The Einstein effect: How a Jewish scientist hit mainstream culture - opinion

Albert Einstein is the most popular dead celebrity on Facebook. With 20 million followers on social media, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist has more fans than Tom Hanks.

You can ask any kind of question of Einstein online and he will respond, often with a pithy quote from the extensive number of comments he made during his lifetime.

Einstein, of course, lived long before texting became a thing. But Benyamin Cohen, the social media manager for the Einstein estate since 2017, is Einstein’s alter ego online, posting up to a dozen times a day.

“John Wayne is on Twitter [now X],” Cohen explains, “but he doesn’t have that much to say. Marilyn Monroe is on social media, too. She occasionally offers some fashion advice.”

With a wealth of Einstein ephemera at his disposal, Cohen – who lives in West Virginia and whose main gig is news director for The Forward – has written a fascinating and frequently irreverent new book, The Einstein Effect: How the World’s Favorite Genius Got into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds. Cohen was in Israel to give a series of book talks, including at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, home of the Einstein Archives.

Cohen is the first to admit he’s not a scientist. “I knew about the Nobel Prize, the E=mc2, whatever that means, the wild shock of hair that looks like he just put his finger in an electrical socket. I came to Einstein through pop culture.”

Cohen has a seemingly endless supply of stories to tell. Like the time a man stole Einstein’s brain, in what Cohen calls “the greatest heist of the 20th century.”

The theft was carried out by a pathologist who cut open Einstein’s skull after he died in 1955. The motivation was: If the brain of one of the smartest people who ever lived could be studied, maybe it could tell us something about how intelligence works.

Cohen’s fascination with all things Einstein includes his possessions. He regularly smoked a pipe; after his death, it was sold at auction for over $70,000. An autographed copy of the classic photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue – $125,000. Sotheby’s moved 54 pages of Einstein notes for $11.4 million. A lock of Einstein’s hair? It’s in the collection of John Reznikoff, a man with the odd hobby of sourcing celebrity hair.

“He claims to have bloody hair from the night Abraham Lincoln was shot,” Cohen says.

Still relevant today

COHEN’S OBSESSION with Einstein stems in part because the scientist’s work is still relevant today. Without Einstein’s theories, we wouldn’t have many of the technologies that we now rely on – GPS (which requires Einstein’s math to unify the movement of the Earth, your phone, and the satellite above), laser eye surgery, fiber optic cables, forecasting the weather, even the lowly remote control (which wouldn’t work were it not for the photoelectric effect, which is what Einstein won the Nobel Prize for, not his theory of relativity).

Long before Einstein was named Time magazine’s Person of the Century in 1999, the physicist was clearly enjoying his celebrity, Cohen says. “People would ask Einstein his opinion on modern art, on jazz, on God. He was a very approachable guy.”

How approachable?

Einstein would walk around the town of Princeton, New Jersey, where he was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Studies, in his bathrobe or in sweaters with holes in them. He stubbornly didn’t like to wear socks. “Kids would stop him and say, ‘Prof. Einstein, I need help with my homework.’ And he’d help them.”

He knew how to work the press, too, and would toss his hat in the air so reporters could get a good photo.

“Marie Curie never tossed her hat in the air,” Cohen quips.

Indeed, Cohen adds, “If Einstein were alive today, I think he’d be super into social media. He would take my job.”

Einstein had plenty to say about all kinds of topics, although one of the most famous quotes attributed to him – “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” – is actually not his at all. That one was coined by civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown.

Cohen’s favorite Einstein quote is “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

“Of all people, Albert Einstein had the right to say, ‘I have a special talent!’” Cohen exclaims.

Einstein’s humanitarian efforts deserve mention as well. In 1933, he founded the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which raised money to get Jews and others out of dangerous places. It’s still active – in 2022, the IRC helped thousands of Ukrainians escape the Russian invasion.

Einstein’s connection to Israel was deep, too. He first visited Palestine in 1923 and later co-founded the Hebrew University, to which he left his entire estate, including some 85,000 papers. That’s why his archives are in Jerusalem, not New Jersey.

But when Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, offered Einstein the presidency of the nascent state, Einstein demurred. “I don’t like getting dressed up,” Einstein told Ben-Gurion.

Einstein’s extended family has some famous faces. One distant relative shared the name Albert Einstein. When he went into acting, he realized, “No one is going to take me seriously with that name.” So he changed it – to Albert… Brooks.

Cohen was nervous, he told me before his talk in Jerusalem: He was being interviewed by Prof. Hanoch Gutfreund, former president of the university and now academic director of the Einstein Archives. Usually, Cohen says, he can get away with the Einstein anecdotes. Now he might have to back up his stories with scholarly references!

Cohen had no reason to fret. He acquitted himself admirably. Were Einstein still with us, he would no doubt have approved – online (and posted by Cohen). 

The writer’s book TOTALED: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World was recently published as an audiobook. Available on Amazon and other online booksellers. brianblum.com