(Scene in Oppenheimer. Image source: Popular Science)

“Ever get the feeling our kind isn’t entirely welcome here?” physicist Isidor Rabi (played by David Krumholz) asks J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer. It’s the late 1920s, and the two are traveling by train from Germany to Zurich. Though Oppenheimer jokes that “our kind” refers to physicists, they both know the people who are not “entirely welcome” in Germany are Jews.

Jewishness is a quiet but important theme in Nolan’s biopic of the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. Many of the physicists who worked on the project—like Rabi, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid)—were Jewish.

But more than that, the film presents Europe’s prejudice against these men as a personal and national justification for the bomb’s creation. “It’s not your people they’re herding into camps,” Oppenheimer tells a military official with some passion. “It’s mine.”

Jewish exclusion and historical Jewish oppression provide a rationale for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the United States, the film suggests, is a place where Jewish people are welcome—and that welcome is evident in the way the government gives Jews the opportunity to contribute to U.S. power, prestige, and victory.

Oppenheimer is not the first film to use Jewish history and trauma to validate American patriotism and wars. But it is one of the most valorized in our current moment—a moment when many U.S. institutions and political figures reference opposition to antisemitism as justification for support of Israel’s sweeping destruction of Gaza. Within that context, it’s important to look at how Oppenheimer navigates and merges American and Jewish identities – and rationalizes horrific violence by using Jewish trauma.

Hollywood’s World War II Didn’t Always Include Jews

Today, World War II and the Nazi regime are virtually inseparable from the Holocaust and the horrific suffering of Europe’s Jews in the American popular imagination. That was not always the case.  As the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, American newspapers reported on escalating Jewish persecution, but did not present antisemitism as urgent. By 1943, four years into the war, there was strong evidence that Hitler had already killed 2 million Jews, but public polls showed half of Americans thought it was just a rumor. By 1944, people did know about the genocide, but when asked to estimate the number killed, most guessed only in the hundreds of thousands.

Even some American Jews who were aware of the Nazi policy of extermination tended to downplay Jewish victimhood and the Nazi’s specific goal to eradicate all Jews from Europe when discussing the Holocaust. Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise wrote in 1943 that, “Jews have become the victims of the Fascist terrorism because they are the unbowed protagonists of freedom, faith, democracy.” That was not a good summary of the conspiracy theories, eugenics, and prejudice that led Hitler to target Jewish people. But it was an explanation likely to get a sympathetic hearing from Americans.

You can see a similar effort to get Americans on board with antifascism in the pop culture of the period. In the famous 1943 anti-Nazi film Casablanca, the dissident resistance leader, who escapes the Nazis, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is never identified as Jewish. For that matter, the term “Jewish” rarely appeared in Hollywood scripts of the period. Even Anne Frank’s father edited her diary to reduce its Jewishness; on its first release in 1947, references to Hanukkah in the manuscript were carefully deleted from the published text. Jewish particularity was downplayed in order to emphasize how the Nazi threat to Jews was a threat to everyone.

Rabbi Wise, Casablanca, and the publication of Anne Frank’s diary were all part of an effort to make Americans identify with Jewish people. In so doing, they also helped to create a basis for establishing Holocaust memory as part of American identity.

America Takes the Holocaust for Its Own

Memoirs and institutions further helped center the Holocaust as an important part of American memory and self-definition. Anne Frank’s diary, and the play based on it, became a huge hit in the later 50s. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official, in Israel in 1961, fascinated Americans and raised public awareness of the Holocaust. Several books and films came out about the Holocaust, including Eli Wiesel’s Night (released in the U.S. in 1960), Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus (1980), Lois Lowry’s Young Adult novel Number the Stars (1989), Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006). They were all to varying degrees critical and/or commercial successes. The United States Holocaust Museum opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1993.

Many of the popular narratives about the Holocaust, like Number the Stars, Schindler’s List, and the film The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017), are gentile savior narratives. In these stories, good Christian or non-Jewish people hide Jewish friends, neighbors, or employees, and thereby protect them from the death camps. These tales are often figured as inspirational and educational; they are meant to teach people to fight for the vulnerable (especially Jews) and to stand up to tyranny (especially fascists.)

The movies also, though, tend to flatter the viewer. As you watch, you identify with Oskar Schindler, or with the Zookeeper’s wife. You become one of those rare, iconic gentiles who risked everything to fight against fascism. The identification is cemented by the fact that the people on screen speak English and are portrayed by recognizable Hollywood stars. They encourage viewers to imaginatively parachute into a distant atrocity and rescue everyone who needs rescuing.

There is an obvious parallel in these films with the U.S. role in World War II, in which American soldiers did, in fact, parachute in to defeat the Nazis. Gentile savior Holocaust films recapitulate an iconic moment of American virtue by presenting Jews as weak, generally passive victims to be rescued by powerful, compassionate non-Jews. The American government fought the good fight; Hollywood actors assure American audiences they would do the same. Onscreen, Jewish genocide has become part of a ritual of Hollywood reassertion of U.S. self-validation.

“We have one hope: antisemitism”

Oppenheimer is not a gentile savior film. But it does still use Jewish experience to buttress and vindicate American nationalism and American virtue.

