility, but does not shelter it from further testing. In science, there is no such thing as “completed testing” of a theory. Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation makes testable predictions that are nearly perfect. Einstein’s general relativity makes all the predictions of Newtonian gravitation with tiny—and not so tiny in certain astronomical domains—corrections. Do the corrections required by general relativity show up in the data gathered from tests of those predictions? Every time. For example, Newtonian gravity predicts that the orbit of a planet around a perfectly spherical uniform sun is closed—it precisely comes back around to its original position. The presence of other planets, or a slightly non-spherical sun, Newtonian gravity holds, can cause the orbit not to close. General relativity introduces on top of all the Newtonian predictions a further calculable, tiny, but testable adjustment to the orbit.

General relativity, like all scientific theories before and after it, is subject to further testing, which may make it fail. This is precisely what happened to Newton’s theory. Despite the power and accuracy of the predictions general relativity makes about gravitation in the observable world, it has for a long time been known to be incomplete. When physicists try to incorporate quantum mechanics into general relativity, serious technical difficulties arise. There have been some ideas proposed that get around these difficulties—like “string theory”—but these ideas have yet to produce unique testable predictions that are within our current technological reach. As our understanding of the universe grows, general relativity will eventually be replaced by another, more complete, theory.

Yet contrary to the view of Conservapedians, relativity qualifies as extremely successful. Nuclear power plants, PET scanners in hospitals, and radioactive tracers, for example, all have critical aspects provided by relativity. The GPS in your phone, car, or airplane works by seeing how the signals from precise atomic clocks ticking away in satellite orbit (moving at nearly 9,000 mph) are received at the position of the detecting device. When there are several orbiting clocks emitting such signals, then a detector at different distances from them will receive the signals delayed, and triangulation off the two clocks provides a position. But for triangulation to work with enough accuracy to be useful, you have to know very precisely the rate at which the clocks tick. Both special and general relativity describe calculable adjustments to the clocks’ ticking rates—since the theories predict how clocks run at different speeds when moving relative to the observer or under the influence of large masses like the Earth. Without relativity to accurately predict these effects, a GPS system might tell us that we are 10 miles off the Jersey shore even if we are standing in Times Square. For its part, Conservapedia cites a 1997 web posting to erroneously note that “GPS satellites are synchronized to Coordinated Universal Time by radio signals from the ground; therefore, they cannot currently be used to test general relativity.” Strangely, that same source reads: “GPS provides a rich source of examples for the applications of the concepts of relativity.”

There’s another real-world device that can be used to test relativity, of course. The device was developed by exiled European scientists working off the theoretical concepts of what the Nazis called “Jewish Physics.” Like Einstein’s relativity, the device overturned a habitual worldview by providing a radical new vision of the world. And the device did more than re-prove Einstein’s powerful theory: It ended World War II, and it tragically proved that “Jewish Physics” in fact provided a useful and accurate description of the physical world.

Paul Fishbane is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Virginia.

“Dr. Einstein with his underpants on display is not consummate with and causes injury to [the university's] carefully guarded rights in the image and likeness of the famous scientist, political activist, and humanitarian,” a Hebrew U. lawyer says. Though we will agree: Ideas are sexy too!

The university owns the rights to Einstein’s image and guards them vigilantly—most of the time. Several years ago, it tangled in court with California-based Electronic Arts over a video game that imagined Einstein dueling with Hitler. On the other hand, it has been willing to sell Einstein’s image to help hawk computers, cameras, and, of course, Coca-Cola.

Full ad below the jump. Warning: It’s utterly ridiculous.

Israeli University Sues General Motors Over Ad Involving Einstein [Motor Trend]
Related: Einstein (the Demon Slayer) Lands in Court [NYT]

• Potential GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been paying serious money to a Jerusalem-based consultant to help him beef up his pro-Israel bona fides. [Politico]

• A dispatch from the Gaza bodybuilding championship reports that many of the participants are former Fatah security guards who relish the opportunity to flout Hamas’s strict modesty rules by taking off their shirts and showing off their bulk. No pictures, (un?)fortunately. [AP/Haaretz]

• Sandra Bullock apparently gave her adopted child a bris (that is, the child was not merely circumcised; there was ritual and everything). This is ironic because (apparently again) her husband who cheated on her likes Nazis. Or something. [JTA]

