August 6, 2023

Members of the leftwing activist group Code Pink last month tried to persuade Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton that China is not persecuting its Muslim Uyghur minority. They urged him to visit Uyghur regions “and see how happy people were there,” one of his aides told the New York Times.

Two years ago, the U.S. State Department determined that the Chinese government is carrying out “ongoing genocide” against the Uyghurs, including slave labor, torture, forced sterilizations, and the imprisonment of “more than one million civilians.”

If Rep. Moulton does visit China, government officials no doubt will carefully arrange to keep him from seeing the truth about the “re-education” camps where Uyghurs are being held.

Hiding embarrassing sights from the view of foreign dignitaries is a tactic dictators have been using for centuries. Its pioneer was Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, a Russian cabinet minister who reportedly built fake villages to impress the Czarina Catherine II during her visit to the Crimea region in 1787.

Some historians believe Potemkin merely redecorated towns along the czarina’s route, rather than fabricating them entirely for the sole purpose of the visit. Either way, Potemkin’s name has come to be associated with this particular kind of deceit.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was a master of Potemkinism. In the 1920s and 1930s, Western visitors to the USSR were taken to see Bolshevo, which was presented as an example of the Soviet Union’s “progressive” prisons without walls or guards, where criminals were educated and inspired to become productive citizens.

Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw went so far as to claim that the only problem in dealing with the typical Soviet prisoner was “inducing him to come out at all” when his jail term ended. In reality, Bolshevo had been created to impress foreigners. It was populated largely by informers whose reward was to live in the sham prison. The slave labor camps of the Soviet gulag remained hidden from foreign eyes.

Adolf Hitler used Potemkin-style deception to help camouflage the mass murder of the Jews. In June 1944, the Nazis invited a delegation from the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt, the Jewish ghetto they created in Czechoslovakia as a transit point for Jews being shipped to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. In the Nazi Potemkin version, the camp was presented as an ‘Endlager,’ a final destination where Jewish prisoners lived happily.

One inmate wrote in his diary of the Nazis’ preparations for the Red Cross visit: “They rain down order after order.  Kindergarten children are to sing during the visit, the workers are to return home.  Plays and cultural events and sporting activities must take place. Even the few lambs left here roam about on the grass around the city.  The children, the workers, the sheep–a perfect idyll.”

Another prisoner recalled:  “A playground was laid out with sandboxes and swings, a ‘children’s pavilion’ was built and painted from inside with big wooden animals as toys.  Behind a glass veranda you could see a dozen cribs.  It was like a story book–but children were only allowed to enter this little paradise on the day the commission visited Theresienstadt.” Houses were freshly painted–but only those portions that would the Red Cross inspectors would see as they walked by.

The delegation’s final report to Red Cross headquarters described conditions in the camp as “relatively good.” They never asked why the population of Theresienstadt at the time of the visit was 30,000 less than what the Red Cross knew it had been a few weeks earlier.

 In the 1950s, the North Korean government built a village called Kijong-dong in the demilitarized zone separating North Korea from South Korea. To this day, the North Koreans call it a “peace village” and claim it is inhabited by two hundred families. In fact, Kjong-dong has no civilian residents; it houses soldiers, artillery, and underground bunkers.

A Washington Post correspondent who visited the area in 1998 reported that “if you squint through your binoculars, you’ll see that the buildings [in Kjong-dong] don’t even have glass in the windows. It’s a lie, a huge Potemkin village…” The sidewalks are empty, and automatic timers turn lights on and off in the buildings in order to create the illusion that people reside there.

The Palestinian Authority has engaged in its own forms of Potemkin-style deception. When President Barack Obama visited Bethlehem in 2013, PA officials temporarily removed a large sculpture showing a map with all of Israel as “Palestine,” which the president would have seen as his motorcade approached the city. For the occasion, the sculpture was replaced with a monument of a dove.

Likewise, when United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was scheduled to visit the Al-Zeitoun School in Gaza in 2017, Hamas officials quickly covered up a large map showing all of Israel as “Palestine.”

The Germans wanted to hide the mass murder of the Jews for fear that the international community might intervene. The Soviets hoped to improve trade relations with the West and promote Communism as the ideal system of government. The North Koreans are trying to disguise military activity in what is supposed to be a demilitarized zone. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas do not want any negative publicity that could jeopardize the international assistance they receive.

And if China, with the help of allies such as Code Pink, ever entices members of Congress to visit, we can expect its government to practice its own particular version of Potemkinism to hide what it is doing to the Uyghurs.

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Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History, published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.

Finally, a movie about two Jews facing off in a war of ambitions, petty rivalries and contrasting moral absolutes—with actual wars in the background! (“Schindler’s List,” after all, is a film about two Nazis.)

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is a movie experience worth watching in old-school fashion—in a darkened theater, on a wide screen that does not allow for pandemic-streaming or impulsive pausing. Nolan, the director of “Interstellar,” “Memento,” “Inception,” and “The Prestige,” is the reigning master of movie thrillers that incorporate science, space, and the bending of time. (He’s also quite good projecting the moral agony of tormented protagonists, evident in “Oppenheimer” and, of course, his Batman trilogy.)

