JEWDAR
BIOGRAPHY American Icarus
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: THE SPHINX WITHOUT A SECRET David Rieff Yale University Press October 20
IN 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer emerged as America’s most fa- mous scientist: the father of the atomic bomb and the man who ended World War II. By 1955, he’d become the most famous victim of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, stripped of his security clearances
and public influence. He has been an object of pub- lic fascination for the better part of the last century. Oppenheimer was closed-off, taciturn, and enig- matic. This fundamental inscrutability created the perfect blank canvas upon which boosters and de- tractors alike could project. Countless biographies, films, plays — even an opera — have offered their own interpretations: patriot, misunderstood genius, war criminal, liberal martyr. In this addition to the corpus, Rieff adds a new perspective, paying spe- cial attention to Oppenheimer’s psychology and personality, including his personal relationships, familial dynamics, and ambivalent relationship to Judaism. For many, Oppenheimer has come to symbolize the naiveté and hubris of scientists who believe they can control their own creations. As data centres across the globe whirr toward arti- ficial general intelligence, this very well may be a timely read. Zachary Kauffman
CURRENT EVENTS Vox Populi
IN THE LAST HONEST MAN: Mordecai Richler and the three-volume Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories oral biographies, Michael Posner pre- sented portraits of two iconic, irreverent, and deeply Jewish favou- rite sons of Canada who rose from being Montreal pishers to giants of contemporary Western culture and entertainment. His new book deals with strikingly different material. For many, the narrative arc of post-war Jewish life — rags to rich- es, Shoah to Israel, wandering to belonging — shattered with October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. While the externally observable, material conditions of diaspora Jewish life have remained largely the same (North American Jews have a level of wealth, social integration, and political freedom never dreamed of by pre- vious generations), they have nonetheless felt a major shift. Posner tries to capture this turning point through the voices of more than 100 Jews from across Canada and the United States. THIS JEWISH MOMENT: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE DIASPORA AFTER OCTOBER 7 Michael Posner Sutherland House October 6 The oral historian is like an impressionist painter, building up a picture by layering human experience in thick, polyphonic daubs. It’s a method that privileges subjectivity, memory, and perception in ways that are often missed in traditional, “authoritative” historical accounts. Zachary Kauffman
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