The central mechanism here is fairly straightforward: the Nazis were a genocidal antisemitic regime. The U.S fought them. In reality, the U.S. wasn’t exactly fighting for Jewish people, but America was certainly on the right side.

Hitler was evil. That evil was so overwhelming that virtually anything done in the name of defeating it became good, or at least necessary.

Oppenheimer and other scientists on the Manhattan Project express concerns about whether political leaders can be trusted with a weapon as fearsome as the atomic bomb. But these worries were inevitably pushed aside by the overwhelming fear that the enemy will develop the weapon first. “Izzy, I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon,” Oppenheimer says with quiet earnestness. “But I know the Nazis can’t.” (The Germans were never anywhere near developing a bomb, though the scientists in the U.S. didn’t know that at the time—and the film doesn’t tell viewers that Oppenheimer’s fear was unwarranted.)

Oppenheimer in the film explicitly states that Jewish participation is a key advantage for the United States. German scientists, Oppenheimer believes, had a major head start on the Manhattan Project. But Hitler disdains quantum physics, which he calls “Jewish science.” He is unlikely to put in the resources needed to develop quantum theory into practical bomb. “We have one hope: antisemitism,” Oppenheimer declares dramatically.

Who Is American?

What Oppenheimer means is really that the one hope is the lack of antisemitism in the U.S. American diversity and equality are strengths measured in kilotons of TNT.

The film is proud of its diversity and equality—so proud that it overstates them. There is no example of American antisemitism in the film. However, prejudice against Jewish people was quite common at the time, and there are documented cases in which Oppenheimer experienced it personally. Even when Oppenheimer is accused of Communist sympathies and has his security clearance stripped away in the film, there is no suggestion that he is seen as untrustworthy or as alien because of his Jewish identity, though antisemitism and anti-Communism in the period were often linked.

Even more striking is the way the film—which again uses the fight against prejudice as a key theme—avoids discussing, or mentioning, other forms of racism. There is one brief conversation about Black civil rights (the scientists support it vaguely). And there is no mention at all of President Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps, or of anti-Japanese prejudice in general, or of the possibility that racism may have made it easier to decide to drop the bomb on Japanese cities—though many of the scientists on the project have qualms about using the bomb against anyone other than the Nazis.

There are in fact no Japanese people in the movie. Rather than visualizing the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nolan shows the effects of the atom bomb by having Oppenheimer hallucinate. In several scenes, he sees colleagues and friends incinerating and melting. Virtually all of those colleagues and friends are white.

Is Cillian Murphy Jewish?

The point here is not that the United States was as bad as Nazi Germany. The U.S. was in no way as bad as Nazi Germany for Jews, nor for virtually any other marginalized group.

But that contrast, and the moral force of that contrast, can be used ideologically in a range of ways. It can be used to distract from, or to discretely downplay, prejudice and violence in the U.S. It can be used to justify military buildup and the mass killing of civilians. Or it can be used as a wedge to fight prejudice at home and abroad by linking all hate to the Nazis.

These aren’t either/or choices, as Oppenheimer demonstrates. The film shows how opposition to the Nazis can provide a moral argument for accepting one marginalized group—Jewish people—into a broad American identity, even while others (Japanese-Americans, African-Americans) are resolutely ignored.

Or to put it another way, who gets to be white in America? Not all Jews are white in every context. But in the U.S., in this movie, Cillian Murphy, an Irish actor, plays Oppenheimer. That’s a choice that is possible because Hollywood sees (white) Jewish actors, and (white) Jewish characters as part of a generalized, interchangeable group of white bodies. White people can put themselves into (white) Jewish characters and (white) Jewish perspectives. By identifying with Jewish trauma onscreen, Americans of various backgrounds can demonstrate their own virtues and open-mindedness, positioning themselves as fighters against fascism (over there) without necessarily having to pay too much attention to prejudice (including antisemitism) over here.

(Image source: Awards Daily)

Opposition to global antisemitism in Oppenheimer provides ideological support for American power and for a devastating American attack on civilians. Out in the real world, rhetorical opposition to antisemitism, and evocations of the Holocaust, have been deployed to justify the Biden administration’s support for the horrific Israeli campaign in Gaza. That campaign has killed some 28,000 people; the International Criminal Court ruled it could plausibly be considered a genocide.

The story America tells about itself and its goodness builds on its success in World War II, which means it builds in part on its treatment of Jewish people and on Jewish identity. To some extent, the process of incorporating a Jewish story into an American one has meant that (white) Jewish people in the U.S. face less open prejudice and less discrimination than they have in many other times and many other places.

Yet, as Oppenheimer shows, America’s valedictory use of Jewish identity doesn’t always result in more opportunities for actual Jewish people. Nor does it mean Americans are willing to confront prejudice, either against Jews or against anyone else. As a Jewish person watching Nolan’s massive, interminable, three-hour tribute to someone who is supposed to stand in for me, I was reminded that my country often seems to see me less as a person than as a blunt weapon with which to bat away self-reflection, self-knowledge, and remorse. I don’t feel like, “I’ve become death,” as Oppenheimer famously, melodramatically asserted. But Oppenheimer doesn’t exactly make me feel like I’ve become welcome here, either.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He writes about culture, politics, music and other subjects at his substack, Everything Is Horrible.