A conversation with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman / New Lehrhaus
Robert Oppenheimer helped bring the atomic bomb into existence, then became a target of the government he served. In this conversation hosted by New Lehrhaus on October 25, 2026, biographer David Rieff joins publisher Steve Wasserman to explore Oppenheimer’s political awakening, his relationship to Jewish identity and the enduring questions his life raises about science, conscience and state power.
Drawing on his new book, Robert Oppenheimer: The Sphinx Without a Secret, Rieff considers the distance between the physicist’s public image and the elusive person behind it. The discussion also examines the government’s treatment of Oppenheimer as a warning to other scientists, and why the man associated with the bomb continues to haunt an age of technological and existential uncertainty.
Editor’s note: The following transcript has been formatted for readability. The speakers’ wording, repetitions, qualifications and existing bracketed clarifications have been retained. The introduction and historical clarifications are editorial additions. This version was prepared from the supplied text and has not been checked against a recording.
Robby Adler Peckerar: Good afternoon and welcome. I’m Robby Adler Peckerar, the executive director of New Lehrhaus, and I’m very glad you’re all here today for this conversation with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman, who have come together to discuss “Robert Oppenheimer: The Sphinx Without a Secret,” David Rieff’s new biography in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. The book just came out this past week, and I want to give a few words of introduction before I turn this over to Steve, who will be leading our discussion with David.
David Rieff is a journalist and author based in New York. He has reported on the wars in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. In the early 2000s he covered Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, and he has also written a great deal about Latin America, particularly Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina. His books include “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West”; “A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis”; “In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies”; and “Desire and Fate,” about the contemporary culture wars. Since the full-scale Russian invasion, he has been concentrating on Ukraine. He teaches at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, where he’ll be heading to teach again in just a couple of weeks.
I’d like to welcome Steve Wasserman, the publisher of Heyday, the independent nonprofit press founded here in Berkeley. A Cal graduate, he has been books editor at the LA Times, publisher of Hill and Wang and the Noonday Press at FSG, editorial director of Times Books at Random House, and editor at large for Yale University Press. He’s also the author of “Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.”
Steve Wasserman: Many thanks to Robby and all his colleagues at New Lehrhaus for extending the invitation to be in conversation with David Rieff about his new book, “Robert Oppenheimer: The Sphinx Without a Secret.”
As everyone knows, Oppenheimer hasn’t exactly been an unexamined figure. There are at least a trio of fine biographical explorations, starting in 2004 with Jeremy Bernstein’s “Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma,” which somewhat anticipates David Rieff’s own subtitle, The Sphinx Without a Secret. Then, rather famously now, thanks to the movie version, there is Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin’s remarkable tome on Oppenheimer. And then the following year, Ray Monk’s also excellent Oppenheimer biography.
Let’s get to the heart of the matter: Oppenheimer was notoriously one of the most deracinated Jews one could imagine striding the American stage, and during his lifetime he spoke and wrote very little about the nature of his Jewishness. Or, to put it another way: in what sense, other than the fact of his birth, was Robert Oppenheimer Jewish in a way that influenced his temperament, or his science, or what he did that makes us now regard him as a figure worthy of a biography?
David Rieff: Wow. Well, that’s an interesting beginning. First, let me echo Steve and thank the organizers for this chance. Steve and I go back a hundred thousand years, to the previous geological era. We practically grew up together, and we’ve certainly grown middle-aged and old together. It’s always a pleasure to talk with Steve because, among other things, you always get things you don’t expect, which is exactly the point of such dialogues.
To tell you the practical side of this, the first answer to that question is that the editors offered me several people, and I chose Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons. First, I thought I might actually have something to say, whereas with the other two who were offered to me, I thought it less likely that I could produce something good. Now, as to why they included him, unfortunately the people involved, Ileene Smith, the chief editor of the series, and Rebecca Keys at the Jewish Lives Foundation, aren’t here to speak for themselves. But my sense of the Yale Jewish Lives series is that they wanted to include pretty much anyone of note who was of Jewish origin, whatever their relation to their own Jewishness. There’s no question of that, though I’m speculating a bit.
It has to be said that three of the five scientists who have biographies in the Jewish Lives series were working on atomic bombs, the other two being Einstein himself, of course, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was not a physicist but an engineer, and who was really the father of the American nuclear navy. In fact, the Jewish Lives Foundation people are doing a sort of box set of all three of those books together, with different covers. I’ve read the Einstein, which is excellent. I’ve not read the Rickover.
I think you can make a case that the fact that Oppenheimer disliked being a Jew is what made him Jewish, in the sense that if he had really been totally indifferent to it, why would he have had any emotion regarding it? He wouldn’t have known this, because he would not have read the book (I’m not even sure it appeared before he died; he was born in 1904 and died in 1967), but Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew” really defines, I think, Oppenheimer’s relation to his own Jewishness. Sartre says that in many ways you’re a Jew if an anti-Semite calls you a Jew, and that you can’t escape it, whatever your feelings about it are. And I do think that applies to Oppenheimer.
He grew up, mind you, in an extremely deracinated German-Jewish family in New York. For those of you who know about this, and I’m sure there are a lot of people on this call who do, his father was a great follower of the Ethical Culture movement and of Rabbi Felix Adler, which was already sort of Reform Judaism on steroids. And Oppenheimer himself took the next step. There’s no evidence of any religious observance. Nonetheless, I think in these Sartrean terms it’s legitimate to say that he’s worth including in this series. Mind you, there are 81 of these books that have appeared so far, and there are probably other lives in the series whose subjects had a similar ambivalence or felt similar temptations to reject their Jewish identity….
https://scheerpost.com/2026/11/05/oppenheimer-the-bomb-and-the-price-of-serving-the-state
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