• This is how Albert Einstein apparently got women to sleep with him. His method involved physics, of a sort. [Negev Rock City]

• Save the date! On Tuesday, May 18, our office-mate Jewcy is hosting the inaugural Yiderati reading series at New York City’s Strand bookstore. It will feature, among others, Tablet Magazine contributing editor Rachel Shukert. [Jewcy]

Instead of our usual Sundown video, here is your caricature of the day, from this Forward article on Jews who support Sarah Palin:

Korn himself has an unusual background. Up until the mid-1980s, he was a self-proclaimed “left-wing organizer” who taught pan-African studies, was a Central America solidarity activist and worked at a jazz radio station in Philadelphia with Mumia Abu-Jamal. He even voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. He then had a radical transformation, switched to Orthodox from Reform Judaism and became a strident pro-Israel activist, an opponent of, as he put it, the “series of concessions that are called the peace process.” Eventually Korn, now 54, even headed the Zionist Organization of America.

Doesn’t sound that “unusual” to us!

‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and the eating of challah is only the most obvious Jewish contribution to the science and history of Time. The division of primeval void into moons and then those moons into meaningful phases; the sectioning of the week to recapitulate the week of Creation; the days themselves maintained by rulings pertaining to work and play as much as by commandments to the performance of hours of prayer—such are just the beginnings of an immense, horizon-sized scroll that also introduced the world to concepts of eschatology and messianism. What follows is a brief, 12-part clocking of Jewish Time, focusing on theology but also widening to accommodate secular theories from the likes of Einstein, Marx, and Proust.

Extra Days in the Diaspora

The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry’s Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon. Once the moon was sighted—or, rather, as it was a new moon, once the moon was not sighted—the Sanhedrin’s rabbis would declare the beginning of the new month, and fires would be set outside the city’s walls to alert distant Jewish communities. Often, however, these fires were snuffed or obscured, or their message falsified by neighboring sects, and, since only the Sanhedrin could pronounce the new moon (though the sages were aware, of course, that the moon in their sky was the very same moon in every sky, Jewish Law required witnesses and consensus judgment), Diaspora communities were regularly confused as to when festivals and holidays would fall within the month. Though the Torah ordains single-day observances for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret, Diasporites began celebrating them for an extra day as a precautionary measure—in order to better ensure that, regardless of any miscommunication as to which was the first of the lunar month’s 29 days, the festivals would be celebrated for at least one correct day.

Shmita

The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for  “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the  agricultural component of the shmita year still is.

Joshua at Gibeon

The Canaanite kings were warring against the Gibeonites, who appealed to Joshua ben Nun, successor to Moses, for help. We are told in Chapter 10 of the book that bears his name that Joshua led his army of Israelites to Gibeon to face the Amorites first and routed them. The four armies of four other kings followed, and Joshua’s Israelites fought every one. However the day of the battle was soon ending. Loath to let the day end without complete victory, Joshua asked God to still the sun above Gibeon and the moon above the valley of Ajalon—effectively extending the daylight of this decisive battle “until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.”

Hebrew Clock, Jewish Town Hall, Prague

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right—as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet. However, Prague’s Židovská radnice or Jewish Town Hall, seat of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, built in the 16th century and extensively renovated in the 18th in the rococo style, features on its cupola “a Hebrew clock,” whose numbers are represented by Hebrew letters, and whose gears turn the hands counterclockwise. The time of Jewish Prague, then, runs in reverse—into the past. Paul Celan refers to this timepiece in his poem “In Prague,” where he memorializes two lovers, two dreams “tolling / against time, in the squares.”

Hershele Ostropoler

Hershele Ostropoler, Jewish trickster, was perhaps a fictional or composite character associated with the court of Rabbi Baruch of Medzhybizh, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. It is said that one day, in need of meal money, he pawned his sole possession: a gold pocketwatch. Later that night the pawnbroker was awakened by a noise and went down to his shop to investigate. Hershele had broken in. “Thief!” the man shrieked. Hershele said, “I’m no thief, I just wanted to know what time it was.” “And for this you woke me up?” “I’m sorry,” Hershele said, “but I only trust my own watch.”

