Curated playlist
Jewish atheists
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski survived the Holocaust by pretending to be Catholic. As a boy in Poland, he memorized prayers to hide.
- Karl MarxKarl Marx left an estate valued at just 250 pounds when he died in 1883. He died stateless in London at 64.
- Sigmund FreudBefore Sigmund Freud studied dreams, he dissected hundreds of eels. He was searching for their male reproductive organs.
- Franz KafkaFranz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had written. Brod refused.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- Mátyás RákosiHungary's Communist ruler Mátyás Rákosi was freed from prison in 1940 in exchange for old battle flags.
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky escaped Siberia hidden in a load of hay. He later built the Red Army.
- Taika WaititiTaika Waititi played a buffoonish imaginary Hitler in Jojo Rabbit and won an Oscar for its screenplay.
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)At eleven, Walter Kaufmann converted from Lutheranism to Judaism. He later learned all four grandparents were Jewish.
- Erich FrommErich Fromm argued that falling in love is not love at all. His 1956 book The Art of Loving became a bestseller.
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr passed out in the bomb bay of a British plane over Norway. His flying helmet was too small for him to wear.
- Lev LandauPhysicist Lev Landau was jailed in 1938 over a leaflet comparing Stalinism to Nazism. A letter to Stalin freed him.
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer once told Mike Tyson to talk like a rational man. The philosopher stepped in at a 1987 party.
- Anton RubinsteinAnton Rubinstein gave 215 concerts in 239 days on one American tour. The Russian pianist called it slavery.
- Paul ErdősPaul Erdős, the Hungarian mathematician born in 1913, spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase. Time magazine called him "The Oddball's Oddball". His biographer Paul Hoffman went further and described him as "probably the most…