“I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country.” Years in EuropeĪfter graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1925, Oppenheimer traveled to England, as the film depicts, to conduct research at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory under British physicist and 1906 Nobel Prize winner J. “I had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany,” he said at his 1954 hearing before the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which is part of the movie’s central framing device.
Antisemitism impacted him throughout his time studying at Harvard, and later, amid the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany, changed the way he engaged with his Jewishness.