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), French-Jewish philosopher, believed that since time was always in motion, the single moment was unknowable. Just as one attempted to grasp an individual moment or thought, it would be gone—not necessarily replaced by another, but lost to the flow of all moments, all thoughts. While physicists of Bergson’s day, which saw the perfection of the microscope and the first experimentation with subatomic particles, observed objects and events in fixed, finite relationships, Bergson invoked a Zeno’s Paradox applied not to spatial or chronologic infinity, but to the mind itself. Bergsonian consciousness, forever eluding mensuration, would instead be characterized by what he called la durée, which has been translated as “Duration,” implying that ceaseless, Heraclitean flux of indivisible experience in which each instant becomes, instantaneously, the stuff of yesterdays, and every yesterday accrues to the account of oblivion. For Bergson it was Intuition (l’intuition), and not any intellection or formula, that would interpret the world, while such interpretation could only be expressed indirectly, symbolically—as memory, or through its practice: reminiscence, or reflection. Bergson’s vertiginous metaphysic, in which nothing is knowable, and in which consciousness can lead only to consciousness-of-consciousness, and so on in a regressus ad infinitum, brings us back to an original garden where memory frolics with fantasy, and where what we know of our pasts is forever being revised by the personalities we are always becoming.

Marcel Proust

In the opening of his vast, sevenfold novel, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), or the narrator “Marcel Proust,” dips a madeleine into his tea, which parlor ritual was a Big Bang for both literature and mind. This dipped biscuit triggers a memory, which in turns triggers another memory, which in turn triggers yet another, until thousands of pages later we realize we have read not only one the great novels of the 20th century but also a grand dramatization of Bergsonian theory (Bergson was Proust’s cousin by marriage). À la Recherche du Temps Perdu explores the world—or merely the memories displaced by the dunking of that teatime treat—through a somnambulistic, or deathly, consciousness, both timeless and without space. One never knows who, where, or when “Marcel Proust” is, what he’s doing or what his life is like while he is telling his story. Childhood experiences are seen through childhood eyes and then, in another paragraph, as if through the eyes of an adult; love is experienced as a teenager experiences love, and then lust is philosophized about in a way befitting a man of experience and wisdom. The gaze of Proust’s masterwork is synoptic, even while the irreducible point at center—the force binding together the novel’s narrator in all his ages and selves, with the writer who, lying abed in Paris, narrates the narrator—remains an insufferable cipher. In Proust, memory becomes modernity’s ultimate and terminal dimension, while the remembrancer himself seems as absent, or as deceased, as God.

Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski

For centuries Galilean and Newtonian physics had proved that it was impossible for a body to measure its own motion. By the 19th century Newton’s theories had become Laws implying that no one thing could determine its own velocity or the velocity of another without reference to an exteriority, without comparison. In applying this idea to the entirety of the cosmos, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) insisted that a comparison of velocities could be made with the use of a universal constant, which he would discover in the speed of light, the c—for Latin’s celeritas: a hurtling at 299,792,458 meters per second—of his famous formula that related energy, E, to mass, m: E=mc². Einstein’s theorizing held that there was no one temporally or spatially stationary perspective in the universe by, or from, which all motion could be judged and that because the universe’s only constant seemed to be the speed of light, it could be theorized that space and time were experienced differently—relatively—by bodies in different states of motion. The very constancy of this lightspeed, when taken in the context of Einstein’s abstract conclusions, illuminated a wholly new field of being, an imperceptible alterity previously unexplored outside of esoteric religion or mysticism—a Fourth Dimension, first postulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), Einstein’s former mathematics instructor at the Zürich Polytechnic. Inextricably coiled within the three normative dimensions of space, which are length, width, and depth or height, was this new (or oldest) dimension of Time, or the superseding dimension of “Spacetime.” It was Minkowski who transmuted the two strands of Einsteinian thought, the physical and temporal, into a precious amalgam that provided the best setting for the jewel of Relativity.

Émile Durkheim

While the Hebrew root kdsh is traditionally translated as “holy,” it actually means something closer to “separate”—to remove something from the context of the everyday being to specialize it, to render sacred by means of occasion or locale. Wondering what it is that makes us conscious of time, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French Jew and the father of sociology, found himself attracted to the study of differentiation, in particular to the palpable differencing of the religious calendar, which serves to separate mundane time from religious occasion and so structures the unconscious life of the community by mediating between holiness observed privately or parochially and the public workaday. Durkheim, who more than any other thinker quested after the societal effects of time-marking and time-management, concluded that the recurrent calendar was the major force behind religion’s survival and that it was so by dint of being religion’s foremost socializer.

Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin

Franz Rosenzweig (1887-1929) of Kassel, Germany, believed not in Jewish history but in Jewish ahistory. In Rosenzweig’s prescription, the ideal Jewish life must seem achronologic—as the religious calendar re-embodies Creation, each year can mark only a new cycle of the same rituals and laws in which progress does not, indeed must not, obtain. Rosenzweig understood that each generation of Jewry achieves its own balance of sacred (specific) and secular (universal) times and that, while creation and redemption are the only two fixed points of rupture along the timescale of any religion, revelation of God’s Law had been addressed to the Jews alone and so allowed Jewry to experience elements of creation and redemption in this world, the here and now. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) of Berlin was an atheist who, toward the end of his life, began experimenting with Jewish belief, perhaps informed as much by his early-century Zionism as by the perils of a war that eventually caused his suicide. One of his later, underdeveloped theories comprised a Marxist approach to Jewish Messianism, or Messianic Time. Benjamin was particularly exercised by memory and nostalgia and considered the past the essential purview of the Jew. Citing Biblical proscriptions against soothsaying, or divining the future, Benjamin instead proposed a sort of permissible foretelling: a before-telling; an inquisition of the past that deprived that hesternal sphere of its historicism, of its entropic sense of momentum and advancement, in favor of asserting time’s eternality and the enduring value of skepticism as a mechanism for redeeming the self. Because the future was so unknowable, or taboo, for the Jew, it acquired, in Benjamin’s thought, an auratic, fetishistic mystery, a fraught potentiality—at any moment the neat, orderly progress of our collective narratives might end, and what Benjamin called the Angel of History, a Messiah previously incapacitated by our political and technological ideas of progress, might finally be actualized, redeeming us from causality.

Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky

Karl Marx (1818-1883) regarded the regulation of time with ambivalence if not suspicion; a position best characterized by his insight that when time becomes decontextualized and so commodified as money, noncommodified time—what we might call personal-time, or family-time—becomes devalued. Marx envisioned a classless future, a mechanized utopia in which historical progress could be measured, and then nullified, only by human equality. The Revolution would come, and all men would be set free in his uniquely profane, but hopefully bloodless, eschatology. But Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) doubted the permanency of Revolution and instead called for “Permanent Revolution.” (Die Revolution in Permanenz was originally Marx’s formulation, though the idea is most closely associated with Trotsky.) Marx thought that a revolutionary class could achieve its emancipation by constantly pursuing its interests through ideological education and occasional resistance, whereas Trotsky believed that one-country socialism was impossible, and that the global proletariat had to seize power over and forcibly dismantle the bourgeoisie, imposing the communist agenda from above in a newer hegemony. Marx’s relationship to Time was traditionally Judeo-Christian: cyclical but redemptive, to be resolved in a future Messianic Era whose inherent egalitarianism would militate against the personality cult of any despotic Messiah; whereas Trotsky’s relationship was one of regular violent Apocalypse as necessary and even salutary.

Death, Afterlife, Messiah

When a person dies he or she is mourned for seven days at shiva (literally, “seven”), usually at the home of the principal mourner, in visits accompanied by food and prayer. For 30 days after the death, the mourner is prohibited from marrying, for 12 months the mourner is prohibited from enjoying public entertainment. Yahrzeit, Yiddish for “time of year,” is the word for an anniversary of a death. One year after burial a gravestone can be “unveiled,” but this is custom only and not a commandment. Jewish bodies must be buried as soon as possible. While the body is being prepared—washed, dried, and dressed—it may never be left unattended. Notions of the Jewish afterlife are disputed. Reincarnation seems a possibility to some, an apostasy to others. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer said the days of the Messiah will last 40 years, Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah said 70 years; Rabbi Hillel said there will be no Messiah, and Rabbi Joseph asked that Rabbi Hillel be forgiven. The prophet Zechariah—the name means “God has remembered”—speaks of two Messiahs.

