Einstein: His Space and Times

Gimbel (Einstein’s Jewish Science), chair of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College, provides a short, comprehensive portrait of Albert Einstein, covering both his life and scientific work. As an installment of Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series, the book also focuses on Einstein’s understanding of himself as a Jew, despite his secular upbringing and beliefs. Gimbel doesn’t minimize Einstein’s flaws, revealing the “arrogance, lack of diligence, and unwillingness to follow directions” that cost him friends and jobs, as well as the politics behind the acceptance of his radical theories. In describing the latter part of Einstein’s life, Gimbel demonstrates the man’s personal complexity. During WWI, Einstein was a strong pacifist who wished for a “United States of Europe.” He carried a Swiss passport. His horror at the Nazis and their anti-Semitism drove him not to religion but to an ethnic sense of himself as a Jew. Einstein considered himself a Zionist, though given his outspoken belief in mutual acceptance, he did not support a nation-state, particularly one that took land from non-Jewish Palestinians. Gimbel reminds readers that Einstein was as personally complex as his theories, and that he thought as deeply about sociopolitical concerns as he did scientific ones. (May)