Atomic bomb “father” J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was Jewish, is one of history’s most famous theoretical physicists. Yet from the start, filmmaker Christopher Nolan had a non-Jew—the Catholic actor Cillian Murphy—in mind for the role, writes Malina Saval, the editor of Pasadena Magazine, in Newsweek.
“When it comes to casting, should it matter that Oppenheimer was a non-observant Jew, a Jew who essentially denounced his Jewish identity? It should not,” Saval wrote. “Judaism is an ethnoreligion. We are a religion, we are a people, we are an ethnicity. Jews originated in the Levant. There are varying degrees of religious observance. But when it comes to one’s ethnic identity, there is no litmus test for how Jewish one is.”