The exhibit’s location opens onto the broader question of how Einstein—very possibly the most famous and influential Jew of the 20th century—felt about Israel, both before and after its inception. “Einstein’s relationship to Israel was complex,” the Times’s Ethan Bronner writes. “A self-described universalist, he became a Zionist when he witnessed anti-Semitism in Europe. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, was a key influence on him. Walter Isaacson, who wrote a 2007 biography of Einstein, said by telephone that Einstein wanted Jews to move here but did not back a separate Jewish nation-state until after it was declared in 1948.”

Last year, Tablet Magazine book critic Adam Kirsch pushed back against a book, Einstein on Israel and Zionism, that argued that the great physicist was lukewarm toward the Zionist project at best. Einstein “was an unwavering supporter of the Yishuv, and he spent a great deal of effort making speeches and raising money for Jewish institutions in Palestine,” Kirsch writes. “But he was also a principled cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist, and he was chagrined by the growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.”

Rewrite of Physics by Einstein on Display [NYT]
Related: Relatively Speaking, A Zionist

Strangely, however, Jerome clearly intends Einstein on Israel and Zionism to be a powerful anti-Zionist statement. All the parts of the book that are not from Einstein’s own hand—the extensive passages of historical and biographical background, the introduction, the notes—are written in a spirit not just critical of Israel, but basically hostile to the very notion of a Jewish state. The book’s politics become clear as early as the dedication page, for Jerome has dedicated Einstein’s words “to the memory of Rachel Corrie,” the American teenager accidentally killed when she tried to stop an IDF bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. This is followed by a note from the book’s German translator, Michael Schiffmann, referring to the Palestinains’ “unprecedented Calvary”—a textbook example of the way durable anti-Jewish tropes are recycled into anti-Zionist ones. Jerome himself rails against “the myth of Einstein the advocate for Israel,” which he says was a deliberate creation of the American media.

How does Jerome reconcile Einstein’s obvious love for Jewish Palestine with his own antipathy to Israel? The answer is both historically simple and, as always when it comes to Israel/Palestine, psychologically complex. Starting after the First World War, when Einstein first became interested in Zionism, he was an unwavering supporter of the Yishuv, and he spent a great deal of effort making speeches and raising money for Jewish institutions in Palestine. But he was also a principled cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist, and he was chagrined by the growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. In 1948, he joined a small but impressive group of Jewish notables—including Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, and Henrietta Szold—in arguing against the creation of a Jewish State.

Because that opposition is the sole reason why Jerome has published Einstein on Israel and Zionism in its present form, it is vital to understand the reasoning, or failure of reasoning, that led Einstein to it. First of all, like many observers in 1948, Einstein was deeply afraid that a war in Palestine might end in a Jewish defeat, which could well turn into a second Holocaust. On April 10, 1948, the month before Israel’s declaration of independence, he wrote an anguished letter to a representative of the terrorist Stern Group: “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks.” Two days letter, Einstein and Leo Baeck wrote an open letter to The New York Times dwelling on the same fear: “We appeal to the Jews in this country and in Palestine not to permit themselves to be driven into a mood of despair or false heroism which eventually results in suicidal measures.”

Beyond the immediate danger, however, Jerome is right to remind us that Einstein was also opposed in principle to the idea of a Jewish state. In response to a questionnaire in 1947, he made his position clear: “Jewish National Home? Yes. Jewish National Palestine? No. I favor a free, bi-national Palestine at a later date after agreement with the Arabs … I am against partition.” Asked to propose his own solution to “the Palestinian problem,” Einstein wrote, “There should be a provisional UN government with a gradually increasing decentralized, bi-national self-government.”

The reasons why Einstein was so averse to the idea of Jewish sovereignty lay deep in his understanding of his own Jewishness. Einstein’s concern with Jewish settlement in Palestine started after World War I, when he was confronted with the upsurge anti-Semitism after Germans started to blame the Jews for their defeat. He admits that before the war, when he was living in Switzerland and doing the scientific work that made him famous, he had no interest at all in Judaism or Jewish issues: “When I came to Germany [in 1914] I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than Jews.” Significantly, one of the first documents in this book is Einstein’s 1919 letter to the Berliner Tageblatt complaining about Germany’s mistreatment of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

