Curated playlist
Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Kurt WeillKurt Julian Weill was born on the 2nd of March 1900 in Dessau, the son of a synagogue cantor, and he died in New York City on the 3rd of April 1950, just days after turning fifty. In that half-century he crossed continents, languages, and…
- Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg was born on the 13th of September 1874 at Obere Donaustraße 5 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, a district that had historically served as a Jewish ghetto. He died on the 13th of July 1951, a Friday, shortly before midnight. That…
- Elsa EinsteinElsa Einstein entered the world on the 18th of January 1876 in the town of Hechingen. Her father Rudolf worked as a textile manufacturer there. She grew up with two sisters named Paula and Hermine. Regular visits to Munich brought her into…
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before. He had grown up in Fürth, Bavaria, watched Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his…
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society. Few thinkers of the twentieth century managed to shape radical politics from inside a government…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Alfred EinsteinAlfred Einstein was born in Munich on the 30th of December 1880, and he would spend his life navigating two worlds: the careful, evidence-bound discipline of musicology and the sweeping ambition of popular history. He died on the 13th of…
- Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum built one of the most unsettling programs in the history of computing, and it unsettled him most of all. In 1966, he released a simple chatbot called ELIZA, named after the ingenue in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. He…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- Peter BergmannPeter Gabriel Bergmann was born in Berlin on the 24th of March 1915, into a family that would scatter across the globe under the weight of Nazi persecution. His father Max was a biochemist who later became a professor at the Rockefeller…
- Emmy NoetherIn a joint faculty meeting at the University of Göttingen, one professor protested aloud: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?" The mathematician…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- Otto SternOtto Stern, born on the 17th of February 1888 in Sohrau, in the German province of Silesia, became one of the most influential experimental physicists of the twentieth century. He earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943, yet his path to…
- Eric GutkindEric Gutkind sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt" sometime before January 1954. Einstein wrote back from Princeton on the 3rd of January 1954, and what he said was blunt. God, Einstein wrote,…