Now he has pointed his gravitational lens at the splitting of the atom, which brought a gruesome albeit definitive end to World War II. It also unleashed a nuclear arms race that forever changed the stakes of global warfare. Ever since then, the central figure credited with turning advanced science into mass murder has always been the enigmatic Robert J. Oppenheimer, often referred to as the father of the atomic bomb.

With this film, however, Nolan, perhaps inadvertently, revealed another kind of secret weapon: brainy Jews and their penchant for making Earth-shattering discoveries. Six of the eight principals of the Manhattan Project (the code name for the development and testing of the bomb) were Jewish physicists—with Oppenheimer functioning as a Moses in New Mexico’s Jordana del Muerto desert.

Many Jewish scientists, technicians and soldiers spent the war years in remote Los Alamos, New Mexico. (Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, was a machinist and communist stationed at the epicenter of the nuclear age, allowing him ridiculous access to share classified secrets with his brother-in-law. Security clearance, anyone?) It was at Los Alamos where Jews placed theoretical physics under a microscope, removed it from labs and loaded it with uranium.

All this triumphant alchemy wasn’t merely academic, or wholly patriotic. It was personal, too. Many were refugees from Hitler’s Europe, and some had family members in Hitler’s death camps—including Oppenheimer’s own relatives. Talk about Jewish payback. In the film, Oppenheimer is seen celebrating Japan’s surrender, but laments that his radioactive fireball of destruction was not first dropped on Germany.

The Pentagon selected the right people for the task and chose the best person to lead them. It bears remembering that when World War II began, the world’s most eminent physicist lived in Germany. The Nazis had an 18-month head start on building a bomb.  Jewish physicists in America knew the global stakes, recognized the urgency, and, frankly, had more foreskin in this game.

Ironically, Los Alamos, which was in the middle of nowhere, would never have had any trouble assembling a minyan—except that nearly all of these enlisted Jews had been AWOL from synagogues for decades. Largely Godless, although they spent a lot of time worshipping the cosmos. And a good many, to their eventual undoing, maintained an ideological commitment to communism.

No surprise. We’re talking about academics. Easily prone to ideology, adhering to the progressive politics of their time. Many were fellow travelers of more ardent comrades. After all, the critical race theorists and woke worshippers of today are Marxists, too.

The Jewish subtext, and plot conceit, of “Oppenheimer” thickens. As if the atomic bomb and its potential to spark a chain reaction, thus destroying the world, wasn’t enough tension, Nolan introduces another Jewish character, Lewis Strauss—the opportunist to Oppenheimer’s moral idealist. Strauss is no physicist. He is a political hack and anti-communist hysteric who headed the Atomic Energy Commission and was a bitter, underhanded nemesis of Oppenheimer who ruined his career and tarnished his legacy.

Such a battle worthy of an IMAX screen required polar opposites. Strauss was a long-serving president of Temple Emanu-El, the reform synagogue in New York City. Oppenheimer never had a bar mitzvah. Strauss was once a shoe salesman. Oppenheimer was an intimate of Albert Einstein.

Not unlike Roy Cohn, an anti-communist schemer operating at the same time, Strauss was pragmatic and conniving. Cohn advanced his career by prosecuting the Rosenbergs; Strauss sabotaged a national hero in Oppenheimer.

Jew versus Jew. The Jewish flirtation with power has always been a deadly resume line. Moses faced similar challenges with a tribal enemy in Korach.

The film confirms that Oppenheimer actually had only minimal ties to known communists. He, himself, was never a Party member. Some, like his wife, had affiliations that were dormant for decades. Nonetheless, the man responsible for ending World War II was stripped of his security clearance throughout the Cold War. Several of his Los Alamos colleagues had it worse, forced out of universities, casualties of the relentless and unforgiving Red Scare.

Oppenheimer may have been a scientific wizard, but with his head always staring up at the stars, he was defenseless against the dirty politics played on Earth.

For Israelis and Americans, “Oppenheimer” could not have premiered at a better moment. The movie serves as both worthy summer blockbuster and cautionary tale.

For Israel, the Start-up Nation, with its abundance of high-tech innovators and Manhattan Project problem-solving skills, “Oppenheimer” is a reminder of the true cost of this internal culture war over the Knesset’s judicial overhaul. Any talk of Israeli scientists leaving the country is unimaginable. A reverse aliyah to America—another divided country short on democratic consensus—and taking all that considerable brain power with it, is an affront to the Jews of Oppenheimer’s army who demonstrated how scientists are a nation’s ultimate weapon and first line of defense.

As for America, “Oppenheimer” should make some reconsider the disastrous consequences of “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies. Had such enforced rebalancing been implemented during World War II, we might all be speaking German and Japanese today.

Making our institutions more representative of America is a noble idea. And we should redress historical inequities when reasonable. But the Manhattan Project would not have been the place to do it unless the goal was an altogether different implosion—one that never left our continent.

Equity is righteous. Making oppressed groups feel better about themselves is virtuous. But if you want to achieve the impossible, math scores, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity, actually serve America better. Objective, color-blind meritocracy will ensure that airplanes land safely, bridges remain upright, and kidneys won’t be mistakenly removed.

For those wishing to split the atom, cure polio, intercept rockets, and desalinate water, “Oppenheimer” is a telling reminder that it’s not a bad idea to start with Jews.

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Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”