Like many German Jewish intellectuals of the time, Einstein found in Zionism a source of new Jewish confidence and solidarity. Broadly speaking, he can be classed with the cultural Zionists, who saw the Yishuv as a means of regenerating worldwide Jewish identity, rather than with the political Zionists, whose goal was a Jewish state. “For me,” he wrote in 1927, “the importance of all this Zionist work lies in precisely the effect that it will have on those Jews who will not themselves live in Palestine…. The internal effect, in my opinion, will be a healthier Jewry: that is to say, the Jews will acquire that happiness in feeling themselves at ease, that sense of being self-sufficient, which a common ideal cannot fail to evoke…. I believe that the existence of a Jewish cultural center will strengthen the moral and political position of the Jews all over the world, by virtue of the very fact that there will be in existence a kind of embodiment of the interests of the whole Jewish people.”

The case for Israel has seldom been better put; it would not be hard to imagine a different editor using Jerome’s own texts to put together a pro-Israel anthology. Yet Einstein was also, again like most German Jewish intellectuals, early and deeply committed to the idea of universalism, which had long been the German Jewish response to anti-Semitism. In particular, he valued Judaism, about which he actually knew rather little, solely as an expression of liberal democratic values. In a piece published in Collier’s in 1938, he declared, “The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men.” As history this is beyond dubious, but even today it is not uncommon to hear it from Jews who want to reconcile their particular identity with universal values.

In the post-Holocaust period, then, Einstein faced an irreconcilable conflict between two things he cherished: the flourishing of the Jews and the ideal of Jewish purity, which meant Jewish powerlessness. (“We are a minority everywhere and have no violent means of defense at our disposal to protect our community against our numerous enemies and opponents—fortunately,” he said. Fortunately—and that was in 1938, ten days before Kristallnacht.) Jerome honors Einstein for refusing to sacrifice the latter value to the former: “in today’s world,” he writes in one of his tendentious commentaries, Einstein’s view “hardly sounds like Zionism.”

But the two most interesting documents in Einstein on Israel and Zionism actually demonstrate how unsustainable and, ironic though it sounds, illogical Einstein’s position actually was. The first is a transcript of Einstein’s testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, in 1946. Here Einstein rather feebly suggests that there is no genuine antagonism between Jew and Arab in Palestine, that the real source of discord is only British imperial policy. “National troublemaking is a British enterprise,” he says, and it follows that if the British were to give up their Mandate, the trouble would go away.

As a result, he is totally unable to face the truth, which is that Arab and Jewish visions for Palestine were incompatible. Einstein insists, for example, that the Jews then languishing in European DP camps be allowed to enter Palestine, contrary to British policy. One British expert asks Einstein, “What would you do if the Arabs refused to consent to bringing these refugees to Palestine?”—as, of course, they did, just as they had violently resisted Jewish immigration since the 1920s. “That would never be the case if there were no politics,” Einstein replies. There is Einstein’s fallacy in a sentence: his response to a desperate political problem is to wish that there were no politics, which is to say, no conflicting desires, no clash of rights, no power.

But surely the lesson of Jewish history is that powerlessness is not a solution for the Jews, but the most dangerous problem. The same conclusion can be drawn from another valuable document in this book, an account of Einstein’s 1952 meeting with an Egyptian journalist, Mohamed Heikal. Jerome interviewed Heikal in 2006, and he remembered his long-ago visit to Princeton to see Einstein. There the great man spoke with anguished sincerity about his desire to make peace between Jews and Arabs, and tried to use to Heikal to open up back-channel talks with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s new ruler. Clearly hoping to find common ground with Heikal, Einstein said that “when it comes to people like Menachem Begin and his massacre of Arabs in the village of Deir Yassin … these people are Nazis in their thoughts and their deeds.”

And what was Heikal’s response? “Ben-Gurion is no less a Nazi than Menachem Begin.” Here we see the ugly reality behind Einstein’s dream of a binational state, and Jerome’s present-day anti-Zionism. There was, in 1948, no way to ensure the survival of Jewish Palestine without a Jewish state, which meant an army, a flag, borders, and all the insignia of sovereignty that Einstein detested. Likewise, there is no way to establish a true peace in Palestine today as long as so many Palestinians, elite and ordinary, are committed to Israel’s destruction. Still, Einstein has one advantage over his new editor: his reservations about Israel were voiced from the standpoint of his unquestionable commitment to Zionism. For that reason, he makes a less useful ally than Fred Jerome appears to